He was quiet, waiting for me to respond, and the skin of his hands was mottled white with the pressure from the clench of his fists.
He’d been bottled, corked, and sealed from any and all emotion for so long, and now that he’d released the stopper, he was dangerously close to exploding.
I searched my manic mind, trying to settle on one single thought or feeling, but the effort was torture. All of it was at odds, too mashed up, and anytime I thought I might be latching on to how to feel, something else would come out of the back and smash it with a goddamn hammer.
And God, his vulnerability, it was there, so deeply evident within every facet of his expression, but it made me feel too many things. Hurt. Pain. Discomfort. Relief.
Finally, he was opening up to me.
Finally, he was letting me inside.
But I couldn’t stop myself from being angry over the fact that he had been lying to me about so many things all along. It was like I’d been playing some sort of game with him, but only he had known the actual rules.
My heart raced and my thoughts turned to scattered chaos.
What were we even doing here? How was I supposed to make sense of anything that had ever happened between us? Even our softest moments, moments of commonality found in the desire to keep the movie true to the story, were shot to shit. The events were heartbreaking—mutilating—but they only made the disarray between us more of a mess.
“Everything,” I whispered, the magnitude of the word making my voice shake. “Every painfully extracted thing between us has been a lie.”
“Ivy, you know that’s not true—”
My head shook, permission from my brain coming without premeditation as his words made me even angrier. “Stop. Don’t fucking insult me. All I’ve known between us is anger and lust and a fucked-up mix of the two while you’ve been stewing on the answers the whole time. All you had to do was tell me. All you had to do was—”
“I’m doing it now,” he interrupted, cutting into my ramble and the air with the same sharp blade. His voice was crisp and unyielding, as though I was supposed to just fall willingly at his feet.
“It’s a little fucking late.”
His mouth turned firm, and the line of his jaw straightened with impossible pressure. I couldn’t understand how a person could grimace so hard without shattering their teeth, but Levi managed it. He managed that look all the fucking time.
“I didn’t trust you,” he pushed, taking two giant steps forward. My hands shook as I jumped back to avoid his advance and bumped into the small dressing table at the side of the room.
I laughed, a caustic, droning sound, as I swallowed the thick bile of irony. “Yeah, well, now I don’t trust you.”
All of the rigidity left his body like it’d been let out through a previously locked door. The tension in his face softened, his eyes lost the harsh glitter they so often carried, and just one gently curled hand smoothed softly down the line of my jaw.
It was intimate—startling.
It was all the physical touch I needed to remind me of our night together.
“I know you don’t. But I do. God, Ivy, I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. More than—”
Stubborn tears pooled at the corners of my eyes before spilling over the dam and paving tracks down my cheeks. I shook my head, fighting the touch of his hand and the soothing affection in his voice. I didn’t want to be affected. I didn’t want to give him any of myself. I didn’t want his soft words or honest confessions, and most of all, I didn’t want the hope that there was a real possibility Levi and I could be together, that we could be something.
Good God, I didn’t want to fucking hope.
“Stop,” I ordered, the word catching on what would have been a sob if I’d let it. Instead, I choked it, guarding it with steel and whatever remnants were left of my battered heart.
I wouldn’t be swallowed up by Levi Fox. Not now, not one day, not fucking ever.
Right?
His words were whispers, but what they lacked in volume, they made up for in everything else. They were honest and considerate, and they were wholly flattering. “I know you don’t trust me. And I don’t expect you to. But you’re everything I never knew I wanted and then some. You’re the perfect mix of backbone and nurture and just stubborn enough to put up with me. You’ve got a brilliant mind and a load of talent, but you still care about what matters. You use your head when you want to use your heart, and fuck, Ivy…you did everything you could to look out for a man who sure as fuck didn’t look out for you.”
My cheeks pinked and my stomach flipped, unable to resist the warming glow of compliments as powerful as the ones he’d just given. He, Levi Fox—the most callous, broody guy I’d ever met—was waxing poetic…about me.
