by Jae
Dawn didn't answer, too concentrated on her task. Her hands began to knead Aiden's upper back again and then traveled over her shoulders. Gentle fingertips slid up her neck and played with the short hair there for a while.
Aiden shuddered when Dawn dragged her nails down her spine. Dawn's fingertips stopped at the small of her back and lightly traced the birthmark that Aiden knew was located there. Dawn took her time, circling every birthmark, every freckle, and every scar. Her fingers splayed over Aiden's back as if measuring its length and breadth.
It occurred to Aiden that Dawn needed this massage just as much as she did. For Dawn, it was a nonthreatening way to be physically close to her, to experiment with closeness and touching, and to get to know her body without feeling the pressure to go any further. She tried to lie still and take calming breaths even though Dawn's touches weren't soothing so much as exciting her body.
Dawn's fingers followed the contours of her shoulder blades and brushed, maybe by accident, against the outer curve of one breast, making Aiden gasp. Dawn seemed to be completely unaware of the effect her touch was having on Aiden. Finally, Aiden couldn't take the sweet torture anymore. She raised herself up on her knees and slipped her T-shirt back on. "Your turn." She nodded down at the mattress.
Dawn knelt on the bed without moving.
"Come on," Aiden encouraged. "I haven't broken anyone's spine yet." She busied herself with the massage oil, making a point of looking away from Dawn as she slipped the sleep-shirt over her head and lay down.
Aiden decided not to straddle Dawn for the massage. It would have given her the best angle, but she wasn't sure if Dawn would be able to relax with her weight pressing her down. Aiden knelt next to Dawn and lowered her hands onto small, but lightly muscled shoulders. She noticed that her fingers were trembling. Carefully, she began to smooth the oil over the pale skin, staying well away from the sensitive sides. She kneaded and caressed until she felt the tension ebb from the body under her hands. Dawn's gaze rested on her the whole time, but she didn't tell her to close her eyes, knowing that unexpected touches in the dark often scared her. When she reached the small of her back, she moved farther down the bed and lifted one small foot into her lap.
Dawn moaned as Aiden rubbed each toe. Aiden bravely ignored the sensual sound and let her fingers swirl up her instep and past the ankle. She kneaded the strong muscles of her calf with a little more pressure. The massage continued up the leg until she reached the knee. Hyperaware of Dawn's reactions, she felt the slight tensing when her fingers strayed higher. Without comment, Aiden let go of the leg, picked up the other foot, and started the same treatment.
When she finally stopped, Dawn half turned to look up at her with now smoky-gray eyes.
Aiden caressed Dawn's face with a single finger. She leaned in, careful not to touch Dawn's half-naked body, and brushed her lips against Dawn's.
Dawn rolled around and wrapped her arms around Aiden's neck to pull her more firmly into the kiss.
Aiden moaned when she felt the naked torso press against her T-shirt-clad body. Her hips shifted against Dawn's. Her fingers flexed, fighting against the urge to wander over the bare skin. She let them tangle in the smooth, golden-blond strands instead. She nibbled on Dawn's lips, and when they opened in response, she leaned over Dawn more fully to have a better angle.
Dawn gasped and shifted under her. Her grip on Aiden's shoulders tightened.
It took a few moments for Aiden's passion-clouded mind to notice that those were not signs of desire but an attempt to stop her. She immediately moved back, breaking the contact between their bodies.
Dawn lay flat on her back. Her breathing came in gasps. Aiden wasn't sure if it was more a sign of arousal or of fear. She looked up at Aiden with wild eyes. "I'm sorry. I just... It..."
"It's okay. It's okay." Aiden rubbed both hands over her face. She closed her eyes to control herself and to give Dawn an opportunity to slip her shirt back on. "Tell me what I did wrong... what can trigger a flashback for you. I need to know so that I don't accidentally..."
Dawn sank back against the headboard. "I don't know either, Aiden. I haven't even thought about sharing physical... sexual intimacy with anyone since the rape, so how would I know?" There was desperation, almost something like anger, in her voice.
"We'll figure it out together." Aiden moved closer and, never taking her gaze from Dawn's face, wrapped her arms around the trembling body. She was relieved to feel Dawn press closer.
"I think... it was... your fingers were in my hair and..."
"You don't like that?"
"I do... I did." Dawn gazed up at her. "I enjoyed what we did... very much so, but I also felt a little out of control and that scared me. And then your fingers in my hair and your body on top of mine... he... Ballard, he grabbed my hair when he forced me to kiss him."
Aiden bit her lip. It hurt to think that she had triggered memories of the rape in Dawn. "I'll be more careful next time," she said with the solemnity of an oath.
Dawn's arms wrapped around her waist and squeezed. "You're already the gentlest and most patient lover I could wish for."
"And the most talented?" Aiden tried a grin.
She was glad to see Dawn smile. "But of course."
"Want to go to sleep now?"
When Dawn nodded, she reached out an arm and extinguished the candles even though she knew that she wouldn't be able to fall asleep anytime soon.
* * *
Someone was in her bedroom.
