CHAPTER 13 — DONT TOUCH ME IF YOU DONT BELIEVE IN ME
POV: Damon Blackwood
Noah was different after dinner with Julian, and the fact that I noticed it so easily irritated me almost as much as his silence itself.
The penthouse wasn't any quieter than before—not in any way you could measure; the rain kept streaking down the tall windows, the heating still made that low hum in the walls, the university town remained spread out below like an expensive, cold chessboard.
Still, something in him had changed. Noah crossed the room without putting down his phone, without making any comment about my posture, without complaining about the ice, without turning my pain into a dry joke, and that absence of friction struck me as more suspicious than any explosion.
I was near the window, holding a bottle of water that had already warmed in my hand, watching his reflection in the glass.
Noah went into the guest room for a few minutes and came out with his expression too composed, his hair still damp from the rain, the dark t-shirt swapped for a gray one, the medical bag propped against his hip like a shield.
He didn't look at me when he crossed the room.
Not because he was distracted. Because he was avoiding me.
Noah Bennett could fake calm for an entire table of sponsors, but around me, his evasions made more noise than confessions.
“Are you going to ignore me until tomorrow, or is this part of the new protocol?” I asked, not leaving the window, tracking him in the reflection as he opened the bag on the low table.
“Evening assessment, ice, wrap, and rest,” he replied, removing supplies with controlled movements. “If you cooperate, I'll be done in fifteen minutes and we can all sleep before this night turns into another catastrophe.”
Fifteen minutes. Everyone. Sleeps. He was using small, practical words like someone stacking furniture against a door.
I watched as Noah pulled a pair of disposable gloves from the bag.
That detail made me turn to face him. Gloves.
In my house. After everything those hands had done to me on the couch two days ago, after that early morning at the hotel, after the way his mouth said my name when there was no defense left.
Gloves were a clearer message than any sentence.
“You're going to use those?” I asked.
Noah paused for an instant, the pair of gloves caught between his fingers, then continued as if my voice hadn't reached his skin before his ear. “Your skin got irritated from the previous tape. Cream, sweat, and adhesive can make it worse if I don't handle it properly. It's procedure.”
“Procedure,” I repeated, walking to the portable exam table set up near the windows. “Funny how procedure shows up whenever you want distance.”
“Interesting how you think everything I do revolves around your need to read aggression into any act of care.”
The words came firm, but his gaze didn't. Noah lowered his head to pull on the first glove, and I watched the latex cover fingers I knew too well to accept the idea of a barrier without feeling something dark shift in my chest. It wasn't jealousy now.
It wasn't even clean anger. It was the sensation of having been allowed too close and then shut out by a hand that still trembled, even if only slightly, as it closed the second glove.
I sat on the table without taking off my shirt.
Noah lifted his eyes to me, clipboard in one hand, expression dry.
I knew he expected a fight—maybe because I gave him one often enough to turn reaction into prediction.
This time, I just held his gaze. It was the fastest way to make him lose some control, because Noah handled attack better than silence.
“Shirt,” he said.
“Ask properly.”
“Don't start.”
“You started when you decided to touch me like I was contamination.”
The glove snapped softly when he closed his hand around the pen.
Color crept up his neck, not from desire—at least not only.
There was anger there. And something underneath, something wounded, something that had the shape of the message he'd received and I still hadn't seen.
Noah had kept his phone in his pocket since we left the restaurant.
He'd touched it twice in the elevator. Both times, his expression had gone too empty.
“Take off the shirt, Damon,” he said, voice controlled. “Or I won't do the assessment.”
“You think threatening absence works on me?”
“It works better than presence when you only use it to attack.”
I took off the shirt. Not out of obedience, I told myself, but because I wanted to see if he would look.
Noah looked. Even with gloves, even with anger, even with an entire wall raised on his face, he looked.
His eyes traveled down the white wrap, the skin, the point where the adhesive had marked my shoulder, the abdomen he'd touched without any barrier before.
