Gina

I was walking through the parking lot after a long Monday when my phone dinged. I thought it was Pria, with another scolding text telling me how fucking stupid I’d been for dismissing Sam fucking Kennedy and not even at least sending him across the street.

Safe to say she hadn’t been happy about me pushing him away. Even though she got it.

As well as a woman with a husband who adored her and family who’d nurtured her for who she was could, at least.

It wasn’t Pria.

Unknown: Is it okay for me to come back yet?

Despite everything I’d convinced myself of, my heart leapt when I read the message. I knew exactly who it was. I dumped all my crap into the passenger seat of my car, staring at the phone, deciding what to say in response. Deciding whether I should respond at all.

Of course, Sam wasn’t waiting for me to decide.

Unknown: Because I am back. So you need to make sure it’s okay for me to be back within the next twenty minutes, because that’s how long it’s going to take for me to get to your place. Just landed in Dallas.

And even if you’re not okay with me coming back, I’m coming anyway. I’m going to make it my mission to make you okay.

Unknown: Whatever it takes.

Unknown: Even a limb.

I frowned at the screen. And at the last part about the limb. Dallas was not twenty minutes away. It was an hour away. In good traffic.

My phone dinged again.

Unknown: I rented a really fast car. I’m not fucking around getting myself to you, Thumbelina.

Maybe it was stupid and illogical and totally irresponsible, but I thought about my father telling me to trust my instincts while I was on the road. He might not have been a fountain of fatherly advice, or fatherly anything, but I thought maybe I might just listen to him on that. So I followed my instincts.

Me: I’ve decided. It’s okay. Just get yourself to me in one piece, please. All limbs attached. You’re nowhere near as good of a driver as I am.

His response was immediate.

Unknown: Know that, babe. I’m nowhere near as good of a person as you are, let alone driver. But I’m gonna try and be really good at pretending until you beg me to be bad.

Even reading that made my panties dampen. And then I realized the reality of what he meant. And the hair removal, or lack thereof, situation downstairs. Plus the utterly boring and sensible underwear I was wearing.

I didn’t waste time in getting in my car and racing home to attempt to prepare myself for Sam in twenty minutes.

Though even if I had twenty years I didn’t think I’d actually be prepared.

* * *

I opened the door, expecting Sam. Since I was expecting Sam and still floating on frigging clouds from the fact that he was here, I was opening the door with an uncharacteristic and wide smile.

Which, as it turned out, was wasted on who was standing on my stoop.

The smile deflated like a balloon when I didn’t see a rocker with a ripped pair of jeans and a ridiculous tee shirt. Instead, I was treated with an asshole in an expertly pressed uniform.

“What are you doing here?” I asked tightly, my entire body stiffening.

He flinched back a little, the megawatt and totally fake smile on his face flickering slightly when my greeting, or lack thereof, sank it.

I understood why. He was used to the weak woman he’d battered down like a chef tenderizing steak. Molded from my natural state so I suited his purposes. So he could chew me up and spit me out.

I was not that anymore.

I was far from that. I had repaired myself, re-inflated everything that he’d tried so hard to destroy.

But he hadn’t exactly seen me at my best when he’d taken my statement a couple of weeks ago. I was sure he’d forgotten about the other day, written it off as one of my “moods,” as he used to call my attempting to stand up for myself. Somehow structured my strength into me being a raging shrew.

So I stopped.

And before that day, I’d made an art out of avoiding him. And it was an art. Avoiding people you didn’t want to see in a town as small as this was nearly impossible.

Nearly.

But for someone like me, who had enough motivation, like survival… well, they learned quick.

So before what I was now referring to as “the incident,” I hadn’t seen him since he’d given me a panic attack in Walgreens a year and a half ago. And he hadn’t even spoken to me. He’d just gazed at me, eyes smug with the knowledge that even though he was technically out of my life, he still held dominion over my mind.

Then, he did.

But this was not then.

“That’s not the greeting I was expecting, Genie,” he said warmly, using the name that had come to make me feel physically sick. An outsider might even say his response held a hint of good-natured teasing.

An outsider I wasn’t. I knew better.

