Читать книгу The Marked Men Series Books 1–6: Rule, Jet, Rome, Nash, Rowdy, Asa - Jay Crownover - Страница 22

There had been a few moments during the last week that had been so perfect, so poignant, that they froze me with fear and made me want to run the other way as fast and as far as I could. Sitting on the couch in my living room, eating pizza and knocking back a few cold ones while I watched SportsCenter and she did schoolwork on her computer was one of them. Watching her just be had me suddenly feeling like I was suffocating in the rightness of it all, and I had to escape to a burning-hot shower before I did something stupid like ask her to marry me or tell her to take a hike. She just fit. She filled every hole I had in my life and the idea of her not being there, of it going away, terrified me like nothing I had ever felt before. I didn’t want to rely on her, didn’t want to build a mountain out of what might just be an early-in-the-relationship infatuation, but there was something that made me think that if this all went away I would never be the same.

The last few weeks had been amazing. I liked having her in my house and in my life, and I enjoyed making a place for myself in hers. My friends all adored her, and I couldn’t begrudge them the little crushes they’d developed. She was just so endearingly oblivious to her appeal; it was hard not to fall for. I could tell when we left the shop that Cora was a fan. That meant a lot because she was kind of like a big sister, and I trusted her instincts when it came to people. It was what made her such a good shop manager. Shaw was already part of my family, and after I gave her the rundown of what happened on my visit home, she wasted no time in firing off a scathing email to my mother, letting her know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t stand for that behavior and pleading with her to seek help. She had my back, and I wondered again how long she had been fighting for me before I pulled my head out and noticed. It always made me feel like shit.

The quiet moments were settling, and made me feel like I was building a foundation for something great. The passionate moments, the moments where she looked at me like I was a present she had always wanted to unwrap, were enough to make me think I had found the one person who would never bore me in bed. The thing about being the only guy she had ever been with was that I got to teach her everything, and Shaw had always been an A-plus student. Whether it was fast or slow, gentle or rough, a quickie that blew my mind or an all-night session that had her running late for class the next morning—there was no doubt that we were sexually compatible. She was starting to figure out her own preferences; she liked it a little rougher and dirtier than I would have figured her to, for instance. She also managed to find humor in the act when it was awkward or not going the way one of us intended. I couldn’t remember ever having as much fun in bed in my life. I didn’t know it was possible, but she even made sex better and the thought of losing any of it just made me want to fall into a hole and never climb out.

I was trying to shake off the fear. After all, it was just a nice night at home and Nash was gone, so I should be doing my best to make her scream my name over and over again at the top of her lungs. But the doubt lingered and I stayed in the shower until the water ran cold, forcing me to get out. I ran a fuzzy towel over my head and face and secured another one loosely around my waist. I left my clothes in a heap on the floor and wandered into my room, figuring she would still be out in the living room doing her homework and I would have a couple more minutes to get my shit together. Only the TV was off and she was sitting in the middle of my big bed, sipping on the beer I had abandoned when I bolted earlier. As if that wasn’t enough, she was only wearing my T-shirt that had the tattoo shop’s logo on it. It looked better on her than it ever had on me, and she was watching me with very serious eyes the color of new grass.

“What’s going on?”

I cleared my throat and tried to play it off. “Nothing. Why?” Only this was Shaw and she knew my bullshit better than almost anyone. She scooted to the edge of the bed and set the beer down on the nightstand.

“Because you were in there forever and you already took a shower this morning. Something spooked you and you ran. I want to know what it was.”

I considered lying to her, considered telling her that she was just imagining things, but in the end knew that I just needed to come clean and hope that she didn’t freak out because I was so emotionally screwed up.

“All this.” I waved a hand between the two of us. “It’s so easy, so smooth and simple, that sometimes it freaks me out. I’m not used to normal and ordinary, so it makes me nervous. My life was always about trying to grab on to fleeting moments of pleasure, of feeling good, and now I have that all the time with you, and I get lost in my head wondering what I’m going to do to screw it up, or how I’m going to keep it together if you decide to take it away. Sometimes I get sucked into my visions of what could happen and I have a really difficult time staying in the present. Watching TV with you, just being with you, soothes something inside me that I didn’t even know needed soothing, but it also makes something in there cower in fear. I’m sorry.”

She just watched me and I prepared myself for her to get up off the bed and walk out the door. If she did I was pretty sure that, towel or not, I would chase her into the cold and beg until she came back. Instead, she unfolded from the bed and came up to me on bare feet. My shirt covered all the good stuff but just barely. She stopped so that we weren’t touching but we were close enough to share a breath.

