All Chapters of The Way He Looked at Me: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Tim povConsciousness crept back in pieces.The first thing I registered was him.Jace hadn't moved. Not an inch. Dawn had apparently come and gone and he was exactly where the night had left him planted in that chair across the room, eyes trained on me with the kind of stillness that didn't come from rest. He hadn't slept. I was certain of it the way you're certain of things you cannot prove. The whole night had passed and he had simply sat there, breathing, existing, staring.Not because he was at peace with any of this.The tension rolling off him said the opposite.I shifted my gaze around the space. People threw the word cabin around carelessly and it had never sat right with me. cabins belonged in snow globes, cute and compact with smoke curling out of tiny chimneys. Whatever this place was, it refused that word. The ceilings stretched. The rooms connected without apologizing for their size. This was something else entirely. Something built with purpose and privacy in mind.A t

Two contradictions wearing the same face, sharing the same heartbeat, demanding equal space inside me simultaneously.My body understood lumber and soil and weather patterns and electrical current. Problems presented themselves and my mind disassembled them before I consciously decided to try. That was simply how I operated the world was a series of puzzles and my brain was the tool that dissolved them.Except this.This had no pieces I could locate. No edges to press together. The gentleness that had moved through my hands when I touched his face had felt like it belonged to someone else's body foreign and unasked for and entirely beyond my ability to explain or contain. I had tended to him. Actually, not from obligation or strategy but from something that lived underneath those things, something older and more embarrassing.The woodpile behind the cabin had absorbed the worst of it.Hour after hour, the ax rising and falling, shoulders burning past the point of complaint, the rhyt

The moment he walked through my door, I should have known better.Some people carry trouble with them the way others carry cologne. You smell it before they even get close. Eddie was that kind of person. I just kept forgetting it every time he looked at me."Be honest with me." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes searching my face. "Since everything happened have you touched anything?"The question landed heavy. I turned away from it, from him, from the memory that tried to crawl back up my throat.That night I lived in a locked room inside my chest. The overdose. The ceiling tiles I stared at afterward. The way my body had quit on me without warning. Losing my mother had been the only thing that came close to that kind of darkness and even then, it was different. That grief had been clean. This had just been destroyed."I'll grab you something to drink."I escaped to the kitchen before he could say another word.He was quiet when I returned, which surprised me. Eddie had n

Neither of us spoke as the truck climbed toward the mountain.He shifted in his seat every few seconds, restless, and kept lifting his hand toward his eye like he was trying to hide it or forget it was there."I want you to know something." His voice broke the silence first. "I am not weak. I make bad choices sometimes. I'll own that but I know how to take care of myself."I believed him. Completely."It was my ex." He said it plainly, like he had already made peace with the embarrassment of it. "I was in a dark place. Lonelier than I knew how to deal with. My head wasn't right, and I made the mistake of reaching out to him. He used to be my supplier back when I was using. He showed up with drugs, and I came too close. Then he decided he wanted more than I was willing to give, and he didn't appreciate being told no." A short pause. "I never should have picked up the phone. That's on me."My grip crushed the steering wheel."Don't contact him again."Tim went rigid beside me. "Yeah,

His hands moved over me with purpose, driving into me with a rhythm that sent heat spiraling through every nerve ending in my body. I accepted every ounce of the pleasure and the ache, craving more of both. I silently begged him to say something. Silently begged him to press his lips to mine. He did neither. Yet somehow, the way he moved with me pulled me far away from reality, into a world where the darkness of my past didn't exist and all that remained was this overwhelming feeling of being alive.When his palm closed around my throat, my entire body went still. But I said nothing. No protest, no hesitation and he took that as permission. His grip tightened slowly, deliberately, just enough to remind me he was in complete control. The thought crept into the back of my mind that he held my life in his hands, literally. That no one would come for me. That no one would even notice if I disappeared. He wouldn't go that far I knew that but knowing that he could send me soaring beyond