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t the greeting you were expecting,” I agreed. “But it’s the greeting you deserve.” I paused. “No. The greeting you deserve was the one your buddy treated me to two weeks ago. But I don’t have enough upper body strength, stupidity and evil in me for that, so I’m just working with what I’ve got.”

That time his smile did more than flicker. It disappeared completely, giving way to a moment of ugly reality. The empty and calculating stare that had stripped me bare, stuck me like a needle a million times before.

It did smart a little, hitting me like emotional muscle memory. But I was strong enough to let it deflect off me.

“Are you threatening me, Genie?” he asked softly. “I’m a police officer, remember?” A threat of his own lingered beneath his words, his poisonous, all-American smile.

I smiled right back. I wasn’t as practiced in a threatening showing of teeth designed to patronize or wound, but I think I did pretty well for a beginner. “Of course I remember. The uniform and general air of a douchebag on a power trip are incredibly hard to miss,” I replied breezily.

I didn’t know where all of this was coming from. Being a smartass was not part of the new, or the old, Gina; this was a new me entirely. Sam flickered into my mind, as he did more often now. If I was honest with myself, he was becoming my constant, everything else temporary.

That was dangerous.

But it was the immediate danger right in front of me that I needed to focus on.

And he was dangerous. I knew that before and I knew it now. What was wrong inside him could never be fixed. There would always be something off, like that smell in the refrigerator that no one seemed to find the source of. The only thing that would change would be that he’d rot more.

He was just as shocked as I was, and despite my own confusion at my current brashness, I was thoroughly enjoying his reaction. He wasn’t used to being on the back foot. It suited him.

“What has gotten into you?” he asked, voice sharp. His eyes ran over my body in a way that settled a cold chill over my exposed skin.

There was a lot of it. It was a muggy summer’s day, so I was dressed in a halter sundress that showed a lot of cleavage and molded down my curves in a way that I would’ve been uncomfortable with before.

He surely wouldn’t have let me wear it before. He never actually ordered me to wear things; even in my beaten-down state, I would’ve bristled at that, refused to be demeaned like that. No, it was more pointed and hurtful comments that hit right in the soft spot, the tender areas.

Backhanded suggestions, even a look, were all used against the unsure and insecure teenager that still lived inside of me. It was stark now, the difference between the way he looked at me and the way I should be looked at. The way I deserved to be looked at.

Sam’s hungry gaze felt like the pleasing ray of sunshine on my skin with a delightful tickle of desire chasing after it.

Simon was cold and uncomfortable and it prickled at me. Every instinct inside me was telling me to slam and lock the door and hide away.

But I would not run or hide from him.

I’d been doing that for long enough. He did not deserve the satisfaction with a thought that he’d ruined me for life.

“You’re different,” he said finally, rubbing at his clean-shaven jaw with his naked and manicured hand.

I found myself comparing every part of him to Sam. Listing everything Sam had that he didn’t. And there was a lot of that. Simon worked out every single day, only ate carbs on the weekends or drank them with his buddies. So he had sculpted muscles that weren’t actually that impressive considering the effort he put into making them. Sam ate almost his entire body weight in dinner last night and hadn’t once mentioned a workout. He was still bigger than Simon.

Simon’s skin was tanned, not from any kind of outside work but from the tanning bed he visited once a week. He did not have a speck of ink, often telling me that tattoos were for criminals.

His blond hair was expertly styled and slicked to the side, like usual. It took him exactly forty-five minutes to get it like that. I’d witnessed Sam construct a world-famous bun in less than five seconds.

Every part of Simon that an outsider might consider attractive took work. A lot of it. Just like his illusion that he was a decent human being.

“Good spotting,” I replied, folding my arms. “Now, did you come here for a reason? Or just to fuck up an otherwise pleasant morning?”

He flinched again. I didn’t curse around him. Not that I cursed often in the first place. But once, when I’d stubbed my toe on the edge of the coffee table and let out a string of only vaguely offensive words, he’d looked at me in disgust and informed me that women who swore were ugly and trashy.

Hence watching my Ps and Qs around him.

I didn’t flinch at his look or his stiffened shoulders.

I know he expected me to, now that he’d dropped the mask of pleasantness. In the past I’d done exactly that, flinched away at his cruel and vaguely threatening stare. I would not do that now, nor would I ever again.

