Chapter 12 #2
Even with a fresh mouth when I’m done, I don’t feel anything close to human.
I keep my head bowed. Her hand keeps making those perfect little circles, but then it branches out, her fingers tracing shapes into my spine.
Does she even know she’s doing it? My sweat is freezing cold and goosebumps break out all over my bare arms and legs.
“Hey.” She angles in and drops her hand so she can use it to tilt my face up. Her eyes are wide and worried, and a little bleary because it’s the middle of the night. “Are you okay?”
I don’t know how to answer that? Honestly? Or try to offer reassurances and choke on my own lies? Anything I say will be off right now, my voice as fractured as my insides.
“I think you should have a hot bath. That’s my favorite thing when I’m sick, or tired, or really upset. Maybe… you can tell me what’s happening after you’ve had a minute?”
She knows. She knows that this isn’t some virus or stomach upset or something that I ate.
I slam one hand down on the counter so I don’t fall over.
I finally look up and catch sight of myself in the mirror.
I’m a mess. Hair soaked and wild, eyes wide but hollowed out, dark smudges below as deep as craters.
I look haunted and half animal, even to myself.
No wonder Esme doesn’t want to leave me alone.
She stands right by my side, crowding into me, real and solid.
She opens her arms. I turn and fall into them, even though I know that I shouldn’t.
This is something one friend does for another.
Anyone with half a heart would offer this.
It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just comfort, and we’re old friends.
I rest my head on her shoulder, even though it means putting it at an awkward angle to get it there with our height difference. I turn my face into her neck, nuzzling into that mix of scents and drinking her in. She’s a little bit sleepy up close, like soft breaths and salty sweat and Esme.
After a moment of holding me motionless, letting me support myself on her, she guides me across the bathroom, taking small steps. I come with her, half wraith, half a shell of myself.
It’s a glorious bathtub, freestanding and deep with claw feet.
I can’t remember if it was Lark or Ella who picked it out, but they did a good job.
Everyone did. They turned this place into a time of nightmares that Tyrant was forced to endure, into something that holds only good memories of our club.
Family. Children. Laughter. Friendship. Brotherhood. Escape.
I built that fire for Esme when we got here. Made her hotdogs we roasted on wiener forks over the coals. We sat on patio chairs and watched the flickering flames. The stars looked down on us. We said nothing. And then… it was late, and we had to go to bed.
I watch the water blast out of the faucet, bubbling into the tub. My throat aches.
Why did I waste so much time? Why wasn’t I ever brave enough to just put a few sentences out there?
It might have saved us all so much pain.
Esme and myself, at any rate. I left her alone when I should have tucked her right beside me.
I should have taken a chance. Put the words out there.
I could have lived with rejection. Honestly, I could have.
So why didn’t I? I’ve always felt this great, big, overwhelming sense of all-encompassing love that I do now.
We fit so perfectly together. We made sense. We were seamless.
I sway toward Esme. She catches me, her hands at my waist. I support myself too, leaning on my own strength.
I’m far too heavy for her. “I’m sorry,” I rasp out.
I screw my eyes shut tight. “Sorry for… for…” How can I even encompass it?
How can I translate my deepest emotions from rivers of current and static and energy and force them into words?
“Sorry for the way I am,” I finally choke. Lamely.
Esme makes a terrible sound in her throat, one that rings of pure despair. Her hand shoots up and tangles in my damp hair. She wraps her other arm around my back and hugs herself to me tightly. “No! No, I like the way you are.”
I can’t make myself stop. The words bubble to the surface like a flash flood.
“I’m sorry that I never saw you or heard you properly.
I’m so sorry that I left you alone. I’m sorry that I loved you, but I never knew how to do it properly.
I had no fucking clue. I just… felt so much.
I couldn’t stop. I was scared, but it was more.
You deserved so much. Everything. And I was just me.
I was so stupid and young and even when I wasn’t, I still couldn’t tell you. Was it too late? Is it too late?”
