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With all my selfish, stupid heart. For as long as you stay.
***
The soup is so good I almost choke on it, I’m swallowing it down so fast. Didn’t realize I was so hungry. When she ladles more into my bowl, I make quick work of it, and then lean back in my chair, full and half-asleep already.
“Sorry,” I mumble, rubbing at my eyes, then groaning when pain jolts through one side of my face.
“Why sorry? Let me help you get clean and into bed.”
As if I’m a little kid, or...or her boyfriend.
She didn’t say a word when I told her I loved her. Not a fucking word. I guess there’s my answer.
What did you expect, Riot? She knows so little about you and already she can’t love you back. Not with your past. Not with the job you’re doing.
Fuck.
“What’s wrong?” She’s standing in front of me and I jerk back.
Jesus. This goddamn time-jumping has to stop. “Nothing. Really. Let’s go.”
I have to steady myself on the table to get up because the bruises on my back somehow make my leg ache—an old injury, from my fighting days. Plus, my eye is swollen almost shut and that throws off my balance.
She’s patient. Sweet. Wraps her arm around my waist, steadies me, and leads me to the bathroom.
“Sorry, no tub here.” I let her put me down on the closed toilet lid like a déjà vu and sniff at myself.
Fuck, I stink. I’m still in the clothes I wore when I was attacked, and my T-shirt is stained with the blood that dripped from my split lip.
She comes back, kneels between my legs, and starts undressing me. Gently she tugs the T-shirt over my head, and I hiss when the act of lifting my arms sends pain slicing through my side. She tugs down my pants and briefs, tosses them into a corner.
Then she straightens and pulls off her sweater, her tank top, her bra. Her skirt, her panties, her boots and socks. I watch it all, my mouth dry with want. Her touch, the sight of her naked body should have me hard by now but I’m too wiped out and in pain for that.
In fact, it feels a little dream-like when she pulls on my hands, trying to get me on my feet, and I end up planting a hand on the wall to push myself up. She turns on the shower and leads me under the spray, and there’s a halo around her head.
I blink, trying to clear my eyes.
“Here.” She makes me turn toward the wall and put my hands on the tiles. “Stay like this.”
“Pax—”
She plants a kiss between my shoulder blades, sending a shudder through my body. “Trust me?”
“Fuck, I do. Always.”
She makes a small sound I can’t decipher, not without seeing her face, then she moves the showerhead and the spray beats on us, warm.
When it hits the bruises in my back and others I didn’t realize I had on my shoulders and arms, I moan between my teeth.
“Stop fighting back,” I hear Elliot’s voice in my head right before his boot connects with my ribs where I’m lying in the street, Oliver holding me down. “Learn to take it like a good little bitch. That’s how I want you to take it when you fight the Crusher. Let him beat the shit out of you, fuck you up, like he did to—”
“Is it too hot?” Pax asks. She glides her hand over my back. “Riot?”
I fold one arm against the tiles, rest my forehead on it. “’S fine.”
No matter how hot the water is, I doubt it’ll seep deep enough into me to thaw the ice in my bones. I have five days. Five days before they come for me again and demand I fight.
Or rather that I lie down and take it until I’m as surely dead as Markus is.