His eyes changed then. Flared with something I didn’t like. The way they did toward the end, when his touch repulsed me and he’d somehow sensed that. It had turned him on more.

And that’s when it ended. That one horrible night when I’d realized the monster he truly was, learned the hardest way. Woke up the most brutal way. But at least I woke up. And at least it was before he could do anything that look in his eyes hinted he was capable of.

He stepped forward. “Yeah, you’re different. I like it, Genie.”

I resisted the urge to step back. Doing so would not only give him the satisfaction in the idea that he intimidated me, but it would bring him over the stoop and into my space. No way was I letting another asshole brute his way into my sanctuary and defile it just because he was stronger than me.

So I straightened my back and braced against the ugly feeling of him in my face, at his repulsive cologne that I was sure he bathed in.

“Step back,” I ordered, voice even, meeting the erotic sickness in his eyes.

He didn’t listen. In fact, it seemed like my voice worked to encourage him more. My repulsion made his eyes flare with excitement.

“See, I came here to see if I could persuade you to recant your statement—you know, for old time’s sake,” he murmured, hot breath on my face almost making me gag. “Wayne’s bail fell through and he’s back inside. He’s a good guy, just misunderstood. Doesn’t belong in prison.”

The knowledge of him being back inside filled me with joy. “No, Simon, you blithering fucking misogynist, that’s exactly where a man who beats his child belongs. Here’s hoping they throw away the key.”

Simon regarded me. “So not even for old time’s sake?”

“Not even if you promised me you’d become a monk,” I hissed.

I turned to stone as he trailed his hand along the exposed skin of my collarbone.

“That’s okay. I’m thinking there are a lot of things we could do for old time’s sake,” he murmured, like he hadn’t even heard the disgust in my voice, or seen it on my face.

I flinched. I couldn’t help it that time. The thought of him any closer than he already was, of him touching me again, made me taste bile.

He grinned wickedly when he saw my reaction, and he somehow used it as a reason for him to keep going.

“The only way you’re going to get close to me again is if you’re sick enough to be into necrophilia,” I hissed. “And with you, I wouldn’t be surprised. In other words, over my cold, dead body would I ever even entertain the thought of letting you sweat all over me like a teenage boy again.”

His eyes turned then. Ugly. Empty. Evil.

His grip tightened on my shoulder and I knew he was going to do something more. Since I’d tasted the way the air changed when someone violent and wretched was about to do something violent and wretched, I knew Simon was going to do something. What, I couldn’t exactly imagine, but it was something that chilled my bones and made me taste naked fear.

I wouldn’t let that paralyze me. I wouldn’t become a victim once more. So I prepared myself to fight. Planned the exact spot where my knee would meet his balls and hopefully sterilize him.

“What the fuck is going on here?” a familiar and welcome voice clipped, the words dripping with fury.

Both Simon and I moved our heads at the interruption, and I used the distraction to step back into the safety of air that wasn’t polluted by his presence.

Simon’s jaw hardened at my retreat but he didn’t move from his spot. Now he had an audience, and he didn’t show his depravity in front of an audience. He had an image to uphold, after all, so he turned his mask in the direction of my hero.

My hero was not on a white steed but wearing all black, covered in tattoos and shoving his Wayfarers onto his tousled head to reveal a fiery glare directed at me.

Or more aptly, the man in front of me.

“Who are you?” Simon asked, his voice brisk, eyes going over Sam in a way they would when presented with a vagrant teenager who he was going to arrest for disrupting the peace.

Sam laughed. “You know who I am, Officer Assface. The question is who are you?” He smiled at him. “Or more precisely, who the fuck are you, and why are you touching my fucking girl?”

Sam’s voice was pleasant. Joking even. But dripping with danger. An open threat that starkly juxtaposed the wide smile on his face.

I tried to hide the grin on my own face, which was impossible, despite the thread of anger that I felt at being labeled “his” like an object in a pissing contest when that very label had only been debated last night.

The secret part of me, the one not chained by third-wave feminism and logic, liked this statement. The whole warmness of the moment, minus the manly aggressive and almost suffocating testosterone, was comfortable. I felt safe, secure, protected. Here it was, my past and maybe kind of present, beside each other. Challenging each other. And I, insanely, felt safe mere moments after I was almost threatened by the man who’d fucked up my life for the year I was with him and the time after I was recovering from what he’d done.

