AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 11
I went back, the night Rhys and I first slept together. After I got his text telling me why he wanted me, even though I was getting off the train in my neighborhood, I turned around and went straight back. Because I didn’t know what to say in return and I couldn’t bear to say nothing.
He answered the door looking hopeful and nervous, and I felt flayed open.
“You came back.”
“No one’s ever said shit like that to me before. I don’t . . . I don’t know what to do.”
Rhys reached out, took me by the wrist, and tugged me inside. He pulled me back to bed and took my clothes off.
“Let’s pretend you didn’t leave and I got to say it to you in person.”
Behind my ribs, my heart was beating desperately, blood rushing to my head and in my ears. I was drunk on my own body’s reaction to the promise of care. It’s my only explanation for how I was able to say it.
“Would you? Will you say it to me?” I asked. I pressed a hand to Rhys’s broad chest, and I felt his heart working just like mine. That’s what we were—two hearts, straining ever toward each other.
His eyelashes fluttered and when he looked at me, nose nearly touching mine, his eyes were the crystalline blue of glacial ice, faceted and glowing.
“Yeah, but you can’t laugh.” He slid his hand over mine where it lay on his chest. “And you can’t leave again. Even if you get scared.”
It sounded like a demand out of a fairy tale.
“I promise,” I said, voice just breath.
Then Rhys looked in my eyes and told me that he wanted me. Why he wanted me. His words found their home inside me, like gems nestled expertly into the settings of my bones, where they could twinkle unexpectedly for as long as they were undisturbed.
“I like how you tease me like you’re grumpy with me,” was delivered with a private smile, and I smiled too. “I like how you touch me like you’re daring yourself to do it,” made me slide a hand to his neck and stroke the soft skin there.
“I’ve never really touched someone when it wasn’t sex before,” I confessed. “I like it with you. Sometimes . . . some of the people I’ve gone home with have wanted to touch me when we’re not having sex but I . . . I don’t like it. It feels . . . like sandpaper.”
“It’s intimate,” Rhys murmured. “Letting someone touch you; touching someone with no objective in mind.”
I nodded and Rhys inched closer.
“There’s something I didn’t say in my text.” He traced the bridge of my nose with his fingertip. “You’re so beautiful, Matt. You look like some kind of painting come to life.” He traced over my cheekbone and my brow, smoothing the wrinkle between them away.
I felt myself blush so I concentrated on him.
“You look like some kind of Viking king. Like you should be wearing a cloak into battle and bathing in a waterfall or something.”
Rhys’s laughter rang out.
“I, um. I meant that as a compliment,” I tried to explain. “You look like Thor.”
Rhys’s laughter turned to a chuckle, and he pulled me close to him, my hair catching on his stubble.
When he held me, my world settled into place. Everything stilled, and I felt a sense of calm I’d never known. So I stayed. I stayed in his arms, and I kept touching him, and when he got to the part about how my life had been hard so I was trying to make other people’s lives easier, I tried to tell him.
Haltingly, and in pieces, I told him about how it felt to lie in a strange bed at night and not know the shape of anything around me. How much I’d believed, for a time, that my mother would come back for me. How my realization that she was never coming wasn’t dramatic or sudden. It sank in so slowly that weeks of not expecting her had passed before I registered the change. How I felt like I’d betrayed her once I realized it.
I told him things I’d never told another soul. Things I’d never even shaped into words for myself. Once I started talking, I’d talked for hours, and Rhys had kept touching me the whole time, like his body was a reminder of where I was. Of how he wasn’t going anywhere.
What I’d told him had been mostly feelings, memories, how things smelled or what people had said. It had jumped around and been as moth-eaten as my memory sometimes was. But it had been the truth. It had been the truest thing I’d ever said.
Later, I’d realized that I’d given him feelings without the armature of facts. That I’d let him draw certain conclusions because there were some things that were simply too hard to say. Some words that burned like acid coming up. But I had given him the pieces that I thought were important in the moment, and Rhys had received them like a sacrament.
