Bound (Bound Duet Book 1) Read online

  “Nothing,” I said quietly.

  “Look at me and tell me that.”

  I did as he asked and met the eyes I loved so much with sadness in my own. He was angry as hell. I didn’t have a reason anymore—there was no justifiable answer for my behavior other than I was weak. I’d thought leaving everything behind after the incident at the hospital would be easy, and the coke was—I hadn’t needed it to survive a single day. But the pot, the non-addictive drug, that one—that was what I struggled with because it offered an escape, a levity of sorts. My schedule wasn’t so hectic I couldn’t manage, and Gray had been attentive, so this was purely selfish. I didn’t have a viable explanation, so instead, I offered nothing and just stared at him. Hoping he’d see how much I loved him and let it go.

  “Say something, Annie.”

  “What do you want me to say, Gray?” I hated the use of our names. It set the tone, and it was one I didn’t like much.

  “How long have you been doing drugs again? Is it just pot or are you back on coke, too?” The sorrow laced his voice, but it didn’t override his disappointment.

  “I don’t know. I guess since you kept leaving me alone at home while you went out with your friends. I didn’t want to pester you or beg you to spend time with me. The pot helps numb the rejection.”

  “Annie, I wasn’t rejecting you. I was spending time with my friends. And now, my beautiful, strong, vibrant girlfriend is fading away, wilting like a flower without water.”

  “I get it, Gray. I haven’t bitched at you for it or even mentioned it. I want you to be happy, even if I’m not.”

  He flinched at my words like I’d sucker-punched him in the gut. But I laid it out there—his happiness was more important than my own, and I had been willing to punish myself to keep from mentioning it to him. To keep from being like the woman he’d left.

  “If you’re not happy, Annie, why haven’t you told me?” Anger crept back into his voice. He was trying to temper it, but not doing such a hot job.

  “I didn’t want to be like Abby. I didn’t want you to leave because you believed I needed too much from you. You made it clear what I could expect, and I’d rather have some of you than nothing at all.” The tears fell silently from my eyes, streaking my reddening face.

  “Why would you settle for that?”

  I shrugged. He wasn’t really interested in the answer, and I doubted I could explain it anyhow. It had happened years ago, and I’d managed to twist that reality into a demented definition of love. Great relationships started with electricity, unimaginable highs, closeness, then it was about riding out the lows, enduring the pain, sacrificing for the other to reach that pinnacle again. If I kept sacrificing long enough, I knew he’d see how much he valued me. I’d let go too easily with Will, and it cost him his life.

  “Don’t shrug. Answer me. What happened to you? Outside you’re this confident businesswoman, but something happened. I still see that version of you in public, but the side of you visible at home is just a shell.”

  I hadn’t wanted to cry. I didn’t even know why I’d started except thinking about what I’d been through, how it had shaped my idea of romance, and it made me incredibly sad. “I don’t know, Gray.”

  “You do know. You don’t want to tell me. We agreed two years ago, sitting on that couch, there’d be no more secrets. So what is it?”

  At this point, I didn’t really have anything to lose. He was already angry, and this wouldn’t have swayed his emotion in another direction. “Will left me really fucked up, Gray. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “The truth. The details you left out. What happened for three years after you found out. Those things might be helpful.”

  “Fine. You want the gory details? Every time it happened, Will needed an outlet. Initially, he yelled and threw things. I’d listen and dodge the objects as they soared through the air until one day it wasn’t a thing, it was his fist, and it wasn’t in the air, it was in my stomach. He’d been crying and lashed out. I think he meant to hit the wall but wasn’t aware of what he was doing or where he was. It was purely blind rage.”

  “He hit you?”

  “It knocked the wind out of me. Scared the crap out of me. But he apologized. Over the days and weeks that followed, it happened more than once, and the way he inflicted his frustration varied, but it was more cathartic for him to hurt another human than it was to break an inanimate object that had no feeling. I took it because he needed it. He was protecting his mom, keeping her from being hurt.”

