Chapter Eighteen #2
I shiver, left in just the utilitarian black bra I put on this morning. I feel him shift, his chin hooking over my shoulder to peer down my back. He bites out a short, angry-sounding curse, and I rock my head back and forth against his collarbone.
“How does it look?”
“Like you got hit by an SUV in the middle of the street.” He turns his head, the scruff of his cheek brushing against the soft skin of mine. “Give me a second, and I’ll get you fixed up.”
“You don’t have to.” I rub my nose against his collar. He smells so good and I’m so—I’m so tired. “It’ll heal on its own in an hour or two.”
He pauses. “I’m not going to leave you like this, Darcy.”
He’s methodical about his work. Careful.
He takes his time as he moves over my back with his hands, fingertips brushing over freshly healed skin, almost as if he’s reassuring himself.
By the time he gets to the space between my shoulder blades, I’m almost fully asleep against his chest, my eyes heavy and my skin tingling.
“Darcy,” Gabriel whispers. “Sit up for a second.”
“No.” I burrow my face further against his chest. “Comfortable.”
Gabriel chuckles, his fingers knotting in my hair. “I know, but I need to see your hip.” He urges me backward, and the look on his face is almost as nice as his magic. Soft. Gentle. So, so careful.
I touch the corner of his mouth. Sweep my fingertips up to the crinkles by his eyes. “You’re so pretty,” I tell him.
“Now I know you’re delirious.” Those crinkles deepen. “C’mon. Lie down. We’re almost done.” He brushes some hair out of my face. “Then you can rest, okay?”
“Then I can shower,” I correct. I feel sticky and uncomfortable from the rain and the road and the blood that’s dried along my back. Gabriel could magic it all away for me, but I’d still feel it there. “Want warm water. Want your soap.”
He snorts and guides me down until I’m splayed across his couch. “You can have my soap in a minute.”
“Good, ’cause I’m gonna use it anyway.”
I dutifully flop my legs across the bottom cushions, uncaring that I’m in just my bra and an old pair of jeans. Gabriel hisses when he sees my torso, and I peer down to look. My upper thigh to the bottom of my rib cage is painted in purple and black. A mottled and angry-looking bruise.
I press at the edge of it. “This is how my magic feels sometimes,” I slur, my thoughts as slippery as water. Like soap bubbles. Every time I get close enough to grasp one, it drifts away again.
Gabriel’s palms are glowing gold. The center of his chest beneath his T-shirt, too. “Like what?” he asks, distracted. He’s still studying the mark on my torso like he wants to fight the car that did this to me.
I close my eyes. “Like no matter what I do, it’s spreading. Like I can’t—like I can’t keep it contained.”
Gabriel’s thumb brushes a gentle arc across my hipbone. “Is that what you’ve been trying to do? Keep it contained?”
I think of the very first time I ever used my magic. I ate the berry and received my assignment and disappeared in a whirlwind of smoke and shadow. I had been terrified of what I would find, but it was just a woman around the same age as me. She was sitting alone on the edge of her bed.
“You here for me?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I don’t think I want to die,” she said.
I whispered I know, then held out my hand.
She was crying when she pressed her palm to mine, and my magic—my magic poured out of me.
Like an oil slick. Like a cup that had been filled to the very brim and knocked over.
It was powerful and intoxicating and I—I hated it.
Shadows curled around us both, and then we were gone.
Standing in a room with towering file cabinets.
I never even knew her name.
“I hate it,” I whisper to Gabriel. “I didn’t ask for it. I never wanted it.”
Gabriel stays quiet.
“I used to lie in that hospital bed and beg for death. But I didn’t realize—” I didn’t realize I would become this. I sniffle. “I just wanted—I wanted the pain to stop, you know?”
“I know.”
“Why can’t I be good?” I blink open my eyes and tip my head against the couch cushion, looking up at Gabriel. “Why can’t I help people, too?”
His mouth tilts downward, his hands still hovering over my middle. “You are good.”
I laugh. “You’re such a bad liar.”
