Chapter 16 #3
But I’d started, so I was going to keep going. “I liked it,” I informed him. “So don’t you dare get all overprotective and think you have to keep me from getting a few scratches that aren’t even as bad as a damn paper cut.”
He stared. Swallowed. Opened his mouth, then shut it. Then swallowed again.
I threw the washcloth in the laundry bin I kept in the corner of the bathroom, far more emphatically than I needed to.
“In fact, I still like it. I like the fact that I made you do it. And I like the fact that you left marks on me.” I felt my own face heat.
“I—it was hot,” I admitted. “Really hot. And I’m definitely going to want you to do it again. ”
I expected him to argue with me.
Instead, he stepped forward, grabbed my face in both hands, and kissed me with so much intensity that I half-stumbled back, knocking my hip on the bathroom counter. I grabbed his wrists and held on.
He pulled back, a little breathless. “Sorry,” he breathed.
“Raj—” I’d literally just told him I didn’t want him to apologize for that.
“For knocking you off balance,” he clarified quickly, interrupting what was about to become a rant.
“Oh.” I said, feeling stupid for overreacting.
“I mean,” he continued, cheeks darkening again. “If you hadn’t just yelled at me about it, I would have apologized for that, too,” he said, dropping his gaze to somewhere around my feet. “But, um.”
“I don’t want you to apologize,” I agreed. “I like that I can make you lose a little bit of control.”
His eyes narrowed. “A little bit?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t want to get disemboweled,” I replied in a tone that I thought was perfectly reasonable.
Raj looked momentarily horrified. “I would never!”
“I know,” I agreed. “But you could.”
He didn’t say anything to that, but I knew it was true. Instead, he pulled my face to him again, more gently this time, and gave me a soft, lingering kiss. “You’re…” He trailed off.
I frowned. “I’m what?” I asked, apprehensive.
He laughed softly, running the backs of his fingers over the furrow on my forehead. “Don’t frown,” he said. “It’s not a—well,” he laughed again. “Maybe it is, considering how fucked up I am sometimes.”
This only made me more confused.
He kissed my forehead. “You’re just… pretty much perfect for me,” he said, which was so far from what I’d been expecting him to say, that I must have looked utterly baffled, just not in such a negative way any longer.
For some reason, that made him laugh again.
I was glad we weren’t going to fight about this, but I had no idea what was going on as he took my hand and led me back to bed.
Raj was deeply asleep, his chest rising and falling slowly.
I was—obviously—not. I wasn’t upset about the fact that he’d apparently decided I was perfect for him, whatever that meant.
But I couldn’t reconcile that with the fact that we hadn’t actually finished the argument about me walking home from work.
I strongly dislike loose ends, because they leave me feeling like I don’t know whether or not the thing in question is something I have to come back to, and therefore keep thinking about, or something that I’m just supposed to never bring up again.
I didn’t do well with the latter. People would tell me to forget about things sometimes, and I struggled to do that.
I also wasn’t ever sure if I was actually supposed to, or if that was just one of those things people said.
Or if it was a thing some people said and didn’t mean, but something other people said and did mean.
I hated trying to navigate social expectations.
Navigating my own relationship was not proving to be any easier, just in different ways.
Or, at least, about different things. Raj didn’t care about social conventions or politeness, and he never seemed to mind when I asked him to clarify things or explain phrases, but he did have certain expectations about our relationship that I didn’t understand and didn’t usually know to ask about.
Like how I had to accommodate his anxiety about my safety to what I viewed as an irrational degree.
I hadn’t asked, but I was pretty sure that those expectations wouldn’t go in the other direction, since his job periodically required him to be shot at.
I wasn’t sure if there was some rule about the fact that he’d already been doing that when we started dating that meant he could keep doing it, or whether it was because it was an expected part of his job and being kidnapped or run over by a car wasn’t part of mine.
Although maybe getting concussed by a brick was.
At least the stitches had come out almost a week ago, and the injury, while a fresh, pink scar, had pretty much stopped itching.
The headache had lasted three full days, but had been less each day, and that had been gone for a while.
I was still missing snatches of memory from the day or so after the concussion, but I’d felt completely fine for the last week or so.
But fielding angry protestors wasn’t something Raj seemed to be prepared to let me handle, either, and that wasn’t going to stop any time soon.
We had séances for the next two days—Beck in one place, Ward in another—and I knew for certain that there was another protest scheduled against the one on Sunday.
We would be on the top floor of a high-rise, so there was no danger of bricks, and after the last one, the client had promised a dramatic increase in security, both for our welfare and for the peace of mind of the party’s attendees.
Even Mason had agreed to go with Beck, and I felt like he and Raj shared a similar overprotective streak.