“Ethan fucking Wesley, you get your damn hands off my daughter!”

Fuuuuuuuck.

That voice is my mother. The gasp I hear is my father.

Ethan keeps his arm around me, circled around my waist so that I’m hooked to him, even when he turns around.

Shit. Shit. Shit!

My parents were in a restaurant down the street. They’d parked when they saw Ethan and I as we were waiting for the valet.

“This isn’t as bad as it looks,” I say to my mother. I can barely catch my breath and she’s barreling toward me in full protective mother mode. This is so fucking bad, but that’s because I can’t imagine my mother being okay with this in a thousand years. I love Ethan, but this isn't how I want to tell my mother that.

My father is trying to calm her down, grabbing her arm, but she’s swatting him away. “Shut up, Daniel, you don’t understand,” she spits her words at him.

I can’t imagine ever talking to Ethan that way, and I know he’d never stand for that. Of course, my father cowers back. I know that mom likes being in charge, and I certainly don’t take any shit, but now I’m seeing the differences in myself and my mother now and what it means for belonging to Ethan. I want to belong to him. My mother just plain doesn’t want that. My father has never acted like that far as I’ve ever seen.

But I don’t have time to put last year’s freshman psychology to use. I lean forward and instinctively Ethan grips me. I bite my lip at the sensation. I crave belonging to Ethan, this is who I am and who I want to be for him. With him. Ethan and I bring out the equal and complementary parts of each other.

The battering ram coming toward us is the opposite…and she’s my mother who wants me to not date my professor, the friend she romantically rejected. God, this is a mess. Everything I want is going down in flames. Tears well up in my eyes and I try to breathe through it.

Ethan is struggling to control his temper; I can practically feel heat rising off of him. I step between him and my mother, my hand sliding over his for a second because I have to touch him. It's how I have to show him that I’m his, that I want him to be okay, even in just a small, momentary touch.

“Move, move right now, Emmaline. You get the hell away from this bastard. I knew he was up to some bullshit. All these years and you figure you’ll just have my daughter since I didn’t want you? You’re crazy. You’re a creep. You need to stay the hell away from Emmaline-“

“MOM!” I can’t take a single word of this. “Don’t talk about Ethan like that. You don’t know him anymore and I’m not convinced that you ever really did. This isn’t about you. I’m an adult’-“ I cut off my mom but she cuts me off, opening her mouth and making a frustrated sound while stepping closer.

I press my body against Ethan, backing against him. Ethan grips my upper arms and the waves of adrenaline shooting through my body that make me want to run tell me that there's nowhere to run because where I want to be is in Ethan's arms.

My mother’s eyes nearly pop out of her head at Ethan's hands around my arms. “He's not some man you can date. You're a child, and this is ridiculous. You have some kind of delusion here, and I love you, baby, but I know that you don’t know what you’re doing right now. You can come home with me, or you can come to the university to me.” She stomps.

Ethan's hands squeeze my arms tight and then release me. “Emmaline, go home with your mother,” Ethan says. His voice has that calm-before-the-hurricane quality, but this won’t be the prelude to something sensual.

My eyes well back up and I turn around. “No!” I try to fight back the tears but they’re streaming down my face. I bring my hands up to touch Ethan's face but he captures my wrists before I make contact.

I can see the pain in Ethan's eyes. “Your mother is right.” The valet pulls up with Ethan's car, and though his eyes are pained, Ethan releases my hands and takes his keys from the valet. “Go home with your parents.”

“Please, don’t leave me,” I cry out.

Ethan steps back toward me and wipes off one of my tears, and I watch his hand drop down into a fist, but he goes back to his car.

I beg Ethan not to leave me, whimpering and crying, but Ethan drives away.

My father comes toward me, but I push him away and he stays back. My mother walks toward me and grabs my arm but I push her away. “I will not go home with you. No one controls me, I'm a grown woman, not a child!” I storm off and drive back to campus.

As soon as I’m inside my room, I call Ethan.

No answer.

“I thought we were past that,” I say aloud to no one but myself.

My tears don’t stop flowing until I’m asleep. In my dreams, I’m sure that I am still crying. When I wake up from my fitful sleep, I pull the rose out of my purse and lay it on the pillow next to me. It smells so good, but right now I should be wrapped up in the unique, masculine scent of Ethan enveloping me.

We were starting something, and now I’m so crushed.

I understand what my mother was getting at, but she’s the one who doesn’t understand. I know that I’ll forgive her, but it won’t be just because she is my mother. I will absolutely need her to even attempt to understand that she crushed something in me when she callously called me a child and ignored anything I had to say.

Ethan won’t be forgiven until he erases every hurt he’s caused me. I feel like I’ve been hollowed out, scooped out and left in his mouth when I kissed him. The husk in a crumbled hump on my bed, that’s not Emmaline Travers.