No. Fuck. I can’t ask that. I can’t.
“I’m even sorrier that this is happening right now. This is supposed to be our time. An escape from everything. This is all wrong and you shouldn’t have to come in here and pick my ass off the floor and clean up after me.”
She tsks under her breath. Her arms tighten around my waist, holding us together.
She presses her cheek against my chest and starts swaying a little.
She rocks us back and forth, my body following the motion of hers like the tide shifting sand.
I’ve tried to be her rock, but now she feels like mine.
She’s my anchor, keeping me here instead of letting me cut myself adrift.
She’s so much smaller than me, but she’s my safe place.
We stand quietly, chests heaving with rough breaths. I don’t feel so alone in my silent agony with her shoulders rising and falling so near to my own and the heat of her body breaking through and washing over me.
She waits until I’m not so obviously wrecked before she loosens her hold and steps back, then turns off the water before the tub overflows. She steps into the water, still fully clothed in sleep pajama shorts and a tank top and sinks down. Her hand floats out.
“Come on,” she coaxes.
Fuck. I didn’t know that she was going to do this.
It’s a big tub. If I draw myself up and huddle near the back…
of course I’ll still have to touch her. I’m so far out of my mind that desire is the last thing on it, but this is so intimate.
We’ve been friends forever and there has been nothing in that friendship that looks like this.
She scoots to the back of the tub and folds herself up like I planned to do, leaving the rest of the space open.
“Wizard,” she urges, but gently. “Come on. It’s no different than sitting in a hot tub.”
My body reacts before my brain catches up.
She’s like a magnet, she’s the tide, she’s the moon.
All the elemental forces controlling my body down to a cellular level.
I get in fully clothed and intend to beetle myself into the faucet at the far end, but my body has other plans.
I step into the warm water, turn, and sit down.
I give Esme my back. Unguarded. Half broken.
I’m so fucking stupid. So fucking fucked.
I shake again, fear and pain and all the questions I don’t have answers to locking into my joints. My stomach flips and I have to swallow convulsively to keep myself from being sick again.
Esme’s hand lands on my back and run down my shirt. She tries to tug me to her, but when I don’t budge, she envelops me. Her palms slip around to my chest, warm and comforting.
I can’t help it. I close my eyes and sway into her touch. She’s channeled some kind of storm from day one. She brought lightning into my life. She left me burned and blistered and scarred, and that’s no one’s fault but my own.
It doesn’t matter how big I am. Esme’s determined to get her arms around me.
She kneels and envelopes me. I try not to groan as her breath fans out hot against the back of my neck.
She rests her cheek on my shoulder. Eventually, her hands unclasp and she flattens her palm right over my heart.
It tumbles and skips hopelessly. I’m very aware of the steady thrum of her heart beating furiously against my back.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she finally says, voice coming out like she has a sore throat. “I’m the one who’s sorry. You’ve had so many bad nights and shitty days that you had to go through completely alone.”
“Not alone. I had friends. And then my brothers at the club.”
“You don’t tell them everything. Would you go to them with something like this?
If you woke up sick in the night? When you don’t know what’s worse—the physical agony or the emotional turmoil, or when it all blends into one big miasma so bad that your body tries to twist itself up and wring itself dry. ”
Esme’s words are water poured into the dusty vessel that I’ve become.
I turn so I can see part of her face, and then of course I have to turn more, because I want to see it all.
She’s beautiful, her lips tipped into a sad smile for me.
Her face is soft, though. Vulnerable. Completely trusting.
She holds me tighter, like she never wants to let go.
Shockingly, she drops a kiss to the back of my neck.
“Wizard?”
“Hm?”
I don’t turn and after a moment, her hands leave me, her arms slip away, and the water sloshes in the tub as she stands. Her warmth bleeds out of me, even as hot water laps at my waist.
She kneels down at the side of the tub, in front of me.
I reach for her blindly and she takes my hand in hers.
