One of her hands flew to her mouth, as if covering it would stop the guttural cries that kept spilling out. “She survived the rape, Hunter.” She wept, her vision completely blurred as the tears came down in torrents. “She survived it; she had me. And then she went on to live for six more years. And you know what took her life?”
Hunter didn’t respond, but he could no longer look Carmen in the eyes.
“I did,” she breathed out, wishing it would just stop hurting so damn much. Everything hurt. Too much. “Six years of watching me smile and laugh and talk and walk and just existing—that's what killed her. Because every single time she looked at me, she had to relive the worst night of her life over and over again. Until it became too much.”
“Carmen.” Hunter struggled for words. “Carmen, please stop. Don’t.”
“I was a reminder of her life being ruined.” She sniffed, wrapping her hands around herself as the sobs subsided and the cries grew silent. “And she couldn’t kill me for it, so she just killed herself.”
Carmen West may have a thunderstorm in her eyes and a touch of galaxies in her veins, but she was also a human. And unlike raindrops and stars, humans weren’t beautiful to look at when they fell.
And right now, Carmen West was falling.
51.
Achilles’ Heel
Carmen’s eyes seemed to have finally run dry, the tracks of her tears on her cheeks still pretty much apparent as she tucked her feet under her and nestled further into the couch.
“You should probably eat something,” Hunter said, stuffing his hands into his pockets and looking around the house he hadn’t stepped foot in for almost twelve years. “You didn’t have much back there.”
Carmen sniffed, running a hand under her eyes to get rid of any wetness remaining there.
“Not hungry,” she muttered, her voice so hoarse it made her tone sound more clipped than she intended.
“Water, at least?” he offered cautiously, still not sitting down as he observed her. “Your—”
“Don’t want anything.” There was that part of Carmen emerging again, the part she loathed. The part that shut down on everyone and pushed people away when she was in agony.
And right now, she was in agony. So much so that it was almost unbearable. She wanted to hug herself so tight in hopes that it would somehow glue back all her shattered pieces.
She couldn’t breathe.
How was it that emotional pain impacted her physically, anyway? How did it manage to suffocate her?
Everything hurt: blinking hurt. Speaking hurt. Existing hurt.
And she didn’t know what to do with all that pain filling up every little crack and dent in her heart.
“So that’s what you’re planning on doing?” Hunter asked, raising a brow as he stood behind the couch opposite her, folding his arms on the headrest. “Giving the silent treatment? Starving yourself? Refusing to even drink anything?”
Carmen’s eyes flashed with warning once they met Hunter’s ones. “Don’t push me.”
“Right,” he drawled, his eyes flashing back at her with a look of pure defiance. “Because you’re going to give me a piece of your mind if I push you too much. Because for once in your life you’re actually going to put someone in their place after wronging you.”
“Stop it, Hunter. I mean that.”
“Well, go ahead, show me what you’ve got then—”
“Stop it—”
“—I mean, you are Carmen West, right? The girl who’s always smiling, always letting things roll off her, the one who’s always unfazed and nonchalant —”
“Shut up!!” Carmen bellowed, jumping from the couch and hurling whatever her fingers could grasp in Hunter’s general direction.
The TV remote flew a good distance past Hunter’s head, crashing into the wall near the entrance of the living room, the batteries falling out and rolling away as few pieces of the device broke and scattered across the tiled floor.
“What the hell do you want from me!” Carmen’s eyes flashed, every bit of that storm in her coming to life and engulfing her as a whole.
“This,” Hunter replied, not appearing the least bit stunned as he gestured towards her. “I want you to stop shutting down. I want you to stop blocking out all the bad shit. Scream at me. Yell at me. Throw whatever at me. Go ahead. Punch me while you’re at it. But don’t go crawling back into that shell of yours.”
Carmen let out a laugh of utter disbelief, throwing her hands up into the air. “Is that what you’d like me to do, Hunter? You’d like me to let you in?”
Hunter tilted his head slightly, his eyes narrowing the tiniest fraction. “Yeah,” he eventually said. “If it takes you screaming your lungs out at me, then so be it.”
“I can’t believe you,” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head to herself.
“Why is it so hard for you to believe—”
“I did let you in!” Carmen’s voice was thunder as wave after wave of buried, restrained pain from a lifetime ago came undone and crashed over her. “I did let you in once.” She bit out, her breaths coming in harsh gasps. “And do you know what you did? You took all that love and trust and admiration I had for you and walked right out of my life with it. And then—do you know what you did after that, Hunter?—you threw it all back at my face in school. You turned all that affection into something ugly and used it to drag me down time after time.”
“Carmen—”
“I did let you in, Hunter.” Her voice cracked, like that split in the sky when lightning struck. “And you repaid it with pain and my heart torn to shreds.”
Asa. She wanted Asa. She wanted his rough fingers running through her