“It scares me, too, Rule. I’m not used to ordinary, either, and I never thought I would have that with you, never thought I would have anything with you at all, so it’s okay to get a little lost in your head, as long as you come back and we can talk about it. I’m not going to ask you to give anything you aren’t comfortable with. People have done that to me my entire life and I’m sick of it.”

I exhaled a hard breath and unclenched the fists I hadn’t been aware I had curled up at my sides.

“What if I ask you to give me everything, Shaw? What if I want it all? Won’t that make me just like all the rest of them?”

She made a noise in her throat and then broke into a smile that nearly killed me on the spot. She was just so lovely and pure. “No, because you don’t have to ask for anything. All of it is already yours. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to give it to.”

This girl was going to be the end of me. She put a hand on each of my sides, one splayed over the angel, one splayed over the reaper, and I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest.

“You have to promise not to bail on me when I get lost, Shaw. You have to promise to just wait it out until I can find my way back. I need to know you’re at the end of the tunnel when everything goes black.”

“I know how to wait for you, Rule, and I don’t mind doing it as long as you promise not to shut me out. I can’t do this with you, be so wrapped up in you and what’s happening between us, if you’re going to close the door on me when it gets to be too much. My heart can’t take that.”

“I know.” But I wasn’t sure that was a promise I could keep. My default was to return to what I knew, and that was distance and space, so that I could protect myself. “I can do my best, Shaw, but I told you all along I’m not real sure how to do this whole relationship thing and I’m scared shitless I’m going to do something to screw it up.”

She leaned forward and let her hands glide up around my back and across my shoulders. She pressed a soft, openmouthed kiss to the center of my chest and it made my entire life zero in on that tiny point of contact.

“Well, you can be scared alone or we can be scared together. I prefer the second option, but if you need some space to get your head around it and figure out what you want, I can make that happen. I want to be with you, Rule, but I’m not going to be here with you if it makes you hurt and makes you freak out. We both deserve better than that.”

I wasn’t sure at this point if it was about what I deserved or not, but I wasn’t stupid enough to let what I had with her get demolished under the weight of doubt I couldn’t control. I finally reached out and pulled her to me in a suffocating hug that pressed her length against all my bare skin. I had spent plenty of time with her this morning, making her beg, turning myself inside out, but that didn’t seem to matter, my cock reacted under the towel, letting her know that whatever was going on inside my head had no bearing on how my body felt about her.

“I’m just messed up, Shaw. I’m sorry that I get this way but the last thing I want is to chase my tail all alone.” I kissed her, letting her feel the things I couldn’t say as they burned through my blood. I wanted her always and the idea of that made my knees weak.

She let me devour her mouth, let me get my hands all tangled up rough in her hair, let me press her up against the closest wall and push an insistent erection against her all without complaint or argument. There was no gentleness, no concern for skill or whether or not I was making it feel good for her, all that existed was a blinding need to get inside her, to make her feel the emotion that was making me go crazy. I needed to syphon off some of the want and need, and the only way to do it was to get it out of me and into her. Her head made a dull thunk against the wall and I felt her suck in a tense breath and still none of it gave me pause. The towel hit the floor and my T-shirt offered no resistance as I rushed through getting both of us naked. Somewhere in my head I knew I needed to slow down, needed to get control back, that my hands were too hard on her, that my mouth was going to leave marks, but I couldn’t rein it in.

She whispered my name, tried to get me to slow down, but I didn’t care. I was ready to just move in her, to bury all the fear and uncertainty blindly inside her warm body, but this was a girl who knew all my tricks, knew that I was operating from a place where I probably wouldn’t even remember what I was doing in the morning, and she wasn’t going to let me turn her into another faceless conquest that I used to find silence. Since I no longer had hair and was so much bigger than her, she had to resort to digging her nails into my scalp and pressing her teeth down on my invading tongue to get me to jerk back and give her some breathing room. She struggled to catch her breath and pushed away from the wall by planting her hands in the center of my chest and giving me a hard shove.

I stumbled back a step and shook my head back and forth. “Casper.” I wanted to apologize, wanted to tell her I would never devalue all that she was coming to mean to me on purpose, but she didn’t give me a chance. She stood up on her tiptoes and put a small hand over my mouth. Her green eyes were big and there was a mixture of desire and trepidation in them that twisted my heart into a knot. This girl just simply understood me and wasn’t going to blame me for all the crazy that I had built up inside me.

