Chapter 15 #2
I didn’t know what to say. I just let him talk. Each word was a hammer against my preconceived notions of him. Each line broke the image of the stoic, haunted, untouchable man I thought I knew.
This was…unexpected and dangerous.
Maybe he is…human.
“Who did you have to protect, Jedidiah?”
His blue eyes bore into me, and it made me feel so small with the pain in his gaze.
“My mother. I…got into a bad crowd to make money to protect her when I was a kid…but things went bad when I turned eighteen…I did a bad thing…and my mother was killed by the people I worked for…I didn’t save her…
I got her killed…after all my efforts to protect her and everything I went through… it didn’t matter in the end.”
I kept washing him with the warm water, blood slowly running off into the drain below, while my fingers traced the bruises. I listened as he rambled in that drunken, messy way. His slurred sentences became his own confessions.
“I killed her. If I had just left it alone…maybe she’d be alive…you’re right, but I still can’t allow someone to get hurt and just stand by. I know I got my mother killed, but I…I will always try to repent for that.”
“You fought for her. You aren’t the reason she died. The people who killed her are the reason. Don’t live with that guilt, Jed. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”
I didn’t realize I had his head in my hands until I felt the tears drip over my fingers.
“If you really believe that, then why…why are you mad at me for fighting for you?”
His eyes were glassy, and the pools of blue bore into my very soul, cracking more of the ice I had placed around it from the beginning.
Hearing about his life was strange. He got into trouble to save his mom, and when he killed Jayce, he ran because they killed his mom in retaliation.
Eye for an eye was always the way in the Yakuza.
Was he part of a gang?
It was a sentiment I could understand. It was why I had to give Jed to The Crimson Carrion, to right the wrong of Jayce’s death and save the piece of my soul I had left.
He’s not…a beast. He is just as much a victim as I was.
I could see the sadness consuming him. The life he’d led before his collar. The gangs, the fights, the constant knife-edge hit of survival.
I knew that life.
Now here he was, bloody, drunk, slurring confessions in my own quiet sanctuary.
I could feel my carefully built walls, and the anger I’d carried for him, for the whole fucking world, and every person who ever hurt me…it all began to crack with the feel of his hot tears on my hands.
I wanted to push him away. I needed to guard myself, but I couldn’t. My fingers lingered on a particularly deep gash on his shoulder, brushing lightly over the raw flesh.
“You’ve lived a dark life,” I whispered. My voice was softer than I’d intended. “You carried this darkness to protect someone you love…and even when the world showed you that they didn’t care about your pain…you still fight for others. Why?”
He looked up at me then, his hands reaching my face to cup my cheeks like I had his. His eyes were half-lidded and unfocused from the memories ravaging his mind.
“Some…things…You just…you can’t…walk away from.” His words stumbled. “Not when…they need you…If I can save even one soul…Hopefully, I can save my own someday.”
I swallowed, and my chest constricted. He was spilling his soul in a way that was… intimate. It was like the blood falling down the drain. Dangerous, and a memory that wouldn’t be easy to erase even after the evidence was gone.
I hated that this was affecting me. I couldn’t feel the anger that had led me all this time. I couldn’t focus on the reason I was here.
He shifted closer to me, leaning in despite himself. His face was bruised, his beautiful lips cut, and his eyes heavy with fatigue and the alcohol, yet he looked at me with something almost bashful.
“You…your eyes,” he murmured, his voice low, almost tender. “They…”
Of course…He was no different. Why did I think there was a possibility this white man would see me for anything but my—
“They’re…beautiful. It’s like they are so dark black they glitter like onyx.”
I froze, my hands falling slowly from his face.
What?
Everyone had always whispered about my eyes, ridiculed my heritage, and feared my difference like I was some kind of demon. And here, this man, bruised, beaten, and fucking raw, was looking at me like I was…something other than a monster.
Like I was human and beautiful.
I wanted to be angry.
I wanted to tell him he didn’t get to say things like that, and to hold onto the only emotion that felt safe to me. I couldn’t handle this strange feeling. This warmth was both suffocating and freeing. It was like a light that flickered in my chest, and my guard shattered even more.
I barely had my wall left. It was just enough for the truth of the compliment to sink in, to truly feel his words.
