Sixteen
Porter
The room echoed with her answer.
She stood there, feet away from me, her body tight with an emotional pain, her face closed off. She uttered those words, so fucking broken, and squeezed her eyes shut, sending rolling tears down her cheeks, and all I wanted to do was wrap her up in her arms and hold her through this storm—exactly what I’ve wanted to do since the moment she walked away from the horrors she endured in that hotel room.
Exactly what I’ve wanted to do since the moment I met her, one September day four years ago.
Before I could contemplate it, I was up and out of the bed, limping my way toward her. The pain in my knee was nowhere near the pain that Asher was emitting in waves around her. Fuck my knee. My girl came first.
Shit, she’d always come first.
If she’d have me.
Standing in front of her, I put a hand on her cheek and tried lifting her face up to mine. “Baby, no,” I whispered down to her. She flinched under my hand and I almost let that be enough to storm back to the bed. She wouldn’t let me in past that last guard.
But I was done with this game.
One way or another, we were working past this hurdle tonight.
And whether that meant I was going to hold her the rest of my days or not, was up to her. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t let her push me away again.
“Talk to me, Asher,” I pleaded with her, my voice still low. Even though the room was dark, the only light coming in from the main room behind Asher, I could make out every tear as they fell down her face. I could make out the dimpled scar from where her Monroe piercing once graced her upper lip. I could count her eyelashes as they rested on her cheeks.
No matter how hard she pushed, I was a sucker for wanting—needing—to be her rock. She intrigued me from the very moment we met.
I’d been lost to her since nineteen.
Asher was shaking her head against my hand, her lips between her teeth. Whatever it was she was holding back, whatever reason she thought she was disgusting and not worthy of us, must have been weighing on her heavily.
What was it that held her back? Was it the kidnapping? Her foster father being her abuser when she was seventeen? What was it?
In all honesty, it didn’t matter. I just wish she knew that.
Nothing she’d tell me, was going to change how I felt about her.
No matter how hard she pushed, my feelings weren’t going to change.
Even if she left tomorrow, leaving my family behind, I would worry about her. I would track her down. I may have given her back her things, but I wasn’t going to let her go that easily.
“Then lay with me,” I whispered, my eyes still trained on her face. I watched as her wet eyelashes lifted and she looked straight into my eyes, the swirl of colors in her own incredibly fierce and bold from her tears.
“Please.”
Her breath hiccupped and another tear fell. I lifted my thumb to swipe it away.
Finally, she nodded and I had to stop myself from jumping in victory.
We were getting somewhere.
I also had to stop myself from pressing my lips to her forehead—I was pretty sure she wasn’t ready for that yet. Instead, I stepped back from her and headed toward the bed, but when she didn’t follow me, turning toward the door even, I frowned. “Where you going?”
She regarded me for three full beats before answering. “Turning off the lights.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
I finished my limp to the bed—damn fucking knee—and got back in under the covers, reaching over to turn on the lamp to give Asher light when she came back in. I sat in the bed far longer than turning off a light in the main room should have taken.
Soon, I heard the sounds of the bathroom.
Shit, she’d better not shower.
I mean, she could, but Asher all fresh and smelling like body wash was not something I could deal with right now, especially if she used mine again…
Not when there was still a very real wall between us.
I knew better than to think that her agreeing to lay with me dissolved that wall.
Asher and her feelings—as absurd as they were—were going to take more than a hug to move past.
I couldn’t believe that was what she thought of herself. ‘Disgusting’ was the very last word I would ever attach to Asher.
What part of her past, of her rape, of her kidnapping, had her thinking that? I would never, ever, in a million years be disgusted with that woman. In my eyes, she was a fucking hero for pushing through the shit hand she’d been given, and turning out to be the amazing woman I knew she was.
Asher was my light in darkness.
Asher was my color in a black and white world.
Asher was the brilliance that sparked everything in my life.
She came into my life when I was fighting so damn hard to be my own person, and because of her, with her, I found a real reason to fight. A reason to hold on to everything I knew. There was a time in my life that being compared to my brothers had me fighting harder to prove who I was. Back then, the thought of being compared to one of my brothers or father would have me angry, but now? If I pulled up that fucking WAGs site and saw another comparison to how much mine and Asher’s relationship mimicked my mom and dad’s?
I’d fucking welcome it.
If we could get past this hurdle, I would be the luckiest son of a bitch on this earth to have Asher in my life, the way my parents had one another.
I heard the bathroom door click open before the main room darkened.
No shower, then.
