Jess’s Reviews > Releasing 10 > Status Update

"I'm just happy, that's all." He took another lick of his ice cream and turned his attention to the water. "Today was a good day" He rested his hand on my knee and sighed in contentment. "A good day, baby."
Yeah, it was. "I love being here, I told him, feeling my body soften right along with my heart. "With you"
"Me too, Liz." He gave my knee a reassuring squeeze, "Me too."

"You know these changing rooms are unisex."
Snickering, I glanced over my shoulder at him. "I don't care."
"Well, I do."
"Why?"
"Because you're mine to look at." My heart slammed in my chest. "Not anyone else's."
I turned around to face my towel-wielding bodyguard and grinned. "Then look."

"You already got your birthday present," he replied, gesturing to the shiny new semicolon charm attached to my bracelet.

"Because you're a little rebel." A shiver racked through me when Hugh placed his hands on the armrests of my chair and leaned in close, caging me in. "Aren't ya?"
"Maybe," I breathed, heart bucking wildly, when my legs opened of their own accord, and he slid between them. "But I'm your rebel."
"No." His lips brushed against mine as he spoke. "You're my baby"😭

That was also how I found the strength to be here, in his home, enduring the discomforting company of a boy who made both my skin crawl and the voices in my head grow louder.
I was doing this for Hugh.

That's how I knew that I would never get over this boy.
For the rest of this life and whatever followed —be it heaven, hell, purgatory, or a thousand reincarnated lifetimes —my heart would eternally beat for Hugh Biggs.

Startled, I moved to pull my hand away, but he was unyielding. Turning my hand over, Hugh continued his mission of killing me with his touch, thumb tracing the jagged edges of every self-borne scar I had inflicted on my flesh. He didn't falter and he didn't recoil. He touched my skin with a reverence that could never be matched. Not in a hundred thousand lifetimes.

My eyes drank in the sight of him and made the rest of the world seem to fade and quieten. His tanned fingers, so much longer than mine, trailed over my flesh, sending sparks of life back into my body. His thumb traced over each one of my knuckles before moving to the inside of my wrist.

Feeling restless, I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted the familiar tang of copper.
Relief flooded me.
It was almost euphoric.
Because the pain weakened my mind's grasp on its rage.
It was how I had learned to function.
To bury it all down.