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“With a lover?” she pondered.
“Oh no.” I had to laugh because she couldn’t hide the hint of jealousy in the undertone of her soft voice. “The only person I’ve shared a shower with was my previous mate. It wasn’t as often as I’d have liked since I always used to cage fight back then, so I normally took showers there, but it happened once in a while.”
“Was that your way of showing intimacy?” she curiously inquired.
“You could say it like that,” I answered. “Face me, Rebel.”
She turned to me before I moved a chunk of her drenched strands to rest along her back.
“Your hair is back to its long length,” I noted.
“Like it?”
“I love any style you do,” I genuinely answered and smirked. “I know Dimitris loved it short though.”
“He was living his fantasy life with his tomboy Beta,” she summed up while her eyes peered up at me.
“What’s up?”
“What?”
“I know you want to ask me something, but you’re hesitating.” I could read her so well.
She bit her bottom lip for a moment while her eyes scanned my face.
“Do you miss your mate?” she quietly asked. “Especially during this time.”
All I could do was smile at first, while I reached out to begin scrubbing her collarbone and then moved onto her shoulders. She watched me the entire time, clearly not rushing me but observing my reaction to her question.
I wasn’t offended by it or anything, but I did want to answer it properly. She deserved that much.
“I don’t want you to negatively judge what I’m about to say,” I admitted, my voice barely there. “It sounds…a little wrong when I put my feelings into words, which is why I avoid it entirely. I avoid thinking about it, even as the events from back then nag me whenever they can. I use distractions to keep me grounded, but this year…has been tricky. We’ve been busy, that’s for sure, but I guess I’ve come to realize that I want to start focusing on what matters.”
I paused in my movement to peer into her eyes. She gave me her full attention, which seemed to calm my nerves just a little bit. I trusted Willow enough to know she wouldn’t judge me poorly, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t frightened at how she’d react.
“I don’t miss my mate. To be honest, when I have to face this sensation every year near her death, it's not ‘her’ I miss. I accepted her passing a long time ago…but it’s my actions that haunt me. The fact that I stole her light from this world. No matter the circumstances that led to me being controlled and pushed to kill her…it’s the fact that her blood cloaks my hands after all these years that leads me down this depressive roller coaster. I get lost in the need to distract myself because I don’t want to go spiraling down memory lane and remind myself of what a villainous savage I was in the ring. I get enough torture from my nightmares that usually trigger fires, which leads to me needing to shower to cool off. It's just a combination of multiple reactions that revolve around the past,” I summarized and took a deep breath.
Letting it out, I gave her my full attention once more.
“So do I miss my mate during this time of year? No. Most people think I do because I get depressed, which gets confused with mourning. I guess at some point, that’s what I assumed, too. That I was mourning her loss. But I wasn’t. I’d accepted her loss but not my actions that led to her end.”
“For you to figure that out means you’ve been doing a lot of internal thinking and healing,” she voiced and reached out for the sponge in my grasp. “Turn around.”
“I’m not done with your front.”
“We’ll do that after your back is done,” she suggested. I wanted to argue, but maybe this was her way of distracting me.
“Okay.”
She was quiet after that, as if lost in her thoughts the same way I was. I’d never been so honest with someone like I had with her. Dimitris understood me, but that was because he was Alpha and could interrupt my emotions without me going into detail about them.
Saint was good at distracting me as well, but that was probably thanks to years of observing me with the many occasions he helped comfort me when I needed to calm down from my nightmares or anger tantrums.
It was the first time a woman had really been able to decipher why I was acting the way I was, which was both comforting and less nerve-racking when speaking about such sensitive topics.
“I’m not used to simply washing someone else in the shower,” Willow admitted as she continued to rub my back slowly.
I was sure she was taking in the markings and scars upon my back, some from various cage fight in the past, but a few were burns.
