Money changed hands. “A couple of muffins would be awesome. G, are you awake?”
I grunted.
“You’re not supposed to have coffee, but you should eat,” Rikker said.
“Not hungry,” I mumbled.
Bella disappeared, her car door slamming. And then there was silence. Even though I couldn’t see him, I felt Rikker’s eyes on me.
“We have to talk,” he said eventually.
“About how I made a complete fool of myself last night?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. I opened my eyes, and found his unhappy ones looking back at me. “Okay. How about we just skip over the part where I get offended at the idea that your wanting me nearby makes you a…” he made quote marks out of his fingers, “complete fool.”
God, I was such an asshole. “Rik, my head is killing me. We can talk now if you want. But I’m going to be even stupider than usual.”
He sighed. Then he opened the passenger side door and got out. A second later, he opened the rear door and slid into the back seat next to me. Reaching up, he took my head in his hands and began rubbing gently.
Oh, yeah. The pain was almost bearable when he did that. I did a quick scan of the parking lot (even though it hurt my eyes to shift them left and right) before leaning over to rest my head on his chest.
He kept up the massage, even dropping a quick kiss onto the top of my head. “How about I talk, and you just listen.”
I nodded.
“Good boy. Now, I realized something last night, and I feel like a big idiot for not getting this before.”
His fingertips smoothed down my brow line, and I leaned into him even though I was positive that I wouldn’t like whatever he said next.
“Somehow, I’d sort of forgotten that you were there too, in that alley five years ago.”
I grunted. “Not ever talking about this. You said so yourself.”
He palmed my forehead, holding my head in place against his chest. “New rule. We can talk about it any time one of us has a fucking panic attack in a hospital. See, I always thought that I was the only one who got hurt that day. But that isn’t true, is it? Yeah, the cracked ribs really sucked. But theyhealed.”
His hands were still, just cupping my head. And I hoped he was done with this subject. But no such luck.
“See, this is really fucked,” he continued. “Because now I’m starting to think that maybe my parents did me a favor sending me away to Vermont. They did it for the wrong reasons, of course. But I got to start over in a new place, right? No chance I’d ever run into the assholes who beat me. I got a brand new school, where they didn’t preach about sin all fucking day. But you had to stay there and pretend like nothing happened.”
“Didn’thaveto,” I said. My silence had been a choice. And I made that choice out of pure cowardice.
He began massaging my temples again. “You were sixteen, G, and you’d just been jumped. I never realized how much that fucked with your head.”
I didn’t want any of Rikker’s sympathy, and I sure as hell didn’t deserve it. “The only thing that fucked with my head was the surface of the ice.”
Rikker gave a grunt of disapproval. He wanted a confession from me — some kind of closure for old fears. As if that would help me become a better boyfriend, the kind that wasn’t afraid to hold his hand in the hospital.
But he was only partly right. That scene in the alley had scared me silly. But admitting it now wouldn’t help. Those old fears had crusted over into something more like disgust. And I’d been trapped in it from the moment I left Rikker alone there to fend for himself.
You can’t solve that with a quick chat in the back of a rental car. You can’t solve it atall.
Even so, I relaxed my body against his. I had to. Everything was just so screwed up. I was injured and in pain. And my teammates thought… I didn’t have a clue what they thought. I felt sick just wondering. The touch of Rikker’s hands was the only thing in the world I had going for me.
The only thing.
His fingertips made slow circles through my pain. His whisper was so soft that I wouldn’t have heard it if I weren’t practically sitting on him. “What am I going to do with you, G?”
My eyes had drifted closed, and so when Bella opened the driver’s door, they startled open again. But I didn’t pick my head up off Rikker’s chest. That would have required more effort than I was capable of exerting.
