The Cruelest Kind of Hate (Riverside Reapers Book 3)

GAGE

“Are you sure you’re okay with watching a horror movie?” Cali asks in a small voice, snuggling into my side when I open my arm up to her. Her cramps seem to have subsided for the time being, which is good, because I don’t know how long I’d be able to sit here while she’s squirming in pain.

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” Though I’m nowhere near prepared for whatever proverbial roller coaster I’m about to be strapped into, I’m determined to give Cali the day she deserves, and if that includes three painstakingly long hours of over-the-top gore, then so be it.

“I just know you aren’t the biggest fan of horror.”

I make a sputtering noise, bracing my hand against my chest in faux offense. “I’m not not a fan of horror. Plus, I want to watch whatever you want to watch.”

Cali grazes her teeth over her bottom lip before chewing on the middle, glancing unsurely between me and the television that projects the title card—My Ex-Therapist Is a Hatchet-Wielding Psycho—complete with a half-naked woman drenched in a fountain of blood, aforementioned hatchet raised above her head and cherry-red lips frozen in a scream.

“If you get scared, we can turn it off,” she promises.

“Cali, I don’t get scared,” I scoff. Ironically, at the same time, apprehension begins to soak into my bones like rot, and a sinkhole opens in my stomach where regret—and only regret—dares to wade across a sea of popping acid.

I’m going to have nightmares. It’s not an assumption. I will have nightmares. If I thought a few store-bought, plastic organs on Halloween were terrifying, the realistic-looking ones are going to make me weep like a goddamn baby. I don’t do well with horror, much like the majority of the levelheaded and rational population. And I especially don’t do well with gore. It’s not normal for a person’s insides to be outside, okay?

But I know Cali loves horror movies, so I’m going to force myself to love them too, even at the expense of a good night’s sleep. I’d do anything to spend time with Cali.

So as the movie begins, with her head resting soundly on my chest, the opening scene hardly acts as a soft, predictable gateway into the spine-chilling terror I’m about to endure for the rest of the night. I try to keep my focus divided between the screen and the excitement flitting across my girl’s face, and I’m pretty sure that if the volume wasn’t so deafeningly loud, she’d be able to hear every cry for help from my poor, overstimulated heart.

I jump. I flinch. I twitch. I shut one eye and try to keep the other open. My blood pressure shoots through the roof like Superman on speed. Meanwhile, Cali’s smiling and chuckling like the last victim’s stomach didn’t get hacked all the way open.

I thought I’d soldiered through the worst of it when the antihero ends up curb-stomping a dude’s head in with her stiletto heel, and I bury my head in Cali’s shoulder while I swallow down a gag that sounds seconds away from being productive.

She pauses the movie—thank God—and sighs sympathetically, stroking the back of my head with her hand. “You really are a big baby when it comes to horror, aren’t you?”

“’M not,” I muffle against her shoulder, disregarding the fact that I’m barnacled to her side and clinging to her like I’m weathering a California-grown earthquake. I can feel sweat seep past the waistband of my pants, I bet my complexion is sickeningly white, and I can’t get the hyperrealistic squelching noises out of my head.

“Oh, really?” Cali muses.

I lift my head up slightly, hand still curled in the fabric of her shirt. “Uh-huh. I just wanted to…snuggle.”

Not fully a lie, alright? Cali smells nice, her body is soft, and she gives hugs so good they blow old people hugs out of the water.

“Gage Arlington, golden boy of one of the scariest hockey teams in the league, wanted to snuggle?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?”

Cali snorts a few times until her laughter devolves into giggles, and she fails to hide the larger-than-life smile overtaking her face—one that shoves all my blood to my cheeks and gives me a permanent just-fucked look.

I was fucked. Figuratively. This girl plays with my emotions like a cat plays with its food. Never in a million years would I picture me voluntarily scaring the living shit out of myself to impress a girl.

“You’re just…I don’t know. You’re not the same guy I met at the rink months ago,” she admits demurely, brushing the back of her knuckles over my shameless blush, all while adoration shimmers on the ocean-blue surface of her eyes.

I’m not, I think to myself. You’ve made me a better person.

“Are you going to make me beg for a snuggle?” I groan, dramatically splaying myself over Cali’s body and pretending like I’ll see death’s doorstep unless she showers me in affection. “Because I will. I’ll even admit it, Spitfire. I’m scared. I’m scared, and the only solution is for us to snuggle…for the foreseeable future.”

Cali rolls her eyes. “The foreseeable future?”

“I think I’m already getting flashbacks.”

“Ugh. Fine. Shut up and come here.”

Considering I’m already all over her, I plunk my head right over her heart, wrapping my arms around her midsection and nuzzling my nose into the dip of her sweet-smelling neck. She’s like a cinnamon scratch-and-sniff sticker.

