Chapter 14 #2
But since this woman has walked into my life, all those feelings of being disconnected, of seeking answers and not being able to find them, seem to have shifted away from being my central focus to merely inconsequential threads in the bigger tapestry that has now placed Lucky front and center of the intricate, stunning design.
I hold her tightly to me as I turn off the water and snag a towel. Wrapping it around her, I ghost a kiss over her forehead, cling to her for one final moment. Breathe her in and enjoy the way she leans into me and stares up with half-lidded, sleepy eyes.
She offers me a tiny smile, but already I can see the darkness starting to creep into the edges of her vision, those sky-blue eyes of hers starting to shift to the stormy version with the reality of what’s going to happen now.
I tried to distract her this morning, tried to cushion the fall that I know is coming for her by assuring her that it won’t change anything between us, but the fear is still there.
On both our parts.
Whatever she’s going to tell me must be bad.
Something that she’s been dealing with on her own for a very long time.
Something she’s never told anyone.
Opening up to me is going to be painful for her, even if she wants to, which I’m not entirely sure she does. I understand that all too well. I don’t want to shut out Killian, Connor, Willow, and everyone else, but I’ve had to.
Self-preservation instinct to keep the pain at bay.
The only way I knew to keep the nightmares that haunted me from seeing the light of day, to wrangle those demons that wanted to control me.
And now I’m forcing her to face her own.
But she won’t do it alone.
I wrap another towel around my waist, scoop her back up into my arms, and carry her out of the bathroom and up the stairs to the loft, setting her on her feet near the dresser so I can dry her thoroughly.
The sunlight flooding through the window now illuminates the rumpled bed, and she keeps her gaze locked on it, as if she can’t bear to look at me right now and wants to focus on that spot and what we did there this morning.
I let her.
Taking my time rubbing the soft towel over her skin. Gently swiping away every last drop of water before I tug open the drawer where I put all of her clothes and grab a bra, underwear, a pair of stretchy pants, and a t-shirt to put on.
She doesn’t have much, only a few sets of clothes that she could easily carry in her backpack, but that’s going to change.
As soon as we have this conversation.
Once she realizes I’m not going anywhere and neither is she, we’ll get her anything and everything she could ever want. I’ll fill these drawers and this house with everything she’s always dreamed of having when she was moving from foster home to foster home.
A place that’s hers.
That’s ours.
Gizmo lifts his head from where he lies on the chair and watches us as she slowly changes while I finish drying off. And her gaze immediately shifts back to the spot where we woke and then lost ourselves in each other.
I snag her brush from the top of the dresser and move behind her, slowly running it through her hair. She lets me take care of her silently, but the longer she goes without saying anything, the more worried I become about what’s going on inside her head.
Where are you going in there, Lucky?
She’s getting lost in the past, the same way I have so often lately.
That can be a very dangerous place.
Grabbing the towel, I gently dry her hair the best I can, letting the long blue locks dangle down her back. I drift my fingers through it. “Why blue?”
She startles slightly at my voice and glances over her shoulder at me. “What?”
“Why the blue hair?” I lean forward and kiss her cheek. “It suits you, I’m just curious.”
Her eyes darken again, and she gives me a tight smile. “I had this stupid idea that the louder I was, the more people might actually ignore me. That they would pay more attention to my hair than my face.”
“And you could be anonymous?”
She nods.
I clench my jaw, despising the fact that her beautiful hair is tied to something as awful as feeling like she needed to hide.
A woman like Lucky should never be in the shadows.
She deserves to live in the light that matches how brightly the rest of her glows.
I place a kiss on her temple. “Well, I love it. Don’t change it unless you want to.”
The smile she gives me now is a genuine one, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. They follow me, filled with trepidation, as I tug on a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt, then grab the towels to bring them back to the bathroom.
“Come on.”
I snag her hand and lead her down the stairs into the kitchen to sit her at the small two-person table while I go to hang the towels in the bathroom. When I get back, she hasn’t moved, frozen in place by her own fear of the truth.
