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 fucking 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.”

I winced and dropped my chin as if I could conceal the place where he attempted to extract my thoughts. “I know that,” I whispered.

“Then don’t try.”

Jared

Fuck.

I stood with my back to her door and tried to reel the evening in. My hands fisted in my hair, and a scream locked in my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.

Because I didn’t fucking know how.

Being in Aly’s presence had proven that.

How had I allowed this to completely spin out of control?

Aly.

Damn it. Motherfucking trigger.

She was slowly driving me mad. Insane. Constantly pushing me up against a wall there was no chance of breaking through, needling her way into my thoughts and mind, invading places I couldn’t allow her to go.

Still she managed to sink her fingers under my skin.

Urges slammed me harder than they had in years.

Addiction was a bitch like that. No matter how many years passed, it never let me forget the temporary escape it gave. The moment’s euphoria. The only place where I could forget. Well, maybe not forget. It just numbed me to the place that I couldn’t feel.

Crossing the room, I fumbled out of my sleep pants and pulled on the jeans I’d worn earlier. I shoved my feet in my boots, grabbed my keys from the coffee table, and bounded down the stairs. I turned my bike over, the loud roar of the engine coming to life. Power vibrated under my hands and feet. I kicked it free of its stand, rolled back, put it into gear. Slowly, I wound around the complex and slipped out one of the side gates.

As soon as I hit the street, I flew. Heat blasted my face. Lashes of hot, angry air tore at my shirt and whipped through my hair. I had no idea where I was going, no destination.

Motherfucking story of my life.

But I couldn’t stay there with her sweet eyes and tender hands. Couldn’t allow myself to slip into her false comfort, to settle into her warmth.

God, I wanted it.

Craved it.

Craved her.

She was doing things to me I couldn’t allow. Fuck, I’d even let her touch me, her fingers like fire as they sketched along the lines that marked my skin with my sins. She’d traced those lines as if she’d drawn them in the pages of one of her books. I’d opened my mouth and let things pour free that I’d never once uttered out loud before.

I let her take a little of what I wasn’t willing to give.

I pinned the throttle as far as it would go. The street blurred below me, and I shook with the speed, shook with the anger.

Stupid.

She admitted that she’d thought about me. Missed me.

On some level, I’d missed her, too. Too much to admit.

But it was on a level that no longer truly existed, just a hollowed-out place that echoed the joy I once had and what might have been. The fucked-up thing was she inhabited that space like she was made for it.

There was no need denying it. I cared about her. But I couldn’t care about her the way she’d want me to. Couldn’t love her the way she deserved to be.

I refused to ever love anyone again.

I was done destroying the things that were important to me. It hurt too much when they were gone.

Resentful laughter tumbled from my twisted mouth when I noticed where I’d ended up.

Of course. Directly across from the old neighborhood.

Shocking.

I was drawn here just as strongly as I’d been drawn back to Phoenix. Just an empty ache that called to me. Taunted me. I came to a rolling standstill, easing my bike off the side of the street just opposite to the spot that had been my everything and where I’d tried to end it all.

The field used to be open. There had only been a wooden fence that separated it from the old neighborhood that bordered it to the right. The expanse of vacant land had once seemed to go on forever, even though there was another neighborhood off to the far left. But to us, this empty field had been our refuge. We’d play here for hours as if it were the only place in the world that existed.

Now a new fence rose at the front of the street, blocking off the area. NO TRESPASSING was boldly stamped on a black sign. Undoubtedly, that sign had been placed there because of me.

I just stared, pinned to my bike, my hands kneading on the handlebars. Memories hit me like the worst beating I’d ever gotten in my life, pummeled me as they fell. And it fucking hurt because so many of them were good.

My lips twitching with an unshed smile, I was barely able to make out our tree in the distance. I wanted to go to it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. It’d once seemed so tall, building it an incredible feat we’d achieved with the brute strength of our hands and the imagination in our minds.

So much time was spent there.

That place inside me expanded, pushed as it struggled for freedom against its confines.

Shit.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes as if doing that would somehow blot out the pictures that spun through my head. For a second, I just wanted to forget. But this was my life.

I’d take death over it, any day.

But I would live it as a penance for what I had done.

Aleena

The next morning when I crept out of my room before dawn, his space on the couch was empty. But I already knew that. I’d heard him leave right after he’d fled my room, and I hadn’t heard him return.

Sleep had eluded me the entire night. All I could do was wonder where he had gone and worry if he was okay.