Chapter 111: Because you always lie to yourself

On the other side of the door, the heavy silence stretched out, thick and suffocating.

For a second, I thought he might actually listen. I thought he might back off and give me the space I was drowning for.

​Instead, a heavy palm flat-lined against the wood, the sudden vibration rattling through the door frame and straight into my spine.

​"Like hell I’m going away," Reid growled, his voice dropping an octave, thick with a volatile mix of frustration and sheer panic. "You don’t get to punch me in the face, lock yourself in a room, and expect me to just walk away, Evans. Open the fucking door."

"Go away, fuck!" I hissed, pressing my forehead against my knees, my grip tightening on the fabric of my pants until my fingers ached.

​"I don’t know what your problem is, Evans," Reid said, his voice dropping into a solemn, heavy tone right against the wood. "You clearly liked it. You enjoyed cumming in my mouth, too."

​"Shut up!"

​"But then you go and get upset and hit me," he muttered, the confusion bleeding through his frustration. "I just... I don’t understand you."

​"You can never understand me because you don’t know the meaning of consent!"

​The words tore out of my chest, raw and jagged. It felt like my heart was going to burst from the sheer, suffocating pain of it.

​"Reid, I know I promised to let you use me however you want when we’re behind closed doors in return for keeping my secret," I sobbed, the tears finally breaking past my eyelids and rolling down my cheeks, hot and uncontrolled. "But honestly, you’re too much. You don’t..."

​My breath hitched, the agonizing weight of the past couple of days—starting from the retreat in lake placid where he discovered my secret—completely crushing me. You don’t listen to me. You don’t stop when I tell you to stop. You just take. You take everything... In my mind, the truth screamed even louder: including my heart. Just how did you manage to pull that off?

​"You do whatever you like, and you don’t have any regrets about it," I choked out loud, wiping my face with a trembling hand. "When I say I don’t want it, I really don’t..."

​There was a sudden, sharp beat of silence on the other side of the door. The aggressive pressure against the wood vanished, replaced by a sudden, tense stillness.

​"Are you crying right now?" Reid asked, his voice losing its rough edge, a heavy spike of panic breaking through.

​"Just shut up and listen to me, dammit!" I yelled back, my shoulders shaking violently as I clutched my own chest. "You’re so arrogant, such a pain in the ass, and you... you don’t care about my feelings at all. You just do whatever you please. Why... why do you never listen?"

​Reid went completely silent. The heavy, suffocating scent of frozen pine outside the door suddenly dulled, turning static and unsettled. For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound in the hallway was my own uneven, ragged breathing.

​Then, his voice came through the wood, quiet, low, and terrifyingly perceptive.

​"It’s because you always lie to yourself."

​I flinched, my eyes widening in the dark room. "What?"

​"You want something, but you tell yourself you don’t," Reid said, each word hitting me like a physical blow. "Your body reacts, but you try to cover it up. You’re always trying to be mature, always trying to be responsible and hide... as if you’re scared. I know you’re scared of your secret getting out, but your secret can’t get out when we’re in the bedroom alone. So I don’t know what you’re scared of. I don’t know why... you just can’t let loose and have what you want to have."

The silence that followed his words was absolute, heavy enough to crush the air right out of my lungs.

​I sat there on the cold floor, staring blankly at the dark wood of the door, completely paralyzed. He had stripped me down to my underwear earlier, but this—this felt like he had reached straight into my chest and pulled out everything I had been desperately trying to keep buried.

​Because you always lie to yourself.

​"You don’t know anything," I whispered, but my voice lacked any real bite. It sounded weak. Defeated.

​"I know what I feel, Evans," Reid replied, his voice shifting, dropping the frantic panic from before and settling into a steady, unyielding gravity. "I feel how you shake when I touch you. I know the difference between someone who hates what’s happening and someone who is terrified of how much they want it. Every time you push me away, you hold on just as tight a second later. You’re fighting yourself, not me."

