Chapter 15
Ami
The old me might have half expected Gage to throw me down on the bed. To cover me with his massive body, tear my clothes off, and fuck me until we both see stars.
Except of course, he doesn’t. Because that’s not the Gage I thought I knew. That Gage, the rough, conquering, demanding, infuriating Gage, is gone.
In his place is a man, stripped to the waist, his scars on full display.
In his place is a man who sets me carefully down on my feet and looks at me like I might break.
Not that he’s wrong. I feel soft and spongy inside, like my heart is made of mush and it could be just as easily stomped on, stomped out, and ground down to dust, as it could be saved and nurtured.
And he stands there, not just stripped bare because his clothing is lying in a pile on my kitchen floor, but because he’s bared his soul to me.
It’s dark in the room. The hall light is turned off and the fading dusky gray seeps through the slim cracks in the blinds, hardly any light at all.
It’s enough, though. Enough that I can see every raised wheal, every scar, every line and every bump and every ridge.
The pink and the white, the silver and every shade in between.
When I look at the ruination marring his otherwise perfect skin, so carefully hidden away from the rest of the world, my stomach clenches hard. Someone did this to him.
He keeps his face neutral, carefully blank, and when I sweep my eyes there, he gives nothing away.
I want to ask him what happened. I want to ask him who hurt him. I want to ask a thousand different things, but I know this isn’t the time. This isn’t the moment, because this moment, this is our moment, and neither of our pasts are allowed to creep in and steal it.
I made myself weak for him. I made myself vulnerable.
I cracked myself wide open and let him see the carnage inside.
He did the same for me. He doesn’t have to tell me that no one else knows about this.
I know all about scars. I know about secrets.
I know about fear and self-loathing, and shame.
I know about pride and about wanting to be a normal person, not the sum of the events that happened, not your past, not a thing to pity, and I already know that a man like him wouldn’t have told a soul.
I swallow hard when his eyes find mine. They lock there, and I read the question he doesn’t voice.
Am I sure?
Am I sure I want to do this? I’m not. I’m not at all, but maybe… maybe everything I told him about wanting closure and peace was a lie. About moving on.
Maybe I sought him out because I finally got brave enough to realize that this was what I wanted all along.
A partner. Someone to protect me. Someone to protect in turns.
Someone to share my secrets with, even the darkest of them.
Maybe, after a year alone, what I really wanted was a family. A second chance.
I’d be lying to myself if I said there was a single day in the past year that his face wasn’t swimming through my mind. That I wasn’t wondering if he hated me for what I did. That I never thought about him or weighed the chances of forgiveness.
When he kissed me, I knew. I knew he was different. I didn’t feel fear with him. Fear or loathing. I wanted to go to him. I wanted him to wrap me up in his arms, haul me against his chest, offer me his protection and his warmth and reinvent me.
To change everything I know about the past. About the present. About my future.
“Ami…” He breathes my name reverently, like he could damage me just by daring to say it. His eyes flick down, then back up, and the uncertainty on his rugged face nearly kills me.
“Gage.” My voice doesn’t waver. I’m certain. Sure. “Tell me what you want me to do. I trust you. If it’s too much, I’ll ask you to stop. And I know you will.”
One brow arches. “Why? Because underneath my clothes I look like someone used me for target practice? Or because you trusted me before?”
I don’t know how he can joke about it. Has he made his peace with what happened to him?
Taken his vengeance? Put it to rest? I want to know what happened more than anything, but instead of offering him an answer I don’t truly have, I raise my hand and trace a four inch long, jagged scar, right above his left hip.
It cuts over the rock-hard muscle. So much muscle that it steals my breath.
Even with all the scars, he’s a work of art.
Hard ridges, firm, not a scrap of fat anywhere.
A light dusting of hair over his pecs and lower, in that delicious V shape his muscles take where his jeans cut them off.
His body defies reason. He looks like a giant, a god, all rough and rugged with rippling muscle spanning his impossibly broad shoulders, streamlined and bunched in all the right places.
His arms are the same works of art. His chest is a masterpiece.
He leaves me breathless, easily the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen, despite the scars.
Or maybe because of them. Because they’re such a tragedy rendered over something of such infinite beauty that it makes him that much more human.
Looking at him leaves me breathless and when he lets out a dark chuckle, my eyes are drawn back to his face. Right to his mouth. I watch, in stupefied amazement, as his lips move.
“I’ll tell you what to do, Ami. I’ll do more than tell you. I’ll show you. I’ll fuck you soft, if that’s the way you want it, or I’ll fuck you hard. So hard that you can’t walk right after. That you don’t know your own goddamn name. Or anything in between.”
My mouth opens and closes uselessly while I try and find language.
Anything. Any words to combat or affirm the dark promise he just flung out between us.
After minutes of trying and failing, fuck, after years of trying and failing, I finally know what it is that I want.
And I want it with him. Him and no one else, though I don’t really understand why that is.
“I don’t want you to erase me. I know that’s not possible. I just want you to help me find what I could have been. I want you to show me what’s possible. I trust you. I know you won’t hurt me unless it’s to break me apart and reshape me into what I want to be. What I need to be.”
