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EIGHT

Gabriel

“Thank you,” I say as I look over at where Liam is sitting up in bed. When he notices my eyes on him, he sets his phone to the side, giving me his full attention.

“Torturers rarely thank people after the torture.”

“It’s a new tactic I’m trying out,” I say with a grin. “Does it work?”

He gestures at himself in my bed. “I mean… clearly.”

I’d never put my shirt back on after my shower, so I just slide off my underwear before pulling back the sheets and climbing on top of Liam.

“Oh? You’re going to wash away my trauma?”

“That’s my plan,” I murmur as I lean forward to kiss him.

When his lips part, I deepen the kiss, tongue brushing against his. His fingers reach up, pushing through my hair as his lips trail over my cheek to my neck where he nips and kisses the sensitive skin. His free hand finds my ass, squeezing it gently as he pulls me in closer so my cock brushes against his.

“You’re so beautiful and perfect. I can’t help but wonder why you’re with someone like me,” he says.

I pull back and he hesitates as his eyes catch mine, realizing something’s wrong. He cocks his head a bit before leaning in for another kiss, but I move away from it.

“Gabriel?” he asks, almost in a whisper.

“Why do you do that?” I ask. “Why do you put me way up on this pedestal and insist you’re not good enough? I’m a really fucking picky man, Liam. My sister used to tell me I’d be old and decrepit before I found a man because I was so damn picky.”

Liam holds my hand tightly against his face, leaning into it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I just…”

He seems determined to simply ignore the world by hiding his face in my hand and kissing my fingertips, but I pull my hand back so he has no choice but to look at me.

“Liam.”

“I love you,” he says, like that’ll wash everything away.

“Then you should cherish what I love.”

There’s a moment of hesitation. “Lucille? I do! Just yesterday I let her bleed my arm to sate her bloodlust.”

“You,” I say. “I want you to love yourself.”

“I tolerate myself. Is that good enough? I love you. I actually have no room left in my heart to love anything but you. It’s all filled up.” He tries to go in for another kiss. “Forget I said something so stupid. I’m sorry.”

I let him kiss my neck without pulling away but wrap my arms around him to hold him close. “Liam, you’re not going to ruin me or taint me or whatever you have stuck in your head. We’re in this together. I want to be with you because I love you. I love how smart and funny and caring you are. You make me so unbelievably happy. You make me feel like I’m the best person in the world. And you make me feel so loved. I really can’t tell you how much you mean to me.” I squeeze him tightly.

“You clearly got your hugs from your mom,” he whispers.

“They’re not that crushing.”

“They’re pretty crushing,” he says as he hugs me back. “But I really like them.”

“Good.” I kiss Liam’s parted lips, savoring the touch of his tongue as I push our cocks together and draw my fingers down them. He grabs the lube from the drawer next to the bed and squeezes some into his hand before he glides his slick fingers over our cocks. Then as my hand strokes up and down our lengths, he reaches around behind me and traces over my hole. He pushes gently inside me as I moan.

His finger presses deeper, brushing against the sensitive skin inside me as my hand moves down our lengths. His lips find mine as I’m pulled further into bliss, especially when I hear him moan. I love how responsive he is to my touch—the way he shudders when I rub the head of his cock just right, or the way he murmurs approval as my hand reaches the base and squeezes just a little.

Liam’s breath is coming quicker, and I realize that mine is as well as my body heats. His finger presses just right inside of me, and I groan. Desire consumes me as I come, driven to the edge by the way pleasure takes hold of me. I squeeze his cock gently before drawing my hand up as he reaches his limit and comes, hot liquid spurting between us.

Breath short, he pulls me in and kisses me again before murmuring how much he loves me, and I find myself feeling so goddamn happy. So fucking happy.

“Liam… your phone,” I mutter as his phone wakes me from my sleep. I glance over at him and see that he’s halfway off the bed as his new cat—who still needs a name since I won’t let him name it First Commander Satan the Third—has completely taken over his part of the bed. For a man who claimed that he would never allow the thing to even sleep on the bed, he’s now struggling to enjoy even his section of it.

“Hmm?”