  “And you thought that was okay? Are you insane? Why the fuck would you let a guy hit you?”

  My tear-filled eyes found his and looking at him I answered with the most honest answer I could give. “I loved him. I was a kid, Gray. I was afraid of the trouble he might get into, and he begged me not to tell anyone. So, I believed if he knew he had a safe place, he’d be okay. He never raised a hand to me any other time. I had no idea what all would happen if I went to another adult, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. And if anyone found out Will had ever laid a hand on me, I wouldn’t have seen him again.”

  “I had no idea. Why’d you leave that out? You should have told me two years ago, Annie. No wonder you’re fucked up.”

  I should have been hurt by his callous words, but I wasn’t done, and he needed to know it all, so he had the full picture. “At the end of our senior year, his mom had slipped. For years, he had taken what his stepfather and his friends pushed on him thinking he protected her, but Gray, she knew. That bitch knew those men were raping her son, and she let them do it. She was either too weak or too sick to protect him. That was the beginning of the end. He was dead a few months later.”

  “But you still didn’t tell anyone?” He was dumbfounded, and I didn’t miss the accusation in his tone.

  This wasn’t new for me. I’d only told a handful of people what I’d seen in those years and the things I’d learned along the way, but the fact was they didn’t understand it because they’d never lived it. And they’d never live it because abusers prey on certain types of people, and they weren’t the types that were preyed upon.

  I shook my head in response to his question. “I thought he’d be safe once we went away to school. It wasn’t until the last minute, and he decided on Clemson after I’d confirmed USC, that I knew he had checked out. Once he left, I tried, Gray. I tried so damn hard to save him, but I was one person, and he was living in agony.”

  “You feel guilty, don’t you?” Maybe he was finally getting it.

  “Incredibly. If I’d held on for one more day or refused to let him leave for school…or gone to the cops instead of staying silent…anything other than what I did, he might still be here.”

  “You think you should’ve been able to prevent him from committing suicide?”

  “I should’ve prevented it all from ever happening again. But I didn’t know. I was so young, and I thought I’d done what was best for him. But Gray, by the time we graduated, I should’ve been smart enough. I knew to get help. And I didn’t. And he’s gone because of it.”

  He had no clue how to handle anything I’d told him. Hell, I’d paid a professional for years, and he hadn’t fixed my issues, so I didn’t know why Gray thought he could.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know, Gray. Everyone told me that, except all the people screaming at me who loved him and lost him, too—they all blamed me for not ratting out his stepfather or his friends. I was criticized, ostracized for not telling a teacher or my parents. The press murdered me during the trials. The kids we went to school with idolized Will, and they took me down. Hard. What I had endured paled in comparison to the abuse Will suffered, but it was non-existent in the eyes of the media. They crucified me.”

  No one would ever understand. They would never get what it had been like—it had even changed the way my parents looked at me. Even they had left me in the end. The only person who hadn’t left my side, who hadn’t judged me, who had simply held my
hand and loved me…was Jenny.

  We sat in silence for several minutes before he reverted to the cause of the conversation. “Annie, you know how I feel about the drugs—”

  I interrupted him, but this time, I was pissed. I’d just laid my heart out, and he was still ready to slice into me. If I were going down, if he wanted to sidle me with the blame, it wouldn’t be without a fight.

  “Yeah, Gray, I know how you feel about them, but I’ve been doing them for months, and you haven’t noticed. You either haven’t noticed, or maybe you haven’t cared that I was sitting at home always waiting on you after you begged me to change my life. I changed my career, am taking fewer course hours, freed up the time to spend with you, and for what? To sit here while you’re out drinking with your buddies, picking girls up in bars? Don’t think I don’t know, Gray. I’m not an idiot. Just because I choose not to fight about it, doesn’t mean I’m not well aware of what you guys do when you go out. Yes, you come home to me every night, but for what? To fuck me? You sure as hell aren’t making love to me when you come in half-lit. And why is it okay for you to get hammered every night, but not okay for me to do my thing? Jesus, Gray, relationships are two-way streets. I’ve put two years into this one, and we’re no closer than we were the day we met. I’m your beck-and-call girl who’s here when you need me and gone when you don’t. You used your divorce as an excuse to keep me at arm’s length, but you know every ounce of my being is devoted to you.” My voice was stern, my face hardened, and my eyes could have bored holes through steel. He’d never seen this side of me, which was funny since this was who I was outside of our relationship, not the meek girl he lived with. He probably assumed it was the drugs instead of the truth.

