Chapter Eight #2
I took a breath and it just came pouring out.
"He calls me little one. He calls me sweetheart. He calls me baby and good girl and he cuts my food into microscopic pieces and he holds me while I sleep and he told me—he told me he wanted me to be his, but it’s too soon.
But what if he was just placating me?" My voice cracked on the last word.
"I tried to kiss him this morning. On the mouth.
A real kiss. And he—" I pressed my lips together, hard, against the trembling.
"He turned his head. Like I was his kid sister.
He kissed my forehead and said 'be good' and left. "
Silence.
"Okay," Emily said, and her voice had shifted into the careful, measured tone of a woman who'd learned to navigate emotional minefields by moving slowly and testing every step.
"Can I ask you something, and will you promise to actually hear it instead of just using it to confirm whatever story you're already telling yourself? "
I nodded, though my jaw was tight.
"How long has it been since you were rescued?"
"Twenty-eight days."
"Four weeks." Emily repeated it like she was placing it on a scale, weighing it.
"And in those four short weeks, you've gone through acute withdrawal from forced sedation, hormonal chaos from fertility drugs administered without your consent, severe malnutrition, PTSD that's still actively manifesting in nightmares and panic attacks, and you're sitting here in this man's house wearing his shirt and sleeping in his bed and he has not left your side for more than fifteen minutes at a time until today. "
"Yes," I said, because all of that was true and none of it was the point.
"Molly." Clare leaned forward, her tea forgotten, her brown eyes earnest and bright with something that looked like recognition—the particular recognition of someone who'd walked a road similar enough to mine that she could read the mile markers.
"Do you know what a good Daddy does when his Little is barely a month out of the worst trauma of her life? "
"Apparently he dodges her kiss and calls her 'good girl' like she's a golden retriever."
Clare snorted. Actually snorted, tea nearly coming out her nose, and the sound was so unexpected and so human that it punctured something in the tight, airless space my chest had become.
"Oh my God," she said, wiping her face. "Sorry.
I'm sorry. It's not funny. It's just—Maddox did the exact same thing to me. "
I stared at her. "What?"
"The exact same thing." She paused, and the brightness in her face flickered, a shadow passing behind her eyes like a cloud crossing the sun. Quick. There and gone. She mimicked turning her head, a smooth, practiced redirect. "Cheek. Forehead kiss. 'Get some rest, little one.' And I wanted to die."
"What happened?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"I cried for about six hours and convinced myself he thought I was damaged goods.
That he was just being a good Daddy because that's what Daddies do—they take care of things.
Broken birds, stray kittens, traumatized women.
It's like a biological imperative for them.
They can't not fix things." Clare set her tea down and curled her knees up to her chest, hugging them.
"And honestly? Part of that was true. Not the damaged goods part—that was my brain being a garbage fire.
But the imperative part. Maddox has this—this need to protect.
It's hardwired. It's who he is before it's what he does.
And when he pulled me out of that situation and I was broken and terrified and clinging to him like a life raft, every single protective instinct he had activated at once, and the absolute last thing he was going to do was take advantage of that. "
"He wasn't rejecting you," Emily said, picking up the thread with the seamless coordination of two women who'd clearly had this conversation before, possibly about each other, possibly about themselves.
"He was protecting you. From himself. From the possibility that what you were feeling was gratitude or relief or trauma bonding dressed up as desire, and that if he kissed you back—really kissed you back—he'd be crossing a line that he could never uncross, with a woman who might wake up one day with a clear head and realize she'd never actually wanted him at all. "
"But I do want him," I said, and my voice broke on the word want like it was made of glass.
"It's not gratitude. It's not—I know what gratitude feels like, and it doesn't make your heart rate double when someone walks into a room.
It doesn't make you memorize the exact way someone's stubble feels against your forehead.
It doesn't make you really wish you slept naked—"
Clare chuckled and I managed a weak smile. Because saying it out loud was the first time I realized my body was recovering as well. Not just physically.