Simon looked to Sam, disdain at home on his classically handsome face, turning it ugly and warped so his outsides matched his insides. He didn’t say anything, but his entire body stiffened and his left eyebrow twitched the way it did when he was raging mad. I’d seen that a couple of times, when I’d really “acted out” or “embarrassed” him. That was the point when I honestly thought he might hit me. When I started to shake myself out of the little corner he’d backed me into.

Then Simon looked at me in disgust, accusing.

I felt rather than heard Sam step forward, the air around him turning thick like the humidity before a storm.

“No. You don’t look at her,” he snapped, all pleasant farce disappearing from his tone. “You look at me. First, you step the fuck back before I make the whole “assaulting a police officer” thing something I do in every state, like collecting shot glasses.” His fist flinched. Visibly. “And I am a stickler for traditions. Test me,” he challenged.

Despite the fact that Sam was literally telling a police officer he was intending on breaking the law, his tone dripped with an authority that a badge, a gun, and a uniform couldn’t replicate. This wasn’t something to be taught or learned or trained. This was something instinctual, something you were born with.

And like an animal in the wild recognizing the alpha, Simon stepped away from me. I didn’t even think he realized he was doing it.

I let out the breath I’d been holding.

In the seconds that it took Simon to take his government-regulation boots out of my space and back onto my step, Sam somehow darted through the small space—a feat in itself since they weren’t small men—and yanked me behind him, so my front pressed into his back. Just like that. Protecting me bodily, shielding me as if there was an imminent threat. The threat had passed imminence. Though I had a sick feeling Simon wouldn’t be done with me after this. He was about image, after all, and Sam, someone who embodied everything he despised, had just torn his so carefully constructed image apart in less than five minutes.

That same part of me that had been pleased with Sam’s statement of ownership before did a girly little dance. Luckily that part of me was not in control.

“Sam,” I warned him.

“Shush, Thumbelina,” he muttered.

My spine stiffened. Even my little alter ego stopped her girly dance to put her hand on her hip. “Uh, did you just shush me?” I asked, momentarily forgetting Simon even existed, let alone was standing a few feet away.

Simon was not used to being ignored, and he seemed to have recover from Sam besting him in whatever man contest had just happened. He cleared his throat, so my eyes and presumably Sam’s—I could only see the back of his head from my current vantage point—went to his to see him rest a hand on the butt of his gun.

“I will remind the both of you that threatening an officer of the law is a crime,” he said, voice ice. “And I don’t want to have to arrest either of you.”

Blatant lie. I could taste his need to exert whatever little power he had over Sam. And me. Though that wasn’t a new thing. But my resistance to his previous tactics made him want to test new ones. I knew Simon well enough to realize that.

Sam, on the other hand, wasn’t intimidated in the slightest by the small man in a big body with a firearm on his hip. Instead, he turned slightly so I could see his raised eyebrows and cheeky grin that were now directed at me. Not even a sliver of the menace he’d treated Simon to existed when he was focused on me.

“You threatened this douchebag with violence, Thumbelina?” he asked cheerfully.

My cheeks reddened. “Well, only kind of,” I muttered.

He grinned wider, then leaned in for a rough closemouthed kiss. “So proud of my girl,” he murmured against my mouth. His eyes lingered there, hungry, dark. And once more, I forgot the presence of the man who’d emotionally abused me for nigh on a year as my blood bubbled under my skin. In a good way.

I didn’t know how, but Sam seemed to sense my body’s carnal response. He winked at me and yanked me into his side, so we both faced Simon, but so he was still slightly in front of me. Outwardly, he might have been causally regarding both Simon and his gun, dismissing them as a threat, but it seemed he wasn’t taking any chances.

“Now that we’ve established that neither of us are afraid to give you the beatdown you most assuredly deserve,” Sam addressed the red-faced Simon, “I go back to my original question. What the fuck are you doing here?” His voice went back to that fake cheer, injected with menace.

Simon regarded him for a long while, then our position with each other. Originally I had intended on shrinking away from Sam’s casual embrace out of principle, because we weren’t technically together. But Simon’s eyebrow twitch had me staying right where I was. And the fact that I felt like it was natural, easy, to be tucked into Sam’s muscles that seemed to welcome me like an old sofa. A very tattooed and toned sofa.