“Just don’t, Rule.” She moved her hand and kissed me with a million more levels of care than I had just shown her. “You need me to take care of you right now and I’m going to do it, but I’ll be damned if you don’t know it’s me.”

“I know it’s you, Shaw.”

“Good, because for a minute there I wasn’t sure, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much that pissed me off. Now shut up and let me help you out of the dark.”

I went to grab for her, to wrap her up and hold her close, but she evaded my hands and slithered around so that she was on her knees in front of me. I stopped breathing for a second when her lips landed somewhere below my navel, and my abs contracted hard enough that it hurt. We had messed around plenty, but this wasn’t an area she had seemed ready to venture into before now. My dick quivered in anticipation as the tip of her tongue traced the outline of the mermaid I had inked down there, the long tail curling right around the base of my cock. I didn’t know how far she was willing to take it so I gingerly placed my hands on the top of her head. Her hair felt like silk against my fingertips and I stopped moving just in case anything I did was going to make her stop.

“Shaw.” I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask her to keep going or to stop, because I wasn’t sure how much I could take. I felt wound up too tight and too ready to break as it was. “You don’t have to do this.” I meant it when I said it but I also knew there was a good chance I would die if she decided to stop. Her mouth was damp and warm and the apadravya piercing I had through the tip of my dick and the Jacob’s ladder that was spaced out on the underside pulled the sensitive skin taut when she closed it over the eager flesh. My eyes squeezed shut as I hit the back of her throat and every sensation I had ever experienced up to this point in my life ceased to exist.

I had received head from a bunch of different girls in my lifetime, and had enjoyed it pretty much every single time, but there was something about having Shaw on her knees before me, having her suck and pull me into her pretty mouth, that made this experience better than all the rest. I was breathing hard and my knees were suddenly feeling like they weren’t going to hold me up anymore. My cock throbbed in time to my heartbeat, and flesh that was sensitive suddenly felt too tight and ready to split into pieces. I didn’t have the words to encourage her or to tell her what I liked and didn’t like, not that it mattered because, just like with everything else we did in the dark, she seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She played with my piercings, her quick little tongue darting in and around metal that heated and cooled as she moved her mouth around it. I sucked in a breath and tried to stave off the impending orgasm but there was no controlling it. I gasped her name in warning, tried to tug at her long hair to let her know that she might want to get out of firing range, but she wasn’t having any of it. She finished me off like a champ, placed a kiss on my quivering stomach while I tried to get my mind back in working order, and glided to her feet in all her naked glory. She lifted a blond brow and flipped her now tangled and messy hair over her shoulder.

“I’ll always take care of you, Rule. In fact, I like doing it because it makes me happy and it feels good, but I’m not ever going to let you use me to work out your demons like you did with all those girls who came before me, so you better learn the difference.”

I didn’t answer her because she was right. Instead, I picked her up by the waist and tossed her on the bed. I didn’t need to give her time to get ready for me. I was pretty sure that working me over—better than anyone ever had—had done a good job of turning her on and making her wet and slippery. Her folds were already slick and ready for whatever I had to give. When I moved inside I made sure the top ball of my piercing rubbed against her most sensitive parts. Now that we had sex with nothing between us I knew even if I wasn’t particularly stellar in the sack that having all that jewelry down there could and would create a sensation that got her off regardless, not that I didn’t always make it my goal to make her lose her mind. She hooked her legs up around my hips as I moved in and out of her and let her eyes fall to half-mast. I was braced up above her and her hands were wrapped around my biceps. I was pretty sure I could die a happy man having her look up like that at me, with having her moan and writhe beneath me as pleasure shot through her body and made it clench around mine.

I had never really given much thought to monogamy and committing to having sex with only one person over and over again because I had never really seen that as a path I was going to take. With her, I knew it to the bottom of my soul that I would be happy just having her, making her fragment and break apart. When she moaned my name low and needy, it triggered my own release and I buried my face in the delicate curve of her neck and growled like a feral animal. After we were both wrung out, I collapsed on top of her in a boneless heap and felt her wrap her slender arms around me. I kept my face pressed into her neck and gave her a series of butterfly kisses with my eyes closed.

“You make me think everything will be okay.”

