Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Luca
It’s natural for parents to think the sun revolves around their child, but Archie was right when he said Dulcie is the sun.
From her stifled laughter to the smile she’s tried to hide all night, she’s beautiful.
She was lovely in the bakery, composed and searching for the right words, and standing at my side like it was easy to summon an ocean’s worth of courage. She pulled down the wisdom of the stars and wrapped them in the palm of her hand.
She’s twenty-fucking-four. It’s beyond astounding.
She was gorgeous when we ate those massive subs outside the little restaurant, sitting outside on a lonely side patio facing a tropical-themed mural with not a soul around.
She was beyond anything I could have expected when we got into the back of the cab, and the guy kept staring at my face.
It wasn’t his fault. He was old. I have scars, so it’s natural to stare.
But then he asked if it was my real face.
I was two seconds away from panicking and melting down, even though I’d tried to prepare myself for the eventuality of being out in the world again.
Dulcie saved me. She laughed and went into a big, long story about being a film student and practicing her prosthetics, and she did it so convincingly that by the end of the cab ride, our driver was asking her multiple questions about film techniques and how she got the skin to look so real. Dulcie had an answer for everything.
As soon as we got into the lobby, and I checked in, still uncomfortable at the way the front desk clerk appeared shocked at my face and then looked everywhere but, Dulcie explained she’d taken a ton of film classes as electives and had a few friends who were majoring in it.
They practiced hair and makeup on her often.
She’s sunshine as she flings open the door to the suite.
There are only a few hotels in Marietta.
The town attracts a lot of historical tourists for its old-timey vibes.
This place is definitely rocking the Victorian aspect, with heavy drapery, gold-framed art, plush carpets, and an ornate bed fit for royalty.
“Holy pie balls!” Dulcie rushes in ahead of me and inspects everything.
She dances her way to the middle of the room while I remain by the door.
Then, she makes a rectangle with her fingers and frames me between them.
“New trend. We send each other absolutely random photos. The most random stuff you can imagine.”
I let my duffel fall to the floor, the strain of the day cascading down over my head like a bucket of water, dousing me half in exhaustion and half electrifying me because I know there’s more coming. Today was just a taste.
Of the world. The bakery. Dulcie’s parents. Us.
Okay, so it was more like a mouthful that I repeatedly choked on, but I survived.
“Like what?” I ask, about to tell her that it should be herself she’s framing in those finger photos, not me. She’s the beautiful one. The remarkable one. The light. A fucking queen.
She rushes into the bathroom and shuts the door behind her. I nearly groan. If she sends me a filthy photo, there’s no way I’m going to be able to cope like a gentleman right now.
Or ever.
Just the thought of it has my dick thickening in my jeans and my pulse quickening.
My phone dings. I pull it out, afraid to check, but then laugh under my breath when the first photo in the series is the underside of the toilet tank. Close-ups of the floor grout between the tiles, the hot water tap, and the mini shampoo bottle follow.
Then, the door flings open, and she’s there. Radiant, smiling, stopping my damn heart, and knocking the breath right out of my lungs.
She seriously just told her parents that she wants me. She made it sound like I’m it for her, and we survived. She walked with me, fed me at the world’s best sub shop, and stood between me and the world until we got to this room.
She’s nothing short of miraculous. She could be mine, and I could be hers. I think we’ve already established with each other that that’s the direction we’d like to head in, but it’s far more official now. She’s told the people she loves the most in the world.
Dulcie takes out her phone and puts on a song.
But not just any song.
She puts on one of my favorite punk rock songs, but there’s no way she could know that. I don’t even know how she found it, as it’s so obscure.
“How—” I gasp.
She winks at me. “I might have been doing some extremely comprehensive research in the form of listening to a ton of this lately. You birthed a love in me that I didn’t know existed.”
All I can do is gape at her, but she’s much more eloquent.
She cranks the volume on her phone, tosses it onto the carved nightstand with the marble top, then kicks off her shoes and gets up on the bed.
I have visions of this going all wrong and her breaking the bed.
But it would be worth every penny the hotel would gouge me for it, and then some.
She could break every bed in here by dancing on them.
Fuck, I’d buy this whole hotel for her if that’s what she wanted.