Simon did the eyebrow twitch again before relaxing his features into his business face. The one he used when speaking to criminals. “I’m following up on an incident that happened here two weeks ago,” he said, his voice robotic.

Sam’s body tightened. “Oh, you mean the assault that had Gina bruised and fucking beaten?” he asked through gritted teeth, cheerful tone a memory yet again. “The one where there has yet to be any real police work to be done on? You mean that one?”

He yanked me into him tighter, as if the gesture could erase evidence of the event in question, fade the bruises, both emotional and physical.

The warm feeling that began with his arrival spread everywhere. Which I would’ve told you was impossible in the presence of Simon. Even healed, being this close to him had settled that ugly chill over my entire body.

Sam was like my own personal emotional space heater, chasing away the chill.

Simon’s expression didn’t change but his hand tightened on his gun. I didn’t think he’d actually shoot Sam or me—he wasn’t that stupid—but I remembered the glint in his eyes back toward the end of our relationship and then in the seconds before Sam had arrived. That emptiness. He might not have been that stupid, but there was something missing inside him. Something that knew no stupidity or intelligence. Something that was just wrong and wanted to destroy.

Sam noticed it too, and he maneuvered me once more, so I was almost directly behind him.

“I assure you, sir, I’m doing everything in my power to keep Gina safe,” Simon spat through gritted teeth.

I couldn’t control the sardonic snort that left my throat at that statement. I did curse myself for it, though not because of Simon’s reaction but because the sound was so not cute.

I decided to speak to cancel out the sound of the snort. “Yes, you’re looking out for my safety by coming over here with the intention of persuading me to drop the charges against your buddy, then aggressively—not to mention highly inappropriately—propositioning me in the very place your friend punched me in the face,” I snapped, my anger doing the talking, the part of me that was so done with Simon’s shit and him controlling my life. Whether it be Sam’s presence giving me the strength or my own repaired self-worth, I didn’t know, but whatever it was actually made me forget Sam was there. Not completely, considering I was plastered to his body, and forgetting Sam was physically impossible. Rather I forgot Sam’s anger and protective persona were also there.

And the reaction was immediate and drastic.

Every molecule of the air seemed to pause with my words, Sam’s jaw turning granite.

If looks could kill, then Simon would be little more than a flaming pile of ash staining my front walk.

“Get in the house, Thumbelina,” Sam commanded softly.

I clutched his arm, realizing my mistake in prodding the angry rock star, albeit accidentally.

The angry unarmed rock star. One who, despite my contestation at the technical label of our relationship, I was rather fond of and didn’t like the idea of getting shot.

Or arrested. Though he’d been arrested plenty. But not shot.

He would not get shot because of me.

“Sam,” I protested, my own voice soft. I had the intention of backpedaling, downplaying what I’d just said, trying to yank him bodily away from this powder keg of a situation.

His eyes snapped to me, silencing me, rooting me to the spot with the ferocity behind them. Even though it wasn’t directed toward me, it worked.

“Gina. Get. In. The. Fucking. House.”

I used to be a woman who got ordered around. Daily. I was not that anymore. I prided myself on that fact. But, like Simon, I moved as somewhat of a survival instinct. I didn’t even really know what I was doing until I found myself in my living room, dazed, blinking at my surroundings for a long while, trying to figure out what the heck just happened.

The sound of my front door slamming shut was what jerked me out of my stupor.

I waited with lead in my stomach for a gunshot. I half expected it. And I just stayed like that, frozen in the middle of my room, listening. Not doing anything productive. Not calling anyone, not running back outside with a garden hose to spray them both. Nothing. Just stood there like a good little woman, doing as she was told while the men took care of things. That was what men did, after all.

And in my stupor, I got mad.

Really mad.

So by the time the door closed, quietly that time, I was pacing and ready to spit tacks.

I didn’t even readily appreciate Sam strutting through my archway not bleeding from a bullet wound. I was too far gone for that.

“What the fuck was that?” I demanded—or, more accurately, yelled.

I didn’t know what Sam’s intention was walking in here, didn’t know what he expected from me, but it certainly wasn’t that. He made that apparent by literally stopping in his tracks at my shout, face going from glassy anger to bewildered shock.

