“It’s… a lot goes into it.” He cleared his throat, still focusing hard on cleaning me up.
“I can handle a lot. You’ve seen my family,” I reminded him. “I handle a lot.”
He smiled at me but shook his head. “I don’t know how to do this. Talk to someone I like in a romantic sense.”
“Just start with what Weston couldn’t tell me,” I tried with a gentle squeeze of his hand. “Start with the coaches’ freshman year.”
Red stained his neck, branching up to his cheeks. “Freshman year?”
I nodded. “Just the parts you can share. The parts that aren’t too hard.”
“It’s all hard.” He stopped wiping my fingers, pulling his hands back into his lap where he stared.
I allowed the silence to wash between us, waves lapping up all his hesitation. If it took hours, days, months, or years, I would wait. However long it took for him to feel safe enough, I would wait.
David eventually took a deep breath. He tossed the towel inside his bathroom door and leaned horizontally across the bed. His gaze was trained on the ceiling as he said, “As a freshman on the football team, you expect a bit of hazing —it’s technically not condoned, but that doesn’t really matter. Not if no one speaks up. And we’re conditioned not to speak up. Especially those of us who have little left off that field.”
I bit my tongue and ran my fingers through his hair, brushing it off his forehead.
He closed his eyes as he continued, sinking himself into a dark world because maybe that made sharing this with me easier. “There were two particular staff members who fed into it with the senior guys. They were younger, so the line between staff and player was blurred. Lukas was one of them. I was… they were… it was the most bruised I’d been in a long time. Far worse than anything my aunt’s boyfriend could have done.”
My gaze flickered to his chest. White scars crisscrossed his skin like the pattern of a chain-linked fence. I remember him telling me not to push him. How it was a trigger. I pressed akiss to his forehead, and when I pulled away, his eyes were open and on me.
“I didn’t tell anyone for the first few months.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Very… pathetic.”
“Afraid,” I corrected in a hard tone. “Hurt. Mistreated. Not pathetic, David. Never pathetic.”
“What kind of person stands there and lets someone…” He sucked in a breath and shook his head, no longer meeting my gaze. “Hurt them. Hurt them over and over and over.”
His chest rose and fell more quickly as he spoke. I brushed circles across his cheeks, trying to keep him calm.
“A person who’s trying to survive in the only way they know because they’ve been doing it this way all their life.” I cupped his cheek and turned him back to me. “Being quiet was how you learned to protect yourself. You don’t deserve blame for that.”
“I just wish I could have been better.”
My jaw tightened at the thought of those men taking advantage of their power and wielding that power against the man who lay before me, a man who was brilliant, thoughtful, and vulnerable. The man who’d closed himself off in fear of being hurt again by those he wanted to trust the most.
“You didn’t have a job or a family you could count on,” I said. “No power. No expectations. David, all you should have had to worry about was playing a game you loved and finding yourself at university. You should have been worrying about crappy cafeteria food and shared bathrooms.”
He laughed through the hurt and covered his hand over mine.
“When I look at you, David,” I said. “I see a guy who fought tooth and nail to be here, who didn’t let the external or internal stop him from being extraordinary. I see a guy who opened himself up to me even though his past told him thatwas the most dangerous thing to do. David, I don’t see what anyone did to you. I see only how incredible you’ve become.”
“I want to believe that.” He squeezed my hand and kissed the palm. “I really do.”
“You will,” I promised. “One day you will. For now, I’ll believe it for both of us.”
31
“We should getyou a change of clothes,” David suggested after his second time going down on me. I groaned into the pillow still covering my face. Pulses from my climax made it too hard to think, let alone plan a trip outside our four walls.
He chuckled, massaging the inside of my thighs like the tormentor he was. “I know you love it, baby. But it’s Sunday. We’ve been marathoning for over twenty-four hours. And I need to feed you more than just pancakes.”
I snatched the pillow off my face and sat up. “Did you just… call me baby?”
David shook his head, brows raised. “Not if you didn’t like it.”
“I hated it,” I teased with a smile and tossed the pillow at him. He dodged it with little to no effort.
