Blank Slate

Chapter 187 - Christopher Paxton

My God.

I felt like Payton had physically reached into my chest and was currently doing her very best to crush my heart. Her dark brown eyes were pools of emotion so deep and turbulent that my breath caught and my pulse pounded in my ears. So much pain. So much betrayal. I thought that I was getting a grasp of what she had lived through, what she had found some way to survive through but I didn't know shit.

I thought that she kept pushing me away because of the physical and sexual abuse forced on her. I thought that all I had to do was be patient and show her day in and day out that she could trust me, that I would never hurt her. That I would do everything in my power to protect her. But it was so much worse than I organically thought. Someone had already done that. Someone had already slowly earned her trust and unfailing loyalty. Someone had won her love.

And it had all been a lie.

Considering everything that I knew about Payton and how she processed not only her trauma but the world around her, this was just about as bad as it could get. For her to take that leap of faith and allow herself to trust and love only to find out that Joey had been actively lying because he had an alternative motive must have destroyed her.

And she faced that destruction alone as she sent everyone she had ever known to jail.

I think I might be sick.

Payton's face was slowly starting to shut down and I knew that she needed some sort of response to her uncharismatic openness. The longer that I said nothing and allowed my revulsion of Joey's actions to overwhelm me the more convinced she was going to be sharing her story with me was the wrong thing to do. Her opening up to me and talking to me had been my number one obsession for months. I had to pull myself together before I screwed everything up.

I reached out and cupped her bare shoulder, her warm skin acting as a beacon as I struggled to push away my own emotions so that I could tend to hers. I swallowed hard and used my tongue to wet my dry lips before saying the only thing that I could think of. "I am so very sorry, Payton."

An edge of confusion entered into the endless pools of pain within her gaze and I latched onto that like the lifeline that it was. I loved Payton's curiosity and one of my new favorite things was explaining things to her. She always took the time to listen to me, even when she didn't agree. She never blocked me out when I was explaining things.

"Why would you be sorry? You have nothing to do with Joey or the decisions he made," Payton asked in that same low whisper and I wondered if she didn't want Ethan and Liam overhearing this particular conversation.

"I am not using sorry as a form of apology but rather expressing my deepest sorrow that you had to experience something like that. You deserve so much more than betrayal. You are the most loyal and fierce person I have ever met. I am sorry that your dedication and love were not returned in kind. It will be now. Us. This team. Your new family. We would never do anything like that to you. We are who we say we are and you mean the world to us. You mean the world to me," I said, finding myself rambling and not expressing what I needed to.

Payton had the ability to completely shut down her emotions. I had seen it over and over again. Her eyes would grow cold and her face blank and not even I could discern what she was thinking. But thankfully she didn't do that now. She stayed with me and I watched as doubt and fear skittered across her beautiful features. She was thinking of Ezra and about all he had done to her. She was thinking about the times I had been an asshole to her. The times that we had failed her.

My heart wouldn't be able to take much more of this.

"I can't mean the world to you," Payton whispered the clear pain within her voice burned. "You don't even know me."