Caught In Your Chaos ✓

Chapter Seventy-five

Jacob

It was the right thing to do. My life was already fifty shades of fucked up unhappy place. Dragging Amy into it would only destroy another beautiful soul. There wasn't anything beautiful about my soul, even though I had to admit my exterior persona somehow orchestrated a different form. That's how I balanced the ugliness within me.

Amy, she was pure inside out, unabashed beautiful with those mesmerizing Hazel green eyes. But her soul was so vulnerable, so fucking clueless of the darkness around her. She kept searching for the person behind my mask, falling for the person who only survived in slivers somewhere deep within.

She was supposed to repulse from me. I gave her every goddamn opportunity to cower away from me, but she kept coming back to me. I showed the one I had become and the one who had painted his heart black. I showed the guy who could either be an object of guilty pleasure or wishful pain. I showed her how little I cared about feelings and emotions. But I failed miserably, every single time.

From the day I first felt her predatory look on me, even though she wasn't the one trapped to the wall. The day she first arrived in the college, I saw her accentuating me as if I had just given her the reason to be in this place. We did the same dance every time we stared into each other's eyes, predator and prey. One moment she was the predator, and I was the prey, then we switched roles.

Her eyes were the same set of eyes that once unleashed an incredible amount of passion in me. I had to paint the person who owned them. Back then, it was the desire. But now, the person with those eyes and the person who wished to paint them was different. The passion remained, but necessity and love replaced desire.

Her first touch so innocent yet so sinful. It took every punch of self-control to resist her kiss, only to lose it eventually as she tangled herself more into my chaos. I wish my yearning to be one with myself hadn't forced me to reach out to her. I still remembered that fucking day.

"You think I care about your kissing skills or any other skills that you exhibit to all your girls. It doesn't matter to me who you are, Jake or Jacob. All I ever wish to seek is you, the real you." Amy had given me her first kiss, had awarded me with my first true kiss. Everything we had after that felt so real and holy, even for a sinner like me.

Her hazel green eyes held mine with admiration. I wasn't quite ready to let her into my messed-up world. My world was tainted with regrets and lifelong remorse. I was convinced there was nothing left in me worth saving until she came into my life and made me believe otherwise.

"You're anything but broken. Do not ever call yourself broken." She was so firm in her deduction as if she believed in everything she said. I craved for traces of doubts in her eyes, but she showed none. That day I fell in love with Amy. My Amy, my savior, my hope, and the love I had craved for years.

Love, my father used to say, weakens us. It creates cracks in the armors of an undefeatable warrior. Love destroys even the strongest of men, Jacob. It either gives you a lifetime of delusional happiness or an eternal wound to bleed.

Amy made me believe those words were nothing but a lie.

And what did I end up doing? I hurt her knowingly. Every drop of her tears was like acid scalding my heart to the point it could never heal. But I had to do it. If she had even one chance to find something better than a hollow-shell like me, I would not strip her of that opportunity. Seb was that chance. I had seen the spark in his eyes, the need to protect her from my darkness. I had been angry and jealous of him, not because I wanted to be better than him. It was because I knew he was better in every sense.