I start crying and set my head on his chest, and he inhales my hair. “Is it what you want? I’ll be your plaything and you’ll be my playboy, and every night you’ll do bad things and then come back to make love to me, and I’ll be in heaven when I’m in your arms, and in hell when I’m out of them and these arms are doing something terrible.”
“I own this body, Mel,” he says, rubbing up my curves. “Every inch. These hands know how to love you more than they know how to do what they do.”
I wipe my tears. “I’ve liked you owning it. Every inch. But the love of my life can’t do what you do. He can’t.”
He cups my face. “He does,” he says, tenderly.
I swallow as I have to acknowledge it. “But I wish he didn’t.”
I shake my head, but he looks at me with those piercing hazel eyes with little flecks of green that seem to glimmer right now. “And yet it’s a part of me,” he says huskily, stepping forward. “I’m not your prince, I’m everything you don’t want and you still want me. You need me, Melanie, you’ve been waiting for me. Let go of the idea of who I should be and—”
“No! No, I don’t want to be in love with you! Not you!” I push him away.
“Baby, I won’t let it blacken you, it only needs to blacken me. You won’t know about anything that needs to be done. Anything . . .”
“No! I couldn’t bear to know you’re doing anything like that, Grey!”
He lets go and steps away to face out to the street, the sunlight hitting his face in every beautiful angle, and my brain still seems to have enough cells working for me to register what is happening. Grey and I are breaking up. I wanted love, and I found it, and I’m going to let it go because . . . it’s not like in the dreams, the stories, it’s not like I imagined.
I feel stabbed in the chest by what I’m doing, but every instinct of self-preservation in me tells me I have to go.
Which makes it hurt inside when Greyson turns to me, cups my face, and tips my head back to his, his voice resolute.
“The Underground will be more organized than it was with my father. Melanie, I’ll keep a cool head . . .”
“You can’t ask me to stay by your side while you blackmail people, intimidate people . . .”
He groans and closes his eyes. “It will be business. Nobody will get hurt. Understand that I can’t just drop this. There are livelihoods . . . fighters who live for this. Your friend . . . her husband, Riptide . . . they thrive, they breathe, they adore the Underground!”
“I know! I know it’s a dark that has to be, I just can’t be in it. I’m afraid?!” I cry. The admission clouds his eyes with torment, and I don’t know if he realizes maybe what I’m most afraid of is the way I feel for him, and the fact that he’s everything I never wanted, and suddenly all I want.
My chest aches as I touch his cheek and look into his eyes and absorb the way he’s looking at me. “You are so heart-stoppingly beautiful and such a good man, in here. When I think of you I want to think of who you were when you were with me, Greyson.”
“You’d rather love the fantasy than the real man,” he says, and it clearly hurts him.
“No, it’s a real man I’m hurting for right now. It’s a real man I’m in love with.” I swallow. “Brooke said you were my Real. That’s what she calls the love of her life now. But you are not my Real, Greyson. You’re my knight in leather gloves who went rogue.”
“God, you’re tearing me open, Melanie.”
I swallow and take his palm and put his gloves there, quietly accepting the fact that I know who he needs to be, and as he curls his fingers around those gloves, he curls his fingers around me. His eyes fall to my lips, and then he kisses my lips, a sudden brush, as if he can’t help himself, then he pulls me back.
“You have three seconds,” he says, “to go.”
It hurts, as if I’m ripping a little piece of my heart, and I can’t know of anyone else but my sister who could take me from this man’s side. The opposite of my every dream and fantasy, and suddenly all I want. “Two seconds, Mel.”
“Grey, stop me . . .” I suddenly say. Omigod I can’t believe I’m leaving him!
“One.”
God, he won’t stop me.
For all his criminal ways, he won’t subject me to this life. His life.
I turn around and grab my suitcase with everything I’d brought here and shut the door behind me. Then I stand there, crying against the utter silence in the room where I left him. Pandora stands and goes to get her own suitcase in silence.
I have slept all over Seattle, and I’ve never once felt like a whore until I broke this man’s heart.
In an ideal world you only love the perfect man.
But it’s not an ideal world. I love an imperfect man who sins, lies, steals, blackmails, and how odd to know already—even though the years have not passed—that not even my Mr. Perfect or Prince Charming will ever, ever live up to the one I just left.
? ? ?
PANDORA AND I don’t talk on our way to the airport. Derek ended up insisting that he drive us, and I’m too devastated to protest. I found love, and I left it. I found all I wanted, and it was all wrong, and I left him standing in a hotel room he paid for, staring out the window like he’d chain me to him if he so much as glanced at me.
“I’m texting Kyle to organize something for tonight,” Pandora says.
“No,” I say.
“Mel, it’s your birthday.”
“No!” I say. “Please. I want to be alone.”
We board. I even go as far as sliding my suitcase into the top plane compartment. And I remember him in the rain. I remember every single thing he’s done for me.
“I’ve got your car.”
“Be home tonight.”
“My life has come at a high price too. Every day of it. So many days trying to find some fucked-up meaning in it.”
“Am I the first man you’ve cooked for?”