“And Fallon and Malcolm like cooking?” I asked.
“What? Fuck no. Nah. Malc’s girl, when he met her, worked at the diner. He and Fallon bought it and she does the bakery.”
“Ah, hence all the donuts,” I said, gesturing toward the box we’d already finished.
“She makes the best. But yeah, what do you like doing?”
“I… I don’t know,” I admitted, voice small, just a whisper of a sound, as the embarrassment flooded my system.
I mean, who the hell got to my age without knowing what they liked? Without at least having some hobbies?
“Shit happens,” Dezi said, shrugging. “Life happens. Gets in the way of shit like that,” he added, brushing away my insecurities. “Life is on pause right now,” he went on. “Seems like a good time to suss that shit out, yeah?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re very wise?” I asked, meaning it.
But when he glanced over at me, a giant smile was on his face, and a chuckle escaped him. “Nah, babe, can’t say anyone’s ever accused me of being that.”
“Well, I think you are. Maybe you just hide it from those people,” I suggested.
“Maybe it’s not something everyone needs to know about me, yeah?” he said. But it was also a question, like he was asking me not to share it with anyone else.
And, well, I was in no place to share anyone’s secrets, not when I was asking so much from them.
“Just a heavy-drinking biker with rocks rolling around in his head then,” I agreed.
“Now you’re getting it. What do you think?” he asked, holding up his several inches of scarf beside his face. “Does this go with my coloring?”
“I can just see it now… your tee, a leather jacket thing, and a big, chunky winter scarf.”
“Chicks would be intrigued.”
“I bet they would,” I agreed.
“Cut,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“It’s not a leather jacket. It’s called a cut. Figure if you’re gonna be a biker old lady, you might want to get some of the lingo down.”
“I’m not… it’s not…”
“Yeah yeah yeah. Heard that shit already. But me? I got eyes. Sexy, smoldering fucking eyes, mind you, but eyes. And they see shit. I’m seeing shit with you and Cary.”
“He’s just helping me.”
“Mmhm, heard this song more than a few times. All the remixes too,” he went on. “You want to order Mexican?” he asked.
“We just had burgers,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but burgers aren’t tacos.”
“I mean, we—“ I started, when I heard a knock at the door that had me stiffening and sucking in my breath hard.
“Prolly just Zaddy,” Dezi said, and the nickname surprised me enough that a wobbly smile toyed at my lips as Dezi got off the bed. He reached for his gun, though. “But it never hurts to be prepared,” he added when he saw my gaze move to it.
Less than twenty seconds later, though, Cary was coming into the room, barely able to keep a smile off his face.
“What’d I miss? Place has been a fucking tomb for weeks, I leave for a couple hours, and it looks like something went down,” Dezi complained as he tucked his gun away.
“Do you remember Louana?”
“The chick Valen skipped town on, yeah? Daughter of that vigilante guy.”
“Yeah. That one.”
“What about her?”
“She just became a prospect,” Cary said, sharing a smile with Dezi that I was jealous of not fully understanding.
“Aw, man. It’s gonna be a shitshow. I gotta go get my front-row seats,” Dezi said, giving me a nod. “Figure out your happy, yeah?” he asked, and then before I could even thank him, he was gone.
“What was that?”
“Oh, nothing. He just helped me realize I have time to figure out what I want to do with my life.”
To that, Cary nodded as he moved toward his bed, picking up the loom Dezi had abandoned, and looking at the progress. “Hey, look, you figured it out.”
“Actually, no, I didn’t. Dezi,” I confirmed at his raised brow.
“I wish I could say I was surprised, but that guy is an enigma. If someone told me he was a world-class pianist, I wouldn’t be shocked. He plays his cards close to his vest.”
“He’s a good guy,” I insisted.
“He is. He can be like having a pain-in-the-ass, grown son at times. But underneath all the scuffling and bullshit, he’s a good man. It’s why I trust him here. I wouldn’t leave you with someone if I didn’t trust them implicitly.”
“I know that,” I agreed, nodding.
“I got a text from the apartment owner. He said things moved faster than he planned, so if we are ready, we can head out of the hotel and over there tomorrow. We don’t have to move in,” he rushed to add. “But maybe do some cleaning. If we have time and it needs it, painting. And figuring out dimensions so furniture can be ordered. And don’t,” he started, cutting me off when I started to open my mouth, “start giving me shit about buying furniture. Way I see it, this is my small way of paying you back.”
“Paying me back,” I repeated.
“For all the letters. For dragging me out of the drudgery that was my miserable life back then. This is the least I can do. Help you get set up in your own place. I mean, you don’t have to stay there after the… situation is handled. But while you figure shit out.”
“I kind of like it here,” I admitted. “I mean, I haven’t seen a whole lot of the area, but I felt this sort of, I don’t know, community here. I don’t know what the future holds, but if I can find a job here, I think I would like it.” A part of me didn’t want to go on, to be anything even resembling vulnerable with a man, but the other part of me wanted him to know how I felt. “And, um, you’re… you’re like the only person I know anymore. It would be nice to have a… friend, ah, nearby.”
