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His hands settled on my hips, pulling me up from my seat onto his body. I was thankful for the contact, for the slight pain that came from the way he gripped me.
“I can be all of those things,” he continued, inches from my face. “Because the world cut me when my skin was soft, and I scarred all over so no one would ever make me bleed again. I hardened against the world in order to never hurt, to make sure I was only ever the one who did the hurting.” He lifted his hand to stroke my face. “But now I have you, and I need to be soft with you. And I don’t know fucking how.”
The utter helplessness is his voice penetrated my layers. All of them. Hit the core of me, the part that was still bleeding from his betrayal, the part that was in pieces from my mother’s death and everything left unresolved with my mother. As furious as I was with him, it wasn’t as simple as holding on to my grudge and punishing him.
I moved my hand up to grip his neck, to press him even closer to me, to ensure he couldn’t move away from me.
“You’re doing it right now,” I whispered. “You’re being your own wonderful brand of soft. I don’t need anything else but you.”
“We need to talk about—”
I put my finger to his lips before he could say her name. I couldn’t hear it right now.
“We do,” I agreed, rage a simmering flame beneath it all. “But not now.”
He searched my face. I knew that Jay was not the kind of person to put off difficult conversations. I also knew that Jay was not the kind of person to put off a difficult conversation just because someone else didn’t want to have it.
But he nodded, leaning forward to kiss my head. “Not now,” he agreed.
“Can you do something for me?” I whispered, clinging onto him.
“Anything.”
I pulled back so I could stare at him. “Fuck me,” I rasped.
His eyes turned dark. “I can do that, Stella.”
And he did.
Twice.
One Week Later
My mother’s funeral was sparsely attended. Very fucking sparsely. Wren, Yasmin and Zoe had attended, of course. They’d arrived the same day I’d called them with the news, dropping everything without hesitation. Wren brought twenty-year-old scotch with her, my father’s favorite. She got drunk with him the first night she arrived, tending to his emotional wounds in a way only Wren could. Zoe organized the entire funeral and wake, and Yasmin dealt with all of the legal stuff that came with death—apparently a lot. And all three of them packed up my mother’s room in the facility with me, giving me shots of vodka as needed. So yeah, I had the best fucking friends.
Right now, I had the best fucking friends. But how long would they stay if my mind started fracturing, if I began to depart from who I used to be?
I suddenly had morbid thoughts about my own funeral, who would attend it, and hated that my mother hadn’t had ride or die girlfriends to help her through the hard times in her life. Then I had the selfish, horrible thought of what my funeral would look like if I followed in her footsteps, losing myself and losing everything and everyone in my life.
I guessed it was a good thing that her funeral was so poorly attended, since my father refused to let me help pay for it, and he sure as shit wasn’t going to let Jay spend a dime on it. It was a male pride thing, obviously, and as much as it pissed me off, it was my father. I’d tried to argue with him about it, but then he went and broke my heart.
“This is my job as her husband, Stells,” he explained, eyes tired and full of sorrow. “Because that’s what I have been all these years, that’s what I still am. A husband takes care of his wife. Protects her. I couldn’t protect her from the demons inside of her own head, couldn’t fix her. But this, this is something I can do for my wife. This one of the last things I will do to take care of her, other than take care of you.” He cupped my cheek and his eyes went to where Jay was standing outside with a phone at his ear. “I know there is another man whose job it is to do that now, but I’ll always be there. No matter what.
“And I’ll always need you, Dad,” I croaked out. “Always.”
He’d hugged me as I broke down in tears, furious at myself for not being able to hold it together in order for my dad to fall apart. But then again, Jay was always around—not that I was complaining—and my dad may have been grieving, may have been heartbroken, but he was also an alpha male, Midwestern man whose values were outdated but strong, which meant he wasn’t about to let another man see him look weak.
