“Need to stop?”
He shakes his head, and she doesn’t waste time getting back to work.
“How short do you want it?” she asks. “Like the last time I saw you? Somewhere in between?”
“Until you think it looks like me.”
She takes roughly three inches off the mess of hair and can’t help but run her fingers through it and across his scalp. She’s taking liberties, but he doesn’t say a word. The shiver that runs through him feeds into her hands and up her arm like a current.
“Okay?” she whispers.
“Mhmm.”
He’s so painfully close that she nearly wraps her arms around him to pull him in. Manages to throttle that desire, but still takes full advantage of the access she’s been granted. Her fingers find the smallest dip just past his hairline. A fracture or crack that never healed properly. She shouldn’t risk dragging up bad memories, but curiosity wins. “What happened here?”
“They told me they had you. That they were doing the same things to you that they were doing to me. Couldn’t get the door open. Couldn’t get out….and then the wall looked like a good option.”
He thought she was suffering and, rather than live with that, he tried to knock himself out.
“But then I saw you again,” he continues, one hand coming up to land tentatively at her hip.
He told her she came to him in dreams. She’s only grateful her likeness could help when the real her couldn’t.
She isn’t sure if his fingers follow the scar on her belly on purpose or if he landed there by chance. She guides him under the fabric to splay a flat palm against the jagged edges.
“I had one of them cornered in this old factory. He told me he knew where you were. That he could take me to you if I spared him.” Her eyes close, and her hand tightens to press his harder against her ribs. “And then he smiled and slit his own throat. So loyal to Silas that he’d rather die than betray him…and I lost it. Tore the whole room apart and threw a wrench against the wall. It bounced back and caught me here. It bled for so long. I cracked a rib at least, maybe broke it, I don’t know, but I couldn’t breathe right for two weeks.”
She’d been so angry at having come so close, only to have it snatched away. Laid on the floor of that warehouse while the gash in her side bled, and wondered if her journey would end there.
Her breath hitches as he sways a fraction until his forehead comes to rest against her lower belly. Her instinct is to welcome him in against her, stroking freshly cut hair and curving an arm around his shoulders. He doesn’t balk like she expects, though his hands still tremble as they travel across bare skin. He roams the expanse of her back and down to the waistband at her hips.
It’s not meant to be erotic, she knows that. A throb between her legs picks up a gentle cadence anyway. She wonders if he can feel her pulse where he’s pressed so close, or smell her arousal. Her body has an agenda all its own, and she frantically tries to tamp that down.
She wants to beg him to touch her, so willing and needy that he could do anything right now and she’d gladly accept it.
His forehead rolls against her stomach, nose nuzzling just below her belly button. Kara arches toward him without realizing what she’s done, heart in her throat when the tips of his thumbs dip into the hollow of her hips.
And then he stops, muffling a frustrated sound against her. “I don’t wanna be like this anymore. Why can’t I stop? It’s over. It’s all over and I’m still…”
“You’re so hard on yourself, Wade. If it were me in your place, you’d be so patient. I know you would. But you can’t give yourself the same grace. Why?”
“Don’t deserve it.”
“That isn’t true.” She knows he’s ashamed of whatever he had to do to survive, and of what they’ve done to him that he couldn’t prevent.
She’s the wrong person to help anyone through this. Hadn’t been able to work through much of her own traumas before even more piled up. She now holds a pile of guilt and shame a mile wide and at least three miles deep.
“There are things I haven’t told you either. Things I’ve done. Things I’m ashamed of.” Her worst sin flickers in her mind’s eye, an image of that child at one of Silas’s outposts, her whole life altered because of Kara. “Maybe one day we can—”
She’s cut off by a knock at the door that has the dog barking and Wade rushing from the bathroom before she can process the change.
He’s wild-eyed when she finds him with the shotgun in his hands. “It’s them. You gotta run. Out the back, just go. Go!”
She’s ninety percent sure it’s not the enemy, but Wade is so certain that he’s already flipped the safety off the gun. “I’m going to look. I’ll be quick.It’s okay. It’s okay.”
They’ve been here before. She briefly considers setting a trap near the porch so unwanted guests never get this far again.
“I need you to hold the dog back,” she tries, knowing full well he’ll have to release one hand from the gun to grab the animal.