I didn’t give him time to yell back or confuse me with tender compliments or promises. I didn’t give him time to utter anything. “You think you have a right to strut up my front walk, being all sexy and aggressive and order me around like your pet fucking dog?” I hissed. The moment the sentence came out of my mouth, I realized my mistake. I pointed at him accusingly; he was the one who was causing this, after all, even my verbal missteps. That’s what my furious brain told me anyway. “No, not the sexy part. I didn’t mean to say that part. Forget I said that,” I ordered.

The shadow of a grin at the corner of his mouth had me seeing red.

“This isn’t funny!” I all but screeched. “I’ve done the being ordered around part of a relationship, even though that’s not what we have. That’s not even what I had before, despite me deluding myself. With the very man you had your pissing party with, no less. For almost a year, I played that ridiculous game. Let him tell me how to do everything down to how to drive my damn car, wear my damn hair, and choose my fucking words.” I shook my head rapidly so my hair fell out of its messy bun. “You think I’m gonna go round two with you just because you’re famous, better in bed and a hell of a lot better looking? Uh-uh. No, buddy. I won’t do that for anyone. I won’t be that for anybody. So if that’s what you’re expecting from the quiet chubby girl you knew in high school, who you’re having your pre midlife crisis with or whatever, you turn that fabulous car around and go right back to your fabulous life. Because that ain’t happenin’.”

My tirade, which had not been at all planned, ended abruptly on that note. My chest was rising and falling rapidly with the exertion of spewing out all that anger, the kind I never let out. I’d never used that many curse words in one sentence before.

I’d only vaguely registered Sam’s expressions during the aforementioned tirade, but now I was replaying them in my mind like a newsreel. He’d gone from shocked, right back to furious around the bit of me talking about Simon ordering me around, then to something much more complicated, then to his current expression. Which was none of them. None of anything, actually. It was blank, like he’d used up all his facial muscles listening to me.

His eyes were the only thing that burned.

“You done?” he asked quietly. Almost in that same chilling tone he’d used on Simon. Almost. This didn’t have that violent menace embedded in it.

This had something else.

I crossed my arms and decided not to speak.

He watched the gesture. “Yeah, you’re done,” he said.

I expected him to launch into his own tirade. Instead he crossed the distance between us in a scary amount of time and, without me really knowing what was happening, he was kissing me.

Kissing the breath, life, and sense out of me.

His hands tangled in my hair, yanking the knots out, pulling at it just enough to be both painful and pleasurable at the same time.

Then they were gone from my hair and were everywhere.

I thought it was utterly stupid when I read about those kisses that took every thought and sense of time and place out of a person. As make-believe as dragons and vampires.

I’d thought that authors used creative license to make us fall in love with their heroes that much more because they could manipulate time and space through their sheer force of feeling for the heroine.

I’d thought that.

Until now.

Because by the time Sam had finished with me, I couldn’t have told you who the president was, let alone how much time had passed.

He seemed to sense my lack of connection with the world because he stayed silent, hands at my hips, watching me as lucidity returned.

“There is a lot wrong with everything you just said,” he rasped when I was back in touch with reality. “There was a fuck of a lot more wrong with what that was out there.” He jerked his head toward the front door. “So much so that I had to kiss you to remind me what was right in this fucking world where women like you get treated like that, brutalized and made to believe by some asshole that they’re chubby.” He spat the word like it tasted bad.

“Sam—”

“Nuh-uh, I’m speaking now. You’ve had your turn, and it was as hot as it was fucking disturbing. And you know it was hot because that’s not a drumstick in my pocket.” His eyes darkened, and I registered the hardness below his waist pressing into the soft skin of my stomach. “But for once, my slightly smaller head is not doing the thinking and acting, and that means I’m talking about that shit. Because I’m not letting it sit between us. Rot in my brain. In either of our brains. So you’re going to be quiet now and listen good.”

I did as I was told and kept quiet for a multitude of reasons, mainly because out of all the expressions and versions of Sam I’d encountered, I’d never seen this one.

