Chapter 2 #3
"My abuela had this restaurant in San Antonio," he began, and his voice dropped into a register I hadn't heard before, lower, softer, almost reverent.
"Hole-in-the-wall place off Commerce Street.
Moreno's. She made these tamales at Christmas that people would drive three hours for.
I'm talking lined-up-around-the-block, calling-in-favors-to-skip-the-wait tamales. "
His hand had moved from my neck to my hair, and he was doing something I couldn't quite process at first, his fingers working through the tangles with impossible patience, separating matted strands without pulling, without hurting.
The way you'd work through knots in something precious. Something you intended to keep.
"She used to let me help when I was little. I'd stand on this step stool next to the counter and she'd give me the corn husks to soak. Told me I had to talk to them while they soaked, tell them what they were going to become. She said the husks needed to know they had a purpose."
His fingers found a particularly stubborn knot near my temple, and he worked at it with a gentleness that made my throat close up.
Nobody had touched my hair in eight weeks.
Nobody had touched me with anything other than clinical efficiency or casual cruelty.
The simple act of someone caring about a tangle in my hair was so devastatingly kind that I had to press my lips together to keep from sobbing again.
"That's ridiculous," I managed, my voice muffled against his chest.
"That's what I told her. I was six. I had strong opinions about the sentience of corn husks.
" His fingers moved to another section, patient, unhurried.
"She smacked me with a wooden spoon and told me that everything deserves to be told it matters.
Even the small things. Especially the small things. "
A tear slid down my cheek and soaked into his shirt. Then another. He didn't acknowledge them. He just kept talking, kept working through my hair, kept giving me the steady percussion of his heart beneath my ear.
“I never had that,” I whispered. “Grew up in the foster system. My mom was an addict and she died.” I’d accepted it. Even in the quiet moments where it seemed like everyone else had a family.
"My abuela died when I was in the Rangers. I didn't make it back in time." A beat of silence. His fingers stilled for just a moment, then resumed. "That was the first time I learned what it felt like to be too late. Wasn't the last."
I understood then, in the bone-deep, wordless way that trauma recognizes trauma, that he was giving me something.
Not just a story. A piece of himself. A wound held up to the light so I could see that I wasn't the only one carrying scars, that the man whose heartbeat I was clinging to like a lifeline knew what it meant to break and keep breathing anyway.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "About your abuela."
"She would have liked you." His chin rested against the top of my head again. "She had a thing for stubborn women who didn't know when to quit."
"I'm not stubborn. I'm stupid. I walked up to two human traffickers in a club like I was going to—what? Give them a stern talking-to?"
"I don’t know what happened."
“I had bad ear infections as a child, and one foster home, the mom was deaf and could lip read, so she taught me.
I loved Rachel, but she got breast cancer and I had to go back to the home.
" It was something I got better at in college. “I saw them talking about looking for a girl. Being dismissive, almost insulting. I thought it was someone they knew, not that they were responsible. Ruby brushed me off. I don’t really remember what happened next.” It was like looking through fog.
The fluid bag dripped. The clock ticked.
Xavier's fingers moved through my hair, and slowly, so slowly I didn't notice it happening, my body began to unclench.
Not all at once. Not completely. But the rigid terror that had kept every muscle locked since the rooftop began to loosen, degree by degree, like ice melting at the edges.
"My eyes are closing," I said, and there was panic in it, a thin wire of fear threaded through the exhaustion.
"Let them."
"What if I wake up and—"
"Then you'll wake up right here. In this bed. And I'll tell you where you are and who you are and that you're safe, as many times as you need to hear it. Every time, Molly. I will be in this house every single time you open your eyes."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to fight the pull of sleep the way I'd fought everything else, with my fists and my teeth and the ragged scraps of defiance I had left.
But my body had reached some limit that willpower couldn't override, and the combination of warmth and safety and the slow rhythm of his breathing was doing something to my nervous system that eight weeks of hypervigilance couldn't withstand.
Take care of me, I thought, half-delirious, already sliding. Please. I just want someone to take care of me. I want—
I want a Daddy.
The thought surfaced unbidden, raw and honest in the way that only the space between waking and sleeping allowed, and I was too far gone to crush it this time.
It just floated there, luminous and terrifying, as Xavier's hand settled warm and heavy against the curve of my skull, cradling me like I was something worth holding together.
"I've got you," he murmured, and his lips brushed my forehead so lightly I might have imagined it. "Go to sleep, little one."
“Yes, Daddy.”