​"Stop it," I begged, covering my ears with my hands, pressing hard enough to make them ring.

I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want the twenty-one-year-old rookie to be the one who saw right through the thick, exhausting armor I’d spent my entire life building.

​"I won’t stop," he said, and I could hear the rustle of his clothes as he shifted outside, his weight leaning heavily against the other side of the door. "You think I’m just taking whatever I want? Yeah, I’m a bastard. I know I am. But I only press because it’s the only time you actually let yourself feel anything. The moment you remember you’re the ’Captain,’ you freeze up. You turn back into stone."

​He let out a long, ragged breath that vibrated through the wood.

​"I don’t care about the secret, Evans. And I don’t care about using you. If you really want me to go, if you can look at me and tell me that you feel absolutely nothing when I hold you or tease you... Then I’ll walk out the front door and leave my own house for you. I’ll leave the keys on the counter."

​My heart stopped.

​The threat of his departure didn’t bring the relief it should have. It didn’t feel like a victory. Instead, a cold, empty void opened up in my stomach at the mere thought of the penthouse being completely silent again. Without his warmth. Without his suffocating, maddening presence.

​He was right. God help me, he was right. I was terrified.

​"Reid..." My voice was barely a breath, a broken plea floating in the dark.

​"I’m right here," he whispered back, his forehead pressing against the wood, right where mine was. "Just open the door. Please."

He was pleading now. Anything Reid used the word please, my insides went soft, and my heart gave an involuntary thud. It was as if the Alpha was stripped out and what was left was the dependent and honest puppy.

"I have too much to lose," I muttered, the words barely carrying over the sound of my pulse, but loud enough to cut through the thin wood of the door.

​"But you won’t have to worry about losing anything when it’s just the two of us," Reid said, his voice dropping into a desperate, grounding register. "Please... take off the mask and just look at me. I know you want to. I feel it every time we connect... I feel it in the scent of your pheromones when I come near. And I feel it when our lips touch."

​I went completely quiet.

​I didn’t even need to spell it out for him to know he was already falling, but he still didn’t fully grasp the concept of what he was doing to me.

I was an idiot. A complete, vulnerable idiot. I hadn’t wanted him to find out at all costs, mapping out my escape so I could get away from him on Monday morning, but... it seemed I couldn’t fight it at all. The walls weren’t just cracking; they were turning to dust.

​With trembling fingers, I reached up and unlocked the door. The heavy click felt definitive, a point of no return.

​I pulled the door open and stood before him, looking straight into his eyes.

​He was still standing right there, barely, as he couldn’t put his entire weight on his ankle, his jaw slightly red where my fist had connected, his blonde hair unkempt, and his grey eyes wide, swallowed by an intense, fragile silence.

​"You’re a son of a bitch," I started, my voice shaking as I forced myself to meet his gaze. "An arrogant and obnoxious rookie, and... you have turned my life completely upside down."

​A breathless, bitter laugh escaped my throat, thick with the tears I was still trying to hold back.

​"For the past few days, I’ve been trying to run, to hide, because nothing scares me more than getting shackled to you. And why does that scare me? It’s because you manage to break down all my walls, no matter how thick and old they are. Reid... you even managed to break the wall to my heart."

​I lowered my head for a second, my eyes stinging fiercely as a fresh wave of tears blurred my vision.

My chest ached so deeply it was hard to breathe. Right now, I knew I might as well regret what I was about to say, but like he said, the hiding, the running, the terror—it was suffocating me. I couldn’t carry the weight of it alone in the dark anymore.

​I forced my chin up, looking directly into his blown-out, darkened eyes.

​"The truth is, I like you. I like you a lot, and there’s this dependency thing that’s drawing me closer to you the more I drown in your pheromones. That’s why... no matter how much I try to push you away, I find myself inching closer just to get a piece of you. This... is what you’ve done to me. It’s your fault, Reid."