Come to Me Quietly (Closer to You #1)(25)
Author: A.L. Jackson

Jared tilted his face away as if he didn’t want me to see his confessions waiting there. He wavered before he spoke. “Sex is like fighting for me, Aly. It’s a release, nothing more. I use girls just as shamelessly as Christopher does. Maybe in a different way. I don’t know, but in the end, it’s the same… It means nothing.”

I winced. Jealousy was not a pretty emotion. But it hit me hard. I’d grown so accustomed to this place that was ours that it’d become easy to imagine that this was all either of us had ever known… just the quiet of my room and the steady beat of our hearts.

In it, nothing else existed.

But Jared had known so much, so much pain, so much loss.

He’d known girls and what it felt like to be touched.

Was it wrong that I wanted that, too?

Pushing past our boundaries, I let my fingers climb up his chest and over one of his shoulders. Sinewy muscle jumped under my hands, beckoned me forward just as assuredly as they fought to resist my exploration.

I held my breath when I reached the bare skin of his neck. Every inch of my body lit, flames licking through my veins and blazing in my stomach. Shivers coursed over the surface of my skin.

How was it possible that one person could affect me this way?

I glanced up at his face. Turbulent blue eyes stared down at me. In them I felt a range of emotions, a warning, an appeal. Anger and affection. Most of all, I saw fear.

Tentatively, I dropped my gaze and watched as my fingers trailed down over his shoulder and traced the ink on his left arm. This arm was covered in blacks and grays, twisted shapes and faces that screamed his horrors. On the inside of his wrist was scripted Lest I forget.

Jared shuddered as if the contact caused him physical pain. But he didn’t pull away, and he released a stuttered breath across my face.

“Were you scared when they sent you away?” The question came so softly I thought perhaps I’d only uttered it in my head.

Still it sucked all the air from the room.

Frozen, Jared remained still, a million emotions spilling from his silence, before he finally spoke. “I was pissed, Aly.” He grunted through the words. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like that. I thought I’d finally found a way to pay for what I’d done, and I managed to f**k that up, too.”

Chills crawled along the surface of my skin. Jared had just confirmed my greatest fear. All these years I’d tried to convince myself otherwise, that there was no chance Jared would have tried to take his own life. Asked myself, How could he? Convinced myself I’d just misunderstood because it seemed impossible to believe.

And to know he’d been angry that he’d failed?

Confusion and hurt and fear saturated my spirit because I couldn’t help worrying he’d try again.

I tried to swallow the lump wedged in the middle of my throat. “Maybe it turned out the way it was really supposed to be.”

Hard laughter rocked from his chest. “Nothing turns out the way it’s supposed to, Aly. And even if it did, I would only ruin it. You need to remember that. I warned you that you’d regret doing this… .” His fingers twisted deeper in my hair and he shifted to palm my neck with the other hand. He squeezed to emphasize our friendship, so hard it almost hurt. But it was my heart that hurt.

“How could I regret you?” I brought my hands to his face, held them there, gave in to the smolder singeing my skin. “I missed you, Jared. So much. They sent you away, and I thought I’d never see you again. Do you know how much that hurt?”

But I knew he really could have no idea.

How could he?

“I thought about you every day,” I admitted, burrowing my head farther into the bed, farther into his warmth. We skirted along the edges of an embrace, his hands on my face, mine on his, the expanse between us so great I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to cross it. “What was it like?” I asked, lifting my face to his.

He paused, his breath palpable in the room. “I don’t know, Aly. It sucked, I guess. People were always telling us what we could and couldn’t do, all the while they were calling it a rehabilitation center. There were some really good guys there, ones who just did some stupid stuff. I always hoped that maybe it did them some good. Most of us there were hopeless, though. It wouldn’t matter what punishment we had, there was no chance of coming up with a different result.”

Hopeless. I blinked, trying to understand, to make sense of the tone in his voice. “You felt you were like that?”

Sadness swelled in the room, a thickness that made my skin crawl with goose bumps.

“They let me out when I turned eighteen, Aly. Eighteen.” His voice cracked. “How f**king ridiculous is that? As if I’d paid my dues? As if spending two years of my pathetic existence behind bars would make up for what I’d done?”

Anger rushed from him, these waves of rage that pounded and fought against my spirit. Jared’s body jerked, and I could feel him trying to hold it back, to hold it in. His face contorted as if he were trying to block it all out. “What kind of bullshit is that? She was worth so much more than that.”

“Jared – ”

In a blink, he shot off my bed and onto his feet.

Shocked, I twisted around and scrambled onto my hands and knees as I faced the man standing in the middle of my room. Agitation spun through him, twitching his muscles. My breaths came heavy and strong, mixed with the hostility seeping from Jared’s pores.

Jerking both hands through his hair, he glared down at me, his eyes frantic. “Just don’t, Aly.” He touched his chest with a fisted hand, then dropped it. “Please don’t say something that means nothing.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Please. Not you, too.”

When he opened his eyes, the walls were down, everything bared to me.

Devastation.

It was the only thing I saw.

My heart twisted, this pain slicing me through to the core, cutting to the place where Jared had been a fantasy in my mind. There I’d imagined he had somehow still been whole and not what I saw now, a mess of the few mangled pieces of himself that now remained in the wake of his ruin.

“Jared,” I whispered, my hand fluttering out in his direction, silently begging him to take it. Seeing him this way killed me. It reminded me too much of those months when I could do nothing but watch him fade away. Some part of me had held on to the hope that time had healed some of those pieces.

Now I was certain it had not.

He stumbled back to the door, recognition flashing in his eyes. “You can’t fix me, Aly.”