Her eyes are so intense that I’m scalded down to my marrow.
“There is nothing to forgive.” She leans in close, so close.
Closer than we’ve been ever, except on those rare nights when she might have rested her head on my shoulder like a sister would have done because she felt protected and safe.
I jerk back when her finger lands on the bridge of my nose. She leaves it there and flows with me. She traces the length of it, then caresses my cheek with the pad of her thumb. “You’re beautiful, Neal. Has anyone ever told you that? Properly?”
A mirthless, half started laugh erupts from me. “Nope. Never.”
She traces a path over my cheek. “All these little freckles. Your hairs. Your eyes. Your lips. They’re all so beautiful. But it’s the light that radiates out of you that’s the most beautiful.”
I want to snort about that all being nonsense, but I can’t. Not when Esme’s looking at me like I really am made of sunbeams and fairy fucking dust.
“There’s nothing about you that isn’t worthy of adoring.”
She says it like she does. For one terrible instant, I want to blurt all the other words inscribed onto the surface of my soul.
That I belong to her. That I dream of a world where she could belong to me too.
Where she’d choose me. Want me. Where she’d tell me that I don’t have to be perfect and I don’t need to deliver the whole world into her hands.
I just need to be me. She only wants me.
I want to haul her back into this tub and settle her on my lap.
I want to crawl inside of her. I want to kiss her and never stop.
I also know that what we’re doing right now, her looking at me like this, touching me so tenderly, is closer than our hearts have ever been, and I don’t want to do anything to break this spell.
It’s like black magic. I don’t understand it.
I don’t even know if I can believe in it.
I’m still so bruised that one misstep on my part, and I’d probably start crying.
Then ugly crying. And just… god, I can’t imagine anything more mortifying.
“You always know what to say to calm me down when I’m freaking out.
” Esme smiles at me so softly that I tie myself into endless knots.
“I can be having the worst panic attack, or the worst anxiety, and just a few words, or a single touch, and it’s better.
Not always gone, but better.” Her eyes get glassy, misting over.
I don’t want her to cry. I might tip over the edge and follow her.
She traces her thumb over my bottom lip.
I want to open and suck it into my mouth, but I pull back a fraction instead.
“It was a dream,” I admit. I’m ashamed about the way it started and horrified by the end.
“A nightmare, really. It was vivid. There were things I didn’t want to see and don’t ever want to imagine.
How… how it might have all gone differently with those men and—you.
If you hadn’t come to me to ask for help. ”
Her teeth scrape over her bottom lip. She worries it a few times, until it’s cherry red. “That would have been awful.” She brushes her lips over my wrist. “I hate that you’re upset about anything at all.” She draws in a shaky inhale and stands.
She sweeps one of the fluffy black towels off the rack and wraps it around her sodden pajamas. She holds the other out to me like a peace offering. I get out and she slings it around my waist. Her eyes rake over me then dart around the bathroom, landing everywhere but on my face.
“It’s probably a few hours before dawn, but I don’t see us going back to sleep. I was thinking about starting a fire again. We could sit outside and watch it. Maybe we could… talk there?”
“Yeah.” I’m awkward now that the spell is over. I can’t look at Esme either.
“You should eat something.”
“Yeah.” Even the thought of food sends my stomach spinning, but I’ll eat it because she asked me to.
“Okay. I’ll get changed and, uh, see you out there?”
I clutch the towel around me tightly, but I’m still dripping little puddles all over the floor. “Yeah.” It would be great if I could say something else, but Esme seems almost relieved to be able to get out of here.
I understand. The air is so thick with emotional turmoil that it’s nearly a biohazard to breathe in.
She stops at the door. She doesn’t turn around, and she speaks so quietly I barely hear her. “I know you spent a lot of bad days totally alone. This is a bad night, but I’m here, and we’ll get through it.”
After she’s gone, I press the heels of hands into my eyes to stop the flow of moisture, but it seeps out from beneath anyway.