  “Annie…”

  “Stop fucking calling me Annie! Are you trying to make me mad? You don’t call me Annie unless you’re trying to piss me off, and right now, I don’t need it. I need something closer to love. I can’t do this right now. My heart is racing a hundred miles an hour, and the madder I get, the worse it feels.” I stood up to leave the room, to escape him, but he stepped in front of me.

  “Baby, you know I love you.” The reassurance in his words might have been meaningful if I hadn’t seen the uncertainty in his eyes.

  He didn’t know this version of me, and I could tell by looking at him he was wondering if he’d kicked me one time too many, taken advantage of how much I loved him for the last time. But I couldn’t beg Gray to give me what I needed. I didn’t bother acknowledging him. I stepped around him and went to the bathroom. Closing the bathroom door behind me, I turned the water on in the bathtub and tried to drown out the pain.

  I soaked until my fingers were shriveled versions of what they once were and the water had become tepid. Stepping out of the tub and onto the cool tile, I reached for a towel and almost lost my balance, suddenly feeling lightheaded. My hand on the counter steadied my body long enough for me to dry off and wrap myself up. Once I was confident enough to leave the bathroom without falling over, I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. If I was dehydrated, the last thing I needed was to make it worse. I didn’t know if this was stress induced, coming down, or if I was sick, but the way my stomach turned, I’d go with the third.

  The light was on in the kitchen. As I opened the cabinet and reached for a glass, I noticed the note lying on the counter and realized Gray wasn’t home. I wasn’t surprised to read he’d gone to Topher’s and would be back later. That’s where he always went when things got a little hazy around here, especially since Heather and Topher had broken up a few weeks ago. And again with the ambiguous “later.” I wanted to be mad, but I didn’t feel well enough to spend the energy on being angry with Gray. In two years, we’d never had a fight—not one where we went back and forth. He was upset in Gatlinburg, and he had known I was, but there was no argument. I had my own life, he had his, we were happy when we were together, but that was largely in part because he’d always gotten what he wanted.

  I didn’t bother putting on any clothes. I took my water and sat wrapped in a towel on the couch, willing the nausea away. The onset of whatever this was came quickly, my body ached as a fever took over, and my head pounded in time with my heart. Movement of any kind threw my equilibrium completely off balance, and when the first wave of unrelenting nausea arrived, I struggled to make it to the bathroom to hang my head over the edge of the toilet.

  Purging what little was in my stomach, mostly the water I’d had to stay hydrated, I held on to the toilet before pushing away to rest against the tile floor. The cool feel of the porcelain helped to lower my rising body temperature. When the towel fell from my body and settled on the floor, I didn’t bother trying to pick it up and just laid there—nude. The streetlight flickered off and on, leaving me cascading in darkness and a bit of moonlight. I let myself fade in and out with the glow they provided, closing my eyes to rest.

  At some point, Gray would come home. He’d find me here and realize none of this was worth what we were doing to each other. We didn’t need to fight, and he didn’t need to run off every time we had an uncomfortable discussion. I knew he hated the drugs, and if we could come to some sort of compromise, I’d quit. I needed him present in my life—not randomly filling a void.

  There were no lights on in the apartment when he got home. I never intended to die on the bathroom floor, but that’s where I was when I heard the door open. My car was downstairs, so he knew I was here, but I wouldn’t have doubted it if he expected me to still be up when he came home. I didn’t hear him move throughout the apartment or bother calling out to him. For all I knew, he wanted to go unnoticed. If he wanted me, he’d come looking, and I wouldn’t be hard to find.

