Vicious.

He was soaked, wet to the bone, standing in the blowing sleet, glaring at the entrance door to the gallery, rubbing his palm over his ice-covered hair.

I sucked in a breath and wheezed. Had he been standing there the whole time? His clothes were heavy with water and his cheeks no longer tinged pink from the cold. He looked blue. Shivering. Freezing.

“Go.” I nodded to Brent, pointing at the cab. “I’ll catch another one. I have to deal with this.”

“You sure?” Brent pulled up his coat hood to shield his head from the sleet. He didn’t appear too eager to discuss my love life with me in this weather. Rightly so.

I used my hand as a visor to shade the sleet from my eyes and nodded. “Absolutely. He’s just a high school…friend.” The lie felt sour in my mouth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Brent gave Vicious another curious look. He must’ve looked like a complete loon to him. After a brief beat, Brent disappeared inside the taxi and it drove away, red lights dancing as they chased the night traffic of New York.

The sleet was stabbing at our faces as we stood in front of each other, but I didn’t say a word. He looked at me helplessly, a lost puppy, and I wondered how I hadn’t seen it earlier. The complete and utter nakedness of his feelings. The pain. The ache. All the things that made Vicious vicious.

“You waited here the whole time?” I swallowed a sob. Because it really was sad, underneath all the anger I had for him.

He shrugged, but didn’t answer. He still looked a little perplexed. Like he, himself, couldn’t believe he’d done what he just did. Waiting for me in a winter storm.

“I don’t want to help you with Jo,” I said. I didn’t, but I still wanted him to get justice. I tried to convince myself that Vicious had other options to explore. His ex-psychiatrist…Eli Cole…

“Not what I’m here for. She’s inherited every single penny my dad had.” His voice was as detached as always. I barely had time to process this new information before he dropped another bomb. “Don’t quit.”

“I already have. Sent my resignation letter in the mail. Thought it’d be better this way, seeing as Dean is back and everything.” I watched as he squeezed his eyes shut, like this was another blow he wasn’t expecting.

I knew Dean was back in town because he’d left me a Post-It note on my door, informing me that my “steady dick” was out of town, but that I could still go up to the penthouse and ride another rodeo if I was feeling lonely.

Disgusting prick.

“Why?” Vicious asked.

“Why?” I almost laughed. The real question was why I’d agreed to work for him in the first place. “Because you have issues, Vicious. You treat everyone around you like crap. You had sex with me in my ex-boyfriend’s bed and then you take Georgia up to your hotel room, the night before your father’s funeral.”

You know, in a nutshell.

“I don’t give a shit about my father. You know what he let Jo do to me.”

“So you rushed home for the money? You disappeared without a word to me. I thought you were hurt or sick when you didn’t show up on Christmas Eve for dinner and didn’t answer my calls.”

“I was out of it when I got the call about my Dad,” he seethed, barely moving his mouth as he took a step closer. Our chests brushed, shivering against one another. “You were right, okay? I do have insomnia, and I sometimes lose a grip on things. Then my phone was dead, and I forgot my charger. Happens to people all the time. And Dean’s place? Yeah, it was a shitty thing to do, but was it really the end of the world? Did you fucking die?” He crooked one eyebrow.

I almost laughed. He looked so dead serious. Like I was the one making a big deal out of nothing.

“And about Georgia…” he continued. “You and I aren’t exclusive. We established that long before I touched you.”

My heart sank. Pain filled the space between us like a black hole we were both scared to fall into. “You did. And now I’m telling you that I don’t do non-exclusive relationships. I’m asking you to accept that, respect that, and leave me alone. You made it perfectly clear that I’m not your girlfriend. And that’s fine. But I don’t think we should keep in touch. We’re bad for each other. Always have been.”

I took a deep breath, thinking about my eighteen-year-old self. Alone and scared, staring at the world through wide-eyes and erratic heartbeats, with no one to look after me but myself. The bus rides from city to city. The “I’m-okay” letters to my family. The hurt, the shame, the pain. All Vicious’s fault.

“You know…” I smiled sadly, ignoring the sleet that threatened to freeze us to the sidewalk. “I used to think of you as a villain, but you’re not my villain. You’re your own villain. To me, you were a lesson. An important brutal lesson, nothing more and nothing less.”

I lied, because I wanted him gone. Because I wasn’t a good person at that particular moment. Visions of him clawing Georgia’s dress, the same one she wore ten years ago, assaulted my imagination. After he touched me. After he marked me.

“I’ve already secured myself a job at the gallery. This time, you don’t get to make the rules. This time, Vicious, you lose.”

That night, I did something I hadn’t done since the day I moved out of my parents’ house. I pulled out The Shoebox. Everyone had that shoebox with their little sentimental secrets. Mine was different, because it wasn’t full of things I wanted to remember. It was full of things I wanted to forget. Still, I’d carried it everywhere with me. Even to New York. I tried to convince myself that I’d taken it with me because I didn’t want anyone to find out about it, but the truth was, it was hard to let go of what we were.