Chapter 12
TWELVE
WES
I sank onto the couch like gravity had doubled in the last five minutes.
My muscles still held the heat of the shower, my skin prickling with that trapped, overheated feeling you got when adrenaline refused to burn off even after the danger was gone.
My hair dripped onto the collar of my T-shirt, the damp cotton clinging to my chest. The TV played something mindless—sports highlights, a commentator’s upbeat voice bouncing off the walls—but it might as well have been static. I wasn’t seeing any of it.
All I could see was steam.
The bathroom door swinging open.
Clara’s sharp inhale.
That split second where her eyes had snagged on me like I was a wreck she couldn’t look away from, even if she wanted to.
My stomach turned hard.
Humiliation sat in my throat like a fist. It had been months since I’d let anyone see me without the armor of clothes, without the clean lines of a prosthetic, without the carefully arranged illusion that I was handling this. The nurses had been professionals, and even then I’d hated it.
Clara wasn’t a professional. Clara was . . . Clara. The girl I’d watched grow up, the one I’d scowled at in high school when she got too close to the guys, the one who’d glittered through Star Harbor like she belonged to a different world. Hayes’s little sister. Off-limits. Loud. Bright.
Now she’d seen me naked, half wrecked, and braced against tile.
My jaw clenched so tight my molars ached.
It wasn’t even the nudity that pissed me off most. It was the moment right before it—right before the door—when I’d been trying to prove something to myself like a goddamn idiot.
I’d been stubbornly standing under the spray when I should’ve been sitting on the built-in ledge like my physical therapist had told me a hundred times.
Sit when you’re tired, Vaughn. Sit before you slip. Sit before your body reminds you it’s not the same body it used to be.
I’d ignored all of it.
The water had been too hot, the tile too slick, my balance a little off because my mind had been elsewhere. For one stupid moment, my foot had skidded and my gut had dropped out. I’d pitched sideways and landed hard on the built-in seat with a jarring smack that shot pain up my spine.
It wasn’t a catastrophic fall. It wasn’t blood or broken bones. It was worse.
It was a reminder.
It was the fact that I’d been standing there in my own shower—my own house—and I still couldn’t trust myself not to fall.
Anger had flared hot enough to sting. I’d forced myself upright again, hands splayed on the tile, water hammering my shoulders, just to prove I could. Just to prove the slip didn’t own me. Just to prove I wasn’t . . .
Weak.
That was when Clara had come in.
That was what she’d seen.
Not just my body, not just scars and skin and everything I’d rather keep hidden. She had seen the way I’d hauled myself back to standing out of nothing but spite.
She had seen me losing to my own damn bathroom and trying to pretend I wasn’t.
My fingers curled into the couch cushion. The fabric strained under my grip.
I could still hear her voice—too sharp with panic, too close to fear.
I swallowed, my throat rough.
She’d come running. Not hovering like Hayes, not the pity committee with casseroles and sad eyes. Clara had come running because she’d heard a thud and her brain had leaped straight to cracked skull and blood on tile.
The thought landed in my chest like a weight. Annoying, inconvenient warmth tried to spread behind my ribs.
It made me angrier.
I didn’t want warmth. I didn’t want soft edges. Soft was how you started needing people. Soft was how you let them into places they didn’t belong. Soft was how you ended up with someone seeing you in your worst moment and then acting like you owed them gratitude for it.
Clara didn’t have any business seeing me like that. She didn’t have any business being in this house at all, no matter what my exhausted, poorly functioning brain had agreed to earlier.
My gaze drifted to the hallway, waiting for movement. Waiting for the creak of stairs, the sound of her coming down with one of her jokes or that stubborn chin tipped up like she dared me to be a jerk about it.
Nothing.
The house sat heavy and quiet, the only sounds the TV and the heater kicking on and off.
Clara wasn’t coming down.
She’d retreated. Probably mortified. Probably telling herself this was a mistake. Probably texting her family a play-by-play while she laughed her ass off.
The image should’ve satisfied me. It should’ve been a clean, easy reaction.
Instead, my mind played the scene again, slower, crueler. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more there.
The way her hand had flown up, but not before the look in her eyes shifted. Shock, yes. Panic, yes. Then something else that flickered so quickly I couldn’t name it without wanting to put my head through the wall.
