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He kissed me.
….Finally.
On multiple levels, it was information I wasn’t even sure how to process - especially when, the next day now, my lips were still tingling with the lingering sensation of his touch.
What the hell was I supposed to do?
How was I supposed tofeel?
A knock on the door startled me from my thoughts, and my heart immediately started racing with the possibility that it was Isaiah. Shaky legs led me toward the door, where that notion was quickly dispelled.
It was just room service, delivering breakfast.
Breakfast that went uneaten as I… continued processing.
I processed while I showered, while I dressed, while I contacted my friends and family to keep them from descending on this place like a SWAT team if something was wrong. I even processed while I was supposed to be working, spending most of my hours in front of that lagoon-view window with my mind on Isaiah instead of the book I was supposed to be writing.
Now that I wasn’t so absorbed with my own feelings, with the anger from the way things ended between us… I wondered what had happened tohim.
Surely being a Thorn hadn’t been sunshine and rainbows.
It was practically an impossibility.
I hadn’t been tasked with the others' killer mentality, but I knew how the Garden operated. I knew how they manipulated, brainwashed, and brutalized their clippings into line.
They called it cultivating.
But I knew and loved Roses who’d been through it, and I knew the stories they had. And iftheirexperience was traumatizing, I could only imagine what someone larger, stronger, had been asked and expected to do.
The only way it wouldn’t have worn on him was if he were a sociopath, and if I knew nothing else about Isaiah, I knew he wasn’tthat.
No matter how hard they tried to make him.
That was probably why he had to go—the proximity to me was keeping him too human, keeping him from the full potential of icy callousness aspired to for most Thorns. As strong as he was, as superhumanly powerful as he’d always felt to me, there was always still this surprising tenderness to him.
Zay made me laugh, taught me hand-to-hand combat, kept me from feeling like there was nobody else in the world who gave a damn about me.
Falling in love with Isaiah had been remarkably easy.
Hell, maybe that was why love stories were standard for me.
Maybe I wanted to see others hold tight to something that had always remained just outside my grasp.
I never got the chance to exchange those words romantically - never knew what it was like to wake up next to someone I adored, never fought and made up, never did the overwhelming majority of things my characters got to do.
Perhaps I’d been living a bit vicariously.
More thana bit.
And maybe I’d been doing so for too long, and that’s why now, what had been so easy didn’t flow as smoothly anymore. I had to come on whole writing retreats now to get it done, and now that I was here… hell, I couldn’t even do that.
This was too much.
If I dwelled too long in that place, my brain would take me somewhere I didn’t want to go and keep me longer than I wanted to stay. So I closed my laptop and put on a bathing suit to spend the afternoon by the pool.
I was bold as hell about it, putting on a two-piece bathing suit. Then, right before I was getting ready to step out the door… I turned around, grabbing a swim cover up just to feel a little less exposed. Going out to sit by the pool was enough stretching for me today, probably.
Baby steps.
