He shifts under me but I bear down.
I put all my body, all my power into it and stop his movements. “Alaric, what are you —”
“Get off me,” he growls.
“No.” I shake my head and keep throwing my weight into it.
“Poe, get the fuck off me.”
“No, I won’t,” I tell him. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”
At this, he stills or at least, he lets go of his efforts to dislodge me from his lap.
Not only that, he also moves his arms.
And then he’s not holding me anymore, he’s gripping me.
He’s clutching me in his palms, my waist at least, and digging his fingers in my flesh.
And this feels even better.
Because now his hold is not only protective, it’s also possessive.
It also makes me think that no one else could ever hold me this way. That I could never fit into someone’s palms like I fit into his.
“What I’m doing, Poe,” he growls, breaking my fanciful thoughts, “is that I’m going back to that bar. I’m going to find him and then I’m going to fucking finish what I started tonight. Which means I’m not going to stop at just breaking his nose like I did before. I’m going to go all the way and fucking stuff him in a body bag.”
His chest is shuddering, moving up and down in waves, his nostrils flared. His forehead is pressed against mine as if he’s an animal, a bull, ready to charge.
But he isn’t going anywhere.
I’m not letting him.
“Y-you broke his nose tonight?” I ask, my own breath coming in shudders.
He watches me a beat, his eyes still dark and furious. “Let me up, Poe.”
“Why?”
His response is a gusty breath and his fingers almost fisting the soft flesh at my waist.
I arch my back at the sting of pain but I don’t budge. “Why did you do that? Why did you break his nose?”
Another few beats of silence. Then, “Because he deserved it. Because he fucking made you cry.”
It’s my turn to go still then.
My turn to pause and cease breathing.
My turn to simply study his anger-lined features. They look even more sculpted like this, even sharper and crisper. More beautiful.
So much so that things inside me get all twisted up.
They get all angsty and restless and heated.
And maybe it’s a testament of how much that I manage to overpower him.
I manage to put even more of my tiny weight into it, more of my will and my little body, that I push him back on the bed with a growl. With a shout even.
And then he’s flat on his back and I’m straddling his torso, bent over him, my hands clenched in the collar of his shirt.
“You idiot,” I say into his face.
That looks as stunned as I feel after having accomplished this feat, overpowering his body like that.
But before he can say anything or overpower me back, I go on, “Why did you do that? Why the hell did you have to do that?” I flex my thighs around his body as I practically sit on his abs that have to be at least a six pack. “Don’t you know it by now? I’m like my mother.”
At this, his hands that are still somehow hooked on my waist even through this sudden turn of events, tighten. They actually mash my top as he growls in a low voice, “What?”
I swallow painfully, tugging on his collar as I say all the things I’ve been feeling ever since I found out about him and Charlie. All the parallels that I’ve been drawing, all the conclusions that I’m coming to.
“Mo told me. She told me everything and you can be mad about that later if you want but first I want you to know that you were right. You were right to avoid me. When I first came to live here. You were right to go out of your way to never be in the same room as me. To never pay me any attention, to not look at me. You were right to go to Italy. You were right. I don’t even know why you took me in. Why you let me stay under the same roof after…” My thighs flex again; my whole body flexes and spasms at this point. “But more than that I don’t even know how you managed to care enough to do other things for me.”
At this, his body jerks and tenses under me.
His eyebrows snap together and he opens his mouth to say something.
But I put a hand on his mouth.
I clap my palm over his lips to stop him. Because I’m not finished.
Not by a long shot.
“Mo told me that as well,” I tell him, ignoring the softness of his mouth under my palm, the heat of his thick breaths. “That you asked her to look after me when I first came here. She told me that you were the one who told her about my nightmares and that you were the one who’d send her in whenever I cried out. And she told me that you were the one who asked her to deliver the news about St. Mary’s. Because you knew that she was my trusted confidant. So maybe I’d take it better, the news. So maybe if my heart broke, it would break in front of her, in front of someone safe. As opposed to you.”