CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“RADISSON?”
At my voice, he jerks away from me. He lets my hands go and gets up and off my body.
I jackknife on the bed, come up to my knees, naked and all, as I watch him get ahold of himself and back away from the bed.
There’s not a lot of light in his space, something I’m only now realizing when my world has expanded and he isn’t my ground and my sky.
But still, I can make out the tensed lines of his body.
I can see his fisted hands at his sides, the way his stance is wide as if battle-ready.
His eyes are locked with mine and I ask, “What’s wrong?”
He moves his jaw back and forth, his nostrils flaring, his chest jerking up and down. But other than that, he stays silent.
“Talk to me,” I urge, knowing that’s the hardest part for him and not just because of his long-ago injury.
His eyes flash and his breaths speed up. I want to go over to him, wrap him in my arms, but I stay put. I don’t want to spook him when he already looks so scared.
God, what is it, Radisson?
“Please, baby,” I whisper. “Tell me.”
His eyes flare and I know it’s because of the endearment that so casually slipped out of me. And for the millionth time tonight, I realize how foolish I’ve been to withhold myself from him. From the man so love-starved. So hungry and thirsty. For me.
He takes a deep breath, and still keeping our eyes locked, he opens the top button of his drenched shirt.
My heart starts slamming in my chest and by the time he gets to the third button, showing a sliver of his bronzed hairy chest, wet from the rain, I want to tell him to stop.
I want to tell him there’s no need for him to do this.
It’s okay. I don’t want his hands to tremble like they’re doing now, and I don’t want his shoulders to twitch and tense with every breath he takes.
But I don’t because something in my gut, in my pounding heart, tells me this is important.
This is him baring himself, being vulnerable, and I need to be his safe space. Like he’s mine.
Finally, all buttons are undone, but since the fabric is soaked, it’s sticking to his body, to the arches and ridges of his torso that I can see a tiny glimpse of.
So he has to push the shirt away himself.
I don’t know if it’s good or bad, that he has control of it.
If it’s cruel to make him go that extra step of peeling his shirt away from his body rather than simply shrugging it off.
Whatever it is, he goes ahead and does it.
He grabs the front of one of the shirts I bought him and takes it off, letting it fall on the floor with a wet thwack, and my heart drops to my stomach.
It keeps dropping lower and lower as he unbuckles his belt and snaps his jeans open at the same time as he toes off his boots.
He unzips it before pushing the jeans down, along with his black briefs.
He bends, the great big muscles of his body rippling and twitching as he shoves them all the way down, even his soaked socks, before stepping out of them. And stands in front of me, all bare.
I try to keep my breaths even as I stare at him.
As I take in the sheer magnificence of his body.
I knew he was large and muscular. I’ve not only seen him but felt those muscles against my body on many occasions now.
But it’s an entirely different thing to behold them bare, without frills and strappings.
Without his clothes to hide behind. That’s what he does, doesn’t he?
He hides behind his clothes like he hides behind his bandannas and Stetson.
Swallowing, I ask, “Is that why… you didn’t want me to dress your wounds? Because you didn’t want me to… see.”
His massive chest, looking even more massive now that I can see those arched pecs and the dark dusting of hair, moves up and down with a breath. “Yes.”
I nod. “It got you, too, then? The f-fire that killed your father.”
I watch the muscles of his torso tense. He has a six-pack, clear and defined, the slopes of his hips sharp and defined, too, all also covered by a dusting of dark hair. They all flutter and tense up at my question. “Yes.”
I told myself I wouldn’t do it, that I would stay calm, but something about his second yes, like he’s so ashamed of it, gets to me.
Like he’s so ashamed that the left side of his obliques, starting in the middle of his torso and back, going all the way down to the top of his thigh, is covered in scar tissue from the fire in the car accident.
Like getting burned because he was trying to save his family is a bad thing.
