“I don’t want to scare you away,” I admitted, looking away from him.

“You won’t scare me away. Please talk to me. Nothing you could do or say would make me leave you,” he vowed, putting a finger under my chin and making me look at him.

I gulped. Does that mean forever, or for the next three months? We just sat there looking at each other for a couple of minutes. His eyes were narrowed in a silent plea for me to open up to him, to finally let him in once and for all. The trouble was I didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, it was more that I knew that if he knew even half of the stuff that went through my head, he’d finally know how f**ked up I was and he’d run for the hills. But the soft, tender, pleading look to his eyes told me that he wasn’t ever going to think badly of me, or judge me, or think I was a bitch or coward.

I sighed and decided to take a chance for once in my life. Ashton was worth taking a chance on. “What do you want to know?”

His shoulders seemed to relax as a dazzling smile crept onto his face. For some reason, he looked extremely proud of me. “What college were you and Jack planning on going to?” he asked.

I smiled. That one was easy. “We wanted different ones. He wanted to be a doctor, so he wanted Harvard, and I wanted MSU,” I answered, shrugging.

His eyes widened with apparent surprise. “You would have gone to separate schools?”

I smiled sadly. “Yeah, we were very confident that nothing could break us up. Neither of us saw Carter coming,” I said grimly.

His expression hardened in an instant. “You were with Carter for ten months?” The way he said Carter’s name was almost a growl.

“Yeah, just over. I banged my head and passed out at the club, and woke up in his house in Miami,” I replied, frowning, trying not to think about it too much.

His hand slid to my elbow. “This self-harming thing that you do, I’ve read about it. People that self-harm sometimes feel that they lack control in their lives. Is that why you hurt yourself?”

I blew out a big breath and turned my arm over, seeing the numerous little white scars that lined the inside of my forearm and the red patch at my elbow where I was pinching myself earlier. “Kind of. I don’t actually know why I do it. It’s like an outlet for pain sometimes is the only way I can describe it to you. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I can’t cope and doing that can sometimes help me focus or can clear my mind. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t do it often anymore,” I answered. That was the truth. I’d only done it a few times since Ashton had been with me.

Ashton was watching me, absorbing everything I was saying with a thoughtful look on his face. “I don’t like you hurting yourself.”

I swallowed noisily. “I know.”

“I can be your outlet. If you just talk to me, maybe I can help you clear your mind from now on,” he suggested hopefully. Unable to answer, I set my head on his shoulder and nodded. I knew there would always be times in my life that I would do it, I couldn’t promise it would never happen again, but I would try

His hand slid down my arm, over the bumpy scars that had gone white over time and settled on my wrist as his thumb traced the biggest, jagged scar across my wrist. “You tried to kill yourself the first time by slitting your wrists.” It wasn’t actually a question and I realised that he was prompting me to talk about the more difficult things that had happened.

I didn’t raise my head from his shoulder as I answered. “Actually, that was the second time. I tried to jump from the balcony at the club when they threw Jack off, but Carter stopped me. He said it was a waste,” I admitted, swallowing the lump in my throat. That was the first time I had told anyone that, ever.

His angry silence filled the room for a few seconds before he spoke again. “You tried to kill yourself two other times, on your birthday.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I took some pills.” Please don’t leave me after this, Ashton!

He took a deep breath, seeming to choose his next words carefully. “You actually wanted to die? You told me when I first started that you had nothing left to lose and that you wanted to die because you had nothing to live for,” he winced, as if the memory hurt him.

I nodded. “Yeah, I wanted to die. I remember waking up after each time I’d tried to kill myself and feeling so disappointed that I was alive. I thought I was being punished for what I did to Jack,” I admitted.

He gasped. “Punished? You thought living was punishment?”

“I guess.” I shrugged. “Every time I tried to kill myself it never worked, I thought that someone wanted me to suffer, to feel the pain every day. Death would have been easier than going through that. The pain, the grief, it killed me inside,” I explained.

He held my hand tightly in his. His eyes were concerned as he tilted his head so I had to look at him. “Your birthday’s coming up,” he whispered.

I nodded and smiled reassuringly. “I won’t do it again, I promise.” I didn’t want to die anymore. I wanted to live my life. I wanted the day when Ashton would want to settle down and have a girlfriend; I wanted the one day that he might look at me and fall in love with me.

“You won’t?” His voice was pleading and hopeful.

I smiled. “No, Ashton, I won’t,” I confirmed, looking into his beautiful green eyes. His whole face relaxed as relief washed over it, he blew out a sharp breath as if he had been holding it a long time.