Ashlyn’s face twists in dismay.
“Actually, that one probably needs to be chopped—” I start.
“Say less. I got you.” He instructs his guys to take care of that, too. “Whatever you need, son,” he says, a little squeeze on his grip.
“Great. Thanks, uh,Dad.”
Ashlyn’s cheeks flame with rage. Ace saunters forward, leaving her behind us as we escape to his Escalade out front.
Though I do help her inside.
Nothing bonds a family like a corpse and a good getaway car. He keeps talking my ear off as we pull away—me, him, and her.
Driving straight into whatever this new, strange dynamic is.
“Oh, fuck.”
I take caution, entering her old bedroom from the actual door instead of her balcony. She’s wet. Steamy from her shower. Only in a towel. The bathroom door hangs open, the mist escaping in a cloud.
As soon as we arrived, Ace showed me one of the guest suites and the shower. I’m wearing his stuff: shorts under sweatpants, and a sleeveless T-shirt. He looked at me all proud-like when I put them on.
My eyes trail behind her to the room she emerged from. The place where things had happened…
Before she can seduce me into doing something stupid in her father’s house, I cup her face and kiss her. Long enough to taste bitter victory from our evening.
“We haven’t talked about it,” I say, voice smaller than before. “You went through something alone. And I want to know. Bring me in now. Tell me what happened.” I nod toward the bathroom. “There…with our son.” I swallow back anguish.
Tears shine in her eyes, sending painful aches across my chest.
“I ask because…well, we haven’t been careful.” I lick my lips, not even sure what I want to say. “I just needmoreof you,” I echo back her words to me. Because they’re true.
She nods solemnly and folds into my embrace. “I don’t care. I haven’t thought about it. If it happens, I’ll be happy.” Her voice is muffled until she plants her chin against my sternum and gazes up at me. “But I’m worried I won’t beableto. Or what if… What if what happened to me happensagain? I won’t be able to survive that.”
With a stifled cry, she whispers, “For so long, I kept repeating that I loved myself. Because I didn’t know if anyone else ever could.”
My body aches as she swallows back a yelp. “I was fifteen. Alone. The tiles were cold. And I was in excruciating pain. I was too scared to tell my parents it was happening. Couldn’t reach them in time. I crawled in there.”
She looks at me like she needs me to anchor her, so I do. Bottom lip quivering, she continues in a whisper. “There was so much blood. And he didn’t cry… Didn’t open his eyes. I sat for a long time, holding him.Willinghim to wake up. But he never did.”
I can see it—the sterile white, her shaking hands, the silence that must’ve followed when the crying stopped before it even began. The ghost of that grief still clings to her skin, like it’s part of her scent. Itkillsme to think of her like that. A puddle alone on her bathroom floor while I was away from her.
“I feel like it wasmy fault. And I know that’s ridiculous and untrue, but the feeling lives there. A whetstone of self-hatred tied around my neck. And if I think about him too much, I drown in guilt and grief. I think about all the things I should’ve done differently.”
Like I could absorb her agony through my skin, I wrap my whole body around her, shielding her from a future she can’t yet face. And a past that haunts us both.
“Give me all your pain,” I grit out through my teeth, trying to explain all the ways I want to take care of her. “We do thistogethernow. No hiding or shields up. I’ll hold you through it.” I kiss her temple. “I’ll consume all the poisonous parts if that’s what it takes.”
Her arms squeeze my chest tighter.
“You didn’t need anyone else,” I tell her, tilting her chin up until she’s forced to meet my eyes. “You needed the other halfof yourself. And that’s me. You’re my reflection, Ashlyn, the part of me that finally looks back.”
My voice roughens. “I love you the only way I can. It’s not the kind you read about in epic novels. But it’s everything I am. Everything I have.”
As if those are the words she finally needed to hear, she collapses into my arms. Sniffles wet my neck as she sobs for a long moment, her back shaking with every deep breath.
Finally, she pulls back, and I erase her tears with my lips.
She smiles softly and shrugs. “We should probably wait for theright time.”