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“Asher?” he pressed when I didn’t answer.
I fisted my hands in his soaked tank to hide their trembling, my voice hoarse as I managed to force out, “Get it off me.”
He stilled for a moment, then resumed his careful strokes with the cloth, soaping me up, taking it away a little bit at a time, lifting some of that weight as he went.
“I thought about you every day that you were gone,” he uttered on a broken whisper. “Bringing you back, all the ways I’d rip apart those fuckers for daring to touch you, for taking you from me. The bloodied and dark-as-fuck form of justice I’d planned to unleash on them is way beyond anything I’ve done before. Complete decimation, brother. Not even ashes left when I’m done.”
He was trying to ignite my violent and brutal side to take away from all the rest.
And he was doing a fair job of it.
It would’ve probably worked if I wasn’t devoid of my usual energy.
If my mind wasn’t… compromised.
As it was, I found myself focusing on what lay beneath. His pain for me. His fear of losing me. It was so raw, more than ever before, because of what had happened between us in my bedroom shortly before the night of the gala.
“I missed you too.”
I brought my other hand up and sank it into his hair.
His eyes briefly fluttered closed, a deep moan rumbling from him.
And then he nuzzled his cheek against mine.
I let it happen, breathing in his familiar woodsy scent, his familiar touch and separating the latter from everything else.
The trembling ceased, the need to pull away, as I focused on the moment, who he was to me, and nothing else.
And then I found myself sinking into him.
He was here.
He was always here.
And after far too long I was finally able to acknowledge it for what it was.
Every. Fucking. Thing.
“You hold me to this plane. You’re with me even through the worst of it all, through the worst of me. You tether me to my fucking sanity, to my humanity.”
The whispered words left me in a hoarse whisper, a raw confession that demanded breath, “I love you.”
He froze in utter startlement.
I heard him suck in a breath.
And then he cupped the back of my head, holding me to him, needing to.
“Fuck,” he breathed against me. “I fucking love you, too. Always have, always will.”
I wasn’t sure how long we stayed like that.
I knew it was long enough until my body grew weary again.
But then he just took my weight.
And he kept his promise to cleanse them from me, the cloth gliding carefully over my skin as he kept contact with his free hand, never moving my head from his shoulder, his hand from my hair, never breaking the connection.
