Page 50 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“You told me I was a means to an end,” I continue, because I can't seem to stop myself, because apparently standing on wet asphalt in my bra in the middle of the night is when I develop the courage I should have found six months ago. “You told me to get rid of our baby. So the man I call to come and get me is none of your business, Xaden. Not anymore.”

Something moves through his expression.

Gone before I can name it.

“You're half naked,” he says finally.

“You took my shirt.”

“I was checking you for a wire.”

“You took my shirt,” I repeat, slower, like he's missing something obvious. “And then you said what you said. And then I left. So here we are.”

He crosses the distance between us before I can step back, and I force myself to hold my ground even as every nerve ending in my body fires in that particular traitorous way they always do when he gets close. He stops a foot away. Close enough that I can see the water still beading at his hairline. Close enough that the warmth of him cuts through the cold of the night air.

He looks down at me and says nothing for a long moment.

Then, very slowly, he pulls the Stormsend Ravens hoodie over his head.

I stare at him.

He holds it out.

“Don't make it something it isn't,” he says quietly.

I look at the hoodie. I look at him. I look at the way he's standing there in just a damp T-shirt, jaw set, eyes hard, holding out a piece of his clothing like it costs him absolutely nothing, while somehow costing him everything.

I take it.

Not because it means something. Not because I'm forgiving him. Because it's cold and I'm standing in a parking lot in my bra and whatever dignity I have left doesn't require me to freeze.

I pull it over my head and the smell of him engulfs me, cedar and salt water and something darker underneath. I hate that I recognize it. I hate that I want to press my face into the collar and stay there.

I don't.

I look up at him and steel every part of myself that wants to reach out.

“Thank you,” I say evenly.

He says nothing. Just looks at me in that way he has, like he's cataloguing damage.

The headlights appear at the far end of the lot.

I know the moment Carnage clocks Xaden.

The car doesn't slow, it pulls into the lot at a steady pace and comes to a stop mere feet from where we're standing, and Carnage gets out before the engine fully cuts. He moves the way he always moves, deliberate and contained, but I've been around him long enough to read the things underneath the containment. The slight forward lean. The way his hands come out of his jacket pockets and stay loose at his sides.

He's in pain.

Even at this distance, even moving the way he forces himself to move so no one can see it, I know. The bullet wound in his side from the ambush is still healing. Has been healing for weeks. The field dressing and the medic and the twenty-four hour window that felt like watching someone hold themselves together with sheer force of will.

He should be in bed.

He came anyway.

Of course he did.

His eyes find me first, a fast sweep that clocks the hoodie, the wet hair, the bare feet shoved back into my shoes, all of it, and something moves through his expression that he smooths away before it can settle. Then he looks at Xaden.