"I know," Emily said gently. "I know it's real for you.
And I'd bet everything I have that it's real for him too.
But Molly —he doesn't have the luxury of trusting that.
Not yet. Because he's the one with the power in this dynamic, and he knows it, and a man like Xavier—a man who's built his entire identity around protecting people who can't protect themselves—would rather cut off his own hand than use that power in the wrong way. "
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say but he should know, he should be able to see it, he reads me like a book every other time so why can't he read this?
But the argument dissolved before it fully formed, because somewhere underneath the hurt and the rejection and the Maria-voice whispering he doesn't want you, a quieter voice was saying something else entirely.
He told you this. He literally told you this.
Three weeks ago, in this bed, with his forehead against yours.
He said he wanted to wait until you could choose him with clear eyes and a healed heart.
He said he wanted you to be able to walk away and survive without him.
He said he didn't want you to need him—he wanted you to choose him.
And then you tried to kiss him four weeks into recovery, while your endocrine system was still in free fall and your nightmares still required his physical presence to survive, and he did exactly what he said he would do. He protected you. Even from himself.
"Oh," I said.
It was a small sound. The sound of something clicking into place—not loudly, not with fanfare, but with the quiet, inevitable precision of a key finding the lock it was made for.
"There it is," Emily said, and her smile was knowing and sad and warm all at once. "The 'oh.'"
"I hate the 'oh,'" I whispered. "The 'oh' means he's being noble and I'm being unfair."
"The 'oh' means he cares enough to wait," Clare corrected. "The 'oh' means he turned his head this morning not because he didn't want to kiss you, but because he wanted to kiss you so badly that doing it would have shattered every boundary he's set for himself to keep you safe."
I pressed my palms against my eyes. The chamomile was going cold in my mug, and my throat was doing that terrible constricting thing again, but the tears behind it were different this time—not the hot, acidic tears of rejection, but something warmer. Softer.
"He left a note," I said, and I didn't know why I was telling them this except that it felt important—like evidence that needed to be entered into the record, Exhibit A in the case against my own catastrophic thinking. "On the nightstand. With my coffee. He signed it 'Daddy.'"
Emily made a sound that was half laugh, half something that ached. "He signed it Daddy. With a capital D. And you thought he didn't want you."
"In my defense," I said, "my brain has been chemically recalibrated by lunatics, and my baseline for interpreting human behavior is currently set to 'assume the worst.'"
"Fair," Emily conceded. "Completely fair. But now that we've established that Xavier Moreno is not, in fact, rejecting you but is instead performing the most agonizingly noble act of restraint since—"
"Men were invented,” Claire said.
"—since that," Emily agreed. "Now that we've established that, I think it's time we address the real emergency."
I blinked. "What real emergency?"
Emily reached for the oversized tote bag she'd brought in and set it on the coffee table with a decisive thump.
The bag was pink—of course it was pink—with a small embroidered unicorn on the front that I recognized as the kind of thing you'd find in a Little's accessories collection, not a regular purse.
She unzipped it with the theatrical flourish of a magician opening a hat and began pulling things out one by one, arranging them on the coffee table with the careful precision of someone setting up a field operation.
Coloring books. Three of them—one with mandalas, one with woodland animals, and one that was unmistakably a princess theme with glitter on the cover that caught the light and scattered tiny rainbows across the coffee table.
A zippered pouch that, when opened, revealed a set of colored pencils so extensive it could have supplied a small art school.
A pack of gel pens in every color the visible spectrum had to offer and several it probably didn't. Stickers—sheets and sheets of stickers, holographic stars and tiny animals and flowers and one sheet that was entirely composed of different breeds of cats making various expressions.
"Emily," Clare said, in the tone of a woman who'd seen this before and was powerless to stop it.
"What? Dion said to bring activities. These are activities." Emily held up the princess coloring book and waggled it at me. "When's the last time you colored?"