She tried to turn on the light but couldn't move. He had her arms pinned to the bed. His body on top of hers held her down. She could feel his breath on her face. Screaming, she tried to dislodge him.
"Dawn! Dawn!"
It was not his voice. Someone else was there, in her bedroom. Help! Dawn struggled again, and suddenly, her arms were free and she swung them around.
"Ow! Dawn! Dawn, sweetheart, you're dreaming. C'mon, wake up. It's just a dream."
Dawn shot up. Her eyes flew open. She pressed a hand over her rapidly beating heart and looked around. She wasn't in her bedroom, and Gary Ballard wasn't there. She was with Aiden. She was safe. Dawn shook her head to fight off the remnants of her nightmare.
"Hey..." Aiden's voice was gentle. "Are you all right?"
She took a deep breath. "Yeah, just a nightmare."
Aiden reached out a hand but hesitated to touch her until Dawn nodded her agreement. Dawn loved her for her intuitive understanding of how difficult it was for her to be touched right now. She closed her eyes when Aiden rubbed half-dried tears from her cheeks. "Do you want to talk about it?"
Dawn sighed. "It was just the usual. I dreamed that I was back in my old bedroom and couldn't move because he held me down." She didn't want to go into too much detail, fearing that it would trigger another flashback.
"Shit!" Aiden slapped her own forehead. "I'm sorry. I think that was me."
"What do you mean?"
"I woke up when you started tossing and turning and screaming. I had moved toward your side of the bed and wrapped an arm around you in my sleep – I practically held you down," Aiden said, her expression guilty.
Dawn shook her head. "No, it's not your fault. I had the same nightmare a hundred times when I slept alone."
"But you haven't had one in a while, have you? Is there something that caused it now?" Aiden's amber eyes looked at her with concern.
"Maybe it has something to do with my work. I saw a patient today whose story hit a little too close to home," Dawn confessed.
"You treated a rape victim?" Aiden's brow furrowed. For the first time in her life, it wasn't the victim Aiden thought of first and foremost. "Why didn't someone else take that patient? I thought your colleagues agreed to see all rape and abuse cases?"
Dawn sighed. "Well, it's not like all of them come in and reveal to the secretary that they're here because they were raped. It was a teenage girl whose parents sent her because of her 'behavioral problems.' It wasn't until the eighth sessio
n that she trusted me enough to tell me that she was raped."
"Do you plan on referring her to one of your colleagues?"
Dawn appreciated the concern in Aiden's voice, but she shook her head. "I can't do that. It took a lot of trust and courage on her part to tell me. If I refuse to see her again, she might not continue her therapy. I can't destroy all that hard work just because it's hard for me."
"Dawn..."
She touched Aiden's cheek for a second. "Don't worry. I'll talk it over with my supervisor. I really think I can do it. I can help this girl." Dawn didn't just say it for Aiden's sake. Now that she knew exactly what a rape survivor had been through, she could help them on a whole new level.
"Okay," Aiden relented, "you're the expert."
The simple words of trust made Dawn smile.
"Do you want to try and go to sleep again?" Aiden asked.
Dawn knew that there would be no more sleep for her this night. "I think I'll stay up for a while, maybe watch some Xena reruns or something. I'll turn down the volume. Don't worry."
"Why don't you stay right here instead? Let's talk for a while, hmm?"
"I don't want to keep you up. You have to work tomorrow," Dawn halfheartedly protested.
Aiden gently pinched her nose. "I've been up all night before. I'm used to it. But maybe you want to be left alone to ogle your Warrior Princess?"
Dawn laughed. "No, thanks, I have my very own warrior; that's enough for me. Or do you want to go and drool over Gabrielle again?"
"I never drooled over that bard," Aiden said. "I have my own drool-worthy strawberry blonde."
"Drool-worthy, hmm?" Dawn grinned. Hearing how she affected Aiden as a woman was like a healing balm for her battered perception of her own attractiveness. She leaned forward to touch her lips to Aiden's. "Hey, what's that?" Her thumb rubbed lightly over the dark smudge on Aiden's jaw but jerked back when Aiden flinched. "Is that a bruise?"
Aiden turned her head away so that the light from the bedside table couldn't reach that side of her face anymore. "It's nothing."
Dawn fluently translated the cop jargon: it hurts like hell, but I don't want you to know. Suddenly, she remembered the desperate kicks and punches she had thrown at her nightmare attacker. She vaguely remembered hitting flesh. "Oh, God! Was that... me?"
"Let's just say that those self-defense classes are starting to pay off. You pack quite a punch, girl." Aiden was grinning proudly.
Dawn was anything but proud, though. "I'm so sorry." She reached out to lightly touch the bruise again. "I didn't want to..."
"It's okay, really." Aiden took Dawn's hand off her jaw and pressed a kiss to every single finger. "It's good to see that you know how to hit someone hard enough to hurt."
Dawn still couldn't see anything positive about her hitting Aiden. She slipped out of bed and returned with a ziplock bag full of ice. "Lie down." She tugged on Aiden's shirt until Aiden's head came to rest in her lap. With one hand she held the bag to Aiden's jaw while the other gently combed through strands of the short, black hair.
