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“No. God, no. Not that. Never.” He said the scariest thing. Something virtually no one knew. “But sometimes, when the dark gets real thick, I … uh … get lost in my head. If you got in the way of that … I don’t know. I’m not really myself then. I lose time. There’s only been somebody around when it happened one time, a long time ago, so I don’t know what I’m like. I might try to protect myself.”
She simply studied him, her expression soft and mysterious.
Now he was utterly humiliated. He should have fucking left when she’d told him to. This was a colossal mistake, and he’d just let the woman he thought he might be half in love with know that he was, in fact, fucking psycho. The military shrink had called it a ‘dissociative state,’ brought on by PTSD. PTSD with psychotic features, in a man who’d had a psychotic mother.
And then the shrink had recommended he be separated from service. His CO had respected and valued him, so he had an honorable discharge rather than a Section 8, and they’d retired Charlie at the same time, to keep the team together.
Where had the PTSD come from? Well, choose your fighter. Was it picking up his infant brother’s cold corpse out of the bathtub? Was it losing his whole family in one swoop? Was it torturing several dozen men and women who had not always been confirmed to be terrorists? Was it watching Charlie take a bullet to the chest? Was it picking up pieces of his human comrades out of the bloody sand and dirt? Was it just the fucking daily horror of war?
Or was being Seth Michael ‘Dexter’ Denson a trauma unto itself?
The why or how didn’t matter. He was fucking psycho.
His mother had killed her own child in a dissociative fugue state. Who the fuck knew what Dex, so well trained in causing pain and torment, and death, was capable of.
“Yeah. Right. This was a mistake. I’m—”
“No, it wasn’t.” She stepped to him and set her hands on his chest. Her fingers played with the placket of his shirt. “It was not a mistake. I am not afraid of you. And I am not letting you go.”
Her emphatic tone charmed him, and he found a smile. Kelsey was about five-seven and slim. He was six-two and almost two hundred pounds, little of which was fat. There was nothing she could do to keep him where he didn’t want to be.
Except look at him the way she was looking at him right now. No fear or condemnation, no judgment at all. Compassion. Concern. Affection.
And he was exactly where he wanted to be, wasn’t he?
“Kelsey, if I hurt you, I will die.”
She shook her head. “No more circles. I’m not afraid of you. And I’m not leaving you to be alone.”
When he felt her soft, perfect hands on the bare skin of his chest, he realized she’d been undoing his buttons as she’d spoken.
Her hands flat on his skin—god, they were sosoft—she swept over the solid black raven that spread its wings from shoulder to shoulder across his chest, and the two deep red roses over his left pec. She leaned in and pressed her lips at the center, the head of the bird, and her hands skimmed up and pushed his shirt from his shoulders and down his arms. Taking note of the ink on his left shoulder and arm, she let his shirt fall away and brushed light fingertips over the image there.
“Atlas holding up the heavens,” she murmured. “I understand it now.”
He tried to think when she’d seen his ink before—of course. When she’d tended to him in the aftermath of his fight with her father.
“I don’t think I’m Atlas. I’m not holding up the heavens.”
“No. But more than your share.”
He caught her hand and drew her square before him again. “Don’t idealize me.”
Her gaze settled on his face, his eyes. “I’m not. I’m seeing you.”
Yeah, he was half in love with her already. At least. “Fuck, Kelsey.”
“Will you come to bed with me now?”
She was too good for him. She was too good for this whole fucking world. But maybe her light was so strong and pure his darkness couldn’t douse it. Maybe the opposite would happen. Maybe her light could overcome the shadows in him.
Lifting her beautiful hand, he rested his lips on her knuckles. Not quite a kiss, but somehow deeper. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
With a tiny, wise smile, she turned her hand in his, so that she was holding him, not the other way around, and she led him the few steps to her bedroom door.
That room was like the rest of her apartment: tidy and impossibly sweet. The color scheme of greys and pinks and creams carried on in here. Her bed was nice, one of those fully upholstered things, in soft grey, with a tall headboard. The mattress was high, too—a really good height for certain activities it was far too soon to suggest. Lots of throw pillows and fluffy linens, and one of those odd blankets that looked knitted but with crazy thick yarn.
In one corner was something he first took as a dollhouse, until he got a closer look. It was adoghouse, shaped like a castle. Inside was a fluffy bed a lot like Lizzie’s anxiety donut.
