by Jenn Hype
Before I could think better of it, I walked next door and knocked on CJ’s door. Then I knocked again when he didn’t answer. Because apparently, I’m a masochist.
No answer. No sound from inside. Not surprising. He was probably hiding. First I showed up at his family dinner, which he was obviously not happy about, then he had to drag me to the hospital. I’d been all about accosting him at his mom’s house when Rose called me about it, but once I saw his face, I felt guilty. Like I was intruding on his personal time with his family. Because, ya know, I totally was. Bugging him at work or his apartment felt less personal. Intruding on his family dinner just felt wrong, despite the fact that his mom had invited me. Her reassurances hadn’t assuaged the guilt that I had crossed some sort of invisible line. I knew her motives were good. She wanted to break her son out of his shell and put some life back into him, and at first, I’d been all about it.
Now I was wavering. In a place where I had no friends to begin with, did I really want to be making enemies? Also, there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that kept trying to pipe up and remind me that I didn’t want CJ to hate me. And that, right there, was dangerous territory. Where in the past I’d had no problem inserting myself into someone’s life, it had never been personal. Not at first. Not until I knew they’d be around longer than a few months. I didn’t set out with the goal of wanting one specific person to be in my life. It was a huge part of why dating was difficult for me. Even with Dan, I’d been detached. Hence the reason it was so easy to end the relationship when I moved.
Why was I so fixated on CJ? It had nothing to do with how attractive he was. I knew the difference between wanting friendship and wanting sex. The man had so many damn walls up, I’d have a better chance of getting the Queen of England to be my new bestie. And yes, I was attracted to him. Ridiculously so. But it was more than that. From the first moment our eyes met, I felt drawn to him in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand. Going for a job interview and it winding up being his company? I’d stupidly felt like it was fate. Then his mom went and gave me the perfect excuse to get close to him. Do it under the guise of helping someone else, instead of admitting to myself that I wanted to get to know him.
Feeling stupid and defeated, I started to turn away from CJ’s door and resigned myself to another night at home alone, wallowing in self pity. Something I didn’t indulge in often, but I was feeling too weak - and drugged - to resist.
But then his door swung open and I froze. I went so far as to pinch myself for good measure. Because I’d had this exact dream numerous times before, where a man answered his door with water dripping down his bare chest and down his chiseled abs before disappearing underneath a tiny towel that wrapped around his waist and hid almost nothing. Initially that dream had involved Stephen Amell, but after meeting CJ, Stephen had been quickly replaced.
My imagination had not done CJ justice. Real life was so much better.
He didn’t say anything as I took my time soaking in every inch of him. If he was annoyed or amused or simply bored, I couldn’t tell ya. I was transfixed. My eyes skated over his broad shoulders, down his biceps and over to his chest. Every inch of the man was toned perfection. Defined abs led to a trail of hair that disappeared beneath the towel. I would have lingered on the bulge there, but if he was going to interrupt my ogling soon, I needed to drink in as much of him as possible.
The towel split just below his right hip, giving me a peek at his strong, muscular thigh. So consumed with my slow perusal, I hadn’t noticed until I got to his knee that something was amiss. Just below his right knee his leg just…stopped. It was then that I noticed the scarring. How had I missed that the other day when he’d been dressing in his office? All down his right side were jagged pieces of raised skin, some larger and more pronounced than others. The scars were angry looking, and the skin surrounding them looked to have sustained some serious burns.
Not until my fingertips lightly traced one of the large scars that stretched from just below his right pectoral to the underside of his rib cage did I even realize I’d closed the distance between us. The thought to touch him wasn’t a conscious one and I was helpless to resist. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. If he pushed me away, I’d go, but it would hurt like hell. And I knew he would pull away if I let him see what was going through my mind. One glimpse into my eyes would give away the pain I felt on his behalf. For what he must have suffered to earn scars like those.
He must have gradually inched backwards, subtle enough for me to not notice and just blindly follow, because the sound of his door clicking shut jerked my head up. I glanced around to find we were in his apartment. That he hadn’t slammed the door in my face, swatted my hand away or even asked me what I was doing was all it took to give me hope. Hope that if I let him see just how much this quiet moment was affecting me, that he wouldn’t shut down like I feared. That he’d let me in, just a little bit.
“What are you thinking?”
His voice was low and hoarse. Like it pained him to ask me. The intensity was too much.
“I think that’s something the girl is supposed to ask,” I teased, but it fell flat. I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat, but the raw vulnerability written all over CJ’s face was killing me.
“You’re the only person other than my doctors who has ever seen me without my prosthetic.”
My head jerked back slightly. His confession shocked me. No wonder he looked so vulnerable.
“What about the women you’ve slept with?” I wanted to smack myself in the face. Shut up, Blake! “Never mind. None of my business, and I really don’t want to hear about it anyway.”
I tried to look away, but his fingers gripped my chin and forced me to meet his eyes again. He didn’t have to say anything, I saw the answer I told him not to give me. I really was the first.
