Page 33 of The Souls We Claim

Each syllable hangs in the air between us.

Halo bites down on his lip as he studies me intently. My heart races. I don’t do well with long pauses. Patrick used to use them when he beat me. He used to build up the anticipation, make me hyper-vigilant and alert, waiting for the next blow to land, wondering if the last blow had been dealt.

“I’m sorry. Don’t answer that,” I manage to spit out.

“You’re gonna piss me off if you keep apologizing,” Halo says, and as he does, he suddenly moves towards me.

And I can’t hold back my reaction.

11

HALO

“Jesus Christ,” I say when Arianne’s hands automatically come up to protect her face as she cowers back onto the bench.

While I want to comfort her, put my arms around her, and hold her to assure her I’m not going to hit her, I stand from the bench, walk to the other side of the patio, and sit down on the stones with my hands in the air.

When someone is that scared, trying to convince them you aren’t the thing they think you are doesn’t work. You need to give ‘em space to work through it. A guy having a breakdown on deployment, when he loses perspective and starts seeing the enemy everywhere, even in his platoon, is as likely to come out fighting as he is crying.

Still, there’s a sting to watching Arianne realize I’ve moved. To see her shoulders move away from her ears. To see the shame creep into her pretty features.

“I was just trying to get my phone out of my back pocket so I don’t crack the screen sitting on it.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I nod. This time I don’t tell her to stop. She needs to know she can say whatever she wants to me. I fucked up. “How bad was it back home?”

“Bad enough that you moving on a bench can reduce me to that.”

“Was it unpredictable violence?”

“Yes. Sometimes. And sometimes it was just impossible to do the right thing. Dinner too hot. Dinner too cold. That kind of thing.” She looks at me with tears in her eyes.

I bite back the urge to crawl over to her, to drag her to the floor with me and hold her tightly. For reasons I’m finding harder to ignore, I want to be the one who helps her through this.

But my hands on her would be too much for her to deal with right now. And I suspect my kind of control might be the very last thing she actually needs. She needs unbridled freedom to learn there are no consequences.

I like rules and fun punishments.

“After what happened this morning, I thought you might ask me to leave.”

I shake my head. “So, you accidentally watched me jack off. It’s not a secret that I obviously enjoyed it. I like your eyes on me, kitten.”

Yeah, those fucking expressive eyes of hers are going to be the death of me. Second on the list of things about Arianne that is going to kill me is the way her cheeks blush. If we weren’t both here for Lola, I’d like to tease that out of her a little more.

“Wait, how old are you exactly?” I ask. I’d guessed before.

“Twenty-three. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three. Ten years older than you.”

Niro once called me a Daddy Dom because I like ‘em younger and really like it when they do as I say, especially if thedomination is playful. I have my limits, like legal in every state and usually no more than a decade younger.

“You asked me to finish my sentence earlier,” she says. “What I was going to say was I would understand if you need me to leave, because I’d find it hard to pretend that watching you wasn’t arousing.”

Internally, I curse.

“And it’s confusing,” she continues.