I Let Her Ruin Herself novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Breakfast

I didn't move.

I lay under his arm with my eyes open and counted the cracks in his ceiling.

The hand on my ribs stayed warm and loose.

It rose and fell with his breathing.

I told myself it could be a different scar.

Then I told myself that nobody else I knew had a burn like that, across all four knuckles, in the same place.

At six, the blind turned gray.

I slid out from under his arm, and he made a small sound and rolled over.

I dressed in the dark and sat down at the one chair at his table.

I thought about the garage, in order, the way I had never let myself in my first life.

The hood.

The hand on my collar.

His voice, low and rough, saying a sentence I had never understood.

She said you'd do this.

Back then I had thought he meant me.

I had thought she was a girl who might say anything about me.

Now I understood that Savannah had said it to someone long before that night.

She had found a man with nobody left, and told him a story about me until he believed it.

And she had started on him the day she wrote his name in a text.

"You're up."

I jumped.

Wyatt stood in the bedroom doorway in his jeans and nothing else, one hand on the frame, hair standing up on one side.

He looked at my face.

"Hey," he said gently. "What happened?"

"Nothing. I just woke up early."

"You're pale."

"I'm fine."

He crossed the room and crouched in front of my chair.

His hand came up and stopped an inch from my cheek.

"If last night was a mistake, you can say so," he said. "I'll take it. I'd rather hear it now."

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