Part of me wanted to roll down the window and hiss at her to mind her own business, assert I knew what I was doing and she didn’t need to stand out there and fret over me, and in turn, back Baz into a corner with this unwarranted ambush.
But the rest of me knew she was right. I had no clue what I was getting myself into. All I knew was it was something that lured me, spoke to me, and petrified me all at the same time.
I had already started the fall. Monday I’d thought I’d hit the bottom. But I realized while I was clinging to Baz’s neck, held in the safety of his arms, that I’d barely cleared the ledge. Now I felt desperate to find out where I would land.
Saying something sharp and low, Baz backed away from her, shot her a look over his shoulder I couldn’t decipher, while he rounded the front and slipped back into his seat. Without sparing me a glance, he put it in drive and flipped us around in the gravel lot, the tires squealing when he took to the street.
Suffocating silence swallowed us while I focused on the way his muscles flexed and bowed as he shifted hard, the ink covering his skin contorting like it ached to tell a story.
A strangled moment passed before I turned to take in the rigid defiance set in his profile. “Thank you,” I finally whispered into the stillness. He swallowed hard, and my eyes trailed the bob of his thick, muscular throat. “You saved me tonight. I don’t know what would have happened had you not been there.”
Dents of conflict slashed all over his gorgeous face when he glanced at me—his voice hard, the words grating up his throat. “I lost it, Shea. That guy touching you?” Disgust deepened those dents. “Couldn’t handle it. You don’t belong to me, and still, there wasn’t one place inside me that could accept the idea of another man touching you. Not one. And I don’t fucking know how to make sense of that. But when he hurt you?” A curse flew from his mouth. His brow pinched when he spit the word, and he slammed his palm down on the steering wheel, obviously unwilling or unable to finish what was burning to be said, words I knew made him just as vulnerable as the ones boiling inside of me.
He jerked to a stop at the curb in front of my house.
The engine still rumbling, the man stared unseeing into the blaze of lights stretching out into the slumbering night.
Lost in the tension that wound us tight, something that only belonged to us, I stared out into the same nothingness.
My voice was quiet. Unsure. “You think I understand this? You think I like feeling this way?” I chanced peeking at him, taking in the sharp curve of his jaw he held taut, and I was sure he wasn’t immune to whatever this was, either. This consuming feeling that came over me every time he was near.
I knew that’s why he was here.
“Do you think I like it that you’re the only thing I can think about? That when I close my eyes, what I see is your face? That I don’t even know you, and somehow you feel like one of the most significant people to have ever walked into my life?”
With both hands, he squeezed the steering wheel, still refusing to look my way.
God, maybe this was the most foolish thing I could do, stripping myself bare, laying myself completely at his feet. But I couldn’t stop. That unexpected grief from his absence that had followed me through the week pulsed at my insides, those many hidden thoughts and desires seeking a way free.
My voice softened and took on a tone of resignation. “I gave up a long time ago, Baz.” Sadly, I turned to consider my house, the windows darkened, the porch swing rocking in a barren sway. “Gave up on dating and men and the idea of love because that little girl has enough love for me. Since the day she was born, she’s been the only thing I needed.”
I looked back at him, and he was barely breathing—his chest tight and his posture rigid. The air escaping his nose was nothing more than a whispered grunt.
If it were possible, my voice softened more. “And then there was you.”
And then there was you.
I figured that’s all he needed to know.
Because it was everything. Both an admission and a plea.