The hands that had patched up his injuries didn’t belong to an expert, and I remembered him telling me he was shit at stitches back when we’d first met. How many of these wounds had he taken care of himself?
My eyes dropped to the worst one—the mottled scar that ran across his throat, an obvious attempt at his life that he’d somehow survived. It jerked along his jawline and toreacross his tattooed skin. For the first time, I looked at it and wondered howyounghe’d been when he got it.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty now, and the scar was healed.
It was strange, feeling like I had the upper hand in our dynamic for the first time. Phoenix was so vicious, so strong, that I knew I wouldn’t have been able to fight him one on one without risking my life, but that wasn’t really why.
It was his personality, his presence, the darkness in him that seemed to demand the broken parts of me that were tired of beingAubreycome to life—the parts of me that had always craved someone who could take the weight of the world off my shoulders and just…
Just tell me what to do. Just tell me that I could begood.
Fuck.
Almost of their own volition, my fingers stretched out and traced featherlight across the scar on his throat. My eyes jerked up, watching his face cautiously to make sure I wasn’t disturbing him. Watching him left me caught up in how thick his black lashes were, how his messy dark hair couldn’t completely hide the scar that ran across his forehead.
So… soft.
When he didn’t move, my fingers went back to their gentle ministrations. Now that I was touching all the places the world had tried to break him, I couldn’t seem to stop. Somehow he’d turned these scars into strength, while every broken part on my body felt like a weight trying to drag me into fathomless depths of an ocean so deep I’d never resurface if I let myself sink.
How could he stay afloat when he had even more scars than I did?
The pad of my thumb trailed slowly along the curve of his full lips, brushing over the shallow cut I’d left when we were fighting and catching at the edge of the white line that ran raggedly through them. A claw, maybe? Some animal turned rabid?
I’d never asked him about any of them, though he’d nearly killed us both wanting to learn about mine. Wanting toknowme.
I didn’t have a reason, though, did I?
It was easy to tell myself I didn’t when I shifted my touch and traced the sharp line of his jaw. It was easier to pretend that the strange, confusing way Phoenix taking me to the ground and fucking the ache out of me yesterday was proof that he was nothing more than an animal.
That I’d only responded the way I had because of the rain.
It was easier to think… and it was getting harder and harder to believe my own bullshit.
I needed to move.
I needed to stop touching Phoenix.
I needed…
A startled gasp escaped my throat—I’d been idly chasing the scars and tattoos along the length of his torso while my mind wandered. I hadn’t even noticed the cadence of his breathing change, because I was too enamored with the stretch of his skin and the confusion trying to drown me.
The color of his eyes was softer without the sharp lines ofblack to make the blue stand out. In that moment, they were staring at me with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. Beneath that was a soft bit of wonder and curiosity that nearly made me panic.
I could take another round of him dragging me into the rain and fucking me. Hell, I could take a beating. What I couldn’t stand was the way Phoenix looked at me like he wanted to see right through me, as if he could reach inside me and touch my heart.
I didn’t know why he was looking at me like he wanted to make it beat again.
I started to pull away when his hand came out, catching my wrist. There was so much strength in something as simple as his hold, enough to break me. Phoenix tilted his head and brought my hand back to the center of his chest, flattening my palm over the beat of his heart.
It was steady, thundering just a little faster than usual.
Was he nervous?
How long had it been since someone had seen him without his paint?
Things with Phoenix were a dizzying kind of strange I couldn’t keep up with, and the man looking up at me wasn’t the raider I’d grown used to. I wasn’t sure I could do this.
He kept the paint that he wore like a mask tucked in his pants, and I’d watched him apply it enough times—touch up the edges and carefully draw the patterns—that I knew all the lines. Since the first time I’d seen him do it, he’d wake up every morning and touch up his paint, then settle me between his legs so he could put mine on.