Pushing aside my pride and the fear choking the life out of my heart, I forced out my confession. “I was wondering what happened, even though I’ll never be able to fully understand what you must have had to endure to wind up with marks like these.” I watched my finger gently move down one scar to another. When I looked back at him, his eyes were squeezed shut and his jaw clenched. “I was thinking that scars like these don’t come without their demons, yet you don’t let them consume you.”
His eyes popped open, narrowing on mine. “What makes you think they don’t consume me?”
I smiled lightly. “You help people for a living, CJ. You employ wounded soldiers like yourself and give them purpose when the world around them can’t see past their handicap to the capable person inside.”
“I’m no hero, Blake.”
The finality in his voice had me blinking back tears. “That’s not up to you, CJ.” He started to argue, but I held up my hand. The one not still rubbing up and down his side gently. “I don’t know you, but I know you’re human. That means you’ve made mistakes and have regrets. You probably carry around a lot of guilt and most likely shoulder the blame for the pain of others, too. You want to make a difference, but the difference between you and the majority of people who want to do good is that you actually follow through. Just because you don’t want the credit or don’t want to acknowledge your accomplishments doesn’t mean you can keep others from noticing. Can’t control everything, Jade. Most especially the way other people think and feel.”
CJ’s hand covered mine, sliding it from the side of his torso over his chest and stopping just shy of his heart.
“And you, Blake? How do you feel?”
My nails curved under, pressing into his skin lightly. “I don’t know you, so I can’t presume to know who you are as a person. But I can tell you that these scars? They make an impossibly sexy man even more attractive. And what I feel?” I paused, relishing the fast beating of his heart beneath my palm. “What I feel doesn’t matter.”
I tried to pull back. Shook my head when he tried to force me to look at him again. He wasn’t having it though. One tug of my hand and I came barreling towards
him. I had no choice but to throw my hands up and brace myself against him. The move had erased the small distance that remained between us, and now our bodies were flush, not one part of us not touching the other in some way.
“Tell me. It matters.”
His other hand lifted to cup my cheek. The move was tender and gentle, and the way his calloused fingers skimmed my skin until threading into my hair was my undoing. Not once did he break eye contact as I spoke to him. And not once did he give me any inclination as to what was going on inside his head.
“I think you’re the most complicated, stubborn, sexiest man I’ve ever seen. And I think when you finally let someone in, she’ll be one incredibly lucky woman.”
After a slow kiss to the corner of his mouth, I forced myself to move towards the door.
He said nothing as I walked out. And I didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TEN
CJ
“No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys.”
- Douglas Horton
It’d been three days since what I had deemed a fluke. An aberration. A moment in time never to repeat itself.
Blake had no idea how huge that stupid, rare moment was.
It wasn’t that I was ashamed of my scars. They didn’t make me insecure or self-conscious. I simply didn’t want to talk about the reason behind them. The women I’d been with since returning to the states all those years ago were nameless, faceless women I never planned to see again. A night of mutual pleasure with the understanding of nothing more was all I’d sought. Letting them see me was never part of the deal. So the sex had stayed in the shadows. Once the goal was achieved, I was gone. I never gave them time to notice a damn thing about me.
Until Blake. The woman I was trying to push out of my life, not let in.
When I heard the knocking as soon as I got out of the shower, I’d hurried to see who it was, though I had no intention of opening the door. A part of me that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge yet had hoped it would be Blake. Why? No clue. That’s why I was ignoring it. And I was ignoring the way my heart rate picked up when it was Blake I saw through the peephole. I told myself to walk away. Pretend I wasn’t there. Or to just let her think I was ignoring her - which I was.
But then she knocked again. My resolve weakened. I told myself to open the door and tell her to go away. Fuck trying to get inside her head in a lame attempt to get rid of her. It was backfiring and pushing her away was a last ditch effort to keep her from fucking with my head even more than she already had.
Only when Blake spun around, I was frozen under her appreciative stare. The way she took her time, admiring the muscles I worked my ass off daily to maintain, it was…different. It wasn’t just lustful appreciation. It was more. All I could do was watch and wait for the moment she saw my leg - or lack thereof. I saw it in her eyes when it happened.
I expected shock, or maybe a little disgust that would be quickly masked with pity. The shock came, the rest didn’t. The initial surprise morphed into fascination. I wasn’t even sure she was aware that she was moving towards me. And when her hand touched the worst scar where the shrapnel had been embedded so deep I swore some days I could still feel it in my skin, one of my carefully constructed walls built to keep people at a distance came crashing down. Hard.
Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how much I feared rejection, or how badly I wanted to tell someone everything and still have them look at me like I was whole. Like I wasn’t just pieces of the man I used to be. And I had to acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t wanting to be accepted by just anyone. Blake was different. I didn’t yet know why, but whose fault was that? It was clear she would be easy to know. She read like an open book. One that I’d been stubbornly refusing to read.
