Chapter 21 Julian #2
I swallow against the water, the steam, the pressure of his hand, my throat burning and my lungs aching while my body hangs limp even as my heart sprints, slams, begs to be seen, to be claimed, to be good, every cell in me vibrating with need.
“N—no,” I gasp, the word barely there but real. “Rafe… I didn’t—I didn’t use.”
Something in him snaps, not with anger but with a relief so violent it twists into something that looks a lot like rage.
He surges forward and slams his forehead into mine—not enough to hurt, just enough to brand, to punish, to claim.
The force knocks a whimper out of me. Our noses brush.
Our mouths collide without fully landing in a kiss and somehow that’s worse.
Hot breath. Teeth. Water running between our lips.
Electricity crawling down my spine like claws.
“Good,” he snarls against my mouth. “Good fucking boy.”
The words detonate inside me, and everything loosens at once—my legs, my ribs, my throat—my knees nearly buckling if not for the way he’s already holding me up, one arm braced hard at my waist to keep me pinned, upright, alive.
His other hand fists in the front of my hoodie and drags me closer until the spray crashes over us like a storm, and he buries his face briefly against my soaked cheek, dragging in a breath that sounds like he’s coming apart.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he mutters, voice shredded. “You hear me? You scared me.”
I would smile if I could, I’d say I’m sorry, I’d say I waited, I’d say I stayed, but the water pounds into my face and my body is a trembling wreck, so the only thing I manage is to press my head forward until our foreheads touch again, shaking under his hands.
And he lets it happen, lets me lean, lets me breathe against him.
For one perfect second, he holds me like I didn’t almost die waiting for him.
My whole body gives out at once—like my nerves finally snap their last thread—and I collapse forward into him, head hitting his chest with a wet thud.
The sound that tears out of me isn’t a word, not even a breath, just a broken animal noise as every muscle slackens.
My legs fold. My ribs seize. My fingers curl into the front of his shirt like I’m drowning and he’s the only thing keeping me tethered to gravity.
Rafe catches me instantly, one arm hooking under my knees while the other braces beneath my shoulders as he lifts me off the tile in one clean, terrifyingly strong movement, holding me like I weigh nothing.
I feel the tremor running through his arms, not from strain but from something far more dangerous—panic and fury and relief all twisting together beneath his skin with nowhere to go.
Water slams into his back as he turns us deeper into the spray, shielding me with his body and taking the full force of the heat onto himself first. “Jesus Christ, Julian,” he mutters into my wet hair, voice low and ragged, breath shaking.
“You fucking idiot. My idiot.” The words are furious-soft, like he wants to rip them out of the air before I hear them but can’t.
“Scared the shit out of me… fucking little halo… fucking staying sober like I asked… Christ.”
I cling. I can’t help it. My fists clutch at his shirt, fingers tangled in the soaked fabric, knuckles white even though I’m barely conscious.
The water is too loud, too hot, too heavy.
Steam curls around us in thick waves. Rafe’s chest is shaking beneath my cheek, his heartbeat pounding against my skin like he’s been running for miles—like he sprinted all the way back to me on instinct alone.
He lowers me slowly, carefully, until my back meets the wall again—but this time his hand stays on my spine, supporting me, keeping me upright.
My head lolls. My vision swims. I blink up at him through lashes stuck together with water, and all I see is fury carved into worry carved into something so raw it makes my throat ache.
“Stay with me,” he growls quietly, his voice low and sharp. “Don’t fucking drop again.”
I try to nod, but my body barely listens, everything sluggish and uncooperative.
Rafe doesn’t waste time, his fingers going straight to the front of my soaked hoodie as he grips the fabric, and for a second I think he’s going to rip it off me like he always does—fast, rough, claiming—but instead he lifts it slowly and carefully, like he’s peeling away a wound dressing.
It throws me so hard I frown, blinking up at him like he’s the one malfunctioning.
“Rafe…?” I manage, my voice thin and weak, barely more than a breath lost under the sound of the water.
“Shut up,” he mutters, but it’s soft. Too soft.
The hoodie sticks to my skin, heavy with sweat and water and the scent of him still clinging to the fibers.
He works it up inch by inch, mindful of my arms, of the weight, of every twitch of discomfort.
