Page 11 of Resist Me Not (Bloody Desires #4)

Chapter seven

TREY

“ I s something about me worth staring at, doctor?”

“Only always. I just didn’t think you could exist outside of a suit coat. You know, without imploding or bursting into flames.”

Oh, Walker is adorable. And feisty as ever. I like that. “True. Usually, my forearms are for behind closed doors only.”

He laughs. “Aren’t I lucky then?”

When I called to solidify our date, I suggested the park between Walker’s place and my hotel.

It’s central to the city and a particularly popular spot with a pond, nature trails with enough trees to almost block the buildings, a playground on one end, a rose garden on the other, and an outdoor art park.

I have ulterior motives for this location as well, which steers the direction I lead us, but I’ll get to that.

I am wearing a short-sleeved button-down tucked into my slacks, no other accessories, aside from my watch and messenger bag.

It’s an especially warm day and I feel less of a need to conceal myself around Walker.

He is in a T-shirt and jeans like on the day we met, and both are just the right amount of too tight on him to hug his physique.

Clear entrapment, because the second we met up near the food trucks lining the park, I wanted to peel that shirt up his abs and lick the sweat from the grooves of his hips.

He is not making it easy to stick to my plan and promises.

“Summer casual is possible for me,” I say. “It’s too hot for a blazer. Besides, it is the weekend.”

“I didn’t think travel writers adhered to normal work weeks.”

“We don’t. But today is for pleasure more than business.”

Walker licks his lips while eyeing me again. At least I am making the wait difficult for him too. It will be so much sweeter when I finally give him what he wants. “No cool establishments to visit? Or just not until tonight?”

“If you feel like taking this walking date indoors for an early dinner, I have a few places of potential on my roster. Sorry again I can’t make it a Saturday evening date because of later obligations.”

“Just so long as those obligations aren’t a fourth date with someone else.”

Adorable and shrewd. “You don’t have to worry about that. When I am interested in someone, Walker, I am purely focused on them.”

“Hopeless romantic it is, huh?”

“I suppose I am.”

Romance I can handle. I even excel at it, at least enough to catch and keep someone’s interest in me for a time.

Love, however, I am not sure I have ever known outside my devotion to my mother.

But what is love really other than wanting to protect someone and be in their presence because their absence makes your life seem lesser?

I don’t need to kill again so soon after doing away with Curtis, but Walker has me so fixated, my base urges are somehow stronger when I’m around him. As if anyone unworthy of their partners and children should be put in the ground that much sooner to keep the world brighter for his sake.

He looks positively golden in the summer sun.

Pain explodes from my temple as a mis-aimed Frisbee collides with the side of my head.

“Oh shit!” Walker says, stifling a chuckle. “Are you okay?”

I rub my head where the Frisbee struck it and find the halted disc wobbling on the ground near my feet, bright orange with some sort of credit union logo on it.

The force of that blow is definitely going to mean a headache later, but I’ll live.

By the time I have finished retrieving it, the owner is already almost to me.

The child comes running up to us with a look of sheer panic on his face, maybe ten, twelve years old at most. He doesn’t seem to have been throwing the Frisbee to anyone, just flinging it through the air for fun. He clams up and straightens his posture like a soldier about to be reprimanded.

“S-sorry, sir! I’m not very good at aiming.”

The fear on his face tells me plenty, long before his mother storms over like the proverbial general to his foot soldier. “Malcolm! You have been warned three times now!” She seizes the kid by the wrist with enough force to nearly lift him off the grass.

My blood boils from far more than the summer heat.

I stride forward, grabbing her wrist in kind.

Not harshly, not so firm as to bruise like she is likely bruising her son, but with expert deflection from years of training my body and reflexes.

In one swift rotation, I turn her arm not in a way that would hurt but that forces her hand to release her grip on him, freeing her son to be handed back the Frisbee.

“No harm done, Ma’am. An adult can take the bumps and bruises children shouldn’t have to.”

She scowls at me, clearly shocked, likely offended, but also disarmed for how to respond. “Come on, Malcom.” She wrenches her hand from me, choosing to grab him again almost as brusquely as before to drag him away.

