Lowering as instructed, she shook her head. Dust rained from her hair, coating her shoulders in a layer of light gray. “Is that what you will ask Zion? To sit? Not bend over or something?”
Seated on the low oak table, I picked out a tiny flashlight and tweezers out of the first aid box. “If I tell you, will you promise not to tell him?”
Her frown returned. Mute, she looked away, focusing on the obliterated kitchen.
Promises were a heavy matter to her. Once made, they were never to be broken. Like a noose around your neck, waiting to snap your vertebrae if you spilled the secret.
Clicking the flashlight’s rubber bottom, I aimed it at the expanse above her sleeveless top. The multitude of grazes absorbed the light, the cuts matte from clotting blood, like all the other minor injuries on her face.
“Chin up.” I gestured, and she obediently followed the instruction. “This is going to hurt,” I warned, positioning the flashlight between my teeth, the aluminum cool, the taste of metal as acidic as the terror at the possibility of losing her.
The tweezers glinted in the silver light as I brought the slanted tips to the fragment of glass embedded in her flesh.
She grew rigid, yet not a cry escaped her as I fished out the seven minuscule shards, opaque from her blood.
Fresh waves of scarlet rushed down her neck, gathering in the hollow of her throat, but her swallow was the sole indication pain was blazing within her.
Dropping the tweezers onto the box's lid, I exchanged the instrument for a brown glass bottle and a clear bag. “How is your hand?” She had been holding a glass when it exploded.
She slumped against the backrest of the couch. “It’s fine.”
Her refusal to be taken care of rattled my bones. The fact she’d had no one to rely on for years and had developed a habit to close off, to guard herself whenever unpleasant things hit her… Not being able to uproot that tendency grated on my nerves. “Kali.”
“See?” Kali held up her palm, the fair skin as smooth as it was yesterday, and the absence of lacerations appeased my decaying patience. “Just a scratch. I guess it got lucky. My face, not so much.”
Her face, her neck, above her chest. Blood had branched out, the trickles creating a painting of a crimson spider web.
Sitting on the wooden table—an uncomfortable seat if there ever was one—I spread my knees. “Come closer.”
With a roll of her eyes, she scooched to the edge of the couch, right between legs. “So…have you?”
I fished out a cotton ball out of the plastic bag. “Have I what?”
“You know”—she gestured at my crotch—“had someone in your butt?”
The aluminum cap crunched as I twisted it off the glass bottle. “Yes.”
She perked up, curiosity getting the better of her. It always did. “Did you like it?”
Soaking the cotton ball with the antiseptic, the whiff of the chemical potent enough to curl the hairs inside my nostrils, I smirked. “Didyou?”
Her cheeks reddened. “I asked you first.”
“It was…” Nothing compared to how she had reacted when I had rocked into her ass the first time. How she had writhedon top of Zion to try to get me to move. How the duct tape had muffled her whimpers. How Zion had felt underneath me, my thighs bracketing his. How his skin had seared mine. How his groans had subjugated me, each grunt a conquest of my logic and reasoning. Returning the small bottle to the stainless-steel box, it clattering as the glass hit the metal, I divulged, “Tense.”
Similar to how Kali stiffened when I pressed the damp ball to the first scratch near her nose.
The antiseptic obliterated bacteria, no doubt aggravating her exposed nerve endings, and she hissed. “Why?”
“You have to feel safe enough for it to be pleasurable.” Willing myself not to flinch at her wince, I moved the cotton sphere to the next injury.
“You didn’t relax,” she mused as I cleaned four nicks close together on the right side of her jaw. “It hurt.”
“A little,” I admitted. “But pain is not the reason why I never did it again.”
She caught my wrist to stop me from continuing to clean her, her grasp a perfect shackle if there ever was one. Silence stretched between us, her demand not requiring words to convey the expectation.
“You need trust for it to work. And trust implies there is a relationship.” I twirled the wet ball. The antiseptic chilled my skin, the streak of red in the cotton as severe as the decisions I had to make for the benefit of my people daily. “I have never allowed myself to have them. Before you and Zion, I could not imagine putting myself in a vulnerable position for a stranger.”
