Your Fault (Culpable Book 2)

We drove to his apartment in complete silence. Nicholas didn’t even look at me. Once we arrived, I tried to keep calm as I followed him inside. I felt guilty for everything, even if it had been my mother’s fault… I couldn’t help but feel that Nick was growing apart from me. My problems and my mother were coming between us, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to make rational decisions, thinking about what would be best for both of us, but nothing turned out the way I wished.

Even in the apartment, he wouldn’t speak to me. I’d have rather heard him shout at me than that because I realized he was thinking about things I didn’t even want to imagine. He crossed the living room and walked into his bedroom. I stopped, indecisive. Did I want to go on arguing with him? Maybe I should have asked him to drop me off at the dorm, but I didn’t want to rub it in his face that I’d moved somewhere else. Without him. And I couldn’t stand the thought of going back there without resolving this. I didn’t want my mother to get away with pulling us apart.

I heard nothing from the other side of the door, so after a few minutes, I gathered my courage and cracked it.

Nick was there sitting at the foot of the bed. He had taken off his T-shirt and was resting his forearms on his knees. He had a cigarette in his right hand. He looked up from the floor, meeting my eyes when he heard me walk in.

I observed him; he did the same to me. We were just a few feet apart, but to me, it felt like an abyss. I was so scared, so alone, that I couldn’t keep myself from walking over between his legs and lifting his face to look him in the eyes.

“Don’t let this pull us apart.” That was all I could think to say. I hadn’t understood how bad things were with us until I heard Nick’s words a half hour before.

Nick looked down to my stomach and took another drag off his cigarette. With one hand, I grabbed his wrist; with the other, I took the cigarette away. He looked at me perplexed as I crushed it in the ashtray right beside him. Then I straddled his lap and cupped his face in my hand.

“I need you to leave me alone, Noah,” he said in a voice so soft, I thought I’d heard him wrong. I wrapped my hands around the back of his neck, tried to toy with his hair, but he reached up and stopped me. “Don’t play with me. Not right now.”

His words were hard, cold, and that coldness only grew worse as he got up from the bed and walked past me. I stood.

“I hurt you when I left, and you’re scared I’ll leave you for good. I get it, but you can’t just ignore me like this. You can’t!”

Shooting fire from his eyes, he said, “I’m ignoring you because I’m trying to keep control of myself!”

I was startled, hearing him scream at me like that. But then he took a deep breath and spoke again in a normal tone.

“I can help you with your tuition.”

I closed my eyes. I knew he’d say that, but I couldn’t accept it. “You know I can’t let you do that.”

“I’m offering you a solution that will make us both happy. Why do you not understand that your decisions affect both of us, not just you?” he said, his voice rising again.

“Because I wouldn’t be happy, Nicholas!” I had hoped to keep calm, but I couldn’t. “If living with you means going to war with my mother and your father plus depending on you for money, I’ll end up hating it. Can’t you see that?”

“Of course I can’t! Not when the alternative is you being surrounded by a bunch of people who aren’t me! That’s the thing I have trouble imagining!”

“I’ve never given you reason to be jealous, and jealousy’s your real problem right now.”

“Don’t give me that. You’re no different.”

I wanted to try to explain to him that jealousy was all right, but only to a point.

“I’ve got more reason to be jealous than you do. You’ve been with more women than I can count. I’ve given you everything. You know I’m yours in every sense of the word. And even still you don’t trust me.”

“You knew what you were doing when you decided to go out with me. I can’t change my past.”

The distance between the two of us was killing me. Of course, I’d known what I was getting into with him, but I hadn’t chosen it; it had just happened. I had fallen crazily in love with him, but that didn’t mean that the things he did or had done would affect me any less.

“A relationship with no trust is a dead-end street, you know that.”

His eyes darkened. “I don’t need to trust anyone. I need you by my side.”

Despite his anger, I knew what he was trying to say. “I’m here now, right?”

He shook his head. “You’re halfway here and halfway somewhere else. It’s always halfway with you, Noah.” He turned to walk out of the room.

“Nicholas, I said I’m right here!” I felt my eyes go damp.

I didn’t know what he wanted from me. I’d given him everything I had, everything I knew how to give.

“No you aren’t!” he shouted.

“This is all I can do.”

“Well, maybe that’s not enough.”

A horrible fear seeped through me. There it was, the thing I had always feared: not being good enough for him.

“It’s not fair, you being the one crying,” he said a few seconds later.

“I’m crying because I can’t give you everything you want, and you’re going to wind up getting sick of me,” I confessed, stifling a sob in my throat.

I couldn’t stand seeing that I’d disappointed him. I wanted to go because if I didn’t, I’d break down, and I didn’t want to do that in front of him.

“I should go,” I said, wiping off my cheek with one hand and looking away.

