Page 34 of Warrior Security
Together.He’d said that too. Minutes ago, or hours, I didn’t know anymore. When I’d been clawing at rock and lunging for the rain and trying to get out of my own skin, he’d caught me and saidwe’ll go together.
I’d never hadtogether.
I’d hadalone. I’d had my mother’s voice on the phone sayingCarter’s been asking about youlike that was something I should want to hear. I’d had my father’s silence and my sister’s disinterest andyou’re being difficult, Eleanorwhile I stood in their foyer bleeding through a dishcloth wrapped around my forearm. I’d had Carter’s hand on my elbow steering me toward the car, steering me toward the bedroom, steering me toward the version of myself he’d decided I should be.
Not one person in my adult life had ever saidyou can go, and I’ll go with you.
Logan had.
The shaking didn’t stop. But the edge of it changed. The desperate animal need to run faded by slow degrees until I realized I wasn’t fighting his arms anymore. I was leaning into them. My weight had settled back against his chest behind me and my fingers had loosened on his forearms, and I was still here.
The panic crested somewhere above me like a wave that had run out of ocean. My body was still flooded with adrenaline, the tremors still running through my hands. But the worst of it was pulling back. Receding. Leaving wreckage behind, the way the water below us was leaving wreckage, but receding.
And as it pulled back, I felt him.
Not his voice as a lifeline. Not his arms as the thing between me and the flood. The warmth of his chest against my back, solid and specific. The rhythm of his breathing, slow and deliberate, completely out of sync with mine, like he existed at a different speed than the chaos inside me.
His heartbeat pressed against my shoulder blade, constant and unhurried, and I wanted to scream at it for being so calm when nothing else was.
He loosened his arms.
Just barely. An inch of space, maybe less. Not letting go. Just easing the hold, the way you’d open your hands around a bird to see if it wanted to fly.
I didn’t fly. I didn’t take the space.
The adrenaline still flooding my body searched for somewhere to go. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t go back to the barn and pick up the clipboard and start the evening rounds and pretend that the last hour hadn’t peeled me down to the studs. All that desperate energy was still alive inmy blood and it had no direction and no exit, and I was vibrating with it.
I turned.
I didn’t decide to. My body just moved, shifting in his arms until I was facing him, my hands sliding from his forearms to his chest, fisting the wet fabric of his shirt.
I looked up at him, and I knew what my face looked like because I could feel it. Wrecked, open, everything I’d spent years hiding written across it in block letters, and I didn’t have the energy to put a single piece of it away.
It wasn’t pity on his face. If I’d seen pity, I would have cracked a joke about cave breakdowns and started cataloging the cloud cover and asked him if he thought Duchess was mad about dinner being late.
Pity was the one thing I knew how to outrun.
But he wasn’t giving me pity. And he wasn’t giving me desire or worry or that careful, manufactured softness that people put on when they think you’re fragile and want you to know they noticed.
He was just there.
A man sitting on the ground in a wet shirt with firelight on one side of his face, looking at me with no performance at all. No mask rearranged to make me comfortable. He’d just held me through the ugliest thing I’d shown anyone since I’d walked into a women’s shelter with a bleeding arm, and his face said nothing exceptI’m here.
Every person in my life who’d witnessed my pain had needed me to manage their reaction to it. My family needed me to minimize so they didn’t feel guilty. Carter needed me to apologize so he could feel justified. Even the well-meaning ones needed me to show progress so they could feel helpful.
Logan needed nothing from me. And that undid me more than anything else could have.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t romantic. It was my mouth crashing into his because the adrenaline had nowhere to go and his face was right there, open and unguarded and asking nothing, and my body chose before my brain caught up.
The kiss was hard and messy and graceless, and I tasted rain and smoke from the fire and my own salt.
He didn’t pull away. His hands stayed where they were, on my back, on my arms, and for a terrible suspended second, I thought he was going to gently stop me. Put his hands on my shoulders and ease me back and say something kind and reasonable that would have made me want to die.
He leaned in instead. Met my mouth with his and matched what I was giving, the desperation and the mess, and his hand came up to the side of my face and held it there.
The kiss changed. Or I changed. The desperate energy pouring through me found its direction, and the direction was Logan.