When it finally pulls over my head, he throws it aside and cups the back of my neck, thumb brushing the tape residue on my throat.
His touch is gentle—actually gentle—and my brain stutters hard enough to lag, because that is not who he is, not with me and not with anyone.
The frown deepens before I can stop it, my brows pulling tight in confusion, and of course he sees it, because he always does, his jaw tightening for half a heartbeat like my reaction just hit some raw, unguarded nerve he didn’t expect to have.
“What,” he mutters, grabbing my wrist and sliding the soaked sleeve off with impossible care. “You mad I’m not throwing you around right now?”
I want to say yes. I want to say I don’t know. I want to say I don’t understand why his hands are shaking or why he’s looking at me like I almost slipped through his fingers forever. But all that comes out is a small, slurred, “You’re… being nice.”
His breath catches—just barely—but I feel it anyway.
“I’m washing you,” he says, his voice low and rough, trying just a little too hard to sound like himself. “Don’t fucking read into it.”
He’s lying, and I know it instantly, because I’ve heard him cold and controlled and brutal, and he has never sounded like this.
He strips the rest of my clothes off piece by piece, careful with every tug, nothing rough and nothing rushed, and when his fingers brush over my hip bone he pauses like he’s checking for pain, while the moment my knees wobble he steadies me without a word, his hand sliding down my side, firm but not demanding.
Then he reaches for the soap, and Rafe Scalzi—the man who tapes mouths shut and breaks ribs without blinking—starts washing me.
Gently, his hands moving in slow circles over my shoulders, down my arms, across my chest, careful around the bruises Kai left with the restraints and even gentler around the tape marks on my throat.
The water runs down his forearm, dripping onto my skin. His breath warms the space between us. He’s close enough that I can feel the tension in his body, the restraint, the quiet fury under every controlled exhale.
He murmurs under his breath—words I can’t fully catch. Something like, “Should’ve been here,” and “Don’t scare me like that again,” and “Good fucking boy.” All while washing me like I’m fragile porcelain.
I stare at him through the spray, confused and trembling and undone.“Rafe…” I whisper, voice cracked. “Why are you—”
He cuts me off by pressing his forehead to mine again, softer this time. “Because you stayed,” he growls against my mouth. “Because you fucking waited. And because I nearly lost you before I ever got to have you.”
The water drowns the rest, but I feel it anyway. Every syllable. Every touch. Every tremor of his hands.
The steam is thick enough to feel. Heavy as breath.
Hot as fever. It blurs the edges of Rafe’s face until he looks unreal—like a hallucination I conjured from need and near-death.
Water slides down his jaw in clean, merciless lines, catching on the stubble, dripping from his chin to my chest. His hands are still on me—one braced at my hip, the other resting just under my ribs, fingers splayed wide like he’s holding me together by force of will alone.
My body is jelly. Liquid. Melting under the heat of him and the heat of the water and the ache behind my ribs.
But something in me manages to move—slow, trembling, hesitant like it’s waking from a coma.
My hand rises between us, dragging through the spray.
My fingers shake. I can barely control them. But I reach anyway.
I touch his jaw, barely, just the tips of my fingers brushing the sharp edge of bone, but that’s all it takes.
Rafe goes still—not his usual predator freeze, but something deeper, a full-body halt like that single touch hits a nerve buried so far under his skin he didn’t even know it existed.
His breath stops, and his hands tighten on my waist just slightly, just enough for me to feel the tremor running through him.
I blink up at him, lashes clumped together with water and tears, and when I speak my voice comes out broken, a cracked whisper scraped from the rawest part of me.
“Where were you?”
The question barely exists, just air and ache, but Rafe hears it like a gunshot.
His jaw flexes under my fingertips, and his eyes—storm-dark and blown wide, something feral burning behind them—lock onto mine with a focus so sharp it carves straight down my spine as the water pounds against the tiles and his breath comes back in a slow, heavy drag, like he’s forcing his lungs to work again.
For a long second, he says nothing. Then, very low and very quiet—“I was killing the man who touched what’s mine.”
