50 Shades of Drake 3 and 4

Torn: Chapter Seventy-Three

    Destiny touched Aubrey's arm. "You told me that you would be okay no matter who I chose."

    "That was bullshit," he revealed. "It was complete bullshit. I was so sure that you would choose me."

    "So now you're saying that you wouldn't be okay if I chose Brian?"

    "Of course not," he said angrily. He closed his eyes, shook his head, and said in a gentler tone, "Of course not."

    She took a deep breath. "So...what now?"

    "I don't know." He rested his elbows on the railing again. "You can tell your boyfriend to rest easy. He can keep his job."

    "And me?" she asked in a tiny voice. "Would you prefer for me to quit? Or leave? Or...move to a different department?"

    "No, you can stay."

    "As long as nothing happens in my office or his office?"

    "I wasn't angry that you were with him in your office," he said. "I was angry that he'd touched you, that you seemed to be growing even closer to him. You're right. I don't have the right to be angry at that. This is an idea that I brought to you and to him. So I just...I just need to learn how to deal with it better. I guess. I don't know."

    She rubbed his arm. "I'll make my decision as quickly as I can."

    He smiled sadly at her. "Back when I was sure you would choose me, that would have made me feel better. It would have comforted me. But now that I don't know who you're going to choose, I don't know whether to feel better or worse about that."

    Moving forward, how can I feel comfortable dating both of them, knowing how completely crushed one will be once I make a decision? she wondered. "If all else fails, you always have Bernice."

    A smile tugged the corners of his mouth.

    "She really loves you," Destiny told him.

    "I know."

    "You know that and you keep using her in situations like this?"

    The smile was wiped from his face.

    "If I were her, I'd never talk to you again after something like this." Destiny stared across the yard, at the towering green foliage that formed the courtyard maze. "Every time you call her, she comes through for you. But once you've made whatever point it is you attempted to make with me, she is the sore loser who is disregarded. Cast aside, only to wait for the next time you call her."

    "Our history is...complicated."

    "What about you isn't?" she demanded.

    His mouth set into a straight line.

    "She gave me the abridged version of your history in the bathroom. She doesn't deserve to be used this way."

    "You know, it's funny..." He paused and ran an index finger across his bottom lip. "That's exactly how I felt whenever I saw you and Brian together."

    She frowned. "But...I'm not using him."

    "Aren't you?"

    "No." Her frown deepened. "I have feelings for him. I love him."

    "I care about Bernice very much," he said. "That doesn't stop me from calling her whenever I need her."

    I'm not using Brian. I'm not.

    "You were ready to choose him, just because I wanted to fire him."

    "I knew you wouldn't fire him if it meant losing me."

    "And if I'd fired him anyway?"

    Destiny shook her head.

    "You would have called my bluff," Aubrey supplied for her, turning to look at her. "You would have chosen him just to spite me. And you would have been using him, if you'd have done so."

    "Not really," she argued.

    "I don't think you love him as much as you think you do," Aubrey said flatly.

    "Now I know you've lost it," she said, pushing herself from against the railing and moving towards the patio doors.

    Aubrey ran to catch up with her and grabbed her by the wrist. "Before tonight, I'd see you and him talking together. I'd see you flirting together, and I'd think to myself, That poor fucking sap doesn't know how much it's going to hurt when she chooses me. He doesn't have a clue. In my mind, he was the vanilla alternative to me. Someone for you to run to whenever the BDSM lifestyle got to be too much for you."

    "That has nothing to do with it," she hissed at him, offended at the implication.

    "In my mind, it did. Otherwise, why else have any feelings for him when I'm here? Why else entertain anything with him? With him, you could imagine yourself having the perfectly normal life, as you'd call it. With the perfect house, the perfect family. Whereas with me..." He hesitated and looked to be fighting to keep the emotion from being reflected in his face. "Whereas with me, you know that life would be far from normal. With me, you don't even know if you'd have the option of having a family."

    "Whose fault is that?" she whispered.

    He looked down.

    She rolled her eyes and looked towards the patio doors. "I need to get back in there. We've been out here for way too long."

    He continued holding her wrist without giving any indication of letting it go. "I'm sorry for how I've acted tonight."

    "An apology isn't going to cut it."

    "No, I know." His thumb caressed the inside of her wrist. "When it comes to my feelings for you, while we're...in this situation. My feelings all collide together, and I keep bouncing back and forth from one extreme to the next. One minute, I feel like I'm losing you...like Brian will take you away from me. The next minute, I feel like you belong with me, and you'll wake up one day and see that." He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

    She watched him with tears burning beneath her eyelids.

    "The cocky side of me says, She's mine and she'll always be mine. She belongs to me, and her pussy belongs to me, and no matter who else touches it, she will always bring it back to me."

    Destiny's eyebrows shot up.

    He gave her the briefest flash of a devilishly handsome smile, then said, "But then the self-conscious side of me reminds me that I could be wrong. The cocky side is what has been pushing me throughout this entire arrangement. But every once in awhile, the self-conscious side pops out and forces me to face possibilities that I don't want to face. Like...the possibility of losing you to someone else."

    "If we are meant to be together, Aubrey, we will be," she assured him. "Acting out the way you have will only push me farther away from you. It won't bring me closer. If you are feeling a certain way about something, you know you can talk to me about it. After the talk we had with your friends, Patty and Lawrence, I'd think that you already knew you could come to me and talk about anything."

    "I'll probably always have trouble with telling you about my own flaws and shortcomings," Aubrey admitted.

    "A night like tonight showcases them in brilliant detail," she told him. "Rather than show your ass, you might just want to sit down and have a conversation with me."

    He nodded solemnly. "Point taken."

    "I need to get back inside," she told him, looking down at his hand, still tightly wrapped around her wrist.

    He didn't release her wrist immediately. He held onto it for a minute longer, then kissed it again before letting it go.