She turned her head to give me better access to her neck and rubbed her hands lightly up and down my spine. “All we can do is try, Rule. I’m willing as long as you are. I’m not delusional—I’ve known you a long time and I know it isn’t always going to be easy and fun; that things like pizza and a quiet night at home have the ability to send you into a tailspin—but I’m here as long as you recognize what is happening and agree to try.”

I snickered a little against her damp skin, which made her shiver. “If freaking out means you go down on me to get me to stop acting like an idiot, I can’t promise to knock it off anytime soon.”

She swore and swatted me on my ass. I fell asleep with her wrapped up in my arms and her soft laughter in my ear. The tunnel was long and dark, and sometimes no matter how good my intentions were, the walls tended to close in on me, but if Shaw was willing to be my light at the end, then there was no way I wasn’t going to try.

We were both quiet the next morning when we got up to go back to her car. We stopped at the corner coffee shop for breakfast and neither one of us seemed overly eager to rehash the events of the night before. After a solid night’s sleep and waking up to her peaceful and innocent face I had my head back on straight and was calling myself all kinds of names for letting my usual hang-ups pull me in such a dark direction the night before. Pizza and quiet time on the couch was nothing compared to all the heavy shit I had rattling around in my brain since she made me come clean. I was ashamed that she knew I had been trying to use her body to escape, to take something that was so different with her and on such another level, and drag it down to where every other sexual encounter had begun and ended. If Shaw hadn’t called me on my shit and just let me go, it would have been the end for us. I knew it and I was pretty sure she knew it. Allowing me to put her in a box with all the rest was something she wouldn’t stand for and I was eternally grateful.

It had warmed up just a tad from last night and the icy spots on the sidewalks were now mushy puddles of dirty slush. We navigated around them while balancing hot coffee and trying to stay warm. She had parked her car off the street, a couple blocks over from the shop in one of the neighborhoods. I was getting ready to ask her if she was all right, if everything was still cool between us, but she came to a grinding halt and I almost ran into the back of her. I swore softly as the hot coffee splashed over my hand. “What the hell, Shaw?”

She didn’t move and I had to jump back when her coffee slid out of a suddenly lifeless hand and clattered on the snowy ground. She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth and before I could ask again what was wrong a pickup truck that was waiting to make a left-hand turn moved and I caught sight of her car.

All the windows were smashed out, the headlights had been shattered; all four tires were on the metal rim on the ground, the slashed rubber sitting lifelessly around them like tattered material. The pristine black paint job was now marred with ugly red spray paint that had even uglier words blazed across the surface. The hood had the word whore in huge letters and along each side of the car from front to trunk were variations of the same thing. It was bad and, considering what kind of car she drove, it was also going to be extremely costly to fix.

I could see that she was shaking, so I put an arm around her shoulders and tugged her to my chest. At first she resisted, standing stone still, eyes locked on the senseless destruction, but when I applied just a little more pressure she came willingly and I tucked her head up under my chin.

“We should probably call the cops.”

She shuddered against me and I felt her head move “no” against my throat. “No. What’s the point? His dad will just cover for him again and make it all go away. Besides, it’s not like there is any proof he did it.”

I hated that she was probably right. “Do you want me to take you to school? I can get this taken care of for you while you’re there.”

“No. I need to call the insurance company and have it towed somewhere. Why can’t he just leave me alone?”

I ran a hand lightly from the crown of her head to the ends of her almost-white hair. “Because you’re kind of impossible to get over.”

She sighed against my neck and just let me hold her until she stopped shaking. “I guess I need to go back to your place and get this taken care of.”

“Of course.” I handed her what was left of my coffee and made sure I kept her tucked in close to my side on the way back to the Victorian. We were both quiet—now for different reasons—but I knew I needed to keep the rage that was practically choking me at bay until I got her somewhere safe and where she felt secure. Having something destroyed like that must have been a violation like I couldn’t imagine. Even though Gabe had been quiet the last few weeks it was clear now he had no intention of letting go of his obsession with my girl.

When we got back inside, she started calling around, getting things in place for an adjuster to check out the damage and have the car towed to a body shop. She needed a rental in the meantime and wasted no time in setting that up as well. After about an hour or two, during which I just watched her like a hawk, all the adrenaline finally wore her out and she mentioned that she wanted to take a shower and lie down. I sent her off to my room with gritted teeth and a kiss, hoping she couldn’t feel the fury that was burning in every cell of my body.

Nash came crawling in a few minutes after I heard the hot water turn on. He looked a little worse for the wear but he had a shit-eating grin on his face and his shirt was on inside out so I assumed the date had served its purpose. He took one look at the way my jaw was clenched and the way I’m sure my eyes were flashing with platinum fire and asked, “Bad night?”

