Page 97 of Watched

“Baby?”

I blink. “Thank you.”

He stares for a beat, seeming to not expect my gratitude. “I’d do anything for you.”

Maybe the full knowledge of what he just confessed hasn’t completely sunk in yet. Maybe I’m making excuses. I don’t know yet.

That soft smile returns. “Can I ask you something?”

I shift, feeling and hearing my stomach detach from his. “Um, can you ask it in the shower, perhaps? I’m a little…uncomfortable.”

I sit back as he sits up. The next thing I know, he’s holding the backs of my thighs and lifting me as he stands.

“Don’t do that,” I snap.

He stops in the bathroom doorway. “Excuse me?”

“Lift me like this. It’s emasculating.”

That pissed off expression I haven’t seen since he held a bat to my face emerges. “Don’t ever, ever use that word. Carrying someone is not bound to a specific gender, because I know for a fact that’s what you’re thinking.” It is. “If I want to carry the love of my life to the shower, then I will.”

My heart jumps, and we both stare, shocked at the words he just let free.

He groans, resting his forehead against mine. “I wanted to say that in a better setting than this one, but…I love you, Rome.” My fingers dig into his shoulders, that dreaded knot tying itself in my stomach. His eyes lift to stare into mine, looking somewhat pained. “I cannot bear a second away from you. If I’m not with you, I’m thinking about you, or painting you. I am so helplessly in-love with you I cannot fathom the thought of a future without you.” His eyes melt with an endearing smile. “I just need you to know that, baby.”

My lids flutter shut as his lips softly press to mine, my heart jumping frantically around my chest. He doesn’t seem at all disappointed that I didn’t say it back just now. I feel incredibly rude that I haven’t uttered a single word.

What do I say? Thank you? I know you do? Your actions have made it clear? I’m a fucked-up person with an extreme amount of emotional baggage, so actually loving someone scares the living shit out of me?

Nothing seems right.

He gently places me down in the shower, and I swipe back my hair under the water. He takes the body wash and wash cloth, eyes locked to mine as he pulls half my drenched body out, takes my left hand, and gently begins washing my arm.

“You had a question?” I whisper through the strangling tension.

“That tattoo on your shoulder.” He scrubs up my arm to the lake, tracing the skull on my bicep with his finger. “Does it have any personal meaning?”

I stare at the bubbles popping over the reminder of the last time I felt confident in my own skin. “When I was thirteen, my family went to Switzerland on a holiday. There was a lake we sat beside for a picnic. We laughed the entire time.” I let my eyes find his as he moves the soapy cloth across my tightening chest.

His movements are opposite to how I usually scrub myself. He’s light. Careful.

“A month later, I told my parents I was gay. From then on, I felt as though icy water was rushing through me each time they looked at me.”

His gaze slides back to the skull. “Thank you for explaining that. Your pneumonia—”

“I was stressed afterward. I trained in the rain and fell ill a week later.”

I had the idea for the tattoo when I was sixteen, and I got it done a week after I turned eighteen. After that, I added a leafless tree on my inner forearm, a dying rose on the other side, its dead petals whisking away to surround the skull. The most recent is the butterfly on my chest. The wing on my right peck is intact, the one on my left bone.

I watch his eyes trace his movements over my entire body until I’m clean. He takes my shampoo next and begins massaging it in. “This is what I wanted to do the first night we had sex.”

“I can wash myself. I’m not a child.”

“And deprive me of having you beneath my fingers? I think not.”

My heart swells as I grip his waist and let my eyes close, the hairs on my neck standing at the welcoming sensation of his fingers gliding through my hair and massaging the throb from my scalp.

“Sum qui sum.” The foreign phase rolls off his tongue.