To that, Cary’s eyes went soft. “I’d like that too. It’s important to have a support system. Especially when you are starting your life over.”
And he would know better than most. He had needed to start over again after he got out of prison. Having his club had been that support system for him.
Now, in a way, it would be that for me.
I mean, at least with Cary and Dezi anyway.
That was enough.
It was way more than I’d ever had before.
“Now I just need to figure out how I’m going to make a living.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“I have to worry about that.”
“No, you don’t,” Cary insisted.
“You can’t keep paying for me.”
“Sure, I can.”
“You’ve already—“
“Done the bare minimum to help out an… old friend.”
“Bare minimum?” I scoffed, waving around the luxury hotel room full of things he’d bought for me.
“Listen to me, love,” Cary said, getting up, but only to drop down to a squat in front of me, keeping intense eye contact. “I don’t have a bunch of bills. I don’t have a mortgage to pay, or college tuition to handle. I have plenty of money, okay? This is barely a drop of it. So while, in the grand scheme of things, this might be more than the bare minimum to others, to me, that is exactly what it is. So stop sweating it, okay?”
He reached up at the end, closing his big hands over my much smaller ones, giving them a reassuring squeeze.
“Okay,” I agreed, finding it suddenly impossible to look away from his unfairly handsome face.
“Okay,” he repeated in this low, sexy rumble that sent a shiver through my insides. Only, it wasn’t just my insides. My whole body did a quick tremble.
Before I could even think to say I was cold or some other excuse for the involuntary motion, Cary was suddenly getting to his feet, and walking over toward the window. Like he couldn’t wait to get away from me. Like he knew what that shiver meant, and that it wasn’t that I was chilly.
And, worse yet, that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with that thing.
That was, well, that was completely and utterly humiliating.
I mean, it wasn’t like I meant for it to happen.
I didn’t even think my body could react to someone like that.
Ugh.
“I’m, ah, I’m going to take a bath,” I said, popping up so fast that I knocked two of my books onto the floor.
I didn’t even pause to pick them up, just grabbed some pajamas, and rushed into the bathroom. Where I could emotionally spiral in peace.
By the time my bath had cooled, then gotten redrawn the third time, I figured I’d more or less managed to pull myself together.
It was fine.
Just a moment of insanity.
It had been so long since a man reached for me in a kind way, and my body just overreacted. That was it. No big deal.
At least that was the story I told myself as I got dressed and finally made my way back out of the bathroom.
“You okay?” Cary asked, sitting on the desk chair that he’d moved as close to the windows as possible.
“Yeah, ah, I just… I have a headache,” I lied. I’d like to claim that it was difficult to come up with a lie. But the fact of the matter was, I’d needed to do a lot of lying in my life. And if you practiced it enough, when things like beatings could be on the other side of getting it wrong, you learned pretty quickly to be convincing. “I thought the bath would help, but it didn’t,” I continued as I climbed under the covers. “I think I just need to sleep it off,” I finished, rolling onto my side to face away from him.
“Okay. I’ll keep it down,” Cary said, lowering his voice as I curled up on my side, like if I pulled my knees tightly enough to my chest, it might ease the swirling ache in my stomach at lying to the only man who’d ever been kind to me.
I stayed that way—stubbornly staring at the back of my eyelids—for what had to have been hours as Cary quietly moved around me.
I was so attune to him that I could feel his movements, could conjure up images as he quietly moved around, tidying up the space, flipping through his recipe book, texting on his phone, turning on the TV to a news station that I knew he could barely hear.
Then, finally, as he grabbed some clothes and moved into the bathroom. The water turned on a second later.
Try as I might—though, admittedly, I didn’t try all that hard—I couldn’t stop visions from playing across my mind.
Of him pulling off his cut, his tee, his jeans, of seeing that body he so carefully cultivated day in and day out on full display.
I would barely let myself even think it, always careful to push thoughts like that about Cary away, but I wanted to know what the rest of his tattoos looked like. I’d made a study of all the visible ones since we’d been in the hotel room together. I’d asked him the stories of several. But I knew there were more. Dozens more. Over his back, chest, his sides, and maybe even his thighs.
I wanted to see them.
I wanted to know why they existed.
And, yes, fine, I wanted to trace them with my fingertips.
God, I wanted to trace them with my tongue.
But that was so insane that I pushed the thought immediately away whenever it popped up.
Especially because he seemed really put off at the idea of me having any level of attraction to him.
Ugh.
My poor, beaten ego didn’t need that.
But there was no denying it, either.
I needed to get my head on right. I had to lock away any growing feelings I might have toward him. Especially since they were so clearly one-sided.
The sadness set in too quickly even to try to fight it off, leaving annoyingly persistent tears to creep out from under my lashes, wetting my cheeks and pillows until I heard the water shut off, and knew that he would see if I didn’t pull it together.
Eventually, at some point, I must have passed out from sheer boredom.
And that was when the nightmares started.
I’d been getting them since I left Raúl’s compound, to varying degrees of awfulness. The themes were always the same. Either I was still back there, still getting abused by him, or I was free, but he found me and was punishing me for getting away in the first place.
