I was smiling now, thinking of how he used to jump around and bob to the music as he drove.
I missed it.
He had a small smile on his face now, too, and his eyes kept darting from me to the road.
“Yeah?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Yeah, angel. If you want to listen to some of your music, put it on. I don’t mind.”
His smile disappeared, and he squeezed my hand before pulling away.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice getting tight and rough. He swallowed so hard it sounded like it hurt.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
He paused as if contemplating whether or not he wanted to tell me what he was thinking, but after a minute, he caved.
“When I was chained in the tub, Damian played dubstep every time he came in to hurt me.”
His words rolled over me, and my blood went ice cold.
“Hewhat?”I gasped.
Cal nodded, looking sad and vulnerable.
“Yeah.” The word came out gravelly, like it was a struggle for him to speak. “I’ve tried a few times since to put it on, but it always triggers a flashback. I can’t listen to it anymore.”
“Angel… baby…” My heart was fucking breaking in my chest. I wanted to tell him to pull over, so I could crawl into his lap and wrap my arms around him… but he was still healing, and I didn’t want to accidentally hurt him.
He glanced at me, and his lips curved again in a small smile. Reaching out to touch my face, he brushed his thumb tenderly across my jaw before returning his attention to the road.
“It’s okay, Ryan. I don’t need dubstep. I have something even better.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, still reeling from the fact that my angel had been so badly traumatized, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.
We pulled into Fairview, and he gave me one last look before getting out of the car.
“You, baby,” he purred, leaning in and brushing a soft kiss against my lips.
“As long as I have you, I don’t need anything else.”
Alexa, play: Stay - Rihanna, Mikky Ekko
The next few weeks passed without much happening, andstill,Ryan wouldn’t do anything intimate with me.
The only time he touched me was when I woke up screaming from one of my night terrors. Whenever this happened, he would fold me into his chest and rock me gently back and forth, kissing me softly on the top of my head and promising me that everything was going to be okay.
Thankfully, I hadn’t tried to kill him again. He seemed to have found a way to rouse me that didn’t trigger a violent need to protect myself, but… I still hated that I woke him up nearly every night. Even before my most recent bought of torture, Ihad suffered from night terrors. That was why I slept primarily at Apex instead of the townhouse. The thought of worrying Naomi or waking her up because of my inability to keep my shit together made me feel like a failure.
Back then, my nightmares were usually of my mother strangling me. Now they were of Damian.
“Who could ever love you, devil boy!?”My mother’s words would come out of Damian’s mouth as he forced the burning hot brand into my chest.
“No one loves you. How could they?”Damian’s voice sizzled along with my flesh, and I screamed and screamed and screamed.
I kept trying to tell him that I could sleep in my car since the rest of the house was occupied. Every time I said that, he always looked like he wanted to punch me in the face for suggesting such a thing, which made me feel good.
However, despite how much he made me feel like my feelings were reciprocated in the dead of night, whenever I tried to initiate any physical form of intimacy, he adamantly refused and pulled away.