He watched me, understood that despite everything I’d just yelled, I was listening to his order. “Good girl. Now let’s start at the end and we’ll go back to the beginning.” He was still holding me and wasn’t giving any inkling that he was going to let me go throughout whatever he was going to say. Not that I particularly wanted him to let me go. Plus I worried about my knees’ capacity to hold my body up at this juncture.

“You are not my midlife crisis,” he said firmly, eyes not leaving mine. “The concept of you being anything but a fucking port in the storm of my life is laughable. I know that I haven’t given you many reasons to believe that I’m here for genuine, albeit selfish reasons, especially since my fuckin’ lifestyle certainly doesn’t foster much faith in that assumption, but I promise you that. You know that good guy I was pretending to be last night? Well, this is where he leaves the building. He only had a visitor’s pass, after all. My intentions were not noble coming here originally, to make up for the fucking abysmal way I treated you after Lexie’s wedding.”

He shuddered at that. Actually shuddered.

“If I were a good guy, I would’ve realized, known that I cut you. Even being the bad guy I was, I fuckin’ saw that, babe. But the good guy would’ve known that you would’ve healed. Because you’re you. You’re so strong. Even as I was doing all that reprehensible shit, I saw that. So the good guy would’ve done his penance for that shit, regretted it for the rest of his life, but let you live yours. Far away from him.” He squeezed me, then kissed my nose gently, his breath hot on my face. “I’m not too far away from the truth, am I, Thumbelina?” he whispered.

I figured it was somewhat of a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer.

“I came here because I haven’t been right since that morning and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. Without even knowing that’s what I was doing because I was so wrapped up in my own shit, I came here to cut all your shit open again and I didn’t even properly realize the depth of those wounds. Didn’t realize the fucking treasure that I’d tarnished until you opened that door and I finally opened my fuckin’ eyes.”

He stared at me, held me so tight that I worried if he let me go I might just float away. “But I’m here for you, babe. I’m also here for me, I’m ashamed to admit it. Because for a year, I’ve been off center. My life that used to bring me so much fucking joy seems so empty it’s a goddamn joke. So I’ll say it, that I wasn’t here for noble reasons. I was here to fix whatever I broke when I hurt you. Whatever I broke in myself.” He paused, shaking his head in what I thought I recognized as shame. “Then I saw you, saw the bruises, felt them in my fuckin’ core. Then I talked to you. Spent time with you. Watched you drive like a maniac, watched you eat dinner with me, wanting to shrink into your seat and somehow bloom like a fucking sunflower at the same time.”

He pulled me closer, which was barely even possible since every part of our bodies was touching, but he managed it. “Then I tasted your lips and felt your body against mine.” His eyes darkened, but not in the good way. “Then I saw that asshole close to you, heard you spew that fucking shit about yourself and what he did to you. Now my less-than-noble intentions have gone out the window and for once, I don’t give a fuck about myself. I want to make sure you’re safe. That you never have a mark on that beautiful body again, unless I put it there and you ask me to put it there.”

Although I’d never been into that kind of thing, my stomach dipped at the mere suggestion of that, my knees, which had begun to right themselves, weakening.

Sam saw that, and the “not drumstick” pressing against me pulsed. Or maybe I imagined it did, because he kept speaking.

“You’ll never have to deal with Officer Douche again,” he continued. “I’ll make sure of that, along with everything else. I’ll make sure you never refer to yourself as anything other than fucking beautiful, which is what you fucking are. And most importantly, I’ll make sure you’re fucking mine.”

Everything he said was a lot to take in, even for someone like me who absorbed information a lot more easily than she offered it up. I knew I liked some of it, a lot of it. I knew some of it, a lot of it, scared me. And I didn’t like the parts of it that implied I couldn’t do basic things like taking care of myself.

I opened my mouth to speak. Words I hadn’t planned or chosen, but to say something.

Sam held his finger up to my lips, eyes midnight. “No, babe. No more words now. We’ve met our fuckin’ quota for the day. Remember I said I’m no longer the good guy I was pretending to be?” He lifted me before I had a chance to realize what he was doing, let alone answer his question, which I think was his intention. Out of shock, I let out an embarrassing little shriek.

He ignored it and began walking in the direction of my bedroom, as if he scented it, like a bloodhound. “Done being a good guy, Thumbelina. So now I’m gonna fuck you so bad you’ll forget good is even what you wanted.”