Better When It Hurts (Stripped 2)

He holds me against him, my back to his chest, supporting me. I’m not standing anymore, not holding on to the walls of the shower. There’s only his arms holding me up, his fingers inside me. There’s only the low murmur of his voice in my ear, reassuring me, soothing me. “Let go, gorgeous. Let go.”

I think he means more than this shower, more than my body.

He wants me to let go of everything I’ve been fighting to keep—control and security. This wall I’ve been building around myself, each brick made from scarlet lipstick or high heels, paved with a fuck-me smile. It’s the only way I know how to be safe.

Even that it’s never actually made me safe.

Safety is a dream, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If I smile enough and dance enough and take off my clothes enough, maybe one day I’ll reach it. Except it doesn’t exist.

I whimper, and Blue murmurs to me, “Shhh.”

My eyes fall shut, letting him pull me from the shower, trusting him completely as he guides me onto a plush mat. He dries my body with a towel, lifting my arms and kneeling at my feet. It’s a form of service, what he’s doing, the way he’s caring for me—an apology and promise all at once.

“I know you’ve been worried about me,” he says, breath warm against my temple. “I know you’ve been protecting me all this time. Let me protect you.”

The words strip me bare.

When you really think about protection, what it means, it’s a cruel thing to accept. If he is my shelter in the storm, then he is the one battered by wind and lightning. He is the one taking away my pain. I’ve never wanted to let him do that.

It hurts him that I don’t let him do that.

He lifts me up, and I wrap my arms around his neck. I curl myself up in him, knowing that if any harm will come to us, it will come to him first. I let him give me what my mother never had—a man who cared more about her than himself, someone who would fight for her, someone who would stay.

His lips are soft against my forehead, a gentle kiss before he lays me down on his bed.

The sheets are white, the walls bare. I’ve been in this room before, been fucked here and used. Being cherished is almost harder to take, more foreign. More of a risk, because if I lose this now, if I lose him now, it will break me. I will be as lost as my mother, like I swore to myself I’d never be.

“Did you take the watch?” My

voice sounds loud in the dark room.

He pauses in the act of getting into bed beside me, sheet raised. Then he slides in, the hair on his legs a lovely friction against mine. His arms wrap around me, underneath and above, a cocoon of cotton and man, a dark space for just us two.

I drop my voice to a whisper. “Did you kill him?”

“I’m not going to lie to you,” he says softly. “I thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”

At this I can breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

He shifts me so I’m on his chest, and when I move my hands under my chin, it’s just like before. We’re teenagers again, and he’s whispering his secrets. I’m whispering mine.

“I don’t care about what a judge says is right or wrong,” he says. “You know that about me. You’ve always known that about me.”

“They don’t understand,” I say, but that’s a lie. Sometimes they do understand and just don’t care. Sometimes their hands are trapped just as much as ours.

And sometimes a killer is born.

A boy who needed to fight to survive. A teenager thrown into war. I don’t blame Blue for what he is. A judge can’t help him any more than one could help me. We were both cast out of society long before we thought to leave, both told we were wrong before we knew what was right.

He washes his hands even when they’re clean, because some part of that little boy is still inside.

I trace circles over his chest. The sparse hair, the sheer size of him. He’s filled out since the last time we were like this. He’s grown, and so have I—not only my breasts and my hips. I’m a woman now, and a woman chooses her own path.

Blue is my path.

His eyes are dark. “I’ve taken care of him. I can tell you how, but—”

A sound of protest escapes my throat before I can rein it in.