The pause was brief, but it happened. His body still remembered.
The satisfaction that gave me died quickly because when he approached, Noah kept his gloved fingers too light, too impersonal, as if touching less was a way of not wanting.
“Range of motion first,” he said. “Raise your arm to the safe limit.”
“You planning to talk to me like I'm a clinical file all night?”
“How would you prefer I talk?” Noah asked, positioning himself at my side to observe the movement. “Like a guest? Like a mistake? Like a relapse? Like a useful body for when you want to forget you still don't trust me?”
That hit. Not because it was unfair. Because it had too much aim.
I raised my arm, and the pain came—moderate, controllable, more bearable than the irritation in my chest. Noah touched my scapula with two fingers, adjusting my posture through the glove, and the touch without skin enraged me out of all proportion.
I wanted his hand for real. I wanted the warm fingers, the smell of lotion, the pressure that knew the difference between relieving me and dismantling me.
I also wanted to tear from him the reason he was trembling inside while pretending neutrality outside.
“You've been hiding something since we left the restaurant,” I said, lowering my arm when he gestured. “Don't lie. Not today.”
“If I answered every accusation you threw at me, there'd be no time left to treat your shoulder.”
“That's the kind of answer someone gives when they have something to hide.”
“Everyone has something to hide in Northaven. The difference is some have enough money to call their secrets a legacy.”
Julian's name wasn't spoken, but it entered the room anyway.
I went still. Noah realized he'd said more than he meant to; his breath caught for half a second, and the glove on my skin paused near my collarbone.
I leaned in slightly, closing the distance between us, and he pulled his hand away before I could catch it.
“This is about Julian,” I said.
“Everything's about Julian when you finally decide to look closely.”
The answer came out so weary that my anger lost some of its footing.
Noah was exhausted. Not just physically, though the night had left its marks on his shoulders, his face, the way he carried himself.
It was an older exhaustion, accumulated, carried in his bones.
For an instant, I saw the eighteen-year-old boy I'd worked so hard to erase from memory: Noah sitting in the dorm hallway, knees drawn up, staring at his own hands as if he'd just discovered that truth could hurt the person he wanted to protect.
“Then help me look,” I said, and I hated how much it sounded like a plea.
Noah let out a low laugh, humorless. “You don't want help looking. You want me to hand everything over on my knees so you can decide if I deserve absolution.”
“You think you don't?”
“I think I'm tired of being judged by someone whose body wants me like it knows the truth, while his head condemns me like it has to obey his brother.”
I pushed up from the table too fast for my shoulder's liking.
The pain came, but it didn't stop me. Noah stepped back—not from fear.
From restraint. The glove still covered his hand, white, sterile, offensive.
I yanked the pair off his wrist before caution could talk me out of it.
Not hard enough to hurt, but with enough intent to make him hold his breath.
One glove fell to the floor, then the other, and the bare skin of his hand appeared under the light.
“Don't touch me like that if you're going to pretend it isn't you,” I said, gripping his wrist.
Noah's eyes went dark. He looked at my hand around his wrist, then at my face. The silence shattered into something denser, charged with what we'd already done and what we still wielded to wound each other.
“Let go,” he said.
I let go. Immediately. The gesture seemed to surprise him more than if I'd refused. Noah brought his free hand to the wrist I'd held—not to protect himself, but to feel where my fingers had been. That hit me like he'd touched my mouth.
“I'm not your enemy, Noah,” I said.
His mouth tightened, and this time the anger came laced with a sadness so swift I could barely track it.
“No. You're worse when you want to be. Because an enemy doesn't ask to share my bed, doesn't say my name that way, doesn't touch me like he still remembers who I was before everyone decided for us.
An enemy doesn't make me want to stay and then look at me like I'm evidence against him.”
“I don't know what to believe.”
“Then don't touch me like you trust my body but doubt everything else.”