As I lift my lips from the symbol of acceptance and move it down to healing, I look up at him through my tear blurred eyes. His eyes lock on to mine and I try to pour everything in myself into our visual conversation.
I accept you, I tell him.
All of you.
The broken parts.
The bent parts.
The ones filled with shame.
The cracks where hope seeps through.
The little boy cowering in fear and the grown man still suffocating in his shadow.
The demons that haunt.
Your will to survive.
And your spirit that fights.
Every single part of you is what I love.
What I accept.
What I want to help heal.
I swear neither of us breathe in this silent exchange, but I can feel walls crumbling down around the heart that beats just beneath my lips. Gates that once protected are now forced apart from the rays of hope, love, and the trust breaking through. Walls collapsing to let someone else in for the first time.
The absolute impact of the moment causes the tears to fall over and trail down my cheek. The salt on my lips, his scent in my nose, and the thunder of his heart breaks me apart and puts me back together in a magnitude of ways.
He squeezes his eyes shut, fighting the tears, and before he opens them, he’s reaching down and pulling me up so we’re at eye level. I can see the muscles in his jaw tic and see the fight over how to verbalize it in his eyes. We sit like this a moment as I allow him the space he needs.
“I …” he starts out and then his voices fades, lowering his eyes for a beat before raising them back up to mine. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet. It’s just too much and as much as it’s clear in my head—in my soul and my nightmares—saying it out loud when I never have, is just …”
My heart splinters for the man I love. Fucking shatters into the tiniest shards possible from the memories that just put that lost, apologetic, shameful look in his beautiful eyes. I reach out and cup his jaw in my hands trying to smooth away the pain etched in the magnificent lines of the face.
“Shh, it’s okay, Colton. You don’t need to explain anything.” I lean in and press a kiss to the tip of his nose as he does to me and then rest my forehead against his. “Just know I’m here for you if you ever want to.”
He exhales out a shaky sigh and pulls me tighter against him, trying to make me feel secure and safe when I should be doing that for him. “I know,” he murmurs into the darkening night. “I know.”
And it’s not lost on me that he let me kiss all of his tattoos—express love for all of the symbols of his life—except for the one denoting vengeance.
CHAPTER 16
Colton
“Motherfucker!”
Where the fuck am I? I jerk awake and sit up. My heart’s racing, head’s pounding, and I’m out of fucking breath. Sweat beads on my skin as I try to wrap my head around the jumbled images floating, then crashing through my dreams. Memories that vanish like fucking ghosts the minute I wake up and leave nothing but an acrid taste in my mouth.
Yeah, the two us—nightmares and me—we’re tight. Thick as motherfucking thieves.
I glance at the clock. It’s only seven-thirty in the morning, and I need a drink already—screw that—a whole fucking fifth to deal with these goddamn dreams that are going to be the death of me. Talk about motherfucking irony. Memories of a crash I can’t fucking remember are going to kill me trying to remember them.
Can you say fucked up with a capital F?
I laugh out loud only to be answered by the thumping of Baxter’s tail against his cushion on the floor beside me. I pat the bed for him to jump up on it, and after a bit of petting, I wrestle him to lie down, laughing at his wildly licking tongue.
I lie back on my pillow and close my eyes trying to remember what the fuck I was dreaming about, what empty spaces in my mind I can try and fill. Absolutely fucking nothing.
Sweet Jesus! Throw me a goddamn bone here.
Baxter groans beside me. I open my eyes and look over at him, expecting puppy dog eyes begging for attention. Nope. Not in the slightest. I can’t help but laugh.
Fucking Baxter. Man’s best friend and shit and also comedic relief when needed most.
“Seriously, dude? If I could lick myself like that, I wouldn’t need a woman.” My words don’t even make him hesitate as he finishes cleaning himself. After a beat Baxter stops and looks at me, head angled, handy tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. “Don’t give me that smug look, you bastard. You might think you’re top dog now with all that flexibility and shit, but, dude, you’d hold out too for Ry’s pussy. Fucking grade A voodoo, Bax.” I reach out and scratch the top of his head and laugh again with a shake of my head.
Am I that fucking desperate that I’m talking to my dog about sex? And the doc says my head’s not fucked up? Shit, I think he’s taken one too many right turns on an oval track.
Baxter stands and jumps off the bed. “I get it, use me and then leave me,” I say to him, and Rylee’s words to me the first night we met resurface. Fuck ’em and chuck ’em. Fucking Rylee. Pure class, gorgeous as fuck with a defiant mouth and feisty attitude. How the fuck did we get from there to here?
I swear to God life is a fucking series of moments. Some unexpected. Most not. And very few inconsequential. Fuck if I would have ever expected a stolen kiss to lead to this. Rylee and me.
Motherfucking checkered flags and shit.
Blowing out a breath as the headache starts, I roll over on the bed to grab my pain meds from the nightstand. It feels like my head explodes with a bright burst of white—a flash of memories from the drivers’ meeting hits me like a fucking sledgehammer—and then disappears before I can hold on to more than a tenth of what flickered.
“Goddammit!” I shove up and out of the bed, the dizziness not as bad as yesterday. As the day before yesterday. I feel restless as I try to force myself to remember, to make my fucked up head recall all that I’d just glimpsed. I pace, my mind drawing nothing but fucking blanks. I’m frustrated, feeling fucking confined, unsettled.
More fucked up than not.
I don’t feel like me anymore. And I need that right now more than fucking anything. To be me. To be in control. To be on top of my fucking game.
To still be Colton fucking Donavan.
“Aaarrrrggghh!” I shout because fucking is most definitely what I need right now. What will help me find the fucking me I need to be again. I may be pacing in front of my bedroom window, but my dick is hard as a rock and my balls are so fucking blue I’m gonna turn into goddamn Papa Smurf if the doc doesn’t clear me soon.
Pleasure to bury the pain, my ass. When you can’t have the pleasure, what the fuck do you do with the pain?
And fuck me if it’s not the worst—sweetest—fucking torture sleeping next to the only woman I’ve ever ached for. I can’t take another damn day of this. Even though it aches like a bitch, just the thought of her has me reaching down to palm my dick, make sure it didn’t shrivel up and fall off from lack of fucking use.
Yep, still there.
And then my hand trembles. Shakes so that my fingers can’t even hold my own dick anymore.
Motherfuck, cocksuck! I’m fucking shaking with frustration right now. At me, at fucking Jameson for crashing into me, at the fucking world in general! This confinement is suffocating me. Making me lose my shit! I’m going fucking crazy!
I pick up the pillow next to me on the couch and chuck it at the wall of glass in front of me before flopping down into a chair. “Fuck!” Squeezing my eyes shut, I suddenly feel like images zoom and collide at a rapid pace slamming against the front of my mind. The bright flash of white returns with a vengeance, crippling and freezing me at the same fucking time.