HE NARROWS his eyes on me as I say, ‘I’d survive. It’d just be a cut.’ The glass particles sparkling within a pool of orange juice would probably cut me, but I’ve seen worse done with glass—a lot worse.
My nonchalance is seemingly annoying him, so I get a strike of urgency to clean the sparkling orange chaos. As I shuffle to jump down, his heat circles me, his proximity to me suddenly enveloping, and I become acutely aware that I am literally caged by his arms. Locked in place. His presence a wall of muscle I am unable to move past.
He’s close.
And my head is dizzy again.
My need to clean is incinerated in a fire lit by his warmth and scent, and—I swallow. The heat radiating between us, filling the gaps, moves around me as if it owns me. Within a few seconds, I’m able to memorise this moment, bank it away. I map the black ink that decorates the slip of chest between his open collars. Map the veins in his forearms, exposed below the shirt rolled up to his elbows. Map the metallic icy flames in his eyes when I peer up to find them tunnelling into mine.
Is he upset about the glass?
Doesn’t seem likely.
Suddenly, my attention is drawn to a sensation in my abdomen. Startled, I curl in slightly.
A fluttering inside me steals my breath. It’s not butterflies. Unless they have managed to break from my stomach and into my uterus… I press my hand between my hipbones. My face stills, my eyes losing focus while my mind becomes attune to the whooshing—no, rolling sensation.
Then I realise what it is.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I hone in on the feeling, forgetting about Clay for just a moment so I don’t miss this. I thought it was too early, but I’m small so maybe… I think, the baby is moving inside me. I can feel something strange.
‘What’s happening, Fawn?’ he orders, his voice finds me in my daze, pulling me from my focus.
I open my eyes to his full of a kind of stern interest—on anyone else’s face, it may be considered concern. I smile at him, training my eyes on his devilishly handsome face, ignoring the fact that he’s little more than a stranger, intimating, all that, and just eager to see if he feels it too. ‘I feel something.’
Without thinking, I throw the silky lapels of my gown open. Pulling his much bigger hand away from where it has a death grip on the counter, I press it firmly to my lower stomach. His hand almost flinches from me, stiff and defiant, but then he stills with my hand on top of his. Exhaling heavily, his long fingers span out to cradle my abdomen with a protective dominance that causes a rabble of butterflies to take flight inside me.
I stare into his eyes as the strange sensation happens again, but it’s too early to be movement… isn’t it? His eyes narrow to the sensation. Then meet mine. I smile wider, breathing with excitement and rapture, knowing he feels it aswell.
He smiles too.
That. Is. Everything.
And for the first time, the mystery in his usually impassive gaze dissolves in a deep pool of sentiment, meeting my soul on an equal plane, no longer the enforcer.
I see him a little raw.
Hi, Clay.
I feel like there is a single moment in time while holding eye contact with someone that can change a relationship forever. The moment has risen for us. We both are met with the choice to look away. It’s an itch in my throat, a shudder in my heart—it’s time to look away, Fawn.
It’s time to stop smiling at him.
To remove his hand from my stomach.
Yet… I don’t.
And neither does he.
But then his fingertips glide around the outline of the swelling between my hipbones, as something inside him switches. Visibly. He leans closer, his breath a warning as he says, ‘Who put this inside you, little deer?’
My heart sinks.
Hating the question, wishing it had never been asked, but wanting more than anything to confide in him, to be honest, I merely shake my head with regret a spiralling pit I’m balancing on the cusp of. A tear pinches from the corner of my eye. He looks at the bead, tracking it as it glides down my cheek and drops off my lip. ‘I don’t remem—’ My voice falters, trembles. The emotions don’t make sense; I haven’t cried over this. Not once. I was angry. And I’ve been on a mission to find out what happened… but I never cried.
Right now, admitting I don’t remember feels like a shredder to my heart. But I want to tell him the truth. And I don’t try to understand why, maybe simply because, like me, he wants to know. And that matters… Someone else wants to know, and thinks I deserve to know. ‘I don’t know for sure. I was cuddling this boy and that’s the last thing I remember. I think it’s his, but I can’t be sure.’
‘You were high,’ he states, displeasure dripping from each and every syllable, his tone almost a growl. I hate the sound. My heart starts to sting. ‘Was the boy who touched you high too?’
I gasp. ‘How did you know I was h—’
‘Do you take drugs?’
‘No!’ I bite out. The memory of the interrogation room, the officer who sneered at me, confused me, rains down frustration and fear and helplessness. I hate assumptions. Hate being questioned. I hate even more that I don’t blame any of them. I was a fucking mess that day. I had just lost Benji. ‘I only ever touched drugs that once. That night.’
Something dark and angry consumed the thin blue rings around his large pitch-black pupils. It’s there. But it doesn’t scare me. I don’t think it’s for me… He leans in closer, his lips just above my ear, his whiskey scented breath floating down my throat, forcing my spine to steel with the intensity pulsing from him and into me. ‘Are you lying to me, Fawn?’
‘No! Fucksake.’ My head gets dizzy. My heart desperate to stop the unfettered disappointment in his voice. ‘I swear it. I swear. I’m not lying to you. I don’t want everyone to think I’m this drug-addicted tramp—’
‘Everyone?’ he says smoothly, but the warning his tone carries causes me to flinch. ‘The only person you need to concern yourself with is me. Only me.’
‘I thought I heard a glass smash,’ Aurora says from the kitchen doorway. While my body instinctively wants to separate from his, he simply glances over at her, leaving our closeness and the position of his hand on my lower stomach for her to witness.
It feels daring.
Possessive.
As if he’s staking a claim.
My pulse runs riot in my throat. The word wife fills my head with white noise. She is right there, looking like a goddess even in a nightgown, even with the soft hooded eyes of a woman who was pulled early from slumber.
Oh God.
What am I thinking?
What am I even doing?
When we say nothing, she smiles. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.’ Her lips are an elegant tick on her flawless features. ‘Careful when you get down, Fawn. You might cut yourself.’ Then she turns and sashays away from us. I stare at the space she disappeared from, lost in confusion.
When I look back at him, the silver lining that was Clay has disappeared behind his mask of professionalism despite his wife’s indifference to our intimate position.
Clay removes his hand from my lower stomach, leaving a lingering warmth that seeps deeper than skin. He lifts me from the countertop and walks me away from the broken orange juice jug.
He places me gently on the ground; his height at this close distance makes me feel like a daisy in a great tree’s shadow. I want to ask so many questions about Aurora and whether he felt that moment between us, too, that they are crawling up my throat wanting freedom. ‘Silly girl. You’re reading into things.’ My foster mother’s anthem chants inside my mind.
Hail the queen of gaslighting.
In this case, she’s right, though.
Dragging my foolish reality of the situation down my throat, away from my waiting tongue and mouth, I lock my jaw.
When he reaches down, covering my body with the silky gown, lacing it up himself, I chant her words and close my eyes. ‘You’re reading into things.’
Ignore the way you feel seen.
Ignore the way his eyes narrow, his lips look good enough to kiss.
Ignore your heart. What concerns him is not the same thing as what it beats so violently in your throat for!
It isn’t.
I let him tie the knot at my waist, wordless, confused. My hands don’t know what to do, so I coil my blonde ends around my fingertip.
‘Go back to your room.’
