I wanted so badly to give him everything he was giving me in return, but I wasn’t sure I was capable. I wasn’t sure I could evencome close to reciprocating in the same way. He said he liked all my parts, but I was missing a lot of vital ones.
“I’m…I feel like you should get to know me better before deciding whether you like me or not.” A bitter laugh scraped up my throat, and when the intensity of his gaze became too much, I tried to turn my head away.
“I think I know you pretty well by now.” He grabbed my chin and turned my head back up. “You’re a pretty little tiger with the sweetest center. You’re precious and vicious and contentious and all the other words ending iniousthat I can’t think of. I’ll have to ask Val.”
I huffed out a laugh.
“And I want to be everything to you,” he said softly.
I had a horrible feeling he already was.
And then his lips quirked up at the corner. “Actually, I think I already am.”
“What?”
“You told me something very, very interesting last night.” His smile grew wider as my heart raced.
“What? What did I tell you?” What the fuck had I told him? What could I have told him that would make him this happy?
He looked into my eyes and said, “You told me that you’ve loved me forever. That you fell in love with me when you were a kid.”
Oh,fuck. The horror that rolled through me was slow and thick and awful. “No…no, I—that’s?—”
He pressed his finger to my lips. “It’s okay. So all this time youdidknow who I was, you just pretended not to?”
I shoved his finger away. “No, I didn’t, actually. I only realized a couple months ago. And I only watched you for a few years; after the accident I didn’t have any interest in anything to do with violin.”
His expression sobered, and he murmured, “Ah. Makes sense. Well, I’ll pretend it’s been for all that time.”
When I didn’t say anything, he put his thumbs at the corners of my mouth and pulled, then squished my lips together, the fucking weirdo.
“Are we okay?” he asked, moving his hands from my mouth to my hair and petting the soft fuzz.
We.
I was part of awe?
And what were we?
I shoved the question away before it could leap from my lips.
Fuck, now I’d be spiraling for a different reason.
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re good.”
“Good. Because I like it when you’re mad, but I really hate it when you’re mad atme.” He pressed a chaste little peck to my lips that made my heart skip a beat. When he drew away, he narrowed his eyes. “And I also don’t like it when you get so angry you try and fight everyone. Can you stop fighting every single person that pisses you off? Please? It scares the shit out of me and I don’t want you to get hurt. Or arrested.”
I wanted to do anything he asked of me. Anything at all. There had never been a reason before for me to try and control the violent urges that exploded through me at times; after losing my family, there was no one left whose judgment I cared about. No one I had to be good for, no one who cared if I got hurt or in trouble or…stopped existing.
But now there was someone who cared, someone who was asking me to curb my impulsive inclination to go on the offensive when I felt attacked in some way.
Because it hurt him to watch me lose control like that, and I didn’t want to hurt him.
But what had I done last night?
Fragments of memories and vague bits of things people had said swam in my mind, muddied and almost totally incoherent—but there was one thing that seemed to have stuck with me.
“Did someone say you broke someone’s arm?”
