A rush of emotion sweeps through me when he shuts the door and just stands there, looking at me with those greedy silver eyes that want to eat me up, inch by inch. Rivulets of sweat drip down his chest. He’s wearing a pair of white jeans with a silver belt—looking very much the rockstar. His wrist is covered in thick cuffs, and the silver ring on his thumb glints in the light. A visceral tug jerks me on the inside as I think of how much I want to feel that silver ring brush against me. My chin, lips, my nipples, my sex. God, yeah—why stop at my lips when I can feel it trail deliciously everywhere?
“You came.” The gruff tone makes my skin pebble.
He takes the first step toward me, but I raise my hand to stop him and blurt out, “Kenna, we can’t have a future if you don’t . . . if you don’t really know who I am. What I did. When you left me.”
He laughs softly and drags his hand over his delicious buzz cut in a way that drives me crazy. “I made a mistake too, Pandora,” he tells me, his eyes shining with regret as he takes in the visual of me like I’m some sort of vision he can barely believe. He spreads his arms out. “Baby, we were young, and that’s all right, we know better now. We won’t hurt each other anymore. I had no future, nothing to offer you, I still shouldn’t have walked away, no matter what you said . . .”
“You! You had you to offer me, Kenna.”
He stares as I extend my hand to show him the ring he gave me. I’m wearing it, proudly, on my finger. And don’t I wish that I could be just as proud of my words.
“I know what my mother did,” I painfully whisper. “I didn’t then, but I do now.”
He stares more, eyebrows pulling low over his eyes.
“Mackenna,” I say, my voice turning huskier and darker, “everything you think you know about me, everything you could possibly feel, it could go away right now.”
A flash of wild grief grips me as I pause for breath and he murmurs, “The way I feel isn’t going anywhere. It’s not changing. It’s not ending. It’s . . .”
“Kenna, I suck. I suck—”
“Whoa, baby.” He stops me with an incredulous laugh. “Call me any names you want, but I’ll be damned if I let you sit there and insult my girl like that—”
“I was pregnant, Kenna.”
The words drop on him like a bomb.
I can’t go on for a moment, a spurt of anxiety seizing me. I measure him for a moment—how still he is.
“When you left, I was pregnant,” I force myself to finish.
The shock holds him immobile, while the pain quietly cracks me open. This is my box. The box of bad things Pandora should never open. Here it is, every last part tearing out of my soul so that the one person I want to love and accept me will know.
“What the fuck are you saying, Pandora?” His voice is distant already. It’s one hundred percent disbelief.
Oh, the look on his handsome face. I will remember it every day to my death. The morphing of his eyes from silver to shocked gray. The lines of his perfect features freezing in disbelief.
It takes every ounce of courage in me to breathe out the rest. “We have a little girl.”
He keeps standing an inch away, his chest not expanding at all, not even for air.
“She’s a little younger than Magnolia. It was a closed adoption.” I can barely look at him, watch his eyebrows slant, his lips thin, his jaw clamp. “I gave her up, Kenna,” I choke out, the hardest five words I’ve ever had to utter in my life.
He hasn’t breathed. Or moved. Nothing. I’m hugging myself just to keep my body from falling apart.
“It kills me not to know . . . ,” I continue in this wretched whisper. “I don’t know if she has your eyes or mine. I don’t know if she’s happy. If she belongs . . . or not. But I know I needed you with me. I needed you to take us away. I didn’t want to be weak and give her up, but I couldn’t do it. Mother said I couldn’t do it. And I was frightened, and I felt betrayed, and so I gave her up . . . like I thought you’d given up on me.”
I can’t look at him. He’s too still, too silent, curling his fingers into his palms at his sides, his knuckles white.
His lack of reply frightens me.
He will never, ever love you again, Pandora . . .
Never call you “baby” again, or “Pink,” as if that’s your name and despite your darkness, you own it . . .
“That’s why I switched schools,” I continue. I scrape my nails over my arms, up and down, up and down. “And met my new friends. Melanie and Brooke, and Kyle.”
He’s staring at me like I’ve just ripped his heart out, for real.
Clouds suddenly darken his eyes. “My girls needed me . . . but I wasn’t there. I was hurting. A rebel, unwanted, writing a stupid song about how much I loathed your kiss.” He rubs my lips with that silver ring that I crave so much, and my whole body shivers. “When really, your kiss was all I wanted. One more kiss from you. For these lips to tell me their owner loved me.”
“We can’t see her . . . can’t talk to her. You have no idea how much I regret it.”
“We will talk to her,” he assures me with steely finality, his ring still skimming over my chin and my neck. “I’ll find a way for us to talk to her.”
Love flows through me. For years I haven’t dared even hope . . . but now I can’t help feel anything but hope. “You don’t hate me?” I hesitate for a second but can’t stop my hands from sliding up the back of his neck to his head.
He laughs bitterly, biting his lip uncertainly for a moment before lifting his gaze to mine. “I’ve hated you, your mother, my father, being apart from you . . . I’ve hated all that I could for as long as I could, but I’m fresh out of hate, Pink.” He’s still biting his lip, his eyes a mix of regret and, above all, acceptance. “I love you,” he whispers. “So we screwed up. We screwed up big. Holy shit, but I don’t want to screw up again. Do you?”