North says nothing. He just keeps holding my hand as if he knows better than to fill this with anything cheap.
“I still do this,” I say, glancing down at my wrist. “When I’m stressed, or if something catches me off guard, I reach for the scar without thinking. Like touching it proves I made it past that version of me when I tried to escape it all.” My laugh comes out shaky and small. “Which is not exactly my hottest confession of the evening.”
North goes still for a second, then looks straight at me. “They locked you in overnight,” he says. “And filmed you. And nobody stopped it.”
I shake my head once.
“People love saying kids are cruel like that explains anything.” His mouth hardens. “It doesn’t. That was deliberate. They wanted to humiliate you.”
I look down at our hands.
“You were a kid,” he says. “You should have been safe and protected.” He pauses, then adds, “None of that shame belongs to you. That belongs to them. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Adelaide.”
Before I can say anything else, he lets go of my hand, then stands, drags his chair around the end of the table, and sits beside me instead of across from me. He’s close now, his thigh near mine, his shoulder brushing mine as he settles. Heat rolls off him in waves, along with that intoxicating scent of pine, woodsmoke, and salted caramel, and my pulse starts tripping over itself all over again.
“I know that,” I whisper. “Logically, I know that.”
“And I know that wasn’t easy for you to say out loud.”
My fingers tighten in my lap.
He reaches for my hand again, slower this time, giving me every chance to pull away. I don’t. He turns it over in his palm, his thumb brushing once over the inside of my wrist before he lifts it and presses his mouth there.
The kiss is brief.
It wrecks me.
My breath hitches down to my lungs so hard it almost hurts, and suddenly, I have to blink because the tears are there, old, stupid, and unwelcome, pressing at the backs of my eyes the way they always do when the past gets too close. But this feels different. Sitting here beside him, with his hand around mine and the ocean breathing just beyond the torches, it’s as if he’s pulling some of the poison out of me. Standing between me and that old darkness and telling it,Not tonight.
When he lowers my hand, he keeps hold of it. “It means everything to me that you trusted me with that,” he says. “You didn’t owe me a word of it, Adelaide.”
I swallow hard.
He’s watching me with that same unshakable focus, but there’s nothing hard in it now. “You didn’t deserve any of that,” he says. “Not one second of it. And it doesn’t get to own you now just because it marked you once.”
I let out a shaky breath and scrub quickly under one eye with my free hand before anything can spill over. “You’re making it very difficult to be cool right now.”
“Be uncool, then.”
I laugh, broken around the edges but real.
His thumb strokes once more over my wrist. “You don’t have to make yourself smaller with me. Not to make it easier or prettier. I can handle the ugly parts.”
My throat tightens all over again, but this time it isn’t the same kind of hurt. It’s relief, which is almost worse because I don’t know what to do with it.
“You say very intense things for a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt,” I manage.
That gets the faintest curve from his mouth. “It’s one of my favorite shirts.”
Another laugh slips out of me, steadier this time, and I lean back a little in my chair, still holding his hand and trying to getmy breathing under control while the worst of the ache eases its grip.
“Better?” he asks.
I nod once. “Annoyingly, yes.”
“Fantastic.” And somehow, with the warmth of his hand around mine and the dark blue ocean beyond the torchlight, I believe he means it wholeheartedly.
“Let me show you something intimate from me.”
