“No! Please.” I couldn’t bear it. It was bad enough he was here, he was hearing me. If he saw evidence of my destruction, too? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “Okay.” A soft whisper from him. “I need you to hate me.” “I will.” He sank down on a chair in the corner, toeing the curtains out of the way so he could see outside his window, and there he held me. “Tomorrow we can go back to hating each other.” I hiccupped on a sob. “Deal.” So the rest of the night, he cradled me. The rest of the night, I cried. The rest of the night, we didn’t hate each other.