Like it’s anything other than brave and heroic and so goddamn tragic.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me. He told me one side of the car had caught on fire and that he pulled his family out of it. He kept going back to pull his family out of it. Of course that fire got to him too. Of course he was burned, too, and dear God, he was only fifteen.
Fifteen.
I open my mouth, my question all ready to go, but all I can get out before I trail off is: “What…”
He picks up my thread, though. “Third-degree burns.”
I flinch.
“They told me I was lucky it wasn’t worse than that. Worse than third-degree or hadn’t spread to a larger area. Or they’d have to give me grafts. Took a few months to heal and then about a year for ’em to look like they do now.”
Raised and puckered skin, he means. Shrunken and pink, raw all over.
I swallow again and ask, “And what are those?”
“Tattoos.”
I mean, I knew that. They’re very clear to see.
His tattoos don’t cover the entire burn site but most of it.
They also go around the area, going up to his ribs and down to his mid left-thigh.
But it’s not a design or a sketch or whatever it is that most people get.
It’s words. I don’t even think it’s sentences. Just plain, random words.
I try to read them, to make sense of them.
I start with the ones on the scarred area.
I notice his sister’s name several times.
Lakelyn. Then there are names I don’t recognize, but I’ll bet anything Willa was his mother and Clive, his father.
Those are the only names, though, the rest are words: inside, outside, fast, calf, walk, and so on. So random.
“Why do you have these words tattooed on your body?” I ask, still looking at them, my eyes jumping from one to another.
“’Cause at one point, those words were hard to say.”
I look up.
He breathes deep, shifting his eyes away from me for the first time. “They ain’t particularly difficult, but…” He swallows. “They were for me. They’d bang around in my head, would get real loud, so I… I put ’em somewhere, purged ’em. Gave ’em a place to go.”
“Did you do these?”
“Not the ones on my scar,” he says, shaking his head. “The skin’s… less elastic. It ain’t like the healthy skin. It’s ain’t dead either. Just… different. So you need an expert.”
“But you do do them,” I go on. “I saw the tattoo station in your room.”
He watches me a beat. “Yeah.”
“So around the scar then?”
Another beat passes where his eyes shimmer somewhat mysteriously. “Yeah.”
I finally look at the words around his scar again; there are a bunch, not random, though, because these are all the words he wanted to say but couldn’t.
Home, rainbow, help, no. They make emotion swell up in my throat, but I push it down and keep reading.
Until I stop at one and my mouth falls open.
It may be one word, a name, but after a certain point past his thigh, it is all there is.
Repeatedly, multiple times. Ten times, twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty times.
“That’s…” My chest heaves and stutters and I have to press a hand on my trembling belly before I can continue. “That’s my n-name.”
It is, isn’t it? Because for a few seconds, I don’t even remember what my name is. I’ve forgotten everything except that he has Peyton written all over his thigh. Over the bulge of his bronzed, powerful muscles. Oh God. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God.
“Yeah,” he rasps.
My eyes skitter up and clash with his. “But you… you hardly ever say my name. You…” I shake my head.
“You call me all these things and I hated them at first. I hated how you called me a princess when I’m not, but then I started to like it because you made me feel like it wasn’t a bad thing.
Like I was your princess. And then you called me darling and I love that.
God, I love that. I…” I inhale a shaky breath.
“I thought you hated my name. So then why do you have it tattooed on your body?”
By the time I finish venting, my words jumbled and hurried, his eyes have started to shimmer with emotion.
With intensity and heat and so many things I can’t possibly understand.
Then, “’Cause for the longest time, I didn’t know what your name was.
All I called you was Princess ’cause that’s what you were to me.
My Princess. And then I found out who you were and”—he swallows—“I hated you for it. Hated you for who you were, who you came from. I was an asshole, still am, but back then, I hated knowin’ you were never mine and you’d never be mine.
But no matter how much I hated you, I finally had a fuckin’ name.
I finally knew what my Princess was called and fuck, it was perfect for her. Peyton. Sweet, delicate, pretty.