“We ran away together, and he patched me up. That was the first night we spent together. It was the first time he kissed me.” His eyes had gone soft, faraway. “It’s a fucked-up story, but it’s not a scar I regret. I can’t. It brought us together.”
He was swimming in emotions. Suddenly everything I’d been trying to pry from him was there at the surface, and I could see it. There was an entire world in the depths of his words—an entire world he’dlost. Aubrey shuddered against me, and every fiber of his being seemed to be lit up with it, with that vast ocean of feeling I’d never seen before. It was a love that I honestly didn’t believe existed.
But it was there on his face, and he was vulnerable withit. In that moment, I could have broken him. I could have fucked him senseless until he was screaming my name on the tide of the softBishopthat he’d whispered so reverently.
But he was looking at me, and I was looking at Aubrey. The real Aubrey.
For the first time.
I leaned in and pressed my mouth to his again, almost surprised that he let me. Helet mekiss him, and his lips were trembling as I swiped my tongue between them and tasted the sorrow on his tongue.
It was a sweet, languid play at pretending that I could be the man he was seeing behind his eyes, that I could be the person he seemed to glimpse behind my paint.
Maybe Icouldbe soft for him… just for tonight.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
AUBREY
I was tearing myself apart,telling him about Bishop. I knew I was doing damage that I couldn’t undo—I hadn’t told anyone.
It was so much more than what I’d told Phoenix, of course. I could still remember every fucking detail of it—the way Morris had looked like a wild, crazed thing. The way he took such savage pleasure in holding me down, thrusting inside me, dragging his knife down the line of my back like he could peel away my skin and wear it to be the man Bishop wanted.
Bishop…
When Phoenix’s mouth pressed against mine, I half expected him to tear me apart like he usually did after I gave him a story. Instead, the warmth of his lips was so soft that it nearly tore a sob from my chest. Fuck, I’d kissed him.
I’d finally broken down and kissed him, but looking at the pain on his face, seeing the way he spoke about his mother… I finally understood the paint.
The mask.
I understood Phoenix, and I had to do something to show him that I was therewith him.
When he pulled back, there was a depth to his oceanic eyes that I couldn’t understand. I didn’t know what he was trying to do, what he was trying to show me.
He was deliberate when he flipped me over and pressed my stomach to the mattress, and the low groan that tore out of me was a mixture of pain and relief.
This… this was the Phoenix I expected. My body tensed, so ready for him to do what he always did. I craved the pain, if only to fill in all the ragged, broken edges of myself that I’d just exposed. Instead, I felt his lips brush faintly along the bottom of the scar, catching at the top of my ass in a whispering, tender touch.
“What are you doing?” I half whimpered the question, more panicked now than if he’d tried to fuck me hard. Phoenix’s hands smoothed along my sides like a balm, and his lips continued to trail the length of the scar until I was shivering in a puddle of sensation and emotion beneath him. He didn’t know what he was doing.
He couldn’t know what he was doing.
It seemed like he never did, though. Phoenix was a fucking ghost of my past, haunting me in all the hallways.
He was Morris, pinning me down and taking what he wanted.
He was Bishop, saving me, putting my broken pieces back together.
He was the everything and the nothing inside me all at once, so much that my head was spinning. I couldn’t figure out how to breathe around it or demand that he stop. I didn’t know how to fight to get his roughness back.
I didn’t know if I wanted it anymore.
“I would have killed him for you, Aubrey. I would have torn his throat out with my teeth.” Phoenix gently bit against the curve of my back, and I squirmed, my breath hitching in my chest. “Our first kiss would have tasted like his blood, and you would haveknownthat he was dead. I…” He paused and pressed a kiss where his teeth had just been. “I would never let someone hurt you and live.”
Fuck, he was so different. He’d opened himself up to me when he’d told me about his mother, when I’d felt my heart breaking for everything he could have been and how cruel she was to him. He didn’t say it, but I’d seen the agony painted across his features.
