Chapter 317
KASMINE.
It was a strange, dizzying feeling–like standing between sunlight and shadow. Elation laced with sadness.
For the first time, I caught a glimpse of the life Kester might have wanted if things were different in his world. And it was a bit tempting.
Watching him hand out the food exactly how I’d asked him to, did something to me. Something warm uncurled in the pit of my stomach, like morning light slipping through curtains. It shouldn’t have meant so much. But it did. It really did.
Because Kester doesn’t do things like this.
Not even if the Moon Goddess herself descended from the clouds and begged him.
So, the fact that he did it for me spoke louder than any love confession ever could.
Everyone has the ability to be human. It just depends on who is asking.
But, God, it was exhausting trying to figure out what I really felt for him… Was it love or pity?
There’s a terrifyingly thin line between the two. One misstep and you mistake tragedy for romance. I didn’t want to wake up one day and realize I’d given my heart to a wound dressed in silk.
It would be a mistake to offer him my heart when what he truly needed was healing.
Kester always had a way of making me see how much he claimed to love me. But his love was the strangest kind.
It wasn’t tender or easy. It wasn’t the kind that wraps you in warmth and tells you everything’s going to be okay.
No.
His love was sharp–edged and possessive. A kind of fierce, consuming obsession that made me feel both treasured and trapped.
And that made me wonder…
Since I walked into his life as a child, barely tall enough to reach his elbow, did he really love me? Or he just had the aching need to possess something when everything else had always been out of his control?
Because the truth was that Kester almost never had control over his own life. All he had was control over other people and the situations around him… He did everything within his power to ensure he stayed in control every single time.
From the little I know, his childhood was… sad and fragmented. But that was all I knew.
I knew almost nothing about how his mother finally died after being maltreated by his father. Although I was still really young then, I always heard Mum and my late father talk about it when they thought I was asleep in their arms after dinner.
However, my perspective changed when Mum married Kester’s father and they seemed so in love with each other.
He was charming, attentive, and loving to me and Mum. The kind of man who kissed Mum’s forehead and brought her flowers for no reason. They rarely argued. Barely raised voices at each other. And I started to think maybe the rumors were wrong. Maybe people just loved to gossip. Maybe love could be simple, after all.
And Kester never agreed to open up or answer any of my curious questions about it and why he and his father were always at
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Chapter 317
loggerheads, barely ever tolerating each other to date.
Standing here and staring at the man sitting on the bed, lost in whatever was on his phone, I wondered how much love he actually had as a child. Because, all I sa at that moment was a man who would do anything to be loved.
It made my heart ache because I wasn’t even sure where this was going.
But for now, seeing how much he was willing to bend for me and how far he’d go just to make me smile, I had to use it to his own advantage.
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