“I see.” I swallowed thickly, dropping my arm and letting her pass before I did anything insane like lean in. So that was two casualties to my dickish behaviour.
While Brooklyn showered, I made the bed up fresh and closed the blinds against the assault of dawning sunlight which was trying to blind me, then gave the rest of the room a quick tidy around. I grabbed the liquor bottles which had been sitting beside my bed and deposited them back in the kitchen, ignoring Mateo’s unending glare the entire way there and back.
When I returned to the room, I spotted a candle on the dressing table and lit it, wondering what the fuck I was trying to achieve with candlelight and deciding to blow it out again almost instantly.
But before I could manage that, Brooklyn stepped back into the room and I straightened quickly, trying to act like I wasn’t some kind of candle lighting fancy man and folding my arms in a way that made my biceps flex.
She’d changed once more, this time wearing a little sleep set made up of a silky cami and shorts combo which was baby pink on one side and baby blue on the other. Her ebony hair was wet and she’d braided it over her left shoulder, leaving her face open for me to inspect, not a scrap of makeup in sight and making sure I couldn’t for a single second forget how much younger than me she was. In mind, body, and soul. Yet there was still this connection there, this tug between us which wouldn’t ever let me ignore the fact that I’d found something in her which I hadn’t ever thought to find. A match. A soul akin to my own.
“No one’s ever lit a candle for me before,” she said, biting on her full bottom lip as she looked at it like it was something special and I cleared my throat, not sure what to do with the mixture of embarrassment and pride her words were shaking up inside of me. “Two-Toe Jill lit her hair on fire once while I was close by. But it’s not the same.”
“I was lighting my cigarette and it fell in there and did that,” I said, wondering why I was even lying about it. There was no cigarette and we both knew it. But some part of me must have still been clinging to my sanity, and it was clear to that part that I shouldn’t be doing anything to make her give me the big eyes the way she was. I shouldn’t have been encouraging it. It was wrong because I was wrong. A bad decision darkened by worse consequences. And I didn’t want any of my bad to come down on her.
Brooklyn frowned and I quickly changed the subject, crossing the room to her bowl of Pops and pouring the milk onto them before offering them up with only a little reluctance in my soul.
“I meant what I said,” I told her as she reached out to accept them with a look of reverence on her face. “You did real good with those fuckers who hurt you. Real fuckin’ good, Brooklyn.”
Her eyes lit up with pride and I bit my tongue against the words which wanted to follow them, the shield I was so tempted to place between us by pointing out how spectacularly she’d failed at evading the cops, but I didn’t do it. She didn’t need me to remind her of that and despite me knowing full well that I couldn’t be what she needed, couldn’t give her what she deserved, I simply had to steal that look in her eyes.
“We still need to talk,” she whispered and I nodded.
“Enjoy your Pops first. I’ll get myself cleaned up before we get into it.”
I turned from her and headed to get myself a shower, cursing and spitting and biting my tongue against the pain in my fucking cock as I washed and fought back the thoughts of her which kept pushing into my brain. Because every time my dick got excited, liquid magma seemed to boil its way through it from the new piercing and it was a hell unlike any I’d ever known before.
I grabbed a loose-fitting pair of navy sweats and pulled them on once I was dry, leaving my chest bare. She deserved to see the ink I’d gotten for her, even if it was going to raise some questions I might not have been comfortable answering.
I returned to the bedroom just as Brooklyn placed her empty bowl down on the nightstand, a contented sigh escaping her as she smiled to herself and leaned back into the pillows on my bed. But as she turned those big, electric blue eyes on me, her smile fell away and the silence in the room deepened until it felt like it was pressing in on us from all around and I would suffocate on it if something wasn’t done to end it.
“I was an arsehole,” I admitted, leaning my shoulder against the wall as I watched her, my inked fingers curling and unlocking again like I didn’t know what to be doing with them. “The things I said to you before you left-”
“Before you kicked me out like an owl in a storm,” she interrupted and I heaved out a deep breath.
“I’m bad, Brooklyn. All the worst kinds of it. Toxic. Poison. Whatever you wanna call me, I’m it. Ava…” The screams of the past rose up inside me until all of my muscles were locked in place and I wanted nothing more than to just turn and leave, to never speak of this again, but I couldn’t. She deserved to hear this, even if I had to cut myself open to say it. “Ava was sweet, innocent, blind to this world of mine through ignorance or a stubborn refusal to see the truth of it. When I was with her, I was a different man to the bloodstained one you see before you. Not because my grief and guilt didn’t hang on me then but because I was just Niall. Just this fella with a normal job who earned an abnormal amount of money for it. I could be different when I was with her. It was like…living this whole other life.”
“But wasn’t that life a lie?” Brooklyn asked, a frown pinching her brow which made me still.
I wanted to bite back at that accusation, but I couldn’t really. She’d gotten to the truth of it.
“Yeah. A pretty lie that I let myself believe in whenever I walked through our front door. That I left behind whenever I went to work for my pa and listened to my victims scream their last screams. I was two men but both of them wanted that lie to be true at least some of the time.” Her screams echoed on inside me and I swallowed thickly. “And that selfish desire was the lie that cost her her life.”
“Hellfire, I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” Brooklyn said slowly.
I swiped a hand down my face and looked away from her. “I’m just trying to explain what happens to people who get close to me.” I needed to warn her away, but I wasn’t sure I could keep hiding how I felt about her, so maybe if she understood the cost of loving me, she’d keep herself from me all on her own.
“But…she wasn’t close to you, was she? Not like I am? She didn’t see you like I get to. All bloody and broken and beautiful in your destruction. So I’m not like her in that way. I can fight, I can kill, I can-”
I stepped forward and cupped her cheek in my palm, looking down at her where she still sat on the bed and shaking my head.
“You’re still too close,” I said. “That’s why I wanted you to run. You have no idea how many people want me dead, little psycho. How many of them want to strike at me and hurt me in any way they can. Even most members of my own family want to see my head roll. I can’t always be there to protect you from that. I couldn’t protect her.”
Brooklyn’s lips parted and I forced myself to withdraw my hand, making a move to step back, but she caught my forearm, her fingers seeming to burn where they pressed against the tattoo of my dead wife’s name.
“Sit with me,” she said, her voice firm but not demanding, more of a plea which I couldn’t refuse.
I moved onto the bed beside her, my entire body aware of her as I made myself comfortable leaning against the pillows to her right, her bright eyes keeping me captive the entire time.
“You lied to me,” she said just as I thought the worst of this conversation had passed and I winced as I remembered there were other issues to discuss. “About your big tits fiancée. If you can’t have people close to you then why are you marrying some big titted, big boob woman?”