“Good. I’ll bring back a menu and rewrap your ankle, and ah, I’ll bring your clothes too.” I was out of the room before she could reply, stopping at the wall just outside my bedroom where I stood for a few seconds. My head fell back against the wall with a quiet thunk as I closed my eyes tightly, trying with everything I had inside me to focus, to put all this crap moving around inside me in some type of order. It wasn’t easy because all this human BS was intertwining with the shifter nonsense, pushing me right in the direction I’d never wanted to be. But I couldn’t actually run away from it, could I? My mother was a Shadow and my father a human. The conflict ran through my blood each and every day, why did I ever think my life could be any different?
CHAPTER 10
Zoe
He’d bandaged me, fed me, kissed me, and now he was tucking me into bed. His bed.
It was confusing to think of how I’d come to be in this place. Fearful to imagine that it might be the place where I’d always belonged. I’d crawled off that couch after Caleb left and into his bathroom, moving as best I could with the pain, but not feeling out of place or unwelcome at all. Even when he sat me on his bed—well, backtrack to the shower. I should have been embarrassed, should have felt so self-conscious about him seeing me naked, but I hadn’t.
Instead, inadequate was more what I’d felt while he held me in his arms, up against his muscled chest. For the record, I’d never stood totally naked with all the lights on in front of a guy before. I’d never wanted that type of attention or scrutiny. So having Caleb’s gaze on me as I stepped out of that shower was uncomfortable to say the very least. Seeing his gaze grow darker once more and the immediate arousal growing between his legs was rewarding in a very basic way. As he’d taken me to the bedroom I envisioned longtime lovers doing this without any modesty or hesitation.
Still, Caleb wasn’t my lover. In fact, what I could only call a lukewarm friendship at best had somehow led to him looking at me with undeniable desire in that bathroom—a desire that was 100 percent reciprocated. Attempting to cover myself had been the only defense I could come up with, not that my hands were actually covering very much. Then he’d put me down and practically run out of the room.
When he returned he seemed calmer, maybe because he’d tossed three grocery bags of clothes on the bed and immediately went back into the kitchen to get the carry-out menu and the bandages and ice. The painkillers had begun to kick in by then and I’d propped myself up on his bed and watched him as he rewrapped my ankle.
His hair was thick and dark as night. His fingers looked strong and capable, but touched me with feather-like care that made me want to weep. The food had been good, best cheesesteak egg rolls I’d ever had and then, I was tired. Or at least my body was. I yawned and Caleb said I should get some sleep. It was almost one a.m. and all things considered, I should have been tired as hell. But I wasn’t. I was edgy and needy and hating every second of it. Trying to sleep was the smarter option.
Caleb had moved from the chair he’d been sitting in to the bed so both of us could see another big-screen television bolted to the wall across from it. I could smell him as he reached around me to take away one of the pillows I’d been laying on. It was a masculine smell, subtle, yet mouthwatering all at the same time. His shirt was so tight it outlined his pectorals and the ridges of his six-pack. My fingers itched to reach up and touch him. He reached for the comforter and I jumped because I thought he was going to pull it down and strip my clothes off—a testament to my very overactive imagination.
For the life of me I had no idea why I was going through this, why I felt like a horny teenager, craving this guy’s touch like he was some type of drug. Considering my history, sex should be the furthest thing from my mind. But it wasn’t, especially not with Caleb. All I could think about was his hands, his lips, all over me.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Zoe,” he told me with the most honest look on his face I’d ever seen. “I would never hurt you.”
Of course he would think my stiff posture was because I was afraid. My ex-boyfriend had just assaulted me. Dex had been one big lie that I’d been too naïve to see. As for Caleb, well, I believed what he’d said. With every fiber of my being I believed him even though I didn’t know his last name. I rationalized that by the fact that I knew Dex’s last name was Tavares and that he worked with his uncle just outside of D.C. and that he planned to take over the business when his uncle retired—or I think he said died, but whatever. I knew all that about Dex and up until about two weeks ago I’d actually been considering having sex with him. The violence I’d seen in his eyes tonight had never surfaced before. I knew pertinent facts about him, but not that he would beat a female in a dark alley.
“I would never hurt you either,” I replied because the desolate sound in his voice said that maybe he’d been hurt at some point in his life as well. He probably needed that declaration just as much as I did.
There was silence and I thought he would say something else but he didn’t. Instead he continued touching the comforter, tucking it around me and beneath my arms tightly. I actually considered lifting them up and telling him to join me. But I wasn’t quite that bold, no matter the bravado I sometimes liked to put up. In the end, I’d seen enough abuse to know that giving of myself completely might not end up well for all parties involved.
Caleb reached for the television remote. When it was off and we were in complete darkness I thought for a second he would leave me there and go sleep on the couch. My chest constricted with the thought. But Caleb didn’t leave.
After a minute or so I felt the bed shift with his weight and knew he was lying next to me. One of the gutsier heroines I’d read about would have rolled over and snuggled close to him. The shy and confused heroine that usually comes around in the end would have insisted he sleep on the couch and when he refused would have crawled out to the living room on her own.
Me, I turned onto my side. I wasn’t bold enough to ask for what I wanted and wasn’t afraid enough to run away. Folding my arm beneath my head I contemplated how that should be construed as progress and tried to sleep.
“Why are you afraid of hospitals?” Caleb asked in the darkness of the room.
I wasn’t asleep, had thought I might never find that solace, but had no idea he’d known that. My voice cracked when I began, I figured it didn’t matter. “I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid so I’d rather avoid them as much as I possibly can now.”
“Were you sick?”
I wasn’t, but my mother and her husband were, and the situation they both put me, my brother, and sister in was. I thought that over for a minute before I finally replied because for some reason I didn’t want Caleb to think my mom was a bad person. Even though she did nothing to stop all the bad things that had happened, she was the only real parent I had.
“I took my mother to the emergency room a lot,” was all I’d decided to say for the moment.
I’d never told anyone about my mom or our home situation. Even when the school nurse had called me in to question me about a bruise on my brother’s face, I repeated the same story I’d told him to tell her. When the calls came to the house I used the money I’d earned from running errands for Mrs. Babarackus to pay one of the prostitutes that worked a couple blocks from our house to return the calls and give them the same report.
“Your mother was abused.”
He said it like he already knew so there was no need to pose it as a question. I didn’t know how him assuming that knowledge made me feel, so I considered what to say next. Denial? Outrage? Offense? Acquiescence?