Chapter Four #2
The tremors didn't stop. But they changed.
Instead of my body fighting against itself, it felt like it was fighting toward something, toward his warmth, his solidity, the gravitational pull of his voice saying those words in that tone that rewired something fundamental in my nervous system.
Daddy's here. Two words that shouldn't have had the power to do what they did, but my body didn't care about what should or shouldn't.
My body only knew that for the first time in fifty-six days, someone was holding me like I mattered, and they'd answered when I called.
"Don't let go," I managed through chattering teeth. "Please, Daddy, don't let go."
"Never." His voice was rough. Not the controlled steadiness I'd been clinging to—something rawer underneath, something that cracked at the edges like he was holding himself together with the same white-knuckled determination I'd been using to hold on to him.
"Never, baby. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.
You just hold on to me and let your body do what it needs to do. "
So I did.
I held on, and I shook, and I cried, and I called him Daddy in a voice that didn't sound like mine, or maybe it sounded more like mine than anything had in eight weeks.
Because this was the me that existed underneath all the armor I'd built, the me that had stood outside Katya's playroom and ached with a wanting so deep it had no bottom.
He held me through all of it. When the shaking peaked and I thought my spine was going to snap from the force of the contractions, he wrapped his legs around mine and pinned me against him, not restraining but containing, his body a compression vest made of muscle and warmth.
When the nausea hit again and I barely made it to the basin he'd positioned on the nightstand, he held my hair and wiped my mouth with a damp cloth and didn't let me apologize.
"Don't you dare say sorry," he murmured, smoothing the cloth across my forehead. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Not a single thing."
"I'm disgusting," I whispered.
"You're healing. Healing is messy. Doesn't make it disgusting.
" He tipped my chin up with one finger—gently, so gently, like he was tilting a soap bubble—and looked me in the eyes.
His were dark brown, almost black in the low light of the bedroom, and there was something in them that I didn't have a name for yet.
Something vast and fierce and tender all at once, like an ocean viewed from a safe harbor.
"You're the bravest person in this room, Molly.
You've been the bravest person in every room you've been in for the last eight weeks.
And I need you to be brave for a little while longer, because this withdrawal is going to get worse before it gets better, and I need you to trust me to get you through it. "
"I trust you." The words came so easily they frightened me.
I didn't trust anyone. I hadn't trusted anyone since the van, since the first needle, since Ruby's smile that never reached her eyes.
But I trusted him. I trusted the heartbeat and the cedar smell and the way he narrated the world into survivable pieces and the way he'd called me little one like it was the most natural thing he'd ever said.
His thumb swept across my cheekbone, catching a tear I hadn't felt fall. "Good girl."
The warmth that bloomed through me at those words was almost enough to override the withdrawal.
Almost. Not quite—my body was still staging its chemical rebellion, my hands still trembling, my muscles still firing in random, painful bursts—but the warmth carved out a space inside the misery where something else could exist. Something small and flickering and desperately fragile.
Hope.
I hated it. Hope was the cruelest thing they could have left me with, because hope was what had kept me alive in those rooms and hope was what had nearly destroyed me when day after day passed and no one came.
Hope was the voice that whispered someone's looking for you while the fluorescent lights buzzed and Ruby adjusted the IV drip and Clive checked his watch.
Hope was a liar and a torturer, and I had sworn I was done with it.
But here it was anyway, curled up in my chest like a cat that refused to be evicted, purring against the steady rhythm of Xavier's heart.
Doc came in again. I was losing track of the visits, they blurred together in a haze of gentle hands and quiet voices and Xavier's constant narration. This time he brought broth. Actual broth, warm and golden in a ceramic mug, and the smell of it hit my empty stomach like a revelation.
"Small sips," Xavier said, holding the mug while I wrapped both trembling hands around his.
The ceramic was warm against my frozen fingers, and the first sip of broth was so overwhelmingly good that tears spilled down my cheeks for what felt like the hundredth time.
Salt and warmth and something that tasted like chicken and home and everything I'd been denied. "Slow. Don't rush it."
I managed about a third of the mug before the nausea threatened again, and Xavier set it aside without comment, without disappointment, without any of the reactions I'd been bracing for. He just wiped my chin with his thumb and said, "That was perfect. You did so well."
And there it was—the pattern I was beginning to recognize.
The wall of care, built one small brick at a time.
Good girl. You did so well. That was perfect.
Each phrase a brick, each brick a piece of the foundation he was laying beneath me, so gradually and so steadily that I was standing on solid ground before I realized I'd been falling.
"I need to tell you something," I said, when the broth had settled and the tremors had subsided to a manageable vibration and I was tucked against his side with his hand in my hair again.
My voice was steadier than it had been. Still wrecked, still a shadow of itself, but steadier. "About what I said. What I called you."
His hand didn't pause in my hair. "You can tell me anything."
"I called you Daddy." I forced myself to say it plainly, without flinching, though my cheeks burned and my heart hammered against my ribs.
"I know what that means. I know what it is.
I was never anyone's Little. I just watched.
I wanted—" My voice cracked and I had to stop, had to press my forehead against his chest and breathe through the sharp, aching want that was so much bigger than I knew how to carry.
"I wanted it. I've always wanted it. And I know that me saying that right now, in this condition, after what happened I know it's probably just trauma and chemicals and my brain grabbing for whatever makes it feel safe, and I'm not—" She swallowed.
"I'm not trying to manipulate you or make this into something it's not. You might be disgusted—"
"Molly." His voice cut through my spiraling with the same quiet authority he'd used on the rooftop. Not sharp. Just certain. Like a hand reaching into churning water and pulling me to the surface. "Stop."
I stopped.
"Look at me."
I tilted my head back. His face was close to mine.
Close enough to see the individual stubble hairs along his jaw, the tiny scar bisecting his left eyebrow, the dark circles under his own eyes that told me he hadn't slept at all.
But it was his expression that stopped the air in my lungs.
Not pity. Not discomfort. Not the careful, clinical neutrality I'd been bracing for.
Tenderness. Raw, unguarded, devastating tenderness, like I'd peeled back a layer of him he hadn't meant to show and now it was just there, exposed, and he wasn't trying to hide it.
"You didn't manipulate me," he said. "You called out for what you needed, and I answered. That's not manipulation. That's trust."
My breath hitched. Then stopped. Then started again with a shudder that had nothing to do with withdrawal and everything to do with the way his eyes held mine—unwavering, unafraid, like he'd looked directly at the most terrifying thing I could offer him and decided to step closer instead of away.
"You don't know me," I whispered. "You don't know who I was before. What if I'm not—what if they broke the parts of me that could be that? What if I can't be anyone's Little because they turned me into—into nothing?"
"They didn't turn you into nothing." His voice was so sure.
How was he always so sure? "They tried. They tried their damnedest, and they failed, because the woman who crawled through an air duct and climbed onto a roof rather than spend one more second in a cage is not nothing.
She's everything." His forehead dropped to mine, and the contact was so intimate, so unbearably close, that I could feel his breath on my lips and count his eyelashes and see the way his pupils dilated when he looked at me.
"And I don't need to know who you were before. I'm right here with who you are now.”