He leaned closer again, and for a moment, I thought his eyes showed some type of resolve. I waited, still as a statue for him to pull away, but he closed his eyes instead, my own following of their own accord.
His lips brushed mine in a soft and gentle way I had never felt before.
I’m…vulnerable.
I’m not safe…
I froze, and my breath caught. I should pull back. I should stop this. If I seduce him now, he won’t remember.
It is not right. I can’t…
My hands hovered on his chest, unsure whether to push him away or lean in.
What was happening to me?
I leaned into the kiss, and he pressed into me harder. The soft kiss lingered while we explored each other. I had been used and abused so many times, but…never kissed.
The heat pooled low in my stomach, surprising me with the urgency pressing against my ribs like a hot flame. His rough hands were somehow soft as he gripped my body, tangling and pressing into the wet fabric of my clothes. It was softness that erupted into fire, consuming us both.
The man was a mess, broken and in pain, yet the kiss deepened into an inferno. It was heavy and demanding. A relentless pull neither of us could stop. I could feel every tremble of his body, every ragged inhale into my mouth like breathing wasn’t important.
He didn’t break away from me. Instead, his sharp inhalations were like a vortex stealing my own air. I could feel his dick harden. And for once, when around an erect man, I didn’t feel fear, I felt…desire.
I…wanted him.
The clarity of the realization made me even more breathless.
Every thrum of desire pouring from him was fueling my own even more.
The world narrowed to the heat between us for a moment, to the bruised man and the broken woman in his grasp.
It was in the way his lips moved over mine, like a claim but also an offering.
I feel…safe.
“Jedidiah.” I gasped, finally breaking the kiss just enough to look at him and see the desire pouring out of him.
His pain was a distant memory. His bruised ribs were not on his mind. Nothing was getting through his head…well, the one on his shoulders at least.
No. No. No.
I pulled him into the free-standing shower.
“Jed. Strip off your clothes. You are injured. We can’t. I need to…”
“These burns…” I said softly, tracing the dark marks along his shoulders as his shirt was pulled free. “Where did they come from?”
He tensed, slightly pulling away from my hand, but he didn’t escape it.
“Atonement,” he said quietly, his voice rougher than ever before.
I saw that atonement. I heard him count the numbers.
I paused, tracing the marks with my fingertips, making him hiss.
“Atonement?” I said, my eyebrows lifting.
He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “Yeah.”
The water fell between us, washing over both of us, making every breath sticky, heavy, and intimate.
My hands lingered, careful but unrelenting, brushing along the contours of his ribs, and along the slope of his shoulders.
The heat radiating off his skin was almost unbearable.
Every shiver and every small flex of his muscles under my touch sent something shuddering through me, too.
“Now…your pants.”
Jedidiah obeyed me before I even finished my sentence. His body was bare in seconds, and that had me blinking to let my brain catch up to my blessed view.
I leaned closer to rinse a cut on his stomach, and my knees brushed against his legs, his hips nearly touching mine.
He shifted slightly, bringing his body closer, subconsciously or not.
The air was thick with the steam, sweat, blood, and something far more dangerous than the damn steam… our desires.
“Anything you want from me, Sayuri,” he said. “You will have it.”
God, my name on his lips was damning in itself.
“What is this?” he said, pulling my wrists to his lips, kissing the scars on my skin.
Some were from Kaito’s games, and others…were from the aftermath of trying to rid him of my blood.
I swallowed hard. “Atonement.”
My need to touch him was surfacing while the clarity of my words was cemented in his mind. I didn’t let him ask any other questions. Instead, I pressed him farther into the shower, the hot water spraying down and cleansing us both from the sins we were to create.
“Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit,” I whispered against his skin, my eyes drifting down to his protruding dick that was hard not to notice while my hands carefully washed away the blood.
I swallowed thickly and grabbed his arms hesitantly, pushing them above my head.
Jedidiah groaned and nodded, listening to my demand and putting his hands above his head on the shower wall.
“I wash my hands…in your—in-innocence,” he choked out when I continued my slow cleaning of each scrape and cut.
“I have no innocence, Jedidiah Franklin.” I moaned, allowing my body to press against his naked form, grinding my tattered jeans against his cock until he hissed without realizing I had become so close.
“Wash me thoroughly…from my iniquity…and cleanse me…from my sins.”