Chapter 51
Jesse
Those three final words knock the air right out of my lungs. There’s no question in them, only this soft, breathless wonder that makes my heart ache and swell.
Jerkily, I nod, swallowing hard as I try to find my voice. Even if he doesn’t need it, I have to answer him.
“I do. Tris, I should have said it before. I just—” Suddenly my reasons for waiting feel petty. Selfish. “I wanted to find the perfect way to tell you.”
Embarrassment touched with shame burns through my skin, but the grin that lights Tris’s face is dazzling.
“You’re fucking ridiculous, sunshine. Don’t you get that it couldn’t not be perfect?
I love you too, Jesse. So absolutely fucking much.
Only,” vulnerability shines suddenly in his eyes and his voice trembles.
“Would you say it to me? That you love me? Just so, you know, I know…”
My already over-full heart feels like it’s about to crack in two as elation and tenderness overwhelm me.
“I love you.” I catch his face between my hands, cupping his jaw in my palms as I hold his gaze, watching his eyes soften and fill as he takes in my words.
“I’ll tell you over and over and over again.
As many times as you want to hear it. Until you’re sick of it.
” I pull in a shuddering breath, blinking back tears of my own.
“I love you, Tristan. This is it for me. You are it. I am in love with you, and I think I have been ever since I first saw you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He laughs a watery laugh that ends in a quiet sniffle as he buries his face against my shoulder again.
“Tris, I think we should call the police. Report what happened. This wasn’t okay.”
I don’t want him to have to go through talking about tonight. Especially not to a stranger who might not even be able to do anything about it. And yet, though I wouldn’t for anything in the world say it aloud to Tris, I can’t ignore the fear that sooner or later, Josh will come back.
With a long, shaky breath, Tris nods. I can feel the tension seeping back into him, and I have to force down the irrational, emotional part of me that demands I make everything better for him now in order to unwind my arms from him so I can go collect his phone and make the call.
An officer arrived within an hour. All through giving her his statement, Tris held it together.
Jesus, not just held it together. He was brilliant. Coherently and clearly, he’d answered every question she’d asked him.
Even so, I’d seen all the little cracks in him. The places where he really was just barely keeping from crumbling.
He’d untangled himself from me to sit on his bed, one arm wrapped around his chest in that anxious gesture of his I now recognize so well.
It took me everything I had not to drag him back into my arms and hold him.
Instead, I settled for holding his hand, squeezing softly whenever he hesitated.
Whenever his voice shook so slightly, I’m not sure anyone but me could have noticed.
When she’d finished collecting my far briefer statement after Tris’s, the officer had tried to convince Tris to go to the hospital, to make sure he wasn’t injured, but he refused.
He’d already shown her the purpling finger marks spanning his lower left hip where that fucking bastard grabbed him.
The darkening bruise and welts circling his wrist. And there was no missing the hand-shaped purple-red mark splayed across his cheek.
“Besides my hair and the bruises, he didn’t hurt me anywhere else.” He’d tensed his arm around himself, squeezed my hand a little tighter. “Nothing happened. He didn’t actually do anything.”
I knew what Tris meant, but that didn’t stop the fresh wave of blind fury that had crashed through me. Fucking Christ, this wasn’t nothing.
Thank god the officer said it for me.
“Assault’s not nothing.” She gave a tightlipped shake of her head. “And this isn’t the first allegation against him. There are similar charges on record from two other men, back in Tucson.”
With instructions that Tris and I were to call if Josh tried to contact him again or if we saw him, the officer left. The moment she was gone, Tris slumped forward, burying his face in his hands.
“Will you take me home, sunshine?” he’d asked, not looking up as he’d leaned sideways against me. “I don’t really want to be here. Not anymore.”
I’ve barely closed the door behind us when Tris is back in my arms, winding himself around me like he can’t stand another moment’s distance from me. Not that I feel any different.
“You’re shaking again.” I run my hands down his back, feeling his muscles shiver beneath them as he tries to burrow closer. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Just cold.”
He does feel cold. His hands are freezing against my skin where they’ve slipped up under my sweater, and when I press a kiss to his cheek, the one not reddened and bruised by Josh’s hand, it’s cool under my lips.
“I can start a bath for you. Make you some tea—”
Tris shakes his head. “Maybe just a shower? I just—” He breathes out a shuddering breath. “I can smell him still. His cologne. Like it’s all over me. I fucking hate it.”
“Anything.”
“You’ll come in with me?”
My heart squeezes as I nod, pain and fierce, protective satisfaction warring in me at his request.
I can’t stop myself from checking over Tris’s body as he strips out of his clothes in the bathroom, but there aren’t any marks on him other than on his wrist and hip and cheek.
Even though he’d told me that Josh hadn’t hurt him anywhere else, seeing the proof makes one of the knots of worry still tangled in my stomach slip a little looser.
My hands twitch with the instinct to pull Tris close again the moment I step into the shower, but I make myself scoot back into the corner instead, leaving him the space under the hot spray of water, trying not to crowd him.
I hadn’t hesitated to hold him and touch him before, when he’d thrown himself into my arms. Now though, I want to be sure not to make him feel like I want anything other than to just be here for him.
He’s still shivering slightly, and when he reaches for his bodywash, he knocks it to the shower floor. Before he can duck down to retrieve it, I’m already scooping it up, flipping open the lid.
“Here,” I hold the bottle out to him so I can squeeze some into his hand, but he shakes his head.
“Will you?”
A lump forms in my throat at the first touch of my palms over his shoulders. I can’t help pulling him closer to press a kiss to his temple, breathing him in as I remind myself that this is real. That he’s safe.
That he loves me.
As I work over Tris’s shoulders in slow, careful circles, suds form under my hands, and the smell of his bodywash fills the steamy air; the peachy-vanilla scent that always clings to his skin.
With a sigh, he melts into me, resting his uninjured cheek against my chest as my hands move lower down his back. “This is alright?”
“Yeah,” he tips his chin up so he can meet my eyes. He’s stopped shivering, and beneath my hands, his body feels warm and relaxed. “Always.”
“I just wasn’t sure. I didn’t want you to feel like I was trying to make this sexual. Like I had expectations—”
“Shh,” he cuts me off, pressing up on his toes to capture my lips in a kiss that, for all that it’s sweet and soft, quickly has my body threatening to contradict what I’ve just told him.
I try to pull back in an attempt to hide the way my traitorous dick is now hanging half hard between my thighs, but he shakes his head.
“Don’t.” His hands close tighter around my waist, and with a quick step forward, he brings his water-slicked body flush with mine. A low groan tears from my chest when I feel the hard press of his erection.
“I want you to touch me,” he whispers, and my breath hitches in my throat at the hungry look in his eyes. “Sunshine, I fucking need you to.”
His voice is suddenly fierce as his hands leave my waist to grab hold of my arms, holding them tight against his body. “Everywhere. I need you to erase that anyone else ever has. I need you to erase him.”
A stab of fear that I’ve somehow misunderstood or that he’s held something back slices through me. “He didn’t—”
Tris shakes his head, eyes blazing as he grips me tighter.
“No. But,” his voice shakes, threatening to break as his chest heaves with rapid, gasping breaths.
“I thought he was going to. And before—all those times before when I thought I didn’t mind.
Fuck, when I thought I wanted it. Please, Jesse.
I only want to remember you. Please, touch me—”