“You don’t have to trust me yet because I’ll wait. I’ll wait for you to understand how much I trust you, and I’ll wait for you to feel like I’ve earned yours. Ivy, I promise…I’ll wait.”
With one soft sweep of my jaw and a kiss to the apple of my cheek, Levi turned and left me.
Left me to his words and my thoughts and the swirl of everything he’d told me about his and Grace’s truth.
Left me to decide.
Levi’s clothes effectively removed from my dresser, I slammed the drawer shut.
I’d meant to launder and return them quickly after changing out of them at his house the night after the hospital.
But the twisted part of me had packed them up in my bag and taken them to our new rental property. The place was way less exciting than Grace’s old house, with white walls and store-bought furniture. The styling was modern rather than quaint farm, and I missed the comfort her house provided when I was feeling too raw.
I knew staying there should have had the opposite effect, but her walls were friendly. She was welcoming in a way I hadn’t expected when I’d first accepted the role, and her little house always seemed to be good for advice on how to handle things I was otherwise wholly unfamiliar with.
I wasn’t Montana born and raised, and I didn’t have the experience with small-town residents. But around every corner, there was a clue. Whether it was her grandfather reaching out to share some wisdom or a thoughtfully placed snow scraper on the front porch, Grace had prepared me for all the things I hadn’t thought about facing.
But now, I was on my own, forced to come to some hard decisions without her guidance.
Given Levi’s revelations about the nature of their relationship, and my very complicated feelings for him, maybe the departure of her spiritual guidance was for the best.
“Hey, Ivy Belle,” Camilla muttered, just her head poking through the small gap she’d created between the door and the frame. “Is it safe for me to come in?”
My brow furrowed, and my attitude peaked. “Why the hell wouldn’t it be safe?”
Her smile was indulgent. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you’ve been slamming shit around in here for the last five minutes loudly enough that I could hear you from down the hall.”
The wrinkle between my brows reformed at the sides of my mouth as I scowled. “I wasn’t banging stuff around.”
She scooted through the door and sashayed to my bed, settling herself on top of one pretzeled leg and wrapping the arms of her sweatshirt tighter around her chest. “Uh, yeah. You were.”
I stuck out my tongue and sighed. “Stop being such a know-it-all.”
She shrugged with a laugh and snuggled deeper into the cotton of her sweatshirt. “I can’t help it if I know everything.”
The statement itself was innocent in all of its properties, but the weight it settled on my shoulders wasn’t by coincidence.
Because Camilla didn’t know everything. She might know me well and her intuition was spot-on, but Levi hadn’t spilled all the private details of the real Cold-Hearted Killer story to her that afternoon.
No. He’d shared it all with me.
Grace’s obsession, their relationship, her discovery about the killer, and what it’d meant for the two of them. His guilt over all of it.
It was perhaps the only thing he hadn’t actually admitted—how culpable he felt over his role in her death. But he hadn’t needed to mention it. It’d clung to the walls and coated my skin, and now, hours later, I was still covered in the vile emotional punishment he’d assigned himself as a result.
Camilla’s voice was soft, but it still startled. “Hey,” she called, only a foot from my face. When my eyes met hers, her body language turned nurturing. “God, you look exhausted,” she cooed, moving with me until I settled onto the bed. “Get some rest, okay? I talked to Mary earlier and Sam is doing just fine. Giving them hell already apparently. But if that’s what’s got you so twisted, you don’t need to worry.”
I nodded and lay back on the bed until my head dented the soft pillow, letting her believe Sam’s well-being was the main catalyst for my anguish. It wasn’t that sharing with my sister was something I wanted to avoid; I just didn’t have the energy. Cam sat there and stroked my hair until, eventually, I settled.
Settled into a restless night and tortured dreams of a man I couldn’t forget—only now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.