Cali doesn’t turn the movie back on, which is probably for the best. Instead, we lie together for what feels like forever, basking in the slight stirring of each other’s breaths, her fingers composing a soundless tune on my forearm. I’d planned to fall asleep on her, and I probably would have if it wasn’t for the grating sensation of her palms on my skin. But even in my sleepy state, I’ve never noticed her hands to be rough with callouses.

I gently guide her hand palm-up to reveal the scarred crescents stamped into her flesh, and the comfort that once coddled me slips through my fingers before I can grab it.

I know Cali hurts herself. I’ve known ever since the night her mother was hospitalized, but I didn’t want to upset her more by talking about it. But fuck, seeing the state her hands are still in, I wish I had.

The blood has congealed and darkened, contrasting starkly against the paleness of her palms. Eight deep wounds span the width of her hand, structured in a line that looks like a botched stitch job. And I don’t need to press into the half-moons to know the skin surrounding them is delicate.

“Why do you do this, Cali?” I ask quietly, brushing the pads of my fingers ever-so-gently over her lacerations.

She looks at me in confusion at first, but then her gaze drops to the conjoined caress of our hands, and a frown ghosts over her lips. She almost refuses to answer me. She strangles her words, shuffles the truth around like a deck of playing cards.

“I…”

My stomach turns—a repercussion of treading on unspoken territory. Her eyes are beginning to gloss over, and her teeth tug at her cracked bottom lip.

“Calista…” Heartache cowers in my tone, and I feel like I’m breathing through shot lungs. This is killing me to see the evidence of a lifetime of self-blame and self-loathing etched into the life lines of her palms.

Her voice is reedy, on the verge of breaking into unintelligible cries and spit-obstructed garbles. “I do it to punish myself,” she confesses shamefully, focusing her gaze on the skin-deep marks, almost as if she’s remembering each time she mutilated herself.

Tears swell over my lower eyelids, and it takes twice the amount of power to rid my response of throat-clogging emotion. “Oh, baby.”

“I didn’t use to do it. It started when my mom got really sick. And each time I saw her suffer, I’d dig my nails into my palms. It was a way of punishing myself—a way to remind myself that I need to do better by her. A way to remind myself that I wasn’t doing enough.”

I wish Cali could see herself the way I see her. She’s made so many sacrifices for the well-being of her family. And she’s harbored just as many emotionally scarring consequences. People like Cali are rare. She has this selflessness about her that some people only have less than one percent of.

“I wish you didn’t do it,” I whisper pathetically.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she responds quickly, backed by a numbness that tells me, at one point, it did. It hurt, but it wasn’t strong enough to counteract the guilt.

“It hurts me.”

Cali freezes in shock, right before her whole frame collapses, and I can tell she’s trying to evade my eyes. She even tries to pull her hand away, but I don’t let her.

She swallows thickly. “I never wanted you to see them. God, they’re so ugly.”

I tip her a half-smile, shaking the corkscrews of hair that dangle against my temples. “They’re not ugly. They’re beautiful. They’re a part of you—even if it’s a part you’re adamant about hiding from me. I adore you. Scars and all.”

Clocking the obvious disbelief rippling off her, I look around for something to show her just how truthful I’m being, and that’s when I catch sight of a purple, felt-tip marker sitting on her nightstand.

I grab the marker and uncap it with my teeth, then rest her hand against my belly. She squeaks in surprise, but she doesn’t dare say anything when I begin to trace over her scars with lavender ink. I connect the fractured puncture wounds with one continuous line, adding angles and miniature stars to make a constellation.

She watches raptly as I elongate each line, and when I finish my masterpiece, her lesions have transformed into a breathtaking work of art. Her fingers twitch while she admires the hastily scribbled stars and inaccurately portrayed constellations, but she smiles all the same, and a barrage of moisture hinders her eyesight.

“See?” I say. “Beautiful.”

She titters. “That’s because you covered up the ugliness.”

For someone who’s a self-proclaimed baby when it comes to blood and gore, I don’t see any of that when I look at Cali’s hands.

“No, Cali. You’re a survivor, and I see the beauty in that. All I’ve done is accentuate it.”

“Gage—”

“I don’t want to see you hurt yourself anymore. But I know that’s easier said than done, so I’ll be here to help you heal. I’ll be here to hold your hand when you feel like you want to harm yourself. I’ll be here to love you and your scars on the days that you can’t.”

Cali, surprisingly, doesn’t fight me. She doesn’t tell me how wrong I am. Instead, with gratitude woven in her eyes, she leans in to kiss me, wrapping me up in the heat of her lips. Our hands connect, palms flat against each other, and the still-wet ink from the hand-drawn constellations smear onto my own skin.

A transference of pain.