“Bad morning. Shaw’s car got trashed last night.”

“You think it was Polo Shirt?”

“Who else would do something like that to her?”

“I dunno. One of your legions of one-night stands who’s pissed you’re off the market? You both have some pretty heavy baggage floating around out there.”

I hadn’t even considered that I might be the cause of retaliation against her. That just made me even angrier. I inclined my head toward my bedroom.

“Can you keep an eye on her until I get back? She seemed okay but I could tell she was pretty shaken up.”

“Where are you going? I have to be at the shop at one.”

“I’ll be back before then.”

“Rule …”

“Just don’t, Nash; it’s long past time for me to lose my shit. This asshole is going to hear it from me that if he keeps messing with her I’m going to annihilate him.”

“You’re asking for trouble and not in a good way.”

“I don’t care. I’ll be back in a few. Just keep an eye on Shaw and if she asks where I am make something up. She doesn’t need to worry about anything else today.”

He grudgingly agreed, but I could tell he was not stoked with what I was about to do.

I jumped in the truck and drove to the school. I knew that Shaw had class the same time as Gabe on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays so after I found a place to park it only took a nod at one coed and a wink at another to find my way to where all the political science classes were held. It was cold outside and students were hurrying from building to building with their heads down, so no one really paid any attention to me as I lurked around the building that I was sure Gabe would eventually come out of. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long, and campus security had already passed by without so much as a pause. Twenty minutes into my vigil the doors opened and a group of dudes who looked like they had emptied out a J.Crew store and topped it off with L.L.Bean’s winter line came pouring out. They were all laughing and talking about something and Davenport looked so self-satisfied I wanted to knock his pearly whites down his throat.

I waited until the group dispersed and it was just Davenport by himself. He pulled the collar of his Patagonia jacket up around his ears and pulled out his cell phone. I pushed off the wall of the building I was leaning against and silently followed him until he reached the parking lot. When he stopped by the Lexus, I reached out and grabbed the back of his neck and shoved him forward so that his face was smashed against the freezing metal of the roof. He let out a surprised sound and the bag with his books and computer in it clattered to the ground. He struggled but I had a good grip and was fueled by a burning fury so he didn’t have a chance. I leaned forward so that my elbow ground painfully into the base of his neck and tightened my fingers until I felt his skin start to resist.

“You want to harass someone, scare someone, terrorize someone, you might want to pick someone who doesn’t have a pissed-off boyfriend waiting around the corner, preppy boy. This is the last time I’m going to tell you to leave Shaw the hell alone. If you don’t, that fancy Ken Doll face you seem so fond of is going to end up like hamburger.” I gave him another shove so that the metal smacked unforgivingly against his cheek. People were wandering around the parking lot and stopped to stare at us but I didn’t care. “Are we clear?”

He grunted and got his hands under his chest so that he could lever himself off the side of the car. I let him go and stepped back, hands hanging loose at my sides in case he decided he wanted to throw down right then and there. He smoothed down the hair my rough handling had messed up and glared at me while working his jaw back and forth.

“We both know my father can keep me out of jail, what can yours do for you? Change a tire, help you move?” He laughed bitterly and spit out a mouthful of blood that narrowly missed the toe of my boot. “You aren’t a match for me in the real world. You can call yourself her boyfriend all you want but the fact of the matter is she simply isn’t allowed to walk away from me for someone like you. It sets a bad precedent.”

I thought he was just spoiled and annoying, but the more he talked the more I started to wonder about his sanity. The guy talked like a lunatic.

“Dude, go fuck someone else. Shaw isn’t into you, she never will be, and harassing her is just pissing everyone off. If you think I’m scared of what your dad or anyone else can do to me, if it means protecting her, then you’re in for a shock. Even if you manage to get me out of the way, there is a whole group of people out there ready to take my place. You aren’t going to get anywhere messing with her and if you ever touch her again, I’m going to snap every single one of your fingers off and cram them down your throat.”

He scoffed at me and poked a finger in my chest. He was lucky I didn’t knock him in the mouth. “You’re so stupid, so uneducated, and low class to think it has anything to do with sex. I can get sex anywhere. You really think I let Shaw dangle her ass in front of me for six months and didn’t get some on the side? Sex is irrelevant and if she’s giving it up to you I don’t want to go near her with a ten-foot pole. This is business and image; she can’t set a precedent that I’m replaceable with a tattooed punk who has nothing to offer. I can’t have people remembering that.”