While the themes may have been the same, the length of the dreams, the clarity, and the perspective of them changed. The nights where I was more of a fly on the wall of it all weren’t so bad. The nights where I felt like I was inside my body, where I was experiencing the abuse, those were the worst nights.
The dreams that didn’t feel like dreams dragged on and on. I felt like I was choking on the fear, like I was feeling every punch, kick, lash, like my actual bones were cracking when Raúl threw me against the wall. Like I could feel his fingertips as he started to rip off my clothes.
It never went beyond that point before.
But this dream kept going. Until my clothes were gone. Until his hands were on me. Until his body was coming over mine.
No.
No.
I was screaming it in my head. It was coming out of dream-me’s mouth.
But it must have been coming out of my mouth as well, too trapped in my own head to know.
Because the next thing I knew, hands were grabbing me for real.
I didn’t recognize them for what they were at first, though.
All I knew was that hands were on me and that I didn’t want anymore of the torment I was experiencing.
So I writhed, lashed out, hit, yelled.
“Hey, hey. It’s okay,” a voice called, thick and unrecognizable while still half inside my dream state. “Abigail, it’s me,” he continued. “It’s Cary, love. You’re dreaming. Nothing is happening to you,” he cooed, pulling me closer, pinning my arms between our bodies as he crushed me to his strong chest.
The warmth was what broke through first.
The warm feel of bare skin against the side of my face.
The scent was next. Like the body wash in the shower. The same body wash in the shower that I sniffed when I was in there, that I barely managed to resist using just so I could have that scent with me all day.
The body wash.
In the shower.
At the hotel.
That I was sharing with Cary.
Because I was free.
Because Raúl hadn’t found me.
Even as I seemed to start to wrap my head around the fact that it was okay, that I was safe, a sort of hysterical cry caught in my throat.
“Shh, it’s okay,” Cary murmured as his one arm held me more tightly. The other moved up, stroking through the hair that was losing more and more dye each time I washed it, letting streaks of my strawberry blonde start to peek through. I knew the darker color was meant to keep me safe, but there was no denying I felt a sort of relief at seeing more of myself come through each time I looked in the mirror.
I might have been able to pull myself together right then. If I had been alone. If I’d been able to process and tuck away the trauma myself.
But something about having someone there, having them be calm and sweet and understanding seemed to make it impossible to fight through the lingering feelings of fear and pain and despair.
So what did they do?
Bubble up and burst out.
All over Cary.
When I tried to pull away, intent on rushing off into the bathroom and getting a grip, he only pulled me closer, held me tighter, murmured more soft and sweet words about being okay, about him being there for me, about him making sure nothing ever happened to me again.
All that kindness, well, it just made the tears keep coming. Until my cheeks felt raw. Until my eyelids felt puffy. Until I was sniffling pathetically in an attempt not to leak all over him.
“You needed that, huh?” Cary murmured after I finally started to be able to pull myself together. “Lot of survival, not a lot of processing,” he went on. “Seems like we need to convince that
subconscious of yours that you are safe now,” he added. “Then maybe you can kick those bad dreams once and for all.”
“Sometimes they’re not so bad,” I admitted. “Tonight was really bad,” I told him.
“I guessed so since you jolted like I’d jabbed you with a hot poker when I touched you. He’s not going to get a chance to do that again,” he told me, voice a solemn vow. “Not while I’m here,” he finished as he shifted me up on his lap, letting his arm loosen around my back just enough to lean me back so he could look down at me. “Okay?” he asked as his free hand lifted, wiping the lingering wetness from my cheeks.
“Okay.” I barely recognized the sound of my own voice even as it came out from between my lips. It sounded as breathless as I felt as I looked up into those dark blue eyes of his.
“He won’t touch you again so long as I’m around to make sure of it,” he went on as his finger moved over the apple of my cheek, down to my jaw, then over. The pad of his thumb traced across the outline of my lower lip.
It sounded crazy, but I swore electricity sparked from his barely-there touch.
I wasn’t even aware of lifting my hand. But I felt it as my palm grazed up the strong, corded muscles of his forearm, then his bicep. It didn’t stop there, though. No, it kept moving over his shoulder, up the side of his neck, then finally, moving behind, sinking in a little.
I realized my intention a moment too late.
I was trying to draw him down toward me, toward the lips his gaze was focused on.
There had to be some sort of other reason for him to be looking at them like that, though. Because he’d made it pretty clear that he had no interest in me that way.
Even so, though, there was no talking to my arm. It had a life of its own at that moment as my hand applied pressure to the back of his neck until I started to pull it down.
I was sure he was going to pull away, that he was going to toss me off of his lap and onto the mattress, then storm away from me while mumbling about how he was just helping me because of an old connection, not because he wanted a new one.
But then his deep gaze slipped from my lips to my eyes, making my breath catch in my throat. Because, while no one would consider me a professional on such matters, there seemed to be no mistaking the heat in his gaze, the intensity of his stare as he kept letting himself be drawn down closer to me.
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