Page 56 of It Destroys Me

“You don’t think I can win.” He cocked his head slightly as he looked at me, the disappointment heavy like storm clouds.

“That’s not it.”

“It sounds like it.” His voice rose in anger.

“It’s not,” I said quietly.

“I would have killed him that night if I’d known you were okay with it. I had to fight him with one hand behind my back, and I still won. And you think I can’t?—”

“It’s not that I don’t think you can, Theo. But you’re the single most important person in the world to me, and there are no words to describe how fucking devastated I would be if you didn’t come back. If you were killed…because of me.” My eyes started to water. “I’m scared. Never been so scared in my life, okay? He kills people for a living. He’s a professional. He lurks in the dark and takes people before they even know he’s in the room. He’s a sneak and a coward. He doesn’t come at his opponents head on like you do.”

His eyes were locked on me, and his steam seemed to have evaporated.

I wanted to tell him I loved him again, but I’d already said it too many times. It was a miracle he hadn’t run off.

He let the silence continue, his dark eyes steady on mine.

I looked away, unable to handle that stare a moment longer.

“Sweetheart.”

After a breath, I shifted my stare back to him.

“I’ll come back to you. I promise.”

“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep?—”

“Other men can’t,” he said. “I can.”

I looked away again, wanting to hold on to that promise like a life raft out at sea.

“There’s something I want you to know.” His voice lost its bite, turning soft like the storm clouds had passed.

I looked at him again.

He straightened in the chair, elbows on the edges of the armrests, his hands together. “I’m not ready to reciprocate your feelings…but one day, I will be ready.”

I inhaled a sharp breath when his promise reached out and grabbed my heart. He’d never addressed the words I said. Continued to blanket me with his affection but sidestep the depth of my feelings.

“I’m still stuck in the past in a lot of ways.”

Shayla.

“But just because I don’t say it…” His eyes shifted away, and he stared at a painting for a while. The silence lasted so long, it seemed like he’d completed his sentence. But after a minute, his eyes came back to me. “Doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”

It was almost ten in the evening when Theo pulled into the underground parking garage. It was for patients of the medical offices across the street, so it was completely vacant at this time of night.

When Theo turned to descend farther, I saw a car parked there, an old black car.

Theo rolled down my window as he pulled up beside it.

Axel was in the driver’s seat wearing a black baseball cap with his arm hanging out the window.

“Where did you get that piece of shit?” Theo asked.

“Bought it from a guy for fifteen hundred euros.”

“You think I’m going to let you drive my girl around in that?”