"Hmmm, you can hit me anytime." Aiden closed her eyes with a hedonistic grin, her limbs sprawled across the bed like a puppy that just got its belly rubbed.
"That's not funny."
"Okay, okay." Aiden turned her head to press a kiss to Dawn's knee. "So, what do we talk about?"
Dawn thought about the million things she wanted to know about Aiden. She supposed she would just begin at the beginning. "Tell me about your childhood," she suggested.
The body resting in her lap tensed.
"What were you like in kindergarten?" Dawn quickly added.
"What?" Aiden's laughter broke the tension.
Dawn smoothed a finger over a dark eyebrow. "Come on, don't be shy. Tell me. I bet you were cute as hell."
Aiden snorted. "Cute is not the word my kindergarten teachers would have used to describe me. I drove them crazy, always climbing on trees and skinning my knees."
Dawn would have loved to see that. "Do you have photos?"
"No. My mom was never big on family photos."
Silence spread. The shadow of Aiden's father lurked in the room. "Tell me about your mother. What was she like?" She left the question vague enough that Aiden wouldn't feel backed into a corner.
"I imagine you already know as much about her as I do," Aiden answered.
Dawn shook her head. "I know a lot about her as an artist, not about her as a mother and a human being. What did she like to do when she wasn't painting?"
"Drinking," Aiden said bitterly.
Dawn softly stroked the bruised jaw. "Are there really no positive things that you remember about her?"
Aiden sighed. "She loved teaching," she finally answered. "She taught art at the university."
"So you do have some things in common with her," Dawn pointed out.
Aiden peered up at her with a skeptical gaze. "I know nothing about art. You know that."
"Maybe not about art, but you are a good teacher." Dawn nodded when she saw Aiden start to shake her head. "I couldn't have asked for a better teacher when you taught me how to wall-climb. And you have the patience of a saint with Jamie."
"My mother was nothing like me." Aiden still couldn't believe what Dawn was trying to tell her. "She wasn't into sports at all. She liked languages, literature, and expensive wine."
Dawn let her fingertips caress the slight dimple in Aiden's chin. She was aware of the implied self-criticism, but she let it go. "Sounds like a woman I would have liked."
"She would have liked you," Aiden answered. "She would have dragged you out of my arms and into her studio, discussing art for hours."
There was a smile on Aiden's face as she imagined her mother and Dawn bonding in such a way, but it was also clear to Dawn that Aiden felt excluded from that part of her mother's life. "Was she aware that you might bring home a woman someday?"
The head resting in her lap shook. "I never told her, no."
"She wouldn't have been overjoyed to hear that you live in a lesbian relationship, hmm?" Dawn guessed.
"Probably not, but I never had the courage to find out. Our relationship was damaged enough as it was, and I didn't want to disappoint her more than I already had," Aiden murmured.
Dawn stroked the bitter lines from Aiden's face. "Disappoint?" she repeated softly. "Why do you think you were a disappointment to your mother?"
"From the moment of my conception, nothing about me was like the daughter she wanted to have."
"Did she tell you that?" Dawn asked, already sure what the answer would be.
"She didn't need to," Aiden answered. "It was obvious. She was an artist; I'm barely able to draw crime-scene sketches. She loved architecture and literature; I'm a jock. She didn't like my choice of careers, and she probably wouldn't have liked my sexual orientation."
"She loved you," Dawn said, looking right into the amber eyes.
Aiden sighed. "Yeah. I guess so."
"She loved you and was proud of you," Dawn said with more determination. "I don't have to guess to know that." She pointed up to the wall and the two portraits that hung above the bed.
Aiden looked up, too. "She was an artist. Of course she would draw me sometime, too. That proves nothing."
"Maybe not the fact that she painted a portrait of you – but the way she did it. Look at this." Dawn pointed at the older portrait. It showed a tiny baby being cradled in her mother's arms. "What do you see?"
Aiden shrugged. "Me as a baby."
"You look beautiful and innocent," Dawn said, studying the portrait.
"All babies look beautiful and innocent," Aiden objected.
Dawn shook her head. "Your mother made you look beautiful and innocent in the portrait because that was the way she saw you."
"I was just a baby," Aiden said again. "Everyone thinks babies are beautiful and innocent."
"What about this?" Dawn pointed to the second portrait. "How old were you when your mother painted that?" The portrait showed A
iden as a teenager, her lanky frame sprawled on a couch in a posture of typical teenage rebellion. The honey-colored eyes held a hint of warmth, though, not the careless disrespect Dawn had expected.
"It was her present for my sixteenth birthday. We fought about it for days – I had wanted a car instead," Aiden said with a chuckle.
Dawn stroked the bruised jaw. "She loved you. She knew you were basically a good girl and would become a wonderful woman. It's obvious in every little detail." She pointed at the familiar golden flecks in the eyes of the teenager in the portrait and at the way the long hands were wrapped around a can of pop, carefully keeping any drips from falling onto the couch. "Just because it wasn't always easy between the two of you doesn't mean she loved you any less."