  The bathroom light bathed me in blinding color, still lying on the floor with my cheek pressed to the cold tile. I imagined I was pasty white with as bad as I felt.

  “Bird Dog…” he called out. Without moving my head, I shifted my eyes up to him painfully. Once he saw the vomit in the toilet, he made eye contact with me. “Baby, are you okay?”

  I shook my head as tears ran down my cheeks, splashing against the tile floor. The pain in my stomach was horrible, and my head was throbbing. “I don’t feel good. I keep throwing up.”

  “How long have you been sick?” he asked as he reached to wet a washcloth to put on my forehead.

  My shoulders rose in a weak shrug.

  “Can I pick you up?”

  I lifted my arms like a child waiting for a parent to hold them and comfort them. Sweeping me up into his arms effortlessly, he took me to bed. I was still naked and had a fever. He pulled a tank top and a pair of panties out of my drawer to cover me and helped me into them. He left me alone on the bed but quickly returned with a glass of water and aspirin.

  I fell asleep with him lying next to me. He was fighting some internal struggle, and I should’ve asked him about it, but instead, I curled into his side, putting my head in the crook of his shoulder. I glanced up at him one last time before closing my eyes to rest and found him staring at the ceiling. He had one arm behind his head and one wrapped around my body, and I was out like a light.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, I woke less nauseous than I’d been the night before. My stomach no longer threatened to vacate my body and seemed to have stopped protesting after I plastered myself to the cold tile in the bathroom. I remembered Gray coming in, but not much after. As the sun peeked through the blinds, I rolled over. I expected to find him next to me, but the bed was empty and the sheets were cold. Cocooned in the blankets, I pulled the covers back and stretched before making my way out of bed and into the kitchen. The smell of coffee about knocked me over and sent me flying toward the bathroom. With nothing left in my stomach to throw up, retching was painful. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through a day of this as weak as it had made me last night in such a short span of time. The wave passed, and I splashed cold water on my face, bringing color back to my cheeks. When I emerged from the bathroom, there was still no si
gn of Gray. My phone in hand, I sat on the edge of the mattress and typed out a text.

  Me: Where are you?

  Gray: Running errands

  Me: Are you going to be back soon or out most of the day?

  Gray: Out most of the day.

  Gray: You still sick?

  Me: I’ll make it. I guess I’ll see you later.

  I laid back down and fell asleep. Gray woke me up when he came in the door and sat down on the bed. My body rose as the mattress dipped under his weight. He kissed my forehead and laid down on his side facing me before he dropped the bomb.

  “Annie”—it was never good when he used my name—“I need to talk to you.”

  I didn’t want to hear this, but I opened my eyes to acknowledge him anyhow.

  “I’m moving back in with Topher. Since Heather moved out, he’s got the space, and it makes sense for everyone. I’m hurting you by staying here, and nothing good is coming out of us living together.”

  Dumbfounded—I stared at him in complete disbelief. This was not on my radar at all. He didn’t even bother lubing up before fucking me over.

  “What?”

  “I love you, baby. But it’s not fair for me to have asked you to make changes to accommodate me, but I make zero for you. I don’t want to stop seeing you, and I’m not interested in seeing other people; it’s just not in our best interest to keep doing this.” His emphasis on the last word struck me as odd, but I remained too confused to comment on it.

  At this point, I sat up, staring at him. I wasn’t sure whether to beg him to stay or let him go. Maybe he wanted me to plead, or needed confirmation of how much I needed him although I couldn’t imagine how he would expect I’d be all right on my own. But quite possibly he needed to see I’d survive without him.

  Two years!

  Holy shit.

  My heart hurt like someone had hit my chest with a sledgehammer to flatten it out and feed it through a paper shredder.

  “Annie, say something.”