“Your phone,” I say.

He grudgingly lifts his head and looks around before he finds his phone and spares a glance at it. Liam scowls and then pushes around the cat to join me on my side of the bed. He drops the phone and wraps his arms around me as he draws me in tight, prepared to ignore the phone that’s frantically been going off.

The comforting feeling of his strong arms immediately makes me forget about everything else as I close my eyes and feel him kiss my fingertips until the phone beeps again.

Since Liam is prepared to ignore it, I pick it up and look at the text.

Abby: Liam, I need your help, please. Come to my apartment.

Abby: Please. Please. I need you.

“What’s going on?” I ask, a chill running through me.

“You know as much as I do,” he says, not letting go of my hand so I can have easier access to the phone.

I scroll up to see if there’s been any exchange between them previously. I see that she messages him one time a year, every year for as far back as the phone seems to go. On March 9 of every year, she simply writes: Happy Day.

But that’s not his birthday, right?

Sometimes he replies. Sometimes he doesn’t. It’s never much. The last time was a “Happy Day” back.

Liam is still kissing my hand as he watches me. He’s peering at me from between my fingers, kissing my palm as his eyes watch me with such fixation that I suddenly feel weird about the whole thing. I simply need to ask him what it means. That’s not that hard. He’s always thrilled to tell me what I want to know.

His head cocks a little as he moves his lips up to the tips of my fingers and kisses each one as I see another text from Abby come through.

Abby: Liam, I’m begging you. Please. I will do anything you ask. Please. I need you to come to my apartment. Please.

“Are you going to go see her?” I ask.

“What do you want?”

I don’t know what to do with that. “Does it matter what I want?”

“Of course. I’ll do anything and everything you want,” he says. “If you want me to throw the phone away and just love you, I’ll never look at the phone again.”

“She seems really upset about something.”

“So do you.”

I hesitate as his words settle in. “I’m not… I’m not upset, Liam. I was just… wondering what this was… and what’s going on with her. Is this her birthday?”

“What?” he asks, like he has no idea what I might be referring to. He kisses the space between my fingers before smiling. “Kidding. No, it’s not. You want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the anniversary of her father’s death.”

“And you killed him?”

Liam’s eyes don’t part from mine. “I did.”

I nod, having assumed as much.

“Does that upset you?”

I think about the answer to that, but I’m honestly not sure upset is the word I’d use. I don’t actually know what to say about that. “I guess… we see what she wants. Maybe she will want to talk in person over what happened… or maybe it’s something else.”

“Okay,” he says as he releases my hand and gets out of bed. We both get dressed before I follow him out the door to the car. “You can ask me about it if you want.”

“Did he deserve it?”

“Do I think he deserved it or would you think he did?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

Liam drives in silence for a moment. “Sometimes there’s no other way out. And before you say that there’s always a way out… her father was a cop who everyone adored, but behind closed doors he had a less than desirable personality.”

“If they saw him as such a good man, why was she taken from him? Didn’t you meet at a group home? Or in foster care or something?”

“She’d run from him to live with her mother who couldn’t keep her. She was being held at the same place as me while they were determining whether she’d go back to her mother or be forced to live with her father. She fought it for a good while, but they eventually approved that her father would have full custody of her and she had no say in the matter.”

“I assume he abused her? She didn’t tell them?”

“She… wasn’t a good kid. She was a chronic liar who’d built her life manipulating people to get what she needed. People who aren’t in these types of situations don’t realize that sometimes that’s the only way you can survive. So when the time came, they believed him over her.”

“But you believed her?”

“I didn’t have to. I just had to watch him from the shadows to learn everything I needed to know. Abby was the same age as me. She only had to put up with her monster for a little over one more year, and I’m confident she was prepared to. But when she heard that her stepmother was pregnant… she knew another kid would go through the same cycle. That it would never end. So I ended it.”

My stomach tightens as I think about what she had to have gone through. “I’m glad she didn’t have to live with him anymore.”

“The two of us see the world in different ways, but that doesn’t mean we can’t both see what the better outcome is,” he says. “We just often get to that outcome differently.”