Chapter 38 #2
His hold was fierce and possessive and immediate, everything I had ever wanted.
“Fuck, Sanora,” he whispered against my hair, his lips trailing desperate kisses into my crown. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
My body shook with tears, throat clogged and mind wondering why he was sorry. I knew why I was crying, but why was I crying so hard?
His grip crushed me close, one hand fisted into my hair, the other holding me against the thundering beat of his chest. He kept repeating how sorry he was, drowning me in his apologies until I let myself sink into him, until the terror bled out and left only relief, until I was done letting out the wave of emotions of seeing him again when I thought I might never do for the next month I’d be spending locked up in this room.
But I was in his arms, and I was safe.
Slowly, he pulled back from the hug. My fingers fisted against his back, as though letting go meant losing him again. His hand rose, brushing the tears from my cheeks with a tenderness that broke me further, then cupped my face as he leaned in, his words soft.
“Let’s go home.”
My chest thudded so hard it almost hurt. Home. The word rang inside me, scattering through my ribs, heavy and sweet.
“Home?” I breathed, uncertain.
He nodded, black irises roaming all over my face “Yes. Home, Nher. Let’s go home.”
My inside me gave way. Home with him. Of course, we’d already been living together, sharing the same bed, and breathing in each other, but it had never struck me—and I didn’t want to get ahead of myself—that we could actually label that house he bought a home. But it was ours. I could call it home.
And yes, I wanted to go home with him.
“I can’t...I can’t walk. Can you...lift me?” I said, getting my speech back slowly.
Nodding, he placed a soft kiss on my forehead, his lips lingering for a while before he scooped me up in his arms, standing on his feet. One arm was under my knees, the other one around my back as he walked out of the room, crossing Winifred’s body to the stairs.
“How did you find me?” I whispered, head resting against his chest.
I missed him so much.
“A girl knocked on my door and told me he saw you around here in his car.”
“Who—”
Amelia.
That fucking manipulator. Was she trying to make Winifred take the fall of everything because he stole me away from her? She was trying to wiggle out of this?
“The one who’d come to return your phone the other day.” He looked at me. “Are you okay?”
Filing her thoughts for later, I nodded, closing my eyes as I sank into him. “You’re here. Yes.”
We got downstairs, and he placed another kiss on my forehead, holding me tight as he crossed the ruin he made in the living room and walked outside the door.
By the time we got home, it was past noon, as I was informed. He got to the door with me still in his arms, and I unlocked it with a turn of the knob.
He walked inside, letting the door shut behind us as he walked us straight to the stairs.
I placed a hand on his chest to stop him when a cluster of crumpled paper and empty sheet littered the kitchen entrance, both on the counter and everywhere on the floor. The sight cut through my haze, pulling me upright with sudden clarity.
I knew very well Thrax’s issue with littering and how his fingers ache to put scattered things back into its place.
He was the guy that would not let my plate sit another hour after I was done eating.
So seeing chaos—a heap of torn, crumpled and empty sheets— spill across his kitchen was wrong and suspicious.
“Please put me down,” I said, my eyes fixed on the litter, desperate to see what it was.
When Thrax noticed what I was looking at, he threw his head back, closing his eyes. “Oh, no. We’re not going there.”
That only made me want to see it more. I wiggled out of his arms, and in hesitation, he let me go.
I wasn’t sure my legs had fully regained their strength, and they trembled the moment they touched the floor.
But with Thrax’s hand steadying me, I didn’t fall.
I forced them into movement, dragging myself slowly towards the kitchen.
Thrax followed close, shadowing me like he was ready to catch me the second I gave in.
I’d told him in the car that Winifred had put something in my water to make me easier to handle, and I'd been paralysed from it. I was yet to tell him about the twins, or that they were the ones who kidnapped me from the station. He thought Winifred was the one who’d been keeping me since yesterday, and he’d cursed himself like it was his fault he couldn’t feel that I was in Nimorran.
