Page 107 of Wretched Thorns

“Yeah.”

“Lay it down.”

“Yeah.” He laid the towel down. His eyes stayed gold. He poured more salve into the tub. The water carried the salve into the burn, and the sting at my wrists eased by a degree, and he moved on up my arm to my throat.

When he came to the bruise at my collarbone he stopped again. I looked at his face for the first time since he had stepped into the room. He could not touch it. The wolf riding just under his skin was not the wolf I had watched tear across the field at the end. This one was looking at the place where two of his brothers and the man we had killed had all put their hands on me inside of two days, and it could not bring itself to touch it. Not tonight.

I lifted my hand out of the water, took his wrist, and moved his hand to the bruise myself.

“Touch it.”

“Serena.”

“Touch it.” He did. His thumb came down so carefully it was almost not there at all. I kept my fingers wrapped around his wrist. “That one is mine,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Marcus didn’t get to keep it. None of you did either. I’m the one wearing it.”

“Yeah.”

“So touch it like it’s mine, like it’s me.”

He did. He bent and kissed it once. Not the wolf’s kiss and not the lover’s, but the kiss of a man who has been asked to do one specific thing and is doing it exactly. Then he drew back and went on.

He washed the rest of me without speaking, his eyes on the cloth, and the salve spread through the water until the rib eased and the wrists eased and the bruise stopped being pain. The bruise had stopped being pain a while back. It was the place I had carried Callum’s mouth and Marcus’s sigil burn and Eli’s anchor and now Jasper’s careful thumb, all of it layered into one tender spot over my heart, and pain was the wrong word for a thing that held all of that.

I did not want him to finish, move away, and just keep watch from across the room. I had spent days being manhandled by hands I didn’t want near me, and even beautiful moments stolen in a dream realm were still just dreams. He was here. He was real, this was real, sleeves soaked to the elbow, his wolf banked down behind his eyes for my sake, and I wanted, more than I wanted to be clean or warm or safe, to be touched by someone who was in the room.

“Jasper.”

“Yeah.”

“Touch me.”

He went still. The gold came up in his eyes and this time he let it stay, and he searched my face. “You’re hurt,” he said. It was not a no. It was a man telling me the truth before he let me have what I was asking for.

“I know I’m hurt,” I said. “And I know I’m asking, what I want. I won’t let you hurt me.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

That undid something in him. He leaned over the lip of the tub, slow, giving me the whole way to change my mind, and he kissed me. Not the careful kiss he had given the bruise. This was the lover’s kiss, the one he had held in check earlier. He kissed me like he had been starving and had decided to be gentle about it anyway, and the gentleness was the part that broke me open.

I got a fistful of his wet shirt and he came down to me, careful of the rib, one hand sliding into the water to find me and the other braced on the floor so none of his weight came down where it would hurt. His fingers caressed me softly, slowly. He kept his mouth at mine and read every sound I made and gave me back exactly what each one asked for, no more, like a man handling something precious. The heat built low and unhurried, and when it took me, it took me quietly, my forehead against his jaw, his name coming out of me on a breath instead of a cry, and him holding himself still so as to not put any weight on me.

He did not bite me. The want of it ran through him the same way it had in the grove, hard enough to bend the air, and he pushed it down. I felt the cost of it to my very soul. He left no mark. That was the thing I understood, after, with my cheek against his wet collar and the gold easing back out of his eyes: Callum had given me a lover’s mark and Eli had given me a sigil, and Jasper, who wanted to put his teeth in me as much as either of them, gave me the one thing it cost him most to give, which was nothing at all. He took nothing, and he left nothing, and he stayed.

After a while he sat back on his heels and did not speak for a long moment. Then he opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again.

“Serena.”

“Don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Not tonight.”