I feel the urge to slip the switchblade from my pocket and jam it into the back of her head, but naturally, I resist. If I couldn’t fight those impulses, I would have been caught long ago.

“Thanks, mister!” the kid calls back at me, waving the Frisbee.

I wave back.

“A hopeless romantic and a softie with kids, huh?” Walker steps up beside me with a warm smile.

“Everyone loses their cool occasionally, but that is never an excuse to be rough with the people one claims to care about, especially children. And she didn’t look like that was a first offence.”

“No.” Walker’s smile falters while looking after the retreating mother and child.

“I hate seeing people like that. Even in the hospital, when families are supposed to be supporting each other, you still see it. We call it sepsis of the soul. Because sepsis—” He turns to me, but I already know what he is going to explain.

“Because sepsis is when the body thinks it’s helping but it’s actually overreacting and hurting what it aims to protect.”

“Yeah.” Walker’s smile returns, and he reaches up to gently brush his thumb through my hair over the spot where the Frisbee struck. Even that faint touch throbs a little. “It’s already goose-egging.”

“I’ll survive. Perhaps this walking date calls for a stroll to a pharmacy.”

Walker chuckles. “No ibuprofen in that messenger bag?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, I know a more immediate remedy that might help.” Walker brushes over the growing bump again and then leans forward to lightly kiss it, like an echo of when I have kissed above his healing cut.

In that moment, the wound tingles more than throbs, with the tickle of his lips on my hair. “All better?”

“Miraculously so… doctor .”

I can tell from the flush to his cheeks when he pulls away that he might have been tempted to respond with, Your welcome, Daddy. After all, whether I call him doctor or good boy, both have two syllables and can be equally purred.

I slowly, purposely, wet my lips while holding Walker’s gaze.

He eventually tears his eyes away from me like the contact is too hot to handle.

“I hope that young patient you’re worried about doesn’t have a family like that,” I say.

“Oh no. They’re wonderful. He has the kind of family that reinvigorates your faith in the world.” Walker gestures forward for us to continue our stroll through the park.

“I appreciate you confiding in me your concern for him but isn’t discussing a patient with a non-involved party a HIPPA violation,” I tease.

Walker laughs again. “It’s all about no identifying information. You don’t know his age, his ailment, or his name. Believe me, if health professionals couldn’t discuss some of this stuff by being vague, we’d go insane.”

“My mother has said something similar.”

“Tell me about her. About your family. Is it just you or do you have a gaggle of younger siblings to explain being so good with kids?”

“No, no. I’m an only child. But what’s the old saying?

It doesn’t take a good actor to recognize a bad one?

The same works for everything. It doesn’t take being a parent or having younger siblings to recognize what decent behavior toward children should and should not look like.

I didn’t always get the good end of that growing up. ”

“Oh.” Walker falters along the path. “I’m sorry.”

“The story of too many.”

As we’re following our current path around a bend, Walker slips his hand into mine. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

I have never told anyone more than that my father died when I was young, but Walker’s storm cloud eyes look almost green today, like a hurricane waiting to consume me, and I find myself wanting to let him.

“My father was… not a good man. Verbally and physically abusive to my mother. I don’t remember how much was directed at me, but I do remember how much she protected me from him.

I was four when he died and left us better off without him.

” When Mother bashed his brains in with that candlestick.

It surprises me how much I want to admit that part too.

Walker squeezes my hand. The path has taken us into a small stretch of canopying trees with no other people in immediate view.

He tugs with his hold on me to halt our progress and shifts to face me.

“I’m glad you were young enough to not remember much and saved from having to live a lifetime with all that. ”

“I’m glad too. It made me want to leave the world better than how I find it.”

“Yeah?” Walker worries his lips like he’s debating saying whatever has sprung to his mind.

He’s blushing again too. “I guess some people want to pay forward the good they got, and others want to outdo the bad, either way it leaves the world better. Like you having a terrible father making you want to, um, be a good Daddy to someone someday?”

Oh Walker. I want to pin him to one of these trees, hoist him up its trunk, and fuck him against it. Two dates after this, and I will.

For now, I step closer into his body, clasped hands between us.

“I didn’t even know how much I wanted that until a good boy crossed my path.”