He had kept glancing at the bruises on my wrists and ankles from where the twins had tied me up, and to say he was enraged was putting it lightly.
When I got to the kitchen, I picked a crumpled paper from the heap on the counter, unfolding it with hands that barely wanted to work.
I didn’t miss the way Thrax quietly placed his palm on my lower back, either to support me or because he just wanted to touch me.
When the paper unfolded, I was thankful he was holding me from behind or I would have lost my ability to stand. I thought I was not going to cry anymore after shedding my heart out when he found me in that room. But I guessed I’d always be too fragile when it came to him.
On the paper was a sketch of my eyes.
The drawing was so good that I didn’t have a doubt it was mine the second I saw it fill the page in my unsteady hands.
Emotion surged so fast I felt dizzy all over again.
He’d captured me—my lashes, the shine in my eyes, the faint arch of my brows, and the fine hair that made them up, down to the last detail.
I knew he always stared at me like he was memorising me, but I never knew he was actually memorising and saving my face for later. The thought sank into my chest like a stone, too heavy for my already weak body.
I dropped that one and picked another pencil drawing, and it was another one of my eyes.
I tried not to let the tears cloud my vision as I picked another one and another one, unpeeling them with desperate hands only to find more eyes—my eyes.
The next was of my lips, and the detail in that one was jaw dropping.
My breath shook, tears rushing until I couldn’t blink fast enough to clear them.
The sketch of my lips filled the sheet, and he’d drawn it like he’d been staring at me when he was doing so. Like he’d traced the curve in his mind a thousand times until he couldn’t help but let it bleed out on paper.
He’d really drawn this from his memory?
“You can draw?” The words choked me, rasping past the lump in my throat as I opened paper after paper. Each one was the same desolated worship, him sketching me multiple times like a madman trying to brand me into his memory forever.
“I’ve lived over a millennium.” His arm came around my waist as he stood behind me, pressing my back to his chest, his chin resting on top of my head.
His touch grounded me, though my knees were close to giving out.
“That is long enough for anyone to pick up a million hobbies just to forget how slow the world is crawling.”
I picked up another paper, and it was of my lips again. How many times had he drawn them? My hands shook under the weight of all his devotion. “Do you still feel like the world is crawling?”
Thrax exhaled deeply, his other hand coming around me to press me tighter against him.
“No, Sanora. Since you walked into my life, I feel as if time has been running. I never thought I’d see the day when my every thought was only for the day not to end.
Time used to be so slow for me that I stopped counting days, only noticing how night bled into morning and day into night.
It was torture, Sanora. And now, with time moving so fast with you here, I didn’t know that could be an even greater torture.
But it is. You make me want to surrender everything I’ve got just to bargain with time to slow down.
Yesterday, all I did was stare at you as you slept, glancing at the window and hoping daylight would never come.
You have made me a greedy man when it comes to time, and I would never have imagined a day would come when all I wanted to do was stop time and live in the moment.
Until you came.” He pressed his face to the top of my head, and a small, ragged sound escaped him.
Time—the enemy he’d always known—had become a thing he wanted to rob.
For my sake. “So no, I don’t feel like the world is crawling when I’m with you.
It’s too fast that I can’t breathe sometimes. ”
As if my heart wasn’t already breaking, his words tilted my world, and I bit my lip to keep from unravelling like a child once more. My chest ached under the tears I refused to let fall freely, my fingers peeling open another paper through blurred vision.
The next paper was of my whole face, not the separately drawn features, but a portrait—me, whole. And it baffled me how many years it took this man to reach this level of perfection.
He’d drawn me so accurately it was baffling, the strokes so alive they almost moved. Down to my collarbone, every detail was more perfect than I could ever have imagined.
“Have you been doing this since I left?” I asked after clearing my throat.
“Yes.”
“To kill time?”
