I keep my eyes on the task but I know he’s watching me.
“Where’s your key?” I ask.
“Threw it away.”
“Why?”
“So I don’t get to you. When I want to. So you’re safe from me.”
My heart twists again and I bite my lip at how much it must sting him when I run the cotton swab over his scrapes, but he doesn’t move a muscle.
“Did you punch the door?” I ask then.
“No.”
“Then?”
“Found a rock. Busted the glass with it.”
I shake my head, still looking at his hand as I wrap a bandage around it. “I was mad at you. Am mad at you.”
“I know.”
“But I was fine. She — Halo — was fine.”
“It didn’t look like that from where I was standing.”
I sigh sharply, finishing up. “What you said to me was rude. It was uncalled for and it was mean.”
“That’s why I said it.”
I look up then. “What?”
His eyes are all dark and intense. “Because I wanted you to understand something.”
“And what is that?”
He comes closer to me, as if now that I’ve gotten my way and I’ve cleaned his wounds, it’s his turn now. To talk. To do things. To grab me.
Which he does.
He grabs my thickening waist with one hand and my face with the other. He even pulls me to him as if he doesn’t want a single thing separating us.
Especially after how I kept us apart by barring the door on him.
So he eliminates every little thing that stands between him and me, presses my short body to his tall one, and I hate that my hands clutch his shirt at the waist.
I hate that as soon as our bodies touch, my achy, tender breasts to his ribs and my swollen belly to his pelvis, my lips part on a trembling, relieved breath.
He dips that body over me then, and cranes my neck up as he growls, “First things first, you’re pregnant with my baby. You’repregnant. And you need to understand that if I want to get to you, you’re going to let me. It doesn’t matter that you’re angry at me or I’ve been an asshole to you. You are going tolet me. Because if something happens to you, Fae, if something happensto her, Halo, I don’t even know what I’m going to do. So if you ever lock your door or bar the windows or whatever the fuck you want to do to keep me out, remember that I’ll break it all down. I will destroy every single thing you put in my way in order to get to you. Do you understand that? Tell me you understand that.”
I do.
I do understand that.
He told me this once when I was sixteen, that he’d climb every tower, bust through every window to get to me. And today he did.
So I get that and I nod. “Yes.”