It twists my stomach as I fill the teapot with water and turn on the stove to boil it. I grab the tea I got from Willow and a mug, occasionally glancing toward Lucky to gauge how she’s doing.
But it’s hard to tell when she’s rebuilding that wall.
Brick by brick, it goes up as I work, moving in near silence, the only sounds the cabinets opening and closing and Gizmo’s little snorts as he finally wanders down the steps after us to see what’s happening.
He sits next to me, staring up expectantly.
“You hungry?”
His head tilts to the side, and I open the fridge and pull out the food I grabbed from Killian’s for him last night—a mix of ground beef and vegetables Willow made until we can get some sort of dog food for him since Lucky ran out of what she was carrying with her.
I toss it into a bowl for him and set it in the corner, and he runs right to it and digs in as I pour the boiling water over the tea leaves in the infuser for her and let it steep while I snag the honey harvested from Willow’s hives and add some.
By the time I bring it to Lucky, all the tension this morning’s activities removed is back, and she’s trembling again, her shoulders tight and hunched forward as if she wishes she could disappear.
I set the mug in front of her and snag the other chair, dragging it over next to her so that I can touch her, so there isn’t any space between us when we talk. Because I don’t want her to put even more there, and I feel like she’s going to.
Or at least she’ll try.
She stares into her cup of tea. “So, I guess we have to talk now.”
I nod. “Yes. And I’m sorry I have to make you do this, but—”
“No.” She glances up, offering me a tight smile.
“You’re right. It’s why I wanted to leave in the first place, why I never should have stayed, because I never wanted to put you in danger.
And it’s not just you. It’s Killian and Connor, and Willow and Niall.
Even Raven and Elaine. I’ve come to care about all of you, and”—she sucks in a sharp breath—“that makes this so much harder.”
Sliding my hand over her knee, I give it a gentle squeeze. “Just start at the beginning…”
She nods and slowly lifts her mug up to take a sip. When she sets it back down, I don’t miss the way her knuckles are white, clutching the ceramic in a death grip. “You know I left foster care when I was fifteen.”
“Yes…”
Though I try not to think about it too much because the thought of Lucky out there alone, at such a tender, important age, when she desperately needed someone to be there for her, is enough to bring me to tears.
“Well, I wandered around a lot. Moved from city to city, primarily big ones. Places I could disappear and didn’t have to worry about some adult seeing me on my own on the street and calling the police or Child Protective Services.
You can disappear in a city. You can blend in.
” She pulls at her hair, referencing our earlier conversation.
“Though I didn’t have this, I had other ways of concealing myself.
Of staying under the radar. And it worked for a really long time.
Because I never let anyone get close.” She peeks up at me, chewing on her bottom lip for a moment.
“I dated a few guys, but it was never anything serious. It was always just”—she shrugs—“a release.”
The thought of her being with anyone else makes my chest tighten, but I resist the urge to rub at that spot where my heart aches and instead focus on her and what she’s telling me.
“Six months ago, I met a guy…”
“Okay.”
She takes another sip, like she’s trying to buy some time before she has to continue. “He seemed nice. Paid me a lot of compliments and attention. He seemed to really care about me.”
The way her voice cracks makes me squeeze her leg again. “Where was this?”
She looks like she isn’t going to answer for a moment, like telling me will somehow reveal something she doesn’t want me to know. “Colombia, South Carolina.”
I nod slowly. “Okay…”
“I should have known.” She clenches her eyes closed, shaking her head. “I should have known who he was—what he was—when Giz didn’t like him.”
My eyes automatically drift to the dog. He finishes off his bowl, licks it clean, then trots over and sits by my feet, leaning against my leg. I reach down and scratch behind his ears. “Dogs are pretty good judges of character.”
She looks down at him and nods. “He never liked Brad. Barked at him, growled. He never wanted him anywhere near me. I thought he was just being jealous, being difficult because he’s Giz, but he knew. He saw something I couldn’t.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Which was what? What did he do to you?”
Her fingers tighten on the mug. “It isn’t so much what he did to me. It’s what I did for him.”