Dirty Red (Love Me with Lies, #2)

by Tarryn Fisher

Technically, I made this. It's convenient how men get to sign their names to these little creations without doing much more than having an orgasm and assembling a crib.

My mother hated most things associated with me — the tangles in my hair after a bath, the color of my hair, the way I chewed, the way I laughed too loud, the way I flicked my fingernails across my thumb when I was in trouble. If you asked me, then or now, what she actually liked about me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.

I was born red: my skin, my hair and my hot, fussy attitude.

No, there is nothing wrong with me. It’s him. He doesn’t want me for who I am. He wants to make me someone else. This is a game Caleb and I have been playing for years. He gives me a standard by which to live, I fail.

My father gave me a prestigious job at his company to prove how little he thought of me. My boyfriend gave me smiles that didn’t reach his eyes. My mother gave me love so thin it felt more like sugarcoated contempt. If someone had cared enough to say: Leah, it’s all in your head ... all I would have to do was refer them to the three people in my life who didn’t really want me there.

Cash had edgy, trying-too-hard chin length hair and lips that had seen about five rounds of the collagen needle. She was striking … sexy.

Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded. When you are the bastard child of a prostitute and you need to know what your adoptive parents are thinking, you learn how to read eyes. You can see a lie prod the truth, a hurt be swept into a cranial recess, happiness as a wide luminescent light. You can see the crushing of a soul beneath a terrible loss. What I see in Caleb’s eyes is a leftover hurt; hurt with mold growing on it. Hurt so profound that blood and tears and regret cannot possibly do it justice.

“I didn’t choose her,” his voice breaks. “Love is illogical. You fall into it like a manhole. Then you’re just stuck. You die in love more than you live in love.”