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My stomach tingled with need. “We’re going to christen the closet.”
Which we did.
It took a while.
It was a huge fucking closet.
CHAPTER NINE
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Like Real People Do – Hozier
KARSON
Something was wrong with Wren.
I’d known it for a couple of days now. She had been acting distant, her smiles forced and her eyes tight with something I couldn’t catch.
The light had only just come back into her eyes. She’d only just come back to me. I woke in the night, shaking off a nightmare, relieved only once I realized her warmth was tucked into me, her arms clinging to me even in sleep.
She slept through the night now. Had for months. She didn’t even flinch when I jerked away, too deep in a sleep that had eluded her most of her life. She’d put on weight too. Slowly. Her relationship with food and her trauma wasn’t going to disappear overnight, nor would her pain. It was part of her now. Part of us.
But there was an us. She had come back to me. And that was all I cared about.
She was all I cared about.
Yet something was eating at her once more. Not our past, but something new. I had to wait for her to tell me what it was, as much as it infuriated me to do that. Wren was stubborn, as always, and needed to process things in her own way before she came to me. She didn’t lean on me. Wouldn’t. And as much as I fucking hated that, I admired the shit out of it too. Her strength of will. Of character.
She thought she was different now. Changed completely. She was altered for sure. Different in some ways, harder in places that should’ve always remained soft.
But her fire still burned brightly. It wasn’t going anywhere.
I was going to make sure of that.
But first, I had a meeting to attend to.
When I’d called Nicholas, he’d been warm, friendly. I hadn’t seen him or Wren’s mother since Wren recovered. We didn’t really run in the same circles.
I met him at a Greek restaurant he ran, and he greeted me with a friendly smile and a firm handshake.
“Karson,” he embraced me as if I was an old friend. “It has been so long. Sit, sit,” he gestured to a booth.
It was nice without being pretentious. Cozy. It smelled fucking great too.
“I was happy to get your call,” he said, sitting down. “It has been too long.” His eyes blazed with something.
The last time we were alone together, he’d killed a man.
I wondered if that haunted him.
I thought of Wren in the hospital bed. Wren staring at the TV eating popcorn. Wren pasting fake smiles on her face. Wren as just skin and bones.
No, I didn’t think it haunted him.
“I’ve got some food coming. Best Greek you’ve had in your life,” he exclaimed.
“I’m here to talk about Wren,” I said instead of answering. I wasn’t much for small talk, and I was anxious to get home. To her.