The words vibrate through me, sinking into my bones, my ribs, my throat, so heavy they nearly take my knees out from under me, because possessive doesn’t even begin to cover it, this is something deeper and darker—not claiming, but marking, naming, feeding something in both of us that shouldn’t feel good, but does.
Rafe leans in, mouth brushing my temple, voice a whisper of heat against my skin. “He doesn’t exist anymore.”
Something collapses in my chest—something old and black and rotted.
The part that still flinched at locker doors, the part that still believed maybe it was my fault, the part that whispered Nathan was the last person who would ever really want me.
All of it is gone, burned out in the raw heat of Rafe’s voice.
My hands seize before my brain catches up.
I fist handfuls of his soaked black shirt, the fabric clinging to muscle, heat, and rage, and yank him toward me—no grace, no warning, no breath.
I pull him down into a kiss that’s all blood and brokenness and baptism: teeth, tongue, a choked sob buried behind my teeth as my mouth slams into his.
Rafe answers like he’s starving. He growls into me, grabbing the back of my head so hard I feel his fingers knotting in my scalp, nails digging in as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear again.
His mouth crashes against mine, wet and furious, teeth dragging my lower lip open like he’s punishing me for surviving without him.
The kiss isn’t sweet. It isn’t tender. It’s a war.
He devours me, pressing me back into the wall with all his heat and weight and drenched cotton, tongue pushing into my mouth like it belongs there, like he’s been dying without the taste of me.
I moan—desperate—and he swallows the sound whole, pressing harder, deeper, hips flush to mine, chest crushing me into the tile as if I’m something he needs to own just to breathe.
My fingers curl tighter into his shirt as I kiss him back with everything I have left—everything that hasn’t cracked open in the last four days.
It pours out now: rage, relief, terror, lust, love.
I hate that word, but it’s there, woven into the desperate way my mouth finds his again and again, into the broken whimpers I can’t hold back, into the way I let my body shatter under the crushing weight of his.
He breaks the kiss just long enough to drag in one wrecked breath—then he’s on me again, teeth grazing my jaw, my neck, scraping deliberately over the faint tape mark like he knows exactly what it means to me.
“You’re mine,” he snarls against my throat, the words vibrating like a brand searing into skin.
And I let him. Fuck, I let him.
His hands slide down my body in one clean, devastating movement—fingertips tracing bruises, ribs, hips—before slipping under my thighs and gripping tight, possessive, like he’s done waiting for gentle, like the relief finally snapped and something darker surged to the surface.
Then he lifts me like I weigh nothing, like I belong off the ground, like he can’t fucking breathe unless I’m wrapped around him.
I gasp—loud, guttural—as my back slams against the wall again and my legs hook around his hips on pure instinct.
Water crashes down on us, steam curling up like smoke, and I realize too fucking late what’s happening—what I asked for—what he’s about to do to me, still clothed, still wrecked, still recovering from almost dying.
Rafe grinds up into me hard, hips slamming forward, and my head cracks against the tile in a wet tangle of hair and moaning teeth.
“Jesus fuck—Rafe—”
Too late.
He growls like a beast finally let off the leash, mouth dragging down my neck, tongue hot against the tape line as he ruts into me with brutal, unrelenting pressure—soaked denim against bare skin, friction and heat and filth exploding under every thrust. The clothes make it worse.
Better. Realer. He fucks against me like he’s trying to erase something, grind it out of me, leave nothing but him.
I gasp again, louder this time, my spine arching hard off the wall as he finds that spot, that perfect, punishing angle—his cock grinding against mine with just enough pressure to black out my vision for a heartbeat.
My arms fly around his neck, thighs clenching tight, and my body—my poor, shaking, near-dead body—wakes the fuck up, every nerve screaming back to life.
“Oh fuck—fuck, Rafe—”
His mouth is at my ear now, breath heavy and ragged, voice shredded raw. “You feel that?” Another thrust—hard, sharp, deliberate. “You feel me?” He bites down on my shoulder, teeth sinking in like a claim. “No one else. No fucking one. Say it.”
My brain is melting. My body is shaking. I’m so hard it hurts, and he hasn’t even gotten us naked—just wet, just ruined, just pressed so close I can feel his heartbeat slamming against mine through soaked clothes.
And I’ve never been more awake in my life.