Ripped

Danger . . .

Oh, shut it, brain!

Mackenna offers his lean, corded arm the same way he offered it to me when we were locked in the closet, but this is the first time I get to watch my own hand stretch out and slip into his. The mixture of peace and anxiety I experience at the contact disconcerts me. He leads me to the dance floor.

Danger.

Stop.

All are instructions from my brain to my body, but I cease to hear them when his arms slide around me.

There’s sweat everywhere, the music is hot, loud, high. It’s okay to have sex. Impersonal sex. But there’s nothing impersonal about what we’re doing now. Nothing impersonal in the way he presses his lips to the top of my head and drags them to my temple, his hands cupping my ass so he can rock his body to mine, grinding against me. His body is both lean and flexible, and the way he moves means I feel every muscle—including his erection.

“I want to gorge on you, stuff my face with you.” He slides his tongue into my ear, then retreats, the passion between us singeing me, shuddering through me. “God, Pandora, the things I want to do to you—”

“Kenna . . .”

“I’m obsessed. I’m fucking mental about you. If you’d only let me in, Pink. Let me in, once and for all . . .”

The stupid internal struggle I’m faced with exhausts me. The constant push and pull between my brain, my heart, and my stupid horny body. I push him away, my voice wavering. “So you can break my every dream? So you can walk away without even a goodbye?”

He blinks as if I just threw a left hook from out of nowhere. “I didn’t want to . . . you think I enjoyed . . .” He’s stopped moving, and when he finally seems to take command of his baffled thoughts, his voice is edged with frustration. Taking my elbow and pulling me back to him, he growls, “Fuck! You were the one—”

“I what? I couldn’t say I loved you, so you left to punish me. That’s what you did!”

“Is that what you think of me?” He may as well have been slammed by a torpedo—that’s how stricken he looks. “You think I’d punish you? Pandora, the day I walked away from you was the day I fucking ripped my own heart out!”

“Hey, chill, both of you!” Lex and Jax gather around us, and Lex pulls me back against him while Jax sets a hand on Mackenna’s shoulder with a look that says he doesn’t think now is the right time for us to be discussing this.

Angrily, Mackenna shoulders free and takes one step forward, dragging one angry hand over his sexy round scalp as he studies me. Everyone else is dancing, but we stand here, both of us about a word away from unraveling.

He doesn’t like seeing Lex touch me, I realize, for he reaches out and jerks me back to him. “Let’s go, Pink,” he growls.

“Kenna, we’ve grown attached to Pink here—” Lex begins.

He pushes him aside. “Stay out of this, both of you.”

♥ ♥ ♥

REALISTICALLY SPEAKING, THE talk was long overdue.

Maybe neither of us wanted to venture there. Maybe we both pretended we hadn’t cared. That it hadn’t hurt. That we were over it.

Sure.

When we get back into the little cocoon of our hotel—separate from the band’s at his insistence—he asks, “Why did you go to the concert that night? Why slap me in the face with the first thing you could find?”

“Because I wanted to. Because I thought it would feel good. I wanted to make you hurt, even if it was just a tenth of the hurt you caused me.”

“I’m hurting now,” he says gruffly, then he comes close, looking down at me intensely. “Does it give you pleasure? To hurt me?”

“No,” I admit meekly, dropping my eyes in a way I rarely do. But, god, looking into his eyes right now is too much to ask. Too much, when my emotions are in a roil, and the emotions he’s stirring in me are overtaking everything else.

“Then why stay when Leo asked you to? Why stay and torture me, Pink?”

“I already told you, I wanted the money,” I argue.

“What do you want it for?”

“Saving it.” I move toward the window, stiff with dignity, staring blindly at the city lights. “For me, and for Magnolia. For independence.”

“I would’ve paid you double to leave me alone.”

I stop breathing, then turn around and look at him. He’s pacing the length of the room, restless, looking about as unsteady as I feel. My pride prickles as I realize that, of course, he would have paid me. He left. He walked away once before, determined not to see me again. “Why didn’t you?” I demand, my hurt and anger rising once again.

