“Uvek.” [always]
Turning my head, I rest my cheek on top of the messy pile of hair on top of her head and take a deep breath.
“Pusti to na mene, moja lepa devojko.” [Let it out on me, my beautiful girl]
“Ja c´u to nositi za tebe.” [I’ll carry it for you]
It only takes a few minutes for her sobs to turn to hiccups. She makes an adorable squeaking sound when she hiccups and I smile to myself.
“What can I do?” I ask, keeping my chin on her head, not letting go.
Her shoulders go rigid, and the muscles harden under my hold as the ache that was weighing so heavy on her starts to lift and she realizes our closeness. Praying I won’t regret it, I tighten my grip around her. “Please don’t pull away. Tell me, what can I do?”
For all of five seconds, she stands frozen against me, her hands still gripping my shirt. And then she surprises me when she mumbles, “You don’t make my skin crawl.”
I know she doesn’t like to be touched, and I always try to respect that, but fuck, it’s hard not to touch her every chance I get. And right now, she fits perfectly against me inevery way.
A chuckle escapes my chest at the declaration, her shoulders relax just slightly, and I recall the comment she made the day of the wedding which has been on repeat in my head. ‘I’m not your next conquest, Jax’. It crushed me when she said it, that she thinks I would use her, or worse, intentionally hurt her.
Does that explain her hesitation in my arms right now? Or is it just the habit of having no contact with other people?
I have to show her what she means to me. She has no use for words. Actions will always speak louder than words.
And that will only take time.
“The highest of compliments,” I say, keeping the humor in my voice.
A tinkle of a laugh reaches my ears before the tension in her body is back and she lifts her head away from my chest. She opens her hands and presses her small palms against me as she pushes away. I reluctantly loosen my hold so she can step back.
Her red-rimmed eyes lift to meet mine and her cheeks flush on each side of her pink nose. “What are you doing in here?”
Lifting my hand, I reach for her face to wipe the wetness from her cheek and she pulls her head back a little in surprise. But I don’t lower my hand, I wait until she is still and cup her face to swipe my thumb across her soft skin. “I saw the horse being dropped off this morning and wanted to see without spooking him.”
It’s a lie. Sort of. Since that asshole crashed the wedding, I haven’t wanted to go too far from her. I don’t trust that he is going to play nice. When I heard them dropping the horse off early this morning, I used that as an excuse to come down and check on her.
I don’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I drop my hand, and her gaze moves toward the bigdouble doors of the stable, toward the round pen.
“I didn’t know you’re interested in horses.” She wipes her hands across her face before she crosses her arms over her chest, looking at her toes before bashfully looking back up at me through her eyelashes.
Keeping my eyes locked on hers, I tilt my head a little. “I am interested in a lot of things.”
The pink in her cheeks deepens to a darker shade, and she toes the floor. Her shyness is the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. She recovers quick, squaring her shoulders and sliding her fingers in her back pockets, pushing her chest out and sending all sorts of sordid thoughts through my head.
The adorable part is that she’s so demure that she doesn’t even realize what she did.
“He’s pretty skittish. I haven’t been able to get him to eat anything yet.” Just as she says that, the sound of a bucket being dropped clatters outside of the stable. We both walk out to find an empty feed bucket on the outside of the pen and the horse on the other side, watching us, like he didn’t just drop that bucket over the rail to get her attention.
Scooping the bucket up, she leans on the metal rail with a smile. “Is that your way of telling me you want more, boy?” The horse just stands there, watching her. “I can already tell you’re gonna be ornery, bring it on, boy, ornery is better than scared.”
I think I may be jealous of a horse.
Her eyes are shining as she looks at him, and the smile on her face is breathtaking. Turning on her heal, she walks back into the stable with the bucket, her big rubber boots flopping against her toned, golden legs.
I’ve overheard her joking with the girls about not liking her ‘bubble butt’, as she calls it, but I think she has the most perfect ass I’ve ever seen. When she walked into the kitchen for breakfast this morning wearing the worn cut-off jeanshorts, with the fringe hanging against her thighs, and a t-shirt, I nearly choked on my coffee and then had to step behind the island to hide my giant fucking hard-on.
Leaning against the tree by the front door of the stable, I look out at the horse in the pen. His dark eyes watch me with no amount of trust, in fact, he looks at me like he would rather kick me in the fucking head than let me close to him.
Maybe that’s why the horses trust Marley so much, she’s had her own trauma and can understand their pain, a shared fear. I sometimes wonder how some people can still carry that fear, holding their feelings so close to the surface, when I turned everything off. After I watched them slowly kill my mother and then my sister, the part of me that felt grief and pain was put into a dark place and left there.