Gage’s hand shoots out and captures my face between his strong fingers again. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t love being nearly manhandled like that, his fingers pressing in to the point of pain, his hand such a contrast, rough against my smooth skin, but I do. I don’t just love it. I crave it.
“The things I’ll ask you to do aren’t because I want to shame you. You know that?”
“Yes,” I breathe, because I do.
“I know you have almost no experience. And what you do know is the worst kind of nightmare. I want you to fight it. Fight back. For the first time in your life, fight what was done to you. Prove to yourself that you can save yourself. That you can be who you want to be. Do what you want to do. That the word on your body doesn’t define you.
I swear to fucking god, Ami, I’ll take you and get that thing lasered and fucking removed.
We’ll make something beautiful out of the evil that was there. You don’t have to live with that.”
“I know,” I hiss. “I know it’s fucking ugly. I should want to get it covered up. I should have done it a long time ago.”
“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t. You did what you had to do.
You survived. You’ve survived all these years and you don’t have to answer to me for the choices you made after.
I might not get it all. I might wish you had done things differently.
I might wish you’d served up justice and that the prick was either rotting in the ground or in prison getting gang raped by a hundred fuckers worse than him, but you didn’t, and that’s where we’re at.
I’m not gonna stand here and judge you. Not one fucking bit.
I know how hard it is to pull yourself out of the gutter and get back to anything that resembles living. ”
I want to cry all over again, hearing him. His words are like a fucked up benediction. An absolution.
“Let me see. Let me see all of you. I want you to take off your sweater and your dress and stand there naked and let me look at you. I want you to look at me looking at you. Looking at you, every bit of you, like the goddess you are. I know you want me to promise not to kill the bastard who did this to you. But I will find him. I will find him and I’ll wrench him apart.
I’ll make him suffer and I’ll mark him. I’ll make sure the entire world knows what he is, and then I’ll come back for you. Because you are mine.”
My body, my heart, my mind, and my soul, should all protest his words. My heart should wrench and my soul should stumble in fear. My mind should stutter and my body should rebel. I should use my voice to scream at him. To tell him that I’m not his.
Except, as my hands slowly, woodenly, mechanically shed my sweater and work the straps of my dress down, fumble with the zipper until it opens so that I can push the fabric over my hips, I know that he’s right.
In this moment. I am his.
I step out of the clothing and even more slowly, reach up and unclasp the flimsy lace bra from behind my back. It falls away, baring me completely.
I haven’t stood like this.
Ever.
Not in front of another person.
Not in front of a mirror.
I’ve tried never to look at myself. Looking made it real. Looking made me a victim. Looking gave him, the beast who took everything from me, all the power in the world.
Except that when Gage looks at me, his eyes absolutely terrifying, they’re so full of emotion, I don’t feel dirty. I don’t feel like half a person. I don’t feel like a thing.
I’m not just that word.
I’m not just a woman who was raped.
I feel… strangely beautiful, like the goddess he told me I am. I feel like I’ve stood in some otherworldly rain and been washed clean. I feel like a woman. Just a woman. Whole. Young. Glorious.
I feel wanted.
I close my eyes, luxuriating in the newfound freedom that I never thought I’d know. It’s not quite peace, not yet, but it feels like the steel bands binding my lungs have loosened and I can finally draw in a full breath.
I stand there beneath his gaze, a gaze that feels like a caress, like a hug, like warmth and safety enveloping me, when his dark, sensual, commanding tone breaks through the sensations enveloping me.
“Do you want me, Ami? Do you want to see me naked the same way you are now?”
Fuck, yes.
I clear my throat and manage to ram the overeager, far too tactless words back down my throat.
I know how difficult this is for me. How my heart feels like it’s going to beat through my chest. How my veins feel like they’re going to tear open, so much feeling is tearing through them.
How my blood surges and my body is overwarm.
How the terror of my past threatens that golden warmth enveloping me, nipping at my heels like a rabid beast.
“Yes. Yes, I’d like to see you.” My stomach grips tight in anticipation.
I expect him to shed his clothing like he did in the kitchen, quick and methodical, but he surprises me. I should have known. He doesn’t do anything that I’ve ever expected. Gage isn’t like any other man I’ve ever known.
“Then come here. I want you to undress me. I want you to see what other parts of my body appreciate your body and your spirit. I want you to look at me and know that I might be giving commands, that I might be physically stronger than you, that I might be rough and hard, but that it’s you who has all the power. ”
Power. It’s a heady thought. I never would have thought a man like him would say something like that.
Would admit it, so readily and easily, like it gives him joy.
And not just my body. But my spirit. As if he can see it as easily as the rest of me.
As if I’m not just a collection of parts, but a person.
God.
I blink hard, but force my stone like feet from where I’m frozen to the floor. I want this. I want him. More than anything, I want him to feel that warmth that he gave me, just by not shying away from my greatest shame. From what should have repulsed him.
For finding beauty in the ugly and the harsh.