Chapter 9: Forget Me

He didn't move for a moment. He pressed his lips to the crown of her hair, kept his other hand smoothing down her back. He helped her breathe.

"Sloane." He took her hand off the front of his slacks. "Are you really that desperate to make this the last time?"

He started putting her back together. He pulled her panties up her legs, tugged the dress back into place over her hips, smoothed it. Pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed the sweat at her hairline. The same handkerchief from last night.

"Sloane. You went with me back then to get away from those people. What's Sullivan getting you out of now?"

She watched him fix her clothes and didn't stop him. Watched the careful way his hands moved. When he was done, she didn't answer his question. She braced her shoulder against the rock, breathing slow, looking out at nothing.

"Holden. You got a smoke?"

He looked down at her. She had glassy eyes still half-blown from coming, and the flat dead expression underneath them. His jaw locked. Some dark thing moved through his eyes.

He brought his hand up and clamped it around her chin, hard, and forced her face up to his.

"Sloane. Don't fucking play games with me. I love you. I'm not pathetic."

The veins stood up along the back of his hand. It looked frightening. But she didn't feel the press of it on her air.

He couldn't bear to.

Her chest twisted. The pain of it ran out into her arms and legs. Her chin was throbbing, the skin slowly turning pink under his thumb.

She'd never heard him use the word pathetic about himself before. Not once. Not even seven years ago.

It hadn't been like she hadn't regretted leaving. It hadn't been a single day of those seven years she hadn't regretted it. But what was she supposed to do. The reality she'd been living in was a mirror — beautiful, fragile, and the second the wind picked up, it had cracked into a thousand pieces and lodged in her flesh. And she hadn't been allowed to cry. Because no one was going to come save her. No one ever had. Not even now.

She closed her hand around his wrist and threw it off, hard. When her voice came back, it didn't have its usual lazy drawl.

"Holden, what is this. You wanted to fuck me, I let you. Now you want to choke me?"

He bit down on his back teeth. She'd made him laugh — the wrong kind of laugh. He pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and looked at her for a long beat. Then he dropped his eyes.

"Sloane. You really won't talk to me. About any of it. Not seven years ago. Not now."

Her hands curled at her sides. Her brow drew tight. She lifted one hand halfway to him, hesitated, and let it fall.

She didn't have the right to comfort him anymore. They were past tense. This — what had just happened — was the freak accident of two ex-lovers in a parking lot.

She opened her mouth to say something. A voice came up the path before she could.

"Sloane? Where'd you go?"

Sullivan.

Both of them turned. Sullivan was standing at the edge of the gazebo, scanning the gardens.

She put her face back together. The drawl came back. "Holden. I let you have me today. You didn't take it. Don't act like I didn't say yes."

She stepped past him toward the mouth of the grotto, toward the sun.

Three steps from the edge, she stopped. She didn't turn around.

"Holden. Forget me, okay? Go live your life."

Forget me. Forget Sloane Bellamy. Be the Ashworth golden boy you were always going to be.

He looked at her back. The skin of her shoulder blade was already coming up red where he'd bitten it. The two ridges of her shoulders looked like a butterfly's wings, opening to fly. He had the strangest thought — that there was only one white butterfly like that in the whole world, and everyone wanted to catch it, and no one ever could.

She didn't wait for an answer. She stepped out into the sun and walked.

She didn't hear him at first. The wind was coming through the rose garden. But then, behind her, Holden's voice came down the breeze and reached her.

"Okay."