17. Ozzy
Ozzy
“ Y ou gonna miss me while I’m gone?” Jackson waggles his brows as he lifts a crate into the bed of the truck like it weighs nothing. It’s irritating how good he looks doing it.
“Nope.” I pop the ‘p,’ tossing a rag into one of the crates. “In fact, the moment your tail lights disappear, I’m throwing a wild house party.”
Jackson snorts. “Yeah?”
“Oh yeah. Bikini contest. Wet T-shirt round. Maybe even a mechanical bull, if I can get Theo to sign off on the rental.”
His steps slow, and I see it—the way his jaw clenches just enough to be noticeable. He moves toward me, stopping only a breath away. But he leaves that little gap. Always leaves that space on my right. My out, my choice. It wrecks me, how instinctively gentle he is.
“Anyone so much as looks at you in a bikini before I do, and I’ll pluck out their fucking eyeballs and make them eat ‘em.” His voice is soft, but dangerous. “That something you want on your conscience?”
I burst out laughing. “Was that your best alpha-male growl? Ten out of ten, very sexy, very murdery.”
Jackson raises an eyebrow, dead serious. “I’m a possessive bastard, Tink. You just happen to like it. Don’t think I haven’t heard some of those books when you think no one is in the house.”
I roll my eyes dramatically, but it’s hard to keep the smile off my face. I glance around—no Carter, no Theo, no witnesses. My heart thuds a little harder.
I step closer. “Will you kiss me?”
His expression softens like I’ve handed him the whole damn world. “Always.”
He cups my face, and I brace myself—but it’s different now. I flinch, just barely, but he waits. Gives me time. And then his thumb strokes across my jaw, and I melt into it.
His lips brush mine, slow at first. I slide my arms around his waist and pull his hat off, tangling my fingers in his hair as I press closer. The kiss deepens—his tongue sliding against mine with a low groan—and heat sparks under my skin like it’s been waiting for permission.
“You taste so fucking good,” he whispers, breath hitching as he breaks the kiss just enough to say it.
“Filthy whore.”
My whole body seizes. Patrick’s voice.
Not here. Not now.
The echo of that word lodges itself like glass behind my ribs. My arms fall away, and I go cold—fast. My mind blanks, rebooting in trauma-mode as shame and embarrassment rise—choking the air from me.
But Jackson doesn’t recoil. He doesn’t question. He just observes me carefully, like he’s watching a storm roll in.
“Tink,” he says gently, his voice a tether. “Hey baby, let me see those pretty eyes.” I force myself to blink, to breathe. His hands are still on my cheeks, warm and grounding.
“I’m here,” he says. “You’re okay.”
I try to speak, but nothing comes. My throat is closing up. I feel stupid. Weak. Ruined.
But Jackson smiles this lazy, crooked smirk and reaches for his hat. Only he doesn’t put it back on his head. He sets it on mine.
“There,” he says. “Now there’s a goddamn look. Pretty, tattooed, pierced, and wearing my hat? I’m keeping that image right here.” He taps the side of his head.
I snort, the sound half-laugh, half-sob. “Wrong head, Rowe.”
“Yeah, well, both are pretty obsessed with you.”
And just like that, the shame doesn’t win this time.
I square my shoulders and turn back to the last crate, tossing it in like I didn’t just derail mid-kiss from a trauma spiral. Jackson doesn’t push. He just works beside me, quietly, like we’re building something together without saying it.
Maybe we are…then again, I can’t help but note my nose wrinkling as I get a whiff of Patrick’s cigarettes.
We might be trying to build something, but as long as my foundation is this unsteady, how can we ever have anything secure?
“Ozzy, I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.” Dr. Lois Krane’s voice is soft in my earbud, a gentle tether pulling me back from the chaos in my head as I pace the floor of my bedroom like a caged animal.
I scoff, running a hand through my hair.
“You’re not hearing me. I was kissing Jackson—this gorgeous, solid, fucking patient man—and for the first time in years, I felt something.
Real want. Real… safety. And then boom. Like a goddamn grenade in my brain—Patrick’s voice, calling me a whore, slithering in from the past like it owns the place. ”
I shiver at the memory, my nails digging crescents into my palms. “This was after I already—God, Lois, I did it with him. Over the phone. Let him talk me through it. I didn’t panic. I didn’t freeze. Then last night, I’m dry humping him like a teenager in heat, and I still didn’t break. But?—”
“No buts,” she interrupts, and I can hear the faint thunk of her kicking off her shoes. Lois doesn’t do the traditional therapy act. She never talks to me from behind a desk. She talks to me like I’m human. Like she sees all my cracks and doesn’t flinch.
