She mutters something under her breath and starts undressing. By some unknown power of inner strength, I manage to stop myself from pulling up the stool just to watch her remove her clothes and instead rummage around the cupboards for something that says serum or bath explosion—I don’t know. Whatever they call the stuff they put into bathtubs to make it all bubbly and shit. Is it just soap? Fuck if I know. It’s not like I’ve had the fortune to take a bath with Bella before.
I find a little bottle of oil I stole from Millie and put a couple of drops into the water. Followed by soap.
Bella barely gives me a chance to admire her naked body before she practically jumps into the tub, hugging her knees to her chest. The water sloshes around her, a thousand tiny bubbles popping against her tan skin.
Reaching behind my head, I pull my shirt off and shuck my pants to the side. She whips around, eyes almost falling out of her head as she shrieks, “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” The hot water burns my skin when I step in, but I grit my teeth and pretend it’s just right.
“No! You can take a bath after.” She goes to the other end of the tub, where the tap water runs down her back, so she’s as far from me as she can possibly go. When will she learn that fighting me is useless?
“You’re not the only one who had some fun in the dirt.”
I’m not sure if she heard what I said because her jaw has dropped, and her full attention is on the big guy, who is definitely getting a little too excited at our proximity to a very naked Bella. She clamps her mouth shut as her throat bobs, really doing wonders for my ego.
“You can touch him. He doesn’t bite.” I smirk. “Much.”
She snaps her attention away and proceeds to wash herself, ignoring me completely. No, that won’t do.
“Hey! Stop that!”
Her weak little hits to my arms do nothing as I pick her up and settle her between my legs, but I admire her tenacity. Plus, all her squirming is making my dick harder—which she is getting a first-hand feel for because, in my infinite wisdom, I have managed to get her ass perfectly lined up against me.
Bella stills when I start twitching. “What is—” She slams her mouth shut.
I smile. She noticed the rager downstairs, after all.
Pigtails hasn’t changed on the squeamish front. When she turned sixteen, it was like she was a different person around me. I put it down to the fact that she realized she was madly in love with me, but it could also be hormones, biology, and shit. I don’t know. I mean, I definitely got hotter around that time.
“I won’t complain if you move around again. Just know I will hold no responsibility over how sore you are after.”
She squeaks. That’s the only way to explain the sound she made. It’s something like a swallowed gasp and a tiny shriek that can barely be heard above the sound of the tap.
“Good girl.”
Like in the woods before, she visibly relaxes from the praise. I can’t wait to see what else will get her going.
I scrub the dirt from her skin and de-nest her hair, and it pleases me more than it should that she hasn’t tried fighting me again. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten any softer. Nope, I am very much still hard and prodding around areas that I very much want to sink into.
It isn’t until I start massaging her scalp that she relaxes into me. It makes brushing her hair difficult, but I’m not about to ask her to move. It feels far too nice having her against me, especially when she grabs a cloth and returns the favor. But I don’t quite like the frown she has as she does it.
“What? You—”
“Don’t ruin it.” She silences me with three words without so much as a glance my way, frowning harder as she scrubs the marks on my forearm.
I don’t have the heart to tell her she can scrub all she wants; it isn’t dirt she’s trying to get off. I paid good money to make sure that ink wasn’t going anywhere.
I see the exact moment Bella realizes what it is. Her cheeks go red, and she looks at me from the corner of her eye and pretends she didn’t spend the better part of a minute having a go at trying to rub off the fine-line tattoo of a drawing she made me when she was seven. The first drawing she ever gave me.
Either way, I still take the interaction for what it is: a win.
Deciding her work is done, she drops the cloth onto the corner of the tub, sighing as she relaxes onto my chest.
My heart beats steadily as I watch her and how she curls into me when I wrap an arm around her waist. There are so many things I want to say and do, but I know I’d ruin this moment if I did.
I know she thinks she has changed, but to me, she’s the exact same person. The only difference is that she’s come out of her shell. I always saw hints of her snarkiness and fighting spirit, but she never let it out. Not even in the three months I’ve been watching her.
“What’s this from?” I trace the three little scars on her stomach. One below her belly button and another on either side of her stomach.
“My appendix burst. I was hospitalized.”
I still. “When?”
“Two years ago.”
I can’t think of what to say. I should have been there for her. Millie and Jeremy wouldn’t have sat by her side or waited when she had surgery. I want to kill Marcus all over again for keeping the letters from her. She must have felt all alone.
“Are you okay?”
She lifts a shoulder. “I just don’t have an appendix.”
Bella’s brown eyes fix on the ink covering my skin. She purses her lips as she runs her nimble fingers over the bear standing on its hind legs on my thigh, to the snake coiled around my wrist, then the tiger crawling down my shoulder, to the mouse on my chest, and finally, the bullet wound just under her name. She ends on my inner bicep, where I have a mouse wearing a tiara, her signature on any street art we’d do together.
She traces each one she can reach, even the pieces I’ve drawn, like the one of the barn house, the design on her locket, and the trip we did to Yellowstone—which she hated because of how much walking we had to do, but loved because she was stalked by a stray cat for three hours. She called herself a cat mom for a solid month after.
“Do they have meaning?” she whispers as her hand skates over a fox.
“Yes.”
She looks up at me through her lashes. “Why did you get them?”
“So when you look at me, there isn’t an inch of me you don’t like.”
Realization unfolds behind her brown eyes. Everything she’s ever liked is marked on my skin for the rest of my life: her favorite animals, the trips we’ve done, things that matter to her.
Her bottom lip trembles for the briefest moment before she tears her eyes away from the tattoos and to the chain around my neck.
Fingering the pendant, she turns it over, narrowing her eyes to read the date engraved into the silver coin.
“My first day at Woodside Elementary,” I say before she can ask.
She looks at me in question.
“The first time we met.”
Her lips form into an ‘O,’ and she slowly settles back against my chest so I can’t see her, stiff with tension. Did I do something wrong? I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything to piss her off.
I turn her around and settle her between my legs. “While I was in prison, I also learned how to play guitar,” I add, to lighten the mood.
“Oh, really?” There’s an air of disinterest in her response. Seriously, what did I do wrong now?