The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 106

Chapter 96: Torn

Bella POV

The dream started the way they all did now – his hands, his mouth, the weight of him. Caleb unhurried and devastating, moving over me in the dark the way he had that one night I couldn’t stop reliving no matter how hard I tried. In the dream I didn’t stop him. In the dream I pulled him closer, his name breaking open in my throat, his hands finding every place on my body that unmade me.

I woke up gasping. The sheets were damp against my skin. My heart was going too fast, breath ragged, the ghost of pleasure still warm and humiliating in my body. Hay there staring at the ceiling, waiting for my pulse to settle.

The house was quiet. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed through it the way I’d been doing for weeks but It wasn’t working.

I kicked the sheets off and sat up, the night air cool against my damp skin. Outside the window the garden was dark and still my garden, my house, the deed sitting in my name in the top drawer of my study. Caleb had given me this. Space entirely mine and still he was everywhere in it.

I’d been doing this for weeks – the careful distance, the careful progress, the dinners that felt almost normal and the conversations that went too late and too deep. He visited most evenings. He ate with Tom, helped with bath time, stayed until our son was asleep and then sat with me on the porch in the quiet while the garden did its slow dark breathing around us. We talked but didn’t touch beyond the occasional brush of hands that I absolutely did not catalogue afterward.

We were being good. And every night after he drove back to his penthouse I came to bed and lay in the dark thinking about him until I couldn’t stand myself.

The problem was that I knew now. That was the real cruelty of it. I’d spent years successfully not knowing – not knowing the specific weight of him, the particular sound of his voice when he was no longer made of ice, the way he said my name like it was something he’d been keeping safe. And then one desperate unguarded night had ripped that protection clean away and left me with the detailed, maddening, specific knowledge of exactly how Caleb Black touched a woman when he finally let himself.

I stood up then walked to the window. The garden needed work – he’d known I’d want that, something to build rather than something already finished. I’d planted things along the left border last weekend while Tom dug enthusiastically beside me and got more soil on himself than in the ground. Caleb had shown up mid-afternoon and crouched down to help without being asked, sleeves rolled up, completely unbothered by the dirt. I’d watched him from the corner of my eye and felt something pull dangerously loose in my chest.

I thought about Ethan. Safe, steady, uncomplicated Ethan – the way dinner had felt like. He’d made his one honest attempt and then let go with more grace than most men managed with things they’d never even had. I’d driven home from that dinner almost certain I was making the right choice.

Then I’d walked into the house and found Tom’s dinosaur pajamas folded on the bathroom counter – Caleb had given him a bath and a note on the kitchen table in his handwriting that just said he ate his vegetables without complaining. I’m as shocked as you are.

And everything had dissolved. My hands moved to the window latch without deciding to as the night air came in cool.

1.3

thought about his hands on my face after our worst fight, that devastating gentleness I still wasn’t prepared for every time he produced it.

+25 Points

The worn leather notebook full of letters, the way he’d stood in Tom’s doorway when our son discovered the reading nook something so enormous and careful in his expression that I’d had to look away because looking felt like trespassing.

And underneath all of it, insistent and inconvenient, the memory I’d been sitting on for weeks. His mouth on my throat. His hands in my hair. The sound he’d made when I’d finally stopped pretending.

I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window. This is chemistry, I told myself. This is nostalgia dressed as feeling. History rewritten by loneliness.

But chemistry could be manufactured. Nostalgia was a liar. History was something I’d lived through with my body and I knew exactly what it had cost me.

六

What wasn’t a lie was the note on the kitchen table, the reading nook he’d built for a boy he was still learning. The way he drove back to his empty penthouse every night without complaint because I hadn’t asked him to stay and he understood that – understood that this house was mine, that my ground was mine, that he had no claim here he hadn’t been given.

I pushed off the window and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. The problem – the real problem, under all the strategy and management and controlled distance – was simple.

I needed to know. Whether what I felt was real or just the ghost of something that had already destroyed me once. Whether what he was showing me now was the man he’d become or an elaborate performance of it. Whether I was brave enough, or foolish enough, or just desperate enough to find out.

There was only one way. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, looked at it for a long moment then I put it back down.

Picked it up again.

His name was at the top of my recent calls as I stared at it then I typed before I could stop myself. Are you awake?

Three dots appeared almost immediately. Yes.

I stared at the screen for a long time. I can’t stop thinking about it, I typed. Then deleted it.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify