Chapter 56 Rae
RAE
[LOCK SCREEN — L. Lazarev's iPhone]
LAZAREV GLOBAL PR: "URGENT: Media requests re: resignation"
CNN brEAKING: "Lazarev patriarch steps down in dramatic..."
Lukas reaches out to roll me into his arms. Without saying a word, he starts to glide the other hand up and down my body.
It’s like he needs to touch every single inch, to reassure someone—himself or me, I don’t know which—that he’s put all the pieces back in their proper place and proper working order.
His fingertips trace the darkening marks on my hips where he gripped me. My wrists bear matching shadows. He tilts my chin up and studies the beard burn blooming across my throat, then lets his gaze drift lower to where the same rough abrasion decorates my breasts and my inner thighs.
When his hand slides between my legs and comes away streaked with red, his entire face crumples.
“I hurt you.” He sounds distraught.
I catch his wrist before he can pull away. Slowly, I bring his bloodied fingers to my lips and kiss them.
“You gave me everything I asked for,” I correct.
He stares at me for a long while. Then he gets out of bed, still naked and glistening with our combined juices, and disappears into the adjoining bathroom.
Water runs. I lie there, listening to the sounds of him moving around, dazed and happy. I’m still processing the fact that I’ve just had sex. I’m no longer a virgin.
I don’t regret one second of it.
Lukas returns with a warm, wet cloth and proceeds to clean me. He wipes away the evidence of my lost virginity with careful, methodical strokes. Every time he encounters a bruise, he pauses to press his lips against it, as if he can heal the mark with his kisses alone.
This is the part they don’t tell you about. Not the sex itself, but what comes afterward. The vulnerability of being seen like this, wrecked and bloody and undone, and having someone care for you like nothing in the whole history of the world has ever been quite so beautiful.
“I’ve never…” Lukas starts, then stops. His jaw works before he tries again. “In my whole life, I’ve never felt anything like that.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just reach out and touch his cheek. His beard is soft under my palm, his skin warm. He turns his face into my hand and nuzzles a kiss into my palm.
“Stay,” he murmurs against my skin. “For as long as you’ll let me keep you, please, I beg you: Stay.”
I stay. Of course I stay. How could I possibly leave after that?
We lie cuddled together in the wet, stained wreckage of the bed. My head rests on his chest, rising and falling with his breath, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear. His fingers comb through my hair in slow, hypnotic strokes.
After a while, I start to look around. I notice that, like the rest of the house, the walls are completely bare. There’s no trace of the woman who once lived here. Nothing except the bed itself.
Lukas follows my gaze. He seems to understand my unspoken question before I can even form the words.
“I had it all removed,” he explains. His fingers never stop their gentle motion through my hair. “Years ago. Everything except the bed.”
I prop myself up on my elbow to look at him. The moonlight through the dusty curtains catches the silver in his hair, the deep lines carved around his eyes. He looks older in this light. More vulnerable.
“Why did you keep it?”
His chest rises and falls beneath me. I’m sure he won’t answer—until he does.
“Because I needed to remember what it felt like to want to die.”
My breath catches.
“I’d lie here some nights and try to will my heart to stop,” he continues.
His gaze is fixed on the ceiling, like he can’t bear to look at me while he says this.
“For months after she was gone—years, even—I’d close my eyes and concentrate on the silence and beg whatever god might be listening to just let me go. ”
He pulls back to look at my face and sighs. “I brought you here to exorcise her ghost. I wanted to prove to myself I could feel something again, but I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I thought I’d freeze and I’d see her face instead of yours.”
His eyes search mine. Gray and silver and storm clouds, raining tears at the edges.
“But I didn’t,” he swears. “I saw you, Rae. Only you. And for the first time in eighteen years, I want to live.”