That’s a grand gesture.
I’m not sure I do those.
It’s her dancing, moving, swaying, and jerking in the most awkward and carefree way.
She’s fluid one second, stiff the next. She said I was a good dancer, but she’s literal fucking perfection, copying the moves I’ve seen in hundreds of videos over the course of a lifetime near perfectly and combining them into one big montage that is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
What. A. Goddess.
A goddess who looked the world right in the face and chose me.
I don’t know if I’m going to cry or laugh, start dancing with her, or kiss her, but something is going to happen. Maybe all of it. If she wants it.
Neither of us had onions on our subs, and we both laughed about limiting the garlic. But that was a joke. I think.
“I expect at least three random as shit photos a day!” she yells over the music, gyrating her hips and headbanging at the same time.
She tied her long hair into a low, tight knot at the sub shop.
But now, the elastic breaks loose, popping off and shooting right past my face.
Her hair spills out, long and luxurious, dark and thick.
She really goes hard at the moshing, unleashing herself like her hair and swinging her arms until the song stops.
Nothing else plays when it’s over. She raises her head slowly. Her eyeliner is smudged and streaky from earlier, when she brushed most of it away with her hands before we walked into the sub place. The flush on her cheeks and neck, and the sweat beaded at her hairline, shouldn’t be so delectable.
Her shoulders rise and fall rapidly. She just did a hard workout on that bed.
Fuck.
I didn’t mean to think that, and now that I did, there’s no coming back from it. My dick is beyond redemption.
God, what is wrong with my brain tonight? It’s feeding me rapid-fire wrongness like slices of pie.
My heart knocks against my ribs until they hurt from the pummeling, and I catch myself raising my hand there to rub away the sting.
Dulcie holds out her arms. “Come up here and dance with me.”
I shake my head. “No way. Come down here. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Okay!” She leaps off the bed, straight at me. I have no choice but to catch her and help support her. Her feet hit the floor, but I have her in my arms.
She looks up at me while I look down at her.
What hits me is far too much for someone I barely know.
I’m a logical person, and I’ve used logic to defeat the shittier spectrum of emotions that came with my accident.
Adam was always pushing me to heal, to be positive, and to think my way out of the holes and dark places I found myself in.
But there’s nothing logical about how badly I want this.
Her.
It’s like that tree falling on her rental car. When it happened, the tree and the car were both irreparably damaged. The tree can’t go back to standing on its own, and the car won’t be able to be rebuilt. Life can’t just go on for them.
Wait.
That’s a shitty comparison.
We also didn’t eat the pie we baked tonight. It’s Dulcie’s favorite. She told me that in the sub shop.
Her warm hand on my cheek stops my brain right in its brain tracks.
My brain is no longer braining.
Unless it’s throwing ridiculous statements like that at me.
She brackets her fingers around the scars, her touch light, not because she’s repulsed by the way my skin feels, but because I’m sure she’s still afraid she could hurt me. “You look like you’re scrambling.”
Scrambling. Drowning. Falling. What words are there that could ever describe that collision of tree and car, lightning and wind? A storm of passion so great that it irrevocably changed those involved in the collision.
It’s not just passion.
It’s everything.
Dulcie is chaos, but she’s also calm. She’s wild and untamed, but she’s also placid waters. She’s the wind, and she’s refuge. She’s the sickness and the cure. The—
“Did you know that when a person looks at something they like, their pupils become large? It’s not just straight-up physical attraction that causes it. It’s the hormones in the brain that make the pupils dilate. It’s more than one emotion,” Dulcie says.
I did know that. I heard it before. Maybe I read it somewhere? “It could also be caused by negative emotions. Like fear. Or rage.”
“Yes.”
“Or changes in light,” I add.
“I haven’t changed the light, Luca. Are you scared or angry right now?”
The terrified part is up for debate, but that’s not it. “I like looking at you.”
“I like looking at you too,” she says.
My first instinct is to snort at that, but how unfair would that be?
Allowing myself to find Dulcie beautiful but refusing to accept that she could feel the same way about me is extremely hypocritical.
It would be presumptuous to so much as assume that I could dictate to Dulcie what she should think and feel. Total. Asshole. Move.