I heard Nicholas draw a few deep breaths. Then he crossed the room and kissed me so intensely, I had to hold on to his arms to keep from falling.

“I could never get tired of you—not in a million years.” With that, he quickly pushed me down on the bed and got on top of me.

He kissed me again, and despite his gentle words, I could tell something was different about him. The way he touched me, the way he kissed me and took off my clothes were more like a struggle he was engaged in with himself than an act of love between the two of us. I’d hurt him when I left, and there were consequences for that. His kisses intensified, and soon his mouth was roving my neck and my breasts, finally arriving at my thighs.

“Nick…” I whispered.

Nicholas didn’t hear me; he was lost in my body, lost in kissing every inch of skin within reach.

“Shh…I don’t want to talk anymore, Noah.” He hushed me, taking off my panties and climbing between my legs. “We’ve already said all there is to say.”

When his lips met mine, I decided to forget everything.

I couldn’t sleep.

Nick was next to me breathing slowly, deep in dreams, squeezing me against him tightly. With his arms around me like that, I could barely move. I watched him sleep and felt a knot gather in my throat.

The night before had been so intense, both physically and emotionally, that I’d ended it destroyed. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and try to become a normal person again. When I looked in the mirror, I saw something that shocked me.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, furious.

I left the bathroom and walked over to him, enraged. He was awake and was observing me imperturbably from the bed.

“Why did you do this?” I asked.

Ignoring my question, he got up, put on a pair of sweatpants, and walked to the bathroom in silence.

“Is this how things are now?” I said, turning to see him gripping the side of the sink and letting his head hang. “You’re punishing me now?”

He looked up. “Oh, by kissing you, I’m punishing you?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to let him turn the tables like that. “You know I hate that, Nick. I don’t want to be marked. And you did it knowing I hate it. That just makes it worse. You’re an idiot.”

“And you’re a spoiled little baby. You need to understand everything can’t be the way you want.”

I laughed sarcastically. “Please! You’ve never heard the word no in your life. That’s why you’re punishing me, because I’m the first and only person ever to do it.”

Nicholas came close to me cautiously. “For me, you are the first and only one.”

But we both knew that wasn’t true.

“I’m sorry, okay?” he went on. “I got carried away in the moment, but can you please stop acting like I did something wrong? They’re just kisses…kisses from me.”

I sighed in frustration. I didn’t want to fight with him. I’d had enough the night before.

“What if it was you? Would you like it?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” He forced a smile. “I love your lips. There’s nothing I’d like better than a mark that would remind me you had kissed me somewhere.”

I wasn’t convinced. “You’d let me leave a mark on you. How so?” I dared him.

He looked at me, trying to guess what I was getting at. “Are you talking about something nasty, Freckles?”

His response was funny. But I wasn’t about to tell him. Among other things, because I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Grinning, I pushed him out of the bathroom.

“Lie down on the bed,” I ordered him.

He looked doubtful, but he did what I asked. I opened a drawer on the nightstand and sat on his stomach.

“What are you up to?” he asked with a dark glimmer in his eyes.

“None of what’s probably passing through that perverted mind of yours.”

After saying this, I brought a marker to my lips and took the cap off with my teeth. His eyes opened wide.

“No fucking way,” he said, reaching up and grabbing my wrists.

“Oh yes fucking way, and you’re going to remain totally still while I do it,” I replied, jerking away from him.

He rolled over me and pinned me against the mattress.

“Put that back where it was unless you want problems,” he warned me, but I could see in his eyes that he thought it was funny.

I kept hold of the permanent marker, though, and I intended to use it.

“Just tell yourself it’s something I’m going to do to you. Me alone and nobody else. I’ve never drawn on anyone’s body before. That will make it sweet, special.”

He lifted his head and observed me with curiosity and interest.

“You call that sweet and special?” he asked.

“Anything I do with your body is sweet and special,” I said with a smile.

“You’ve been hanging around me too much, that’s clear.” He rolled back, sitting me on top of him, right where I wanted to be.

“Be good,” he warned me, resting his hands on my bare thighs.

This was fun, and even if it wasn’t my intention, it was helping me to leave aside that emotional burden that had weighed down on me those past few hours. I bent over him and started tracing out a drawing on his chest. A heart on his pecs, a happy face on his shoulder, an I love you over his heart. This supposed punishment soon turned into a love letter composed on his skin…one I had written to him. He stared at my face the whole time while his fingers traced circles on my skin and I worked to make that decoration on his sculpted body as beautiful as possible. I wanted to show him how much I loved him, I wanted him to understand that he was the only one for me.

That ink was covering our pain, drawing a new bond between us.

With a smile, I grabbed his wrist and wrote one last message on it: You’re mine.

Forever.