Now it was all I could think about. Despite my hangups and the way everything about Blake made me uncomfortable, I couldn’t quit thinking about her. Wondering what it was that made her so damn upbeat. I’d never seen her frown. Even when she was half molesting my chest, her face had been serious but her lips were still smiling. Like they were trained to turn up on their own. I don’t think she even realized she was doing it. Happiness just radiated off of Blake, and dammit if that wasn’t contagious.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my family and my job and my friends and I was grateful every damn day to be alive, but Blake and the onslaught of complicated emotions that she brought out in me proved just how little I actually lived. Everyone walked on eggshells around me. My family tended to be a little more forward than the rest, yet even they held back. I saw it every time they looked at me. They missed me. The man I used to be. I’d made progress, but I still wasn’t nearly as open as I’d been before I enlisted. But you can’t just go back. Can’t undo the things you’ve seen and experienced. They wanted me to be who I once was, but that man was dead and gone.
Yet…
Somehow Blake made me wonder if I was wrong. If the part of me that could still find joy through the pain and laughter through the tears wasn’t dead, but just buried. I was jaded and cynical, but I still had compassion. So that meant it was still in me somewhere, right? My heart, my ability to love, was still alive. The thought filled me with as much hope as it did fear.
I had a lot more to lose now. I had men that depended on me for a paycheck and sisters that depended on me for guidance and friends that depended on me for protection. Could I really risk fucking myself up even more by opening myself up to more pain? And that’s how it would end. It wasn’t the pessimist in me or the cynical side that always assumed the worst that reminded me that pursuing anything non-platonic with Blake would end badly. She was open and free. She thrived on the energy around her. She’d want to fix me. Want to bring me back to life, but no matter how much of myself I got back, it’d never be enough for her.
I liked quiet evenings indoors, intimate gatherings with friends and the easiness that came from spending time with my family. Even in the past, I’d never been one to party or go out. It just wasn’t my scene. The crowds, the chaos, the stupidity happening around every corner. It all felt so pointless and had never appealed to me. It would to Blake, though. I didn’t have to know her well to know that she enjoyed being social. She was the life of the party while I was the person who stood guard over the punch bowl to make sure no one spiked it.
The fuck is wrong with you, CJ? Going to make a pro and con list now before handing her a note asking her to be your girlfriend?
“Hey boss. You got a sec?” Reed asked, startling me out of my thoughts before strolling into my office.
“Sure, what’s up?”
I tossed my pen down and picked up the file Reed dropped onto my desk, flipping through the pages as he took a seat.
It was Blake’s file. Any and all information we might need or want on her was right there, in my hands.
The procedure was normal. Sort of. We always looked into employees. Maybe I had Reed look a little more deeply into her… personal affairs. But that was my right as an employer. Sort of.
Shit. I hated being unsure of myself.
I closed the folder and tossed it down, ignoring Reed’s confused look.
“Anything out of the ordinary I should know right away?”
Reed hedged. Likely trying to figure out why I didn’t just dive in and start scrutinizing every detail after I’d made it sound urgent that I get the information asap.
“Not really. Nothing that would give you cause to terminate her employment here.”
I waited for the irritation to take over. For the burning desire of wanting to get Blake out of my life to consume me.
It never came.
“Okay, thanks. I’ve got a call with a client starting in a few minutes, so I’ll look at it after that.”
Reed wisely kept his mouth shut, though I could tell there was something he’d wanted to say. Once he was out of my office, the door closed behind him, I breathed out a sigh. Relief? Confusion? Irritation? All of the above? That sigh held a shit load of emo
tions in it.
Emotions.
I wasn’t an unfeeling bastard, but I didn’t do emotions.
Worry for my parents, sisters and guys at work on a don’t-want-them-to-die level was an acceptable emotion. Mild annoyance with an exceptionally difficult client was tolerable some of the time. Anything beyond that was unacceptable. Hence the reason Blake being in my life was a problem. She made me feel. Most of it bad, none of it appropriate, all of it unwanted.
But yet…
I still couldn’t bring myself to open the file. It felt…wrong.
Hear all that hesitation going on in my thoughts? I don’t hesitate. I don’t second-guess myself. I don’t teeter on the edge of indecision. I fucking do. I act. I get shit done.
I apparently sit in my office, talking to myself and over-analyzing things like I’m a goddamn woman.
Heh. My sisters would kick my ass for that sexist remark. I was half tempted to text it to them just to rile them up.
Which I didn’t do anymore. Ruffle feathers, bicker, playful banter: All things that should not exist in my repertoire.
Even as I mentally scolded myself for thinking and behaving like such a pussy, I found myself walking out of my office and looking for Blake. Why? Beats the fuck out of me.
Unsurprisingly, she was nowhere to be found on the first floor. You know, where she was supposed to be. But then I didn’t find her downstairs, either. Nor did I see at least half of my staff anywhere inside the building, which was suspicious. Only a few were out on assignment. So where the hell was everyone else at eleven in the morning on a weekday?
My unspoken question was answered when seconds later they all came walking inside together, Blake leading the pack. I started to yell at them for all disappearing without saying a word, but Blake walked up to me and held out a styrofoam container. Her smile was wide, like it always was, the hint of mischief that never seemed to go away making her eyes brighter. I never realized it was possible for someone’s eyes to brighten. Not until Blake. I saw the difference between us every time I looked at her. She was pure, the picture of innocence. I was tainted, my scars running much deeper than anyone could see from the outside.