It hadn’t been disgust.
She hadn’t looked at my residual limb and flinched away like it was something grotesque.
For the smallest moment, it almost looked like desire.
I cut the thought off hard, but my body reacted anyway.
My chest tightened, my skin still humming with leftover heat.
I hated the part of me that was cataloging her reaction like evidence.
I hated that my brain wouldn’t let the moment die.
It circled it, poked at it, kept turning it over like it could find the answer to a question I wasn’t ready to ask.
Clara was not anything I could afford to want. Wanting felt like the first step toward losing something. Wanting was a debt you paid later with interest.
I stared at the dark ceiling above the living room, the TV flashing reflected light in the corner of my eye. My hands loosened slowly from the cushion. My body felt heavy, used up, as if the shower had taken the last fight out of me.
Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked.
My whole body went still.
I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose, tasting anger, embarrassment, and something dangerously close to relief.
Tomorrow was going to be awkward as hell, and the worst part was that I’d done it to myself.
I shifted on the couch, trying to find a position that didn’t make my hips ache, and my body answered the movement with a cruel, immediate reminder that it had its own opinions about tonight.
I was hard.
Not a flicker. Not a passing thought I could ignore. Full and unmistakable, pressing against the seam of my sweatpants like I’d been sitting here watching porn instead of replaying the most humiliating five minutes of my life.
A sharp laugh scraped out of my throat, humorless and bitter. “Really?” I muttered to my dick. “That’s your takeaway?”
My pulse kicked again, like my body wanted to argue.
Heat curled low in my gut, the kind that didn’t care about pride or guilt or the fact that I’d been braced against tile two seconds away from eating shit in my own shower.
It didn’t care that Clara was off-limits, that she was Hayes’s little sister, that she was upstairs right now probably wishing she could bleach her eyeballs.
All it cared about was the curve of her waist in those sleep shorts earlier, soft and bare and too damn casual for a house that had been mine alone.
The way she’d rushed toward the bathroom with panic in her voice, like I mattered.
The split second in the steam when her eyes had landed on me—quick, accidental, human—and something in her gaze had caught.
My hand flexed on the couch cushion again, knuckles whitening.
No.
I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t going to use Clara Darling like she was a fantasy I could indulge and then tuck away when I was done.
I tried to breathe through it, tried to pretend this was just another flare-up—like phantom pain or the nightmares that dragged me under. Something you rode out. Something you survived without giving it more power.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling, jaw clenched, fists tight at my sides.
The erection didn’t care.
It lingered, heavy and insistent, a physical betrayal on top of everything else. My skin still held the memory of hot water and steam, my brain still stuck on the flash of her silhouette in the doorway, cheeks flushed, voice trembling with adrenaline.
The worst part was how easy it would be to give in.
To wrap my hand around myself and chase the quick, mindless relief that would erase her voice for sixty seconds. To pretend I was still the kind of man who could take what he wanted and not pay for it later.
My throat worked. Shame crawled up my spine, hot and mean.
I wasn’t that man anymore.
I couldn’t even be alone on a couch without wanting something I had no right to want.
I shut my eyes hard, hoping the darkness could smother the image of her and the ache in my body at the same time, and I let the self-loathing settle where it always did—thick and familiar, layered over the need, over the humiliation, until I couldn’t tell which one made me feel worse.
I listened for her.
For the soft click of her bedroom door, for the cautious creak of the stairs, for the sound of her like she hadn’t just seen me naked and trembling under the spray of water. Part of me dreaded it—the forced eye contact, the apology, the inevitable joke she’d use as a shield.
Another part of me waited anyway, wired and restless, as if her footsteps could undo what had already happened.
Nothing came.
My hand slid down my stomach before I could stop it. One brief, stupid drag over the front of my sweatpants, palming myself like I might find some kind of answer there. My cock twitched, aching hard and hot, and my chest tightened with a sharp, ugly mix of want and rage.
“At least one thing isn’t broken.” Bitterness hit so fast it tasted like blood.
Disgust flared. I yanked my hand away like the skin had burned me.
Clara was upstairs. In my house.
The need lingered anyway, pulsing and stubborn, as if my body didn’t give a damn about any of the reasons I had to stay away.