{18+ COMPLETE} For the past three years, Bren Hadaway has been preparing to die.
When he was sixteen, he watched his dad murder his mom. And ever since, he's been counting down the days until it was his turn to be at the end of a gun. And Bren has...
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I woke before Bren again.
Even though I couldn't see his face, I knew he was still sleeping. I knew it because his steady breaths hit the back of my neck in time with every other beat of my heart. His arm was wrapped tightly around me, trapping my back against his bare chest. I knew he was sleeping because otherwise, those hands of his wouldn't be so still.
I'd become used to waking up to Bren's light caresses.
For the past month now, I woke up every morning feeling...appreciated. Wanted. Loved.
Even though he hadn't said the words until just the other day, he always made sure I felt it.
It wasn't even three months ago that Bren had burst into my dorm room, taken my bruised wrists in his hands, looked in my eyes, and told me that I deserved to feel loved all the time.
And I had thought that he was crazy. I'd thought that he was oversimplifying the complexities of what it meant to have a relationship. I thought that Bren just didn't understand. To feel loved all the time? That shit didn't actually exist. It was for fairytales and romcoms. It was for romance novels or anything else heavily based in fiction.
But it did exist.
Bren Hadaway had proven that to me.
Relationships aren't simple. Ours—Bren and mine—definitely isn't.
But being loved, feeling loved, is.
And now I needed to make sure that he felt it all, too. Bren needed to know he was worthy and loved and everything else he had been telling me since the moment I met him.
Because I'd watched him from beneath my lashes last night, reading through letter after letter from his dad on the floor of Caroline's living room. And I saw the way his jaw had tightened as his eyes scanned the pages. I studied the way his hands had shaken, the way they had clenched, the firelight licking at his veins as they popped out.
I hadn't caught the beginning of his conversation with Caroline, but I woke in time for the end.
So I knew what he was trying to do. I knew what it was like. Trying to come to terms with someone who had hurt you in the past was soul-wrenching.
But I hated that he was doing it alone. That he was sitting there by himself with his own hate leaking onto his face. And there was a part of me that worried the hatred wasn't for his dad.
It was for him.
The light breathing against the back of my neck altered, and seconds later, I felt a kiss there. Bren shifted, pulling me closer to him. His hand slipped beneath my shirt to skim his fingers against my bare skin.
And that was all it took for my whole heart to catch on fire.
I wiggled in his arms, and he groaned into my hair. "Morning, baby."
