But it’s her neck that gets me.The slope of it, exposed where her shirt slipped sideways.Her tank top rides up enough to show a strip of stomach, tight and tense even in sleep.No bra on, I see the outline of her nipple rings.Those are new.Fuck me.
Heard about them, not seen them.Not yet.Will.
I regret returning her clothes.She curls one hand near her face like she’s ready to claw the world apart the second she wakes.
She shouldn't seem serene.
She shouldn’t look breakable.
But she does, and that’s the problem.
There’s a fierceness under her skin.A girl raised in a cage who learned to sharpen her own teeth.A girl I should fear.A girl, I should return to her father and walk away from.
Instead, I sit in the old metal chair across from the bed and watch her breathe.And I wonder when the hell she got so deep under my skin.
A bruise blooms just beneath her collarbone, not from my chain, but from running, from fighting, from surviving.Could be from the other night when she lunged at Sophie.Could be from Oaks and I dragging her inside.Could be from when she swung at me, and I caught her too hard.
Becki collects bruises the way church women collect recipes.She has always been marked by something, someone, some place.Born into a preacher’s house.Raised in fear.Fed on guilt.Carved by shame.Every hurt in her is a story waiting to break open.
And God help me, I want to be the one she breaks open for.
It is a problem.
She’s a problem.
She’s my fucking problem.
Legend told me to keep her here until we know what the Reverend is really planning, what Becki meant by her threat at Paradise Falls, what lies are tangled under that new haircut.I try not to notice his name carved into her thigh.
Means nothing now.
Sophie wants her gone.Wants her erased from the picture.Legend wants answers before bloodshed.Oaks wants her punished.Vandal wants her watched.Whiskey wants her muzzled.They all wanted her contained.
And they all knew I was the best one to do it.
Not because of the chain.
Because I know how to keep secrets.
Because I know how to want a woman and not touch her.
Unless she begs for it.
Unless she bleeds for it.
Becki bleeds beautifully.
She shifts in her sleep, rolling onto her back.Her lips part slightly, pink and soft in a way that makes something inside me twist.She breathes like a woman whispering to a lover.And for as long as anyone remembers, that’s been my president, Legend, my brother in so many ways as the Reverend took us both into his sick fold.It should disgust me.Make me walk out.Make me turn away.
But it doesn’t.It never has.
I close my eyes.I let memory pull me back.
Rain.Screech of rubber.Her bike spinning out on Crooked Creek Hollow.The thud of metal slamming into a tree.Steam pouring out like a spirit fleeing the wreck.
I’d been tailing her for weeks then.Masked.Hooded.Silent.Watching her slip between club and cult, between rebellion and despair.I wore the mask then, white and tight and stitched black around the mouth like some horror movie villain.I liked it that way.It kept the world out and me in.She didn’t know someone had been following every one of her footsteps.She never does.Becki walks through the world like she wants to be seen and never expects to be saved.
The night she crashed, I should’ve left her.Let her father find her.Let the Reverend drag her home by her hair and punish her for daring to live.Let her suffer beneath the burden of the man who raised her like a sermon carved from bone.
