Page 23

I shook my head, trying to get myself under control. “Nothing. I just…I can’t do affection right now.”
“Okay. What do you need?”
My mom. I needed my mom to not be lying on the floor of a courthouse, while police officers and paramedics and the press swarmed around her limp body. I needed her to be at her wedding reception, eating cake with a man who saw past her flaws and loved her the way I did. I needed her to be pulling me up from my seat while I complained that I couldn’t dance, and for her to say, “Who cares, do it anyway!” the way she always had when it was just me and her, dancing around the kitchen in shitty Saint View low-income housing.
I was never going to have that again.
“I need to be sick.” I ran for the little bathroom off to the side of his room, crashing through the doorway and dropping to the floor in front of the toilet.
But there was nothing in my stomach. I dry heaved, stomach cramping painfully in on itself every time I thought about my mom, the red-tinged bubbles around her mouth, her staring, unseeing eyes.
Fang knelt on the tiled floor beside me and rubbed a hand down my back. “You’re okay, Pix. I got you.”
I shook my head. “Just leave me.”
“No.”
I turned to glare at him. “Why? Why did you bring me soup and chocolate? Why did you even say yes to driving us to the reception? Why did you bring me here? This isn’t what we do.”
His thick eyebrows furrowed in. “What do you mean?”
“We fuck, Fang. That’s it.”
“It doesn’t have to be it. You know I want more than that.”
But it did. Because he was too much. Of everything. And he was all mixed up in that night, and I didn’t quite know how to fully separate him. “You aren’t my boyfriend.”
His mouth pressed into a line. “I’m well aware. But what did you want me to do? Leave you standing on the side of the road while the police brought your mother’s body out in a body bag?”
The tiny ounce of backbone I’d found crumbled into a heap. A sob shook my entire body.
“Ah, fuck. I’m sorry, Pix. I shouldn’t have said that. Come ’ere.”
I couldn’t let him touch me again. I’d disintegrate into dust.
When I didn’t move, he got the hint. Instead, he reached over and turned on the shower, slowly adjusting the temperature until steam billowed around the room. He stuck his hand beneath it then quickly withdrew it, swearing below his breath. “It’s scalding. Just the way you like it.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I knew I was hurting him, but I had nothing else to give.
He stepped in, and when I didn’t flinch away, he put his fingers beneath my chin and tilted my head up. “You don’t need to be. I’ll be whatever you need me to be.”
And this was exactly why I’d never let myself get too close. Because I’d burn the man. On the outside, he was formidable. Six foot five, thick as a tree, scarred and tatted up so bad that small children ran from him.
But on the inside, he was soft. Gentle. A man who’d give a woman he loved anything she desired.
That woman couldn’t be me.
I was selfish with him. Used him. Took what I needed with no thought to how it affected him.
And yet I couldn’t stop. Especially not now.
His fingers found the zipper on the back of my dress and pulled it down. He pushed the spaghetti straps down my arms, and the rest of the dress fell away easily, leaving me in just my panties. He knelt at my feet and lowered my underwear as well, his gaze on mine the entire time.
There was nothing sexual about it. As soon as my panties were off, he stood and stepped toward the door. “Get in. I’ll get you a towel and something clean to wear.”
He closed the door quietly behind him, and I stared at it for the longest time. We’d been naked together probably a dozen times, and it had never been like that. Normally it was all tongues, and hands, and lips. We were throw you up against a wall and slam home hard and fast. We were moans, orgasms, and dirty words.
We weren’t whatever we were doing right now.