“You’re looking at the wrong part of the equation, Ozzy. Yes, the voice came back—but you didn’t let it take you down. You stayed in the moment. That’s huge. That’s not failure. That’s a win.”
I pace to the window and stare out at the rustling fields, heart clenching. “It doesn’t feel like a win when I flinch every time he touches my face. Or when I imagine him wanting more—wanting to see me—and all I can think about is how I look. The scars. The brand.”
Lois is quiet for a moment, letting the words settle. “You’re talking about your body, the way it’s changed, the parts that were violated.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me. “Yeah. The scars down there… I didn’t tattoo over them. Couldn’t. Every time I tried to imagine someone close enough to see, I’d go cold.”
“And now?”
My voice is barely audible. “Now it’s Jackson.”
“And he’s the first man in five years you’ve been willingly intimate with?”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Five years. No touch. No sex. Not even letting someone brush against me in line. And now he’s holding me. Kissing me. And it doesn’t feel wrong. Not with him.”
“Then trust that. You’re allowed to hold both truths at once: that it still hurts—and that you’re healing.”
My jaw trembles. “But what happens when he wants to see me naked?”
Lois’s voice doesn’t waver. “You tell him what you’re ready for. You communicate. You don’t have to leap from kissing to naked in one move. Trust takes time. Safety takes repetition.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “But it’s not just trust. It’s shame. I look at myself, and all I see is what he did to me. That I was branded. Like fucking cattle. There’s no hair, no softness, no normalcy. Just that word. I can’t let Jackson see that,” I murmur.
“What if he doesn’t look at it and see shame? What if he sees survival? What if he sees the woman he’s falling for, not the mark left behind?”
I don’t answer.
I don’t know how.
Lois softens her voice even more. “Ozzy… he’s not afraid of you. He’s not shrinking from you. That terrifies you, doesn’t it?”
Tears spring to my eyes. “Yeah. Because if he’s not scared, if he’s willing, then I have no excuse to run. And I don’t know how to be this close to someone without running.”
“You’re not broken,” she quietly reminds me.
“And you’re not behind. You’re just moving through grief, trauma, and desire all at once.
That’s a brutal cocktail. But you’re allowed to want love, Ozzy.
And you’re allowed to not be ready for all of it yet.
You’re allowed to have desires, to want to be desired. ”
“That’s disgusting,” I spit out.
“Oh? And why’s that?”
“Besides the fact that I’m mutilated down ther–”
“Try again,” she snaps, refusing to let me say it. I sigh in annoyance.
“Besides the fact that I haven’t come to terms with how I look down there, I fear having someone inside me again. Especially since I know it will feel weird for them,” I whisper, looking at myself in the mirror.
“This isn’t a race, Ozzy. You aren’t going to be okay just like that. Intimacy after trauma isn’t always easy, and like I said, this isn’t linear. You may find yourself okay with intimacy one day and triggered the next, and that’s okay.”
There’s a pause before she speaks again. “I’ll email you some trust-building exercises and partner education resources. And if Jackson’s as good as you say he is, I think he’ll be willing to learn how to love you in the ways you need.”
I nod again, my heart thudding. “Thanks, Lois.”
“Now… are we ready to talk about Morris?”
Cold rushes through my limbs. My chest goes tight. Just hearing his name like that, like we’re preparing for loss, makes me feel like I’ve swallowed glass.
“No,” I say, cutting her off. “I gotta get breakfast ready. I’ll talk to you later.”
I hang up before she can say anything else. My reflection stares back at me in the mirror, messy-haired, sad-eyed, branded, breathing.
Bare-chested, I stare at the thick black flowers curling up my sternum, wrapping like armor around my ribs and breasts. The thorns climb toward my belly where the bat sits below my navel, wings wide.
And lower still, just past that, the red scar.
brUMBY
“Hello?” I croak through a yawn, rubbing at my face as I answer the phone.
I don’t even glance at the caller ID—I’m far too drained to care.
My body’s heavy, aching in all the places I didn’t know still had weight.
Between loading the guys’ trucks this morning for the fair, back-to-back therapy, checking on Morris, rearranging furniture so we can move his hospital bed to the living room, and helping Dorothy keep the house running, I’m ready to collapse into a five-day nap.
But something in the silence on the other end of the call slices through my fatigue like a blade.
“Ozzy?”
It’s Carter’s voice, but not the Carter I’m used to—the cocky bastard with too many jokes and not enough boundaries. No ‘Hellraiser,’ no teasing, no swagger. Just… breathless fear.
“What’s wrong?” I sit up straighter, the sleep haze evaporating instantly. “Carter?”