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On a choked whimper that gave too much away of what I was feeling, my forehead slammed into his chest. His arm went up my back and remained there, sifting through my hair as I tried to pull myself together.
He was, at once, both right and wrong. It should always be okay to stop, to want to slow things down, to need things to go at my own pace. That was my right and no one should make me feel guilty for that. But he was wrong too. Because he didn't understand. He didn't know what it was like to not want to stop, but to need to. He didn't know how it felt to feel ripped in two with desire and fear. He couldn't comprehend the struggle to overcome an invasion and move forward from it, to fear hands that wanted to give pleasure because there once had been hands that had caused pain.
"Janie," his breath made my hair flutter slightly. "Don't," he demanded.
"Don't what?" I heard myself croak, the tears stinging at the back of my eyes, begging to be released once and for all.
"Go there," he clarified. "Don't go there."
"How can I not go there? I live there," I told his chest, my voice both strong and weak at once. "It's everywhere. It's in everything. It won't go away. It won't let me..."
"You wear it."
"How can I not? It's etched into my skin. I can't scrub if off. I've tried. I've tried everything." My breath hitched, making me bite hard into my lip to keep any other sounds from coming out.
He silently pushed me backward and reached between us, taking the wrist of my un-burned arm and stroking up my skin, no doubt feeling the raised lines underneath the tattoos, touching the scars. "Covered them."
"Didn't work either," I admitted, keeping my eyes down, not trusting myself to make eye contact when I was so close to tears.
"No," he agreed. "But made it into something beautiful." My head snapped up then, looking for an excuse in his face to not believe him, to deny deny deny. But I found nothing there. "Beautiful," he repeated and it sent a shiver across my skin, soaking in like a healing salve.
"Wolf..."
"Don't regret me," he said, a vulnerability in his tone that I had never heard before, that I wasn't sure I believed he was capable of until that moment.
It was my turn. To comfort, to soothe. It wasn't a role I was familiar with, it wasn't one I felt fit to play. But he had been so good to me, so understanding, undemanding. I owed it to him to try.
My hand raised slowly, his hand still holding it at the wrist, and moved to the side of his face, resting there. "I don't regret you. It's weird and it's warped and I'm pretty sure I need therapy for thinking this, let alone admitting it... but I've felt okay here. That sounds strange," I said, searching for the right words. I seemed full of the wrong ones all of a sudden. I sucked in a breath and charged on, ignoring the sharp twisting inside that was trying to make me clam up, to keep him from getting any further under my walls. "It's like... I feel like every day of my life for eight years I have been wearing a mask. I try to hide it, disguise it, pretend it isn't there. But it's there and all I've accomplished by denying it is making sure no one can ever really know me. No one. Not even Lo. It's... made me unknowable. It has made me alone even in a room full of friends. But you..."
"Saw under the mask," he supplied when the words failed me.
I felt myself nodding. "I don't need to pretend here. It's... safe here." I threw myself onto my back on a strange, hysterical-sounding laugh, covering my face with my hands. "Like I said... I think that proves I need some serious head shrinking."
My arms were snagged at the wrists and pulled away. "Stop hiding," he said with a pointed brow raise. Then he reached across my body and grabbed my book off the bed where it had fallen when I passed out. He pressed it into my hands, reaching down and dragging the blankets back over our bodies. He settled in beside me, one arm draped across my belly. At my questioning look, he settled his head into the space above my shoulder. "You won't sleep," he said simply, knowing it was the truth. "You read. I'll sleep."
And there it was: acceptance.
He knew.
He saw.
And he didn't shrink away; he didn't look at me any different.
He saw and he accepted.
His breath warmed my neck and chest, his arm was a comforting weight across my middle, his massive body beside me, curled toward me, offering protection.
And, again, the word flashed across my mind, it burrowed deep into my soul:
Safe.
I was safe.
So I read. And Wolf slept.EIGHTJanieWolf's body didn't move all night, my sleeping, stalwart protector. He drifted awake a few minutes after I finished the book, turning his face in toward my neck slightly and planting a soft kiss there. My stomach clenched at the normalcy of it, the casual intimacy, like he did it every morning. But then he rolled away casually, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. "Good book?"
I almost wanted to laugh. "Yeah," I said, smiling wide at his profile, a happiness inside me that felt foreign and almost overwhelming.
His head tilted in my direction, his eyes drifting over my face for a long moment and I watched as something strange happened, a shutter closed down over his eyes. While the honey-colored depths always hinted at a bit of distance, there had always been an openness there. Right then, it was gone completely. He shut down. He shut me out.
"Shower first," he commanded, bolting off the bed and making his way toward the door, Harley and Chopper jumping up to follow.
The door slammed and I sat up slowly staring at it. What the hell was that? Like, I got that he had walls. There was nothing about Wolf that suggested he had escaped from his past unscathed and completely well-adjusted. I mean he couldn't have a normal conversation for chrissake. Suddenly, I found myself wanting to know every detail. He implied he had done something bad, something that didn't help him, but had helped his mother. Did he do something to his father? Or his mother's boyfriend or something? I wanted to know. I wanted to know every gory detail.
