Indulgence ( PATIENCE #2)

22. Scares

Tessa

Hardin can kill. Like actual- end of life - kill. He does when needed, because that's his work.  He sits on the top throne of that work. The past hour of his revelations has that thing cleared. The almost sure suspicion I had has been cleared.

And it's not any fictitious novel's plot summary that I have heard in school from those literature geeks. This is reality. This is the real world thrown at me. The nightmare, people try and stay away from. The nightmare they are scared of.

I should be scared too… I should  be fucking shivering till the bones.

My feets should be moving….

I should be gathering my gut. And I should be running. I should not be sitting here as calmly as I am, after Hardin's graphic description of the blood bath he is capable of. After his graphic explanation of how dangerous things really are. How it is actually so dark like a crime thriller, which one I remember I had joked about years ago.

This hot man who rocked my world on his orbit kills as a job.

I shouldn't be seeking comfort on his black skirt against my face. I shouldn't be letting him pull me half the way on his lap. I shouldn't be letting my nostrils inhale his scent…

God, his scent sends me into a frenzy every time.

But here I am, laying on him almost, as I feel peace engulf me. His truthful explanation which I yearned for and now I received, has failed to make me scared.

Being a law abiding citizen I should scream, claw and stomp upon being introduced to all this. I should hate Hardin for the illegal line of work he is involved in. But I cannot. In front of him, my moral sense has stopped working. My sense of laws and rules and regulations breaks the binary and escapes through the elevator leaving me a dumb mess.

To add to the horror, I am demented ly satisfied . He told me. He is telling me everything. Dismantling one brick at a time of the wall of pain, he built around me.

I am ecstatic now, after I let him explain to me the death of Francois.
As he explained how he chopped his fingers off, I was glad. Those fingers that, tortured, God knows how many women needed that kind of treatment. Those fingers, emptying families, deserved that. Those fingers responsible for making a child orphan deserved that.

I could finally breathe when he said that he choked him to death. The clench in my chest, due to a mix of three year back on a night, and the night when Francois held me by my throat, suffocating me, stayed. But upon hearing how Hardin punished him, unclenched that splintering pain.

The tears that escaped me, were of trust. The trust I had lurking in the corner of my mind, The conflict between what I was made to believe by this idiot I am clinging on to and what I felt in his eyes.

That one square inch of my hopeful heart had always screamed that Hardin couldn't have left me. He didn't. It was all a lie.
But three years of pain just layered on that thought until I lost hope.

Now here I sit, his one hand gently running by my temple and the other one caressing my thighs.

That tiny part of my heart won. And now my brain is just angry and mad at him.