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He snapped his eyes up. “Change into those.” He jerked his head to the bed.
I wanted to argue against putting anything that had been on his body, that smelled like him, on my own. But I couldn’t. My clothes, what little there were of them, were ruined. No great loss. But it wasn’t like I was free to go home for jeans and a tee.
I wondered when, or if, I’d be free to go home. Home to the shitty apartment that definitely wasn’t home. Home to the town that should’ve felt safe to me but was now filled with emotional landmines with this ugly truth staring me in the face.
“I’ll find somethin’ from Macy, something your size,” he continued.
Ah, so I guessed I wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. I hoped Macy—who I was yet to meet because she’d just given birth—had a more covered sense of style than Scarlett.
“Towels are in the bathroom,” Liam continued. His eyes darted sideways, fists clenched. He was obviously struggling. Uneasy.
I couldn’t find it in me to care.
“Wait,” I said as he turned to leave.
He stopped immediately.
I sucked in a harsh breath.
Fuck, I really didn’t want to do this. But there was no other choice. I was covered in blood. I needed to shower. I could’ve tried to do it the alternative way, but that would’ve likely had me having a panic attack on the bathroom floor for an hour, I didn’t have an hour. And if I was honest with myself, I didn’t have the emotional strength to get through it.
“Can you stay?” I asked, trying not to make my voice sound small and pathetic. “In the room, I mean.” I pointed to the bed. “While I shower.” I paused. “I can’t, um, I don’t handle it very well…showering in strange places alone.”
I held my breath as the words sunk in. Waited for the inevitable question. I was a reporter, so I knew there were always questions. I was used to them. Answering them investigative mode worked so it barely even took my breath away when I explained it like I was reporting from a war zone, where I was more comfortable than the war zone that was my head.
Every part of him changed as my words hit him. He was a man that knew trauma, obviously. And from what I’d seen, he knew pain. In a different way than him, I knew it too. So I knew there were ways to spot it in what people said, the tone of their voice, everything. He was clocking mine, likely running through all the scenarios that would have me needing to make such a request.
I’d thought he was violent before, but as my words ran into the air and over him, he physically changed. Something etched into his body, into his bones. Something that made it impossible to deny that he cared about me.
He clenched his hands into fists at his sides, not taking his eyes off me, not moving.
My breath was fractured, though I kept my façade. I’d kept this even, blank look on my face in front of warlords, so much death I couldn’t understand it, bombs, machine gun fire, some of the worst acts of depravity humans have committed and called it war, but keeping my expression blank had never been harder than it was in this moment, with my beautiful, damaged and scarred past staring at me with violence and heartbreak.
I wasn’t quite sure I’d survive explaining the truth to him. But no way I could lie.
I didn’t have to do either. Because he didn’t ask a question. Only nodded once and sat down on the bed.
I exhaled.
“I won’t go anywhere,” he promised. It sounded like an oath.
But it worked as an omen.
Chapter Four
I got changed in the bathroom after a long and thoughtless shower.
You’d think after being faced with everything I had seen tonight that my mind would be pulsating with pain, with thoughts, panic, anger.
But I had a nifty trick perfected over years of pain, panic, and anger. My job that was nothing but trauma. It was somewhat of a gift. The gift of an empty mind when life became too full.
Too all-consuming.
This situation was all-consuming, to say the least.
So as I washed with soap that smelled of him, in a bathroom with a hint of a scent of bleach, abandoning bloodstained clothes at my feet, I thought of nothing. When I stepped out of the shower and into men’s sweats that smelled of him too, I still thought of nothing.
I walked into the bedroom to see him exactly where I’d left him, hands clasped on his knees, eyes on me.
Then there was no such thing as nothing.
I sucked in a harsh breath, pain blindsided me with his simple stare. His simple presence.
I sank my fingernails into my palms once more. It stung, opening up wounds that hadn’t even begun to heal. But that’s what this was. All of it. An open, festering, wound.
