Save Me

Chapter Nineteen

"It's tougher to be vulnerable than to actually be tough."

-Rihanna

♔ Chapter Nineteen ♔

Luke was looking over at me, his eyes lost in thought. He sat on the creased corners of my bed, his pallid face glossed over, not saying a word.

An unemotional silence filled my bedroom, and it was like he wasn't even there with me. The space he occupied was filled with silence, with nothing. It was like all of those times I'd spent in that same room, alone, angry, sad, unhappy. He may as well had not been there at all.

In those moments, where his silence said more than anything, where his eyes tried their best to look straight into me and uncover all of my darkest and innermost hidden desires, I wanted to know exactly what he was thinking.

My mind was shooting all over the place, wondering just exactly what he thought of me, contemplating the bare reasons why he'd decided to chase me back, why he kept being interested in me, or how he actually managed to justify it to himself; knowing just how badly I treated his brother, the person most alike him on the planet, and yet the person he couldn't be more opposite to.

How did he live with himself, lying in bed beside me and knowing what I'd done? Even if he didn't know the whole truth about Tom, he knew enough that he should have been angry, or upset, or betrayed. His reactions felt wrong, and if anything, it only peaked my intrigue even more.

I wanted to know his motives for staying with me, for lying in my bed beside me, under the covers, warm and cosy. I tried to tell myself there was nothing strange about it at all, nothing darker hidden behind the lukewarm blue of his eyes, or something hiding in the abrupt black of his irises, scars and secrets so cold and callous that my imagination was running wild just thinking about him.

I got this intense feeling when I was around him sometimes, and it was starting to reappear more and more, gradually popping up in the back of my head. I felt safe with him one moment, and completely out of my depth the next. I felt like he could flip personalities so quickly, or maybe that he was putting on a facade, a brave face to hide something ugly and unnatural underneath. Did I even know him at all?

More than that, I felt like I couldn't hide anything around him, like he saw through my white and black lies, like when he was looking at me, he could see straight into my fucking soul. Twisted and destructive as it was, I felt like he could see it, and it was the worst feeling. A daunting sensation in the pit of my stomach, and the question on the end of my tongue - what if he can see me for what I really am? What if he knows everything?

I chalked it up to my nerves. By instinct, I told myself it was nothing. It was better to pretend there wasn't a problem at all, and to keep living life the exact way that you always had, than to embrace the harsh reality and begin down a path of change. Parts of me wanted to change, but the more time I spent with Luke, the more I felt myself regressing backwards, like an older and crueller version of myself was coming back to the surface - the part of me I'd grown to hate so much, the darkest recesses that I wanted to forget about and overcome. But he was bringing it out in me, just like Tom had in the beginning, and I knew I didn't have the self-control to stop it from happening, to stop history from repeating.

I could feel the regression, and maybe some part of me thought that letting Luke fuck me would stagnate it somehow, or make it worse. There was a kind of vulnerability in losing that control, the control I'd been clinging onto for years, as a coping mechanism that I knew wouldn't last forever. Better now than never though, right?