“Apparently I’m a fucking masochist. When I saw you . . .” He tugs on his diamond earring and sighs as he lifts his head to me. Our gazes meet. His eyes are darkened with emotion. Dirty silver. Haunted somehow.

By me?

“If you can’t stand me, then why did you agree to this too?” I ask in a suffocated whisper, my chest clutching in pain as I anticipate his reply.

“I agreed to it in exchange for a time out—away from the band.” He waits for a moment, and then he quirks one mocking eyebrow. “You look surprised.”

“Well, what do you mean ‘a time out’? You’ve dreamed about this. You had big dreams, Mackenna, and this . . . this is your dream.”

“It’s not how I dreamed it would be,” he says, propping a shoulder negligently against the wall and tapping his fingers restlessly against his thigh. “All I wanted was to make music. I never wanted or imagined everything else. I never really wanted all of this.”

“Why create such a big band, then?”

He hikes up one shoulder. “The guys needed a lead, and I needed to get away.”

“Because of your dad?”

He pushes away from the wall and starts crossing the room, his laugh soft and bitter. “Because of you, Pandora.”

The words stun me.

Cut me.

His continuing approach unsettles me, causing little ripples in my tummy.

“I tried to be good enough for you, Pandora,” he says darkly, and with every step he takes, my heart grips harder, more painfully. “I tried to make you happy. I tried to make up for my shitty dad. But I was never good enough to be taken home to meet my girl’s family. Nothing I did could ever prove myself to you.”

“I never made you prove yourself to me!” I gasp.

But his face is grim now, a frown of remembrance flitting across his features as he stops a good three feet away from me. “You wouldn’t walk next to me on the street. By the time I left town, you were determined that nobody know I’d been with you.”

“Because my mother would have my head! It had nothing to do with you not being good enough. I thought you were . . .” My words are choked with anxiety. “I thought you were the most amazing human being I’d ever met, Kenna. You had goals, you knew who you were, and who you wanted to be. And what was I? Mourning, confused . . . unwanted.”

“You were wanted by me. Yet you walked next to any fucking guy you knew except me. Even though I was yours.” The brilliant pain in his eyes nearly bowls me over with its intensity.

“I didn’t want it to be them, I wanted it to be you!” I cry.

“It was me!” he shoots back. “But you wouldn’t have it.” He openly studies me, the muscle ticking in his jaw betraying his frustrations. “Even when you gave yourself to me, you still held back. You gave me your body, your time, but not you. Never you.”

His gaze claws into me as if he can find me—the real me—inside here somewhere, and when he reaches out to take my hand in his hand, my emotions rage at the gentle squeeze he gives me. “I loved you, Pandora. I loved you so fucking hard.”

Oh, how wrong I was to think you could hurt someone so much and ever find real closure. It just hurts more, and more, and more. “But that’s over now,” I whisper.

He swears and reaches out for me, but I edge back. “Don’t. I’ll never forgive myself if I cry right now,” I warn.

“I cried for you, Pandora. Drunk and sober, I cried for you, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“Don’t! Stop, Kenna!” I spin around and blink rapidly, and thankfully, he doesn’t touch me when he walks up to the window, stopping an inch to my right.

He sighs, dragging his hand through his hair as we both stare outside.

“Look, this is over in a week. Let’s just try and be friends. I don’t want to hate you, Mackenna. Hating you makes me miserable.”

He turns me around to face him. His eyes are brilliant, and if my gaze weren’t blurry, maybe I’d see the pain I can hear in his voice. “Whatever you want.”

He leans forward and kisses my forehead.

The lump in my throat grows.

Framing my face with his big, wide hands, he kisses the tip of my nose, my chin, my forehead.

“Kenna . . . ,” I whisper. “I think I’m ready to go home. This wasn’t how I imagined it either.”

He keeps kissing me.

My throat hurts. Like all my sins and mistakes are trapped in me, like everything else. Trapped like my love for him, and anything good I have to give. He rains kisses on my face, gently, as if he truly cares about me, bringing all the things that I’m feeling just under the surface of my skin to bloom in full view. For anyone and everyone to see.