Chapter 45 Garrett
Garrett
This was fucked up. I knew it was. I wasn’t stupid. None of it was healthy. I should have had better ways to deal with my head than this. I should have had something solid. Something normal.
I didn’t.
Before him, my coping mechanism had been arrogance and noise. Be loud. Be cruel. Be untouchable—until I could lock myself away and survive the night alone. That was all I had ever done. Survive. I had never actually been okay. I had never known silence in my head. Not real silence.
Not like now, when I could finally feel good for once. When I could finally feel… anything.
I had slept with girls. Plenty. It worked the way it was supposed to. It proved what it was supposed to prove, but it never fixed anything or gave me what I really wanted. Or what I needed.
It just put a temporary lid on it. It made my mother relax. It made Dr. Graves nod like I was progress in motion.
Of course, he never told me to have constant meaningless sex, and neither did my mother, but they both made it clear I needed to discover appropriate relationships. With women. As God intended. Julian Graves had spent a year conditioning me to love girls—to appreciate their beauty, their company, their bodies—and I had taken it to heart when I came back.
Until the demons clawed their way in again.
Until him.
When my lion took control, everything stopped. The panic. The shame. The constant pull under my skin. It all went quiet. I didn’t feel broken. I didn’t feel like I was one wrong move away from being dragged back somewhere I didn’t want to go.
With Aslan, I didn’t have to make all those hard choices—I felt free. I felt those choices were made for me so I could breathe and blame him.
That scared the hell out of me because I was bringing us both down.
He pulled back from the kiss, breathing hard, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to decide whether I was stable enough to touch. He actually cared whether I was okay. That was the insane part. He respected me more than I respected myself.
When he suggested we shouldn’t do this, I didn’t let him finish.
“Please,” I told him, not even trying to hide how desperate I sounded. “No talking. Don’t analyze it. Don’t fix it. I just need you to be you. Do… what you do. Take over.”
I pressed my mouth to his again—just to stay anchored.
“If you start thinking, I’ll lose my nerve,” I muttered against his lips. “And I can’t afford that tonight.”
He caught my wrist again before I could pull away, his fingers wrapping gently around the bandage he’d just placed there.
“I’ll stay,” he said quietly. “But you promise me something.”
I almost laughed at that. Promise. Like I was capable of keeping one.
“You don’t do this alone again,” he continued, his thumb brushing carefully over my wrist. “Not this. Not when it gets loud in your head. You don’t bleed by yourself. If it gets bad, you come to me.”
He leaned in and kissed me again, softer this time. Slower. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to let him put me back together, to let myself believe that maybe he could hold me steady long enough for the world to stop spinning. If I did that—if I let him become the thing that kept me standing—they would tear it apart. They would not hesitate to take him down with me.
Graves could do that. The court had already handed him authority over my life. He could have me evaluated, recommitted, locked away under the excuse of “treatment.” He could force sessions, supervision, medication. He could label this connection as instability, call it relapse, call it risk. They could order Aslan to stay away—for my safety, for his. They could make it official. Permanent.
There was no fighting that kind of power.
“We can figure this out,” he murmured. “Whatever this is.”
He thought this was the beginning.
I saw it in his eyes. That dangerous hope. That idea that maybe this was where we stopped hurting each other and started choosing each other.
He had no idea what was coming.
I lifted my hands and held his face firmly, forcing him to look at me.
“Lion,” I said, steady even though my chest felt like it was splitting open. “I can’t promise you that.”
His expression shifted immediately.
“Whatever the hell this is,” I went on, “we can’t keep it. I can’t keep it. I’m not allowed.”
The words tasted like rust in my mouth.
“Come tomorrow, I won’t be near you. I won’t touch you. I won’t kiss you. If you let yourself believe this is something, I will be the one who tears it apart. So I need you far from me by morning.”
He looked at me like I’d just hit him.
“Then why ask me to stay?” he asked, voice tight.
Because I was weak. Because I was terrified. Because I knew what Saturday meant.
“Because right now,” I said, pressing my forehead to his, “I can’t do without you.”
It was the closest I’d ever come to begging.
“I can’t choose you,” I admitted. “So choose for me. Do that thing you do. Take it from me. Tell me what to do. Anything. Just don’t stop. Please. Take control.”
I was ready to watch him leave. I would have, if some lunatic had told me to be with him tonight and get the hell out by tomorrow.
I saw all those thoughts run through his mind. I felt the conflict, the pain, the hesitation. He was even crazier than I was.
The corner of his mouth twitched like he was about to fight it, and then he didn’t. The smallest smirk, crooked and dangerous, and something inside my chest loosened.
He grabbed the back of my neck hard enough to hurt. Fingers digging in. Claiming.
“Fuck,” he muttered, breath hot against my mouth. “I love when you beg me.”
He kissed me, trying to erase every word he’d said before it. It wasn’t slow. It wasn’t pretty. It was teeth and heat and urgency. He caught my bottom lip between his teeth and bit down, not enough to draw blood, but enough to make me feel it. Then he dragged his tongue over, trying to fix what he’d just broken.
“You taste so good, little wolf,” he said roughly. “So fucking good.”
There was no softness in it. Just hunger.
I huffed a breath against his mouth, half a laugh, half something darker. “You’re insane. Did you just call me a wolf?”
“Yeah,” he shot back without hesitation. “You are my wolf. Wild. Dangerous. But still mine. I can still devour you.”
That landed. Not sweet. Not romantic. Possessive. A warning disguised as a confession.
“Isn’t the wolf the villain in every story?” I asked, brushing my mouth against his throat before dragging my tongue slowly over the skin.
He cupped my jaw, forcing my eyes back to his. “Even the big bad wolf can be saved,” he said quietly, “and can have his happy ending…”
I closed my eyes for a second, letting the words sink in. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to be something that could be saved… loved. Deep down, I already knew there was no happy ending to my fairytale.