Page 64 of Equilibrium
“No! I am the only one that can see your bra, okay? I don’t want to have to kill my own enforcer just because he looked at you in your bra.”
I saluted, “Yes, boss.”
I wanted us to continue what we started, but one look at his face and the wounds inflicted by Hunter, and I knew he needed his rest more than the needed sex. “Come on, big guy. On the bed and let me clean those wounds.”
“No,” he groaned and buried his face between my boobs. “I’m okay. Nothing’s gonna happen if we do it later.”
I dragged my hand through his hair and started massaging the scalp, going from the back of his head to the top, moving slowly behind his ears and then his neck.
“We have time for this, but I really need to look at those and clean them up. You’re gonna be in the world of pain later. Those puppy eyes don’t work on me. Now get your ass up and into the bed. I’m gonna clean these and then we can take a nap. I’m pretty sure you need one.”
Hell, I needed one.
“We’re gonna talk later, but for now, I wanna have a look at that nasty cut on your eyebrow and put some ice on that eye. I also want to kill Hunter, but—”
“Hey.” He laughed. “I let him do this.”
“Regardless, I still wanna kill him. Cut off his balls, make an omelet with them, feed him those same balls, you know, the usual.”
The look he gave me as I continued ranting about all the ways I wanted to make Hunter suffer should’ve had me running for the hills, but it didn’t. If anything, I knew I really wanted to stay. I wanted to try and live life without being constantly on the run. He mentioned he would help me find Maya, and I wanted to believe him.
No, I did believe him. I believed him when he said he wanted me, and that was all that mattered.
I stood up first, extending my hand to him. “Up, come on.” He squinted at me, wincing at the same time.
“You really love being a nurse, don’t you?”
“Well,” I started as I pulled him up. “I actually wanted to be a veterinarian, but I became a little butcher instead.”
He towered over me as he stood up, and as I tilted my head to look at him, I knew I made the right choice staying here, slowly accepting this, because that tender look on his face was enough to confirm what I kind of, almost, mostly, already knew.
Storm really did care about me.
The two ofus together probably had more issues than Eastern Europe with their politics. But what happened earlier today told me that she wanted to try. She wanted this—me, us. She wanted to stay.
After she cleaned the cut above my eyebrow and cleaned the blood and the other cuts on my face, both of us just collapsed on the bed, taking a much-needed nap. I didn’t even realize how tired I was until I put my head on the pillow, with her wrapped around me. The lights inside the room were turned off, and while I didn’t know how long we slept, the darkness of the night seeping inside the room through the windows told me it was more than enough. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark as I greedily took in her sleeping form, her bare shoulders and her hair spilled over my pillow.
I fucking missed her smell, her taste, even her angry little mouth. The last three days were pure torture, because having someone you cared about so close, yet so far, was the worst feeling known to a human mind. I spent so many years searching for her and having her here without really having her with me... Yeah, that wasn’t going to work.
Her head was on my chest, and I could feel the small puffs of air as she exhaled, tickling my skin. With one hand on my pec and the other one on my ribs, it looked like she was hugging me. Her legs were entwined with mine, holding me hostage. Her dark hair was soft beneath my palm, as I started playing with it, dragging my hand through the waves she naturally had. Women’s hair was not something I often noticed, but I noticed hers.
God, I sounded like a lovesick fool, noticing every little detail about her. The way she narrowed her eyes when something wasn’t going how she imagined it. Or the way her eyes shone when she spoke with Zoe, even when she wore that disinterested look on her face. Or how she talked with Atlas as if they knew each other for years and not less than a month.
I noticed all of it.
She thought she was a monster for what she did in the past, but the real monsters were the ones that were supposed to save her. The ones that were supposed to protect her from real evil. I had no idea if she knew about everything her father did, but I was starting to see that while she had his last name, she was nothing like him. You could always feel the true evil when it stood next to you, and she didn’t carry it with her.
The kids from the club didn’t cower from her, even though they knew what other people called her. I wanted to laugh every single time she tried to shoo them away, but it was never in a malicious way. I had a feeling she never learned how to interact with other people, at least not in a healthy way. She kept mentioning Ava, her best friend, and it seemed that she was the only person in her life that was well, normal.
I could hear the people talking and laughing through the open window, and I could feel the cool breeze of the December night coming through, washing over my skin. I would probably be freezing right now, if it wasn’t for the human blanket wrapped around me. Her cute rambling, the tender way with which she pressed the antiseptic wipes against my skin, apologized every time I winced, the way she scolded me for allowing this to happen, it all made me realize how idiotic it was keeping secrets from her.
If there was anything I’d learned in the thirty-three years of my life, it was that you never lie to the people you care about or the people that care about you. The truth is better than a thousand lies, even if it was the painful one. I just wished I had enough courage to tell her everything she needed to know. To tell her what I did, what her father did and was still doing. But she was still recovering, she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to stay here, and I needed her to stay.
I didn’t want to give her more reasons to get out of here as soon as her body healed. I wanted to give her more reasons to stay, the good ones, not just because there were people out there that wanted to see her dead and she wanted to lay low for a little while. I wanted her to stay for me, for her, for this tight-knit family we had here. I wanted to show her that life wasn’t all dark and bad, and it could be good if the right people were with us.
I wanted to be able to touch her like this every single day—to drag my hand over her arm, over her naked back, over the scars and tattoos. The bruises she got from her time with the Nightingales were slowly starting to turn into pale-yellowish ones, but her finger was still swollen, and I noticed she wasn’t using that hand as much as her left one. That cut on her cheek was still red but closed.
I wondered how many scars and bruises she hid inside her soul, just so she could keep walking, keep fighting or running. I wondered if anybody ever asked her if she was okay, or if she needed help. There were stories about the fierce and cold Ophelia Aster; stories that made your blood turn into ice, but the person they were describing wasn’t the same person as the one lying on top of me.
