D minor.
“Did you miss him?” he asks.
“I never knew him. There were pictures, but Mom got rid of them when she took me to Jeremiah’s compound. Mom loved Dad, though. She had years and years to fall in love with him—to build her whole identity around him. When he left her, she had no idea who she was, and she attached herself to the next man she thought wouldn’t leave her and break her heart the way my dad had.”
Maybe that’s where I get this addiction to music from. Mom. She would do anything for someone to love her unconditionally, and I lost count of how many times I would lie awake all night repeating music in my head.
“I needed to feel something,” I say, my fingers curling on the piano keys.
I feel Nash looking at me. “Tonight?”
I shake my head. “Up on the roof. Standing at the edge. I stopped feeling in the desert. I should have sat down and died, and I couldn’t, but I don’t know that I wanted to live either. That’s why I haven’t wanted to play. What if all my feelings are gone, and it doesn’t feel the same anymore?”
What if a part of me died in the desert after all?
If I lost music, I wouldn’t know who I am.
He moves closer, cradles the nape of my neck, and tilts my head up so we’re eye to eye. He looks down into my face, his heated stare flicking from my eyes to my mouth, communicating exactly what he intends to do.
Kiss me.
I can push him away or tell him I don’t want him to kiss me. But I peer up at him, not moving.
My toes curl, and my eyes flutter shut as he brushes his mouth over mine in a soft caress.
He lifts his head. “How did that feel?”
I lick my lips, wishing he would do it again. “I shouldn’t have let you kiss me. Vonn and I?—”
“Slept together,” he quietly cuts in. “I know. So does Makhi. We all care about you and want you to be happy. If that’s with one of us, then so be it.”
“And if it’s with all of you?” The sound of my heart beating is loud in the quiet dark.
“Then be happy with all of us.”
I admit what I hadn’t wanted to say before. “I liked it. Your kiss. I liked the way it made me feel.”
All soft and warm and gooey.
“Again?” he whispers, voice husky.
I nod.
His mouth on mine is soft, then hungry. Sweet and so rich, I lean into it, craving more.
He breaks the kiss to frame my face between warm hands, softer than Vonn’s slightly rough, calloused touch. “If I wanted to carry you upstairs and make love to you, what would you say?”
I’m used to hiding from my feelings. I used to view them as a weakness—a tool someone used to bludgeon me because people have hurt me so many times. At every school, I was the new kid, bullied for my thrift-store clothes, uneven home-cut haircuts from my mom, and no idea of where I fit in the world. Every time I thought someone was being nice to me and I opened up to them, they used what I told them to hurt me.
I started guarding my heart. Then my mom, the one person I believed would never betray me, betrayed me to Jeremiah. With him, I always hid my feelings, or he would have used them to control me the way he controlled everyone else in the compound. Including my mom.
Until now.
Now, I don’t want to hide from my feelings or hide them from the three men in this house.
Nash gave me a safe place to hide from an obsessed cult leader.
Vonn has never stopped making me feel safe.
