Unravel Me: The Juliette Chronicles Book 2

against his skin. His clothes are in a pile on the floor and his mattress is in the middle of the room and the chair he was just sitting in is facing the wall, staring at nothing at all and I realize he’s begun to lose his mind in here.
    “Can you believe that?” he asks me, still not looking in my direction. “Can you believe he thinks I can just wake up one morning and be different ? Sing happy songs and give money to the poor and beg the world to forgive me for what I’ve done? Do you think that’s possible? Do you think I can change?”
    He finally turns to face me and his eyes are laughing, his eyes are like emeralds glinting in the setting sun and his mouth is twitching, suppressing a smile. “Do you think I could be different ?” He takes a few steps toward me and I don’t know why it affects my breathing. Why I can’t find my mouth.
    “It’s just a question,” he says, and he’s right in front of me and I don’t even know how he got there. He’s still looking at me, his eyes so focused and so simultaneously unnerving, brilliant, blazing with something I can never place.
    My heart it will not be still it refuses to stop skipping skipping skipping
    “Tell me, Juliette. I’d love to know what you really think of me.”
    “Why?” Barely a whisper in an attempt to buy some time.
    Warner’s lips flicker up and into a smile before they fall open, just a bit, just enough to twitch into a strange, curious look that lingers in his eyes. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say a word. He only moves closer to me, studying me and I’m frozen in place, my mouth stuffed full of the seconds he doesn’t speak and I’m fighting every atom in my body, every stupid cell in my system for being so attracted to him.
    Oh.
    God.
    I am so horribly attracted to him.
    The guilt is growing inside of me in stacks, settling on my bones, snapping me in half. It’s a cable twisted around my neck, a caterpillar crawling across my stomach. It’s the night and midnight and the twilight of indecision. It’s too many secrets I no longer contain.
    I don’t understand why I want this.
    I am a terrible person.
    And it’s like he sees what I’m thinking, like he can feel the change happening in my head, because suddenly he’s different. His energy slows down, his eyes are deep, troubled, tender; his lips are soft, still slightly parted and now the air in this room is too tight, too full of cotton and I feel the blood rushing around in my head, crashing into every rational region of my brain.
    I wish someone would remind me how to breathe.
    “Why can’t you answer my question?” He’s looking so deeply into my eyes that I’m surprised I haven’t buckled under the intensity and I realize then, right in this moment I realize that everything about him is intense. Nothing about him is manageable or easy to compartmentalize. He’s too much. Everything about him is too much. His emotions, his actions, his anger, his aggression.
    His love.
    He’s dangerous, electric, impossible to contain. His body is rippling with an energy so extraordinary that even when he’s calmed down it’s almost palpable. It has a presence.
    But I’ve developed a strange, frightening faith in who Warner really is and who he has the capacity to become. I want to find the 19-year-old boy who would feed a stray dog. I want to believe in the boy with a tortured childhood and an abusive father. I want to understand him. I want to unravel him.
    I want to believe he is more than the mold he was forced into.
    “I think you can change,” I hear myself saying. “I think anyone can change.”
    And he smiles.
    It’s a slow, delighted smile. The kind of smile that breaks into a laugh and lights up his features and makes him sigh. He closes his eyes. His face is so touched, so amused. “It’s just so sweet,” he says. “So unbearably sweet. Because you really believe that.”
    “Of course I do.”
    He finally looks at me when he whispers, “But you’re wrong.”
    “What?”
    “I’m heartless,” he says to me, his words cold, hollow, directed inward. “I’m a heartless bastard and a cruel, vicious being. I don’t care about people’s feelings. I don’t care about their fears or their futures. I don’t care about what they want or whether or not they have a family, and I’m not sorry,” he says. “I’ve never been sorry for anything I’ve done.”
    It actually takes me a few moments to find my head. “But you apologized to me,” I