I grabbed the wrist of the hand that was poking me and shoved him back into the car. “If you think sex with Shaw is irrelevant, then you’re the one who’s uneducated, jackass. Get over yourself. If I can prove that you had anything to do with her car, we’re pressing charges. If you keep harassing her, we’ll keep going to court and eventually someone will notice your old man covering your ass. I’m telling you this stops now or you can go to the hospital and I can spend some time in jail, got it?”

We stared each other down. By now there was a sizable crowd gathered around while we sized each other up. I didn’t see the security guard until he was getting between the two of us. Before he could start asking questions, I flipped Gabe off and headed back to the side street where I had parked the truck. The guard called something after me and I heard Davenport’s raised voice, but I didn’t stop until I was back in the truck and had the heater blasting. I flexed my hands repeatedly on the steering wheel and took a few deep breaths to get myself back under control. The last time I had felt this amount of impotent anger, this unfinished need to destroy something, was when I had watched them put my brother in the ground. I wanted to tear Polo Shirt’s perfectly tailored body apart seam by seam and watch him suffer. Pushing him around and making him uncomfortable just wasn’t enough. The darkness, the unpredictability that lurked inside me reared up again and wanted unbridled vengeance, but I had to put it back in the box because I wasn’t going to make Shaw wrestle with it again so soon.

It took me a solid half hour before I felt like I was ready to go home and face her. When I walked in the door, Nash was playing one of the game units and screaming a mouthful of obscenities through the headset at whomever he was playing with. He ripped the gear off and gave me a once-over as I shut the door and climbed to his feet.

“I don’t see any blood or gore.”

I shrugged and tossed my jacket on the back of the couch. “Too many people around. Plus, I think kicking his ass would only encourage him. The guy has a whole toolbox of screws loose. It isn’t even about Shaw; it’s all about how it looks that she dumped him and is hanging out with me. His ego is out of this world. I seriously don’t know what we’re going to do about it because he’s right about his dad being able to cover for him; he already proved it once.”

Nash jerked his head in the direction of my room. “She hasn’t made a sound. She never surfaced after the shower so I don’t know how she’s doing, but I have to go or I’m going to be late for my appointment and I still need to tweak the drawing a little.”

“It’s cool, I got her. Maybe she was just so stressed out she slept the whole time.”

“You could only be so lucky, bro.”

I snorted and waved him off as I headed toward my room. The door was closed and everything was dark when I pushed it open. Shaw was curled up in a fetal position in the center of the bed and it didn’t take a genius to tell she was wide awake and had been crying. She had her hands tucked up under her cheek and was staring sightlessly at the blank TV.

“What did you do to him?” Her voice was raw and even more husky than normal from crying. I sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to run a hand over her thigh.

“I told him to back off and that it wasn’t smart to piss off someone who had me as a boyfriend. I don’t know what his deal is, Shaw—I think the dude is certifiable. He just doesn’t relate on any kind of logical level.”

“I thought you were going to hurt him.”

“Well, I might have but it was broad daylight and there was an entire college of students walking around. I pushed him around a little and we tossed some crap at each other, but I just mostly wanted him to know you aren’t alone, that if he hurts you there are plenty of people waiting in the wings to hurt him back.”

Silent tears ran down her face and I had to lean all the way over her supine form to wipe them away with my thumbs.

“I just want him to go away. I never did anything to deserve this. All I ever do is what everyone else wants. Why I am being punished for doing the one thing in life I want for myself?”

“I don’t know, Casper, I just don’t know.” I didn’t know how to make her feel better so I just scooted up on the bed behind her and gathered her up in my arms while she cried. I didn’t consider myself an empathetic or even a compassionate guy. I was usually too wrapped up in my own head and my own spiral of emotional nonsense to pay much attention to anyone else’s, but holding Shaw while she cried changed something in me on a fundamental level. I felt like there was nothing on earth I wouldn’t do or wouldn’t give to make this better for her. I felt like a failure for not stopping it from happening in the first place, and I knew that from this point on, keeping an eye on her and keeping her relatively safe from just Davenport wasn’t enough.

Suddenly, with blinding clarity, I knew that I wanted to keep her safe from anything that could hurt her, and that just sucked, because I had a sneaking suspicion that somewhere along the line I had been the source of just as much distress as Polo Shirt was proving to be. That made me want to break things all over again.