“To etch you into my skull,” he said. “To have your face own me completely, so that you’ll be the first thing I see when I close my eyes. That way, I’ll be able to take you with me everywhere.”
Would he stop saying the nicest things I’d ever heard? He was making me bawl inside even when I fought to keep it together.
“And here I was, thinking you’re not as affected by the fact that I was leaving the way I was.”
Those words made him tighten his arms harder, almost crushing me to him.
“Oh gods, Sanora. You don’t want to know,” he said.
“You don’t want to know how fucking hard it was for me to stay back and not touch you.
I wanted to do more than touching you. I wanted to kiss you, I wanted to hold you.
I wanted to carry you back into the room and lock us there.
And I was scared I’d do all that if I touched you or even crossed a certain distance to you.
Believe me when I say it was hard for me, Nher. ”
Those were the words I’d wanted to hear while leaving, and hearing them now, hearing how he’d sat in torture begging the day not to come, made me feel stupid for even thinking this man would just be okay with saying goodbye to me.
“I thought...I thought you’d be used to saying goodbyes to people,” I confessed, my voice breaking.
“You’re not people. And you’re wrong, I’m not used to saying goodbyes.
I’ve never even said or felt that about anyone before.
I’ve never gotten close to someone enough to feel bad about their departure.
It’s just you. You were the first person I’d ever said goodbye to. And fuck if that shit didn’t hurt.”
Despite myself, a weak chuckle slipped through, relief loosening the tight pressure in my chest. It was everything I wanted to hear and more.
Amidst the clutter of rumpled sheets, I picked up the sketch pad where all the papers were torn from, staring down at the last piece still attached.
On the page was a full body drawing of me...naked, under the shower. My hands were in my hair, my eyes closed, water streaming over me in lines he hadn’t even finished yet.
I stared in awe at yet another detailing, from my collarbone to my breasts, down to my navel. That was where he’d stopped. The shower was incomplete, and so was my body. It must have been what he was working on when Amelia knocked.
“Will you complete this?”
From over my head, he stared at the last page. “Yes, when you get naked for me.”
My cheeks flushed. “You were drawing it very perfectly from your brain.”
“And now, I selfishly want to see you have your bath while I sketch you.”
That dragged a smile through my exhaustion. A real one. A part of me was thankful to Amelia and her brother for kidnapping me. I would never have known any of this otherwise, I would never have seen his reverence and obsession spilled out in pencil, or heard the words he’d been bottling up.
And that begged the question again—did the universe used to make all men like this before the wrath? Because I didn’t want to believe men these days were capable of feeling so deeply. Not when all my exes had been the human definition of trash.
As if just catching on, Thrax’s arm shifted away, his palm pressing against my stomach. On cue, it rumbled with hunger, a loud reminder of how little strength I had left.
He spun me around, and knowing how much he loved feeding me, I knew I was up for a sweet treat. His gaze was fierce when he leaned down. “Don’t tell me the last time you ate was when you left here.”
Unfortunately.
He closed his eyes, rage simmering in the tight set of his jaw, stabbing Winifred in silence behind those lids.
Before I could blink, he scooped me up into his arms again, carrying me up the stairs and into the bathroom.
Dropping me gently, he said, “Before you’re done washing up, your meal will be ready.”
Remembering I’d put all my luggage inside the train earlier, I spoke up. “I have nothing to wear.”
“Wear mine for today, I’ll put it on the bed for you.” His hand came to the back of my head as he pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You’re truly alright, yeah?”
I nodded, weak but sure. “Never been better.”
“Good.”
And with that, he left me in the bathroom.
I turned to the mirror, taking in my dirty and tired appearance. My hair was dishevelled, my skin pale, my eyes red...but my lips curved into the widest smile I had not seen on myself in a while.
I would have never thought I’d feel this content and happy again while leaving here yesterday. But I was with him, and I was happy.
My smile faded.
Oh, shit.
My mother.