Less fucking exhausting, even with as dangerous as it was to get close enough to someone for them to see.

“So, why pretend, then?”

“It makes things easier.” I reached up and rubbed at my neck. Her questions were getting a little too in depth, too close to me. “It didn’t take long to learn that after… People don’t really want to know that your knee and wrist ache every day, your body hurts in ways you can’t describe, that you’re plagued by migraines and nightmares, or your depression and anxiety continue years later.”

Fuck.

It just spilled from me, part in agitation and part because I had a feeling out of everyone I knew, she might be the only one to understand. Nobody understood, but from what I’d learned about Lila, I knew there was so much she kept hidden. Whether for emotional stability and protection or just trying to fit in, Lila’s charade was just as orchestrated as my own.

“What about you?”

Her spine straightened almost imperceptibly. “What about me?”

There was no way I was going to let her play that fucking game after what I just told her. “You really want to play that game? Do you want me to say it?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Why, then?”

She let out a huff, her face scrunched as she set a can of pasta sauce down a little hard on the counter. “The same. It’s easier to say I’m fine then go into detail about how I put out a confident front, but inside I’m holding the darkness at bay and one word can send it crashing down.”

One word?

Those two little words confirmed some of my suspicions. Verbal abuse was rampant in her life at one time, probably her childhood.

I tilted my head to the side as I looked at her. “You confound me.”

She stared back, her brow still scrunched.

“You have such a poor view of yourself.” It was a constant with her that I didn’t understand, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. There was a strong sense that I would be very violent against another human if I knew the details. “How did you get this way?”

She kept her eyes away from me. “Doesn’t matter. Damage done, and I’m working to get past it.”

Bullshit answer for the win.

We were a fucking pair.

I leaned against the counter and watched her move. It was fluid, smooth, but there were nuances in her posture. The way her head was always bowed down, elbows kept close to her ribs. Even her footsteps were small and light to avoid making any sound. She may have been out of it, but she was far from over it.

“Hiding it doesn’t help you get past it.”

She set a pot in the sink and turned on the faucet, filling it with water. Her avoidance tactics were well honed, but not with someone like me.

“No, it doesn’t. You know that all too well. The thing is, I’ve at least gotten a little better over the years. Have you?” she asked as she set the filled pot on the stove.

“Your eyes say differently,” I said as I ignored her question.

“I said I’ve gotten better, not that I was healed. Downers don’t help. That’s why I don’t go out drinking with people…you’ve seen what happens.”

I had. Years of repression, of sadness and despair, came pouring out of her. Darkness that she drowned in. She risked the memories for a few hours of shutting it all down.

“Yes, but that also shows you aren’t better.”

“You make me better,” she whispered.

I froze.

No. No, no, no.

Those words were the exact reason I didn’t want to get so involved with her. Not that I didn’t want her to get better, but her saying that it was me and the way she said it—they were tells that she had feelings for me. Feelings that could get her killed.

“You make me feel like I’m all of the things they said I wasn’t. Beautiful, smart, sexy…worth something.”

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked after a moment of silence as I tried to ignore what she was saying. “What did ‘they’ do to you?”

She slammed the box of pasta down on the counter. “You want to know? You’re certain you want me to tell you how every day I was told how insignificant I was?”

The way her voice shuddered cut at me.

“You’re not forthcoming with information, and I get that, I do. I hope one day you’ll be able to tell me. As for me… Well, when you’re young, and the people in your life tell you these things every day, you begin to believe them. They become ingrained into who you are, and I’ve worked damn hard to push them away. Years of therapy. I’ve seen a psychiatrist from the time I was seventeen. Twelve years later, I have more confidence, but everything still haunts me.”

Her hands shook as she stared down at the counter. Broken and beaten down. What happened to me was instantaneous, but Lila was stripped away little by little until she was barely human by the time they were done with her.

“I’ve done that to you, haven’t I? I’ve said something to trigger you?”

When I first met her, I was certain I said something. She turned to me and shrugged before returning her attention to the counter.

“You didn’t know. Alcohol is a double-edged sword for me. It helps me sleep, but my depression spikes.”

“Yet you drink every Friday, letting everything come back.” I’d seen it, the transformation in her. I didn’t know anything about her insomnia, because I seemed to fuck her to sleep.

“Stalking me now?” she said with a teasing tone in an obvious attempt to change the heavy mood that surrounded us.

“No, just observant.”

“Well, Mr. Observant, can you hand me the bread sitting next to you?”

Diversion was obviously one of her coping mechanisms. I’d seen it before, but with just the two of us in the most honest conversation we’d ever had, I was a bit surprised.

I handed her the uncut loaf, then moved my hand to caress her cheek. She was so beautifully broken, and I wondered how different she would be if she’d grown up in a loving home.

“You are so much more than pretty. That was what I wanted to say to you that night. Instead, I was inadvertently mean to push you away.” I pushed her back with my body until she was settled against the counter, my forehead against hers. Those intriguing eyes of hers stared at me. “How do you do this to me?”