His expression grows fierce. “You are,” he repeats. The soft glow in his hands dissipates, and he drops his palms against my hips, squeezing. “You saved Nate today.”
Does a good deed count if it’s motivated by selfish gains? That feels like a shitty loophole, if so.
“I did it for myself,” I whisper.
“He’s still alive because of you. I don’t really care why you did it.”
My bottom lip trembles. “You really think I did good?”
He brushes some hair out of my face. “You fishing for compliments now, trouble?”
“I got hit by a car. If I were to fish for compliments, I’d say now is the time.”
He laughs and it’s better than his magic. It warms me from the inside out. Makes me feel like someone just shoved a candle in the middle of my chest.
“All right. Yeah,” he says. “You did good.”
“Keep going.”
“Nah, that’s enough.” He slips one hand under my knees and the other behind my back, careful not to brush against the still-sensitive skin between my shoulder blades.
He lifts me against his chest for the second time, and I get the absolute pleasure of being nestled under his chin while he slowly moves us down the hall.
“No,” I whine. “You’re supposed to give me whatever I want. Flatter me with compliments.”
“I flatter you enough.”
“Oh?” A rasping chuckle creaks out of me. “Sometimes I catch you staring at me like you want to scoop out my eyes with a melon baller. Is that flattery?”
He shakes his head. “That’s not how I stare at you, Darcy.”
He shoulders the door to his bathroom open and carries me inside.
It’s a small room. Checkerboard matte tile in cream and ebony.
A single vanity with a frameless mirror above it.
It’s clean and utilitarian and perfectly Gabriel.
The only indulgence is the massive claw foot tub, porcelain white with a brass faucet.
Gabriel sets me on the edge of it, reaching over my lap to fiddle with the taps.
“I can manage from here,” I tell him, still clinging to his neck like a baby koala.
He doesn’t look at me. “I’m sure you can.”
The water creaks on with a groan and Gabriel holds his hand beneath it, testing the temperature. Apparently to his satisfaction, he finds the plug and places it carefully in the drain. I watch the water fill the basin with a dreamy sort of detachment, my exhaustion making me feel drunk.
“This isn’t a shower,” I mumble.
“Technically, it is.” He nods at the mounted showerhead, extending from the spout. “We’re just not using it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust you to stand long enough to get the blood off you, and I don’t want you to follow up getting hit by an SUV with cracking your skull open on the side of a porcelain tub.”
“I’m already dead, Gabriel.”
His sigh brushes against the skin of my neck. “Yeah, and I don’t want to see you hurt. C’mon. Stand up.”
He keeps his hands on my hips as I stand on wobbly legs, making quick work of my jeans.
He strips them down my legs efficiently while the tub continues to fill, sparing a quick glance at my legs.
He is a series of detached, practical motions.
I could be a carton of milk at the grocery.
A particularly stubborn knot down at the docks.
“In the water,” he orders, and I huff, lifting my foot over the edge of the tub.
I hold on to my indignation and pride for all of seventeen seconds before the decadent feel of the slightly too-hot water against my skin makes me collapse into a puddle of moans and groans. I slip the rest of the way into the tub in a rush, water sloshing at the edges.
Gabriel grins at me from the bath mat, his arms crossed on the lip of the tub, his chin resting on top. I sink back into the water until everything below my chin is submerged, my toes wiggling happily.
This is what heaven must be like. A claw-foot tub in an outdated bathroom with a beautiful angel draped over the edge.
“Good?” he asks.
I close my eyes and make another sound I’ll probably be embarrassed about tomorrow. “Very.”
He gives the water another minute, and then reaches over me to turn it off, the ancient pipes groaning once again.
It smells like Gabriel in here. Like whatever soap he uses.
Maybe his laundry detergent. I slip half an inch deeper in the water, and my body goes loose.
Like a spool of thread rolling across the floor.
I float in the tub and Gabriel sits quietly next to me, keeping watch and trailing his fingers across the top of the water. I lift my knees until they poke out of the water and I feel Gabriel’s attention shift, his mouth curled in a barely there smile.
“What?” I ask.