It was like a ritual to him, and I would have been lying tomyself if I said I didn’t relax beneath the feel of his fingers transforming me into a different person.
Now, without the barrier of that paint between us, I felt oddly raw and exposed. I leaned over, grabbing his pants off the floor so I could rifle through the pockets and rise back up with the tin in my hand. He just watched me with that same calm, patient expression, though he refused to let go of my wrist.
Phoenix didn’t need to know I was doing this because I couldn’t stand to look at him without his paint. Without that mask to hide his youth and the soft curves of his face, the beauty beneath the roughness, I could see the man he might have been if the world were different. As much as I kept my past a secret from him, he hadn’t told me much about why he’d chosen the life he had. There were obviously people who did it because they were just brutal. There were people who looked at the world and how fucked up it was and they embraced that cruelty with both hands.
But for all the ways he was fucked up—the people he’d killed, the fact that he was a god damn cannibal… Phoenix didn’t strike me as someone who’d taken up the role of a raider just because hewantedto. He had a pack. A family.
He was different.
I had no idea what had turned him into the killing machine that he was, what had caused his scars, but without the paint, I could see something else.
I could see Phoenix leading one of the little camps that the Order so often “secured” supplies from, protecting them in the face of guns and soldiers because you didn’t turn on your own people.
Phoenix standing strong and tall, pledging to the Order because he was young, and he thought maybe he could make a difference.
Phoenix, standing at my side when I’d joined up, the tags around his neck his own, seeing me when I was at my most broken and holding me together instead of Ben.
That final image burned violently behind my lids. I’d lost the last of my hope when Ben had turned on me so easily, the last bit of trust I might have had in the world. But something told me Phoenix…
Fuck, Phoenix wouldn’t have turned on me if he’d learned I’d never earned my tags the same way he had—he would have realized I’d earned them through pain, through loss.
And I could see it play behind my eyes—a fucking painful, impossible what-if.
I didn’twant that.
I couldn’t want that.
I couldn’t see him as anything other than the monster I needed him to be.
Wanting and what-ifs would drive me insane.
I uncapped the paint and dipped my finger inside. I was forced to do it all one-handed, because Phoenix refused to release my wrist. The warmth of his fingers encircling mine felt like an anchor that kept me from flying apart, from trying to run.
I craved the strength of that grip, and I hated the way I did. I had to bite the inside of my cheek until it bled to stop myself from speaking, from telling him to let me go.
To stop.
To never stop.
I wasn’t sure anymore.
I focused on my task instead. I had to lean across his broad chest to trace the marks he meticulously painted on his features—marks I finally understood. He wouldn’t be half as intimidating if everyone could see what I saw now.
Phoenix watched me with careful eyes as I swept my finger across the bridge of his nose to cover the scar there. The paint settled into the ridges of it before I worked my way back beneath his gaze and over his temple. After a moment, he lay back against the pillows and finally closed his lids. A small hum of satisfaction rumbled from his chest when I swept my thumb carefully across his brow.
There was something complicated and intricate about the pattern that he drew on himself; it was all webbing and spattering. It wasn’t random, because he made sure the same outline kissed his skin every morning when he freshened the paint on his face. I wasn’t sure I could completely replicate it, but I knew I could do enough to make sure that he looked like the raider who had dragged me out into the rain and fucked me until I lost my voice last night. I could transform him fromwhat-ifback to the roughness that had kept me tethered to him from that first night he’d fucked my throat when I’d tried to run… to the monster capable of making the emptiness inside me seem less empty in the moments when we were fucking, fighting, when we were together.
I worked in silence, except for the satisfied little purrs that escaped his chest—my fingers pressed strokes here, careful touches there. I dipped my nails back into the paint to tracethe spider webbing that ran from the top of his lid, along his brow, and to the shaggy fall of black tresses that spilled across his forehead. I kept my touches light, careful, feathery and soft in a way that drew goosebumps along his bare arms and chest.
The proximity of our bodies wasn’t lost to me, and I could tell it wasn’t lost to Phoenix either. Whether it was how I lay atop him, or the gentle glide of my fingers against his skin… I could feel his cock reacting. He pressed hard against my thigh where I half straddled him, though his body stayed still as I kept working. Everything about him was so big and hard, so rough around the edges. I needed to make his face match.
“Aubrey.” The sound of someone breaking the silence was nearly too much, but I was surprised at how gentle his voice could be when he wasn’t fighting or barking out demands. He was a completely different creature when he was relaxed. We’d never spent a morning like this before… bare and clean and wrapped around each other in what I could only call—and refused to acknowledge to be—a lover’s embrace.
“Hmm?” I kept my voice soft, unwilling to spark the fury I’d unleashed last night unless he started trying to break me apart with questions again.
If I was being honest, there was something so intoxicating about him when he was gentle. It was another facet of him that could fill the empty parts of me and make me forget all the ways I was broken, but I didn’t know how to use this part of him, how to catch Phoenix when he was sweet and keep him.
It was too dangerous anyway—Phoenix with gentle eyes and a soft voice was too close to thatwhat-iffrom earlier.