Shortly after, Asher walked into the bedroom. I took in the sleep shirt that fell to her thighs—it wasn’t one of mine and I wasn’t surprised at how much that shit hurt—and as badly as I wanted to believe she had little on underneath, I knew she had bike shorts on.
Her hair was loose from its earlier braid and hung down her back in crazy waves. She stalked into the room like a woman on a mission, or maybe it was just so she didn’t convince herself to walk back out. Without even looking at me, she issued, “You really ought to take off your brace. You should have stopped sleeping with it on last week.”
I lifted my brow but kept quiet.
Didn’t want to scare her away.
She pulled back the covers on the opposite side of the king bed, and slipped in, still not letting her eyes meet mine. “Did you do your range-of-motion today? Probably not.”
I couldn’t stop the grin if I tried, and of course, her eyes moved and actually met mine this time.
“It’s not funny, Porter! Do you want to play the end of the season, or no?”
“Just lay down, Ash,” I told her, shaking my head while my grin refused to leave. For as badly as she tried to prove she didn’t care…
My girl cared.
I reached back behind me to turn off the lamp, the room once again going dark.
Before settling though, I did take off my brace.
I lay on my back, one hand on my stomach and the other lying uselessly between the two of our bodies. With as big as the bed was, I was happy that Asher didn’t leave a wealth of space between us. Asher, only inches away, was on her back and, with a quick glance in her direction, I saw she had both hands on the upper part of her stomach.
I shifted my head on my pillow to try and make out her face.
She was staring up at the ceiling, her eyes open.
Maybe in the dark, it wouldn’t be so hard for her…
I moved my hand slightly, just enough so my fingers could brush her outer thigh, before saying so quietly it probably didn’t even qualify as a whisper, “Talk to me, Asher.”
I watched as she took a deep, slow breath.
“I promise, beautiful, that whatever you’re holding back, it’s not as bad as you think it is,” I vowed to her, my voice still quiet.
Her breath caught in her chest, but still, I waited.
Would she do it?
Could she?
Could she finally, truly, lean on me? Let me take what she had to give? She didn’t need to hold on to it all on her own.
Her eyes still fixed to the ceiling, she started shaking her head. “It will change everything.”
I rolled to my side, pushing up on my elbow, but when I went to place my hand on her stomach, Asher visibly shuddered. I snapped my hand back and instead, placed it on the mattress between us. I licked my lower lip, contemplating her below me. Still, her eyes didn’t shift to mine. She was locked somewhere…
“Asher, I know you now. Nothing you say,” I started, before taking a breath and offering her a truth of my own, “will change how I feel about you. You can put as much distance as you want between us, but I will not stop loving you.”
This time, her eyes drifted over to mine. In the dark, I couldn’t make out the colors that haunted my dreams, but I could see the pool of tears at the bottom of her lids.
I was fully prepared to get into another stare down with this woman, when she softly admitted, “I liked what he did to me.”
I had to force myself to not frown in confusion. Before I could ask her to elaborate, she did on her own.
“My body reacted to him,” she scoffed, one of her hands leaving its place on her stomach to brush down her side, in an offhanded showing. “It liked what he was doing to me,” she said, her voice cracking. “Even though I knew it was wrong.” She closed her eyes, tears falling from the heavy pools. “I liked what he did to me,” she sobbed quietly.
“Asher, no.” I shook my head and scooped her into me, rolling to my back and cradling her to my chest. I threaded my hand into her hair and held her to me. “No, Asher. You didn’t like it,” I tried reassuring her.
“But my body—”
“That’s chemical,” I tried telling her. “A physical reaction. It has nothing to do with you.”
“My body—”
“No, Ash,” I said firmly. I shifted so I could put my hands on her face, moving her from my chest so her eyes had no choice but to meet mine. “If you had truly liked it, you would not be so broken up about it. It was a physical response, Asher. It was a power control on his part. If was not, is not, you.”
“Everyt—”
“It was just your body, Asher,” I pleaded with her quietly, not so what I said would be true, but so she believed it. Even if she had, in her words, liked what her foster father did to her, it wouldn’t change my opinion of her. But the fact was, she was raped, she’d been scared, and her body reacted. I would never hold that against her. “It’s like fight or flight. A race to the end so it’s finished. It. Was. Not. You.” I shook her head gently. “You didn’t ask for it.” I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to calm down when I realized my voice was no longer the soft whisper it was at the beginning of this. “It wasn’t you,” I promised her, my voice quiet once again.
And, once again, I held her sobbing body against mine, wishing I could do more to prove to her that she was whole, that she was worthy, and that she was loved.
My God, she was so fucking loved.