Instead of speaking, I reach down and grab the bottom of my shirt that she’s wearing and pull it over her head. She grumbles, but lets me do it.
“I’m not having sex in the shower with you,” she mumbles.
I don’t speak, and she doesn’t fight me as I pull her panties down her legs, forcing myself to not get turned on. The smell coming from that trashcan helps out.
She’s limp in my arms when I pick her up, letting her head loll against my chest, and I carry her into the shower. She doesn’t even react when the water hits her skin, and I slowly lower her to the seat made on the side.
“I’ve never done this before, so bear with me,” I tell her as I grab the shampoo.
She looks up at me and swallows hard, but before I can put the shampoo in her hair, she kisses my stomach. It’s a chaste kiss not meant for seduction, and she props her head against me as I go to work.
Chapter 35
BELLA
My finger stabs into the hard chest next to me, and Ethan jerks awake. Apparently he felt that.
He groggily blinks a few times, as though he’s forgotten where he’s at, but he gives me a lazy grin when he sees me. I’m naked, and so is he. Because every time I hurled, he carried me into the shower and cleaned me up. I bathed more in one night than I thought possible.
It was total overkill, but hella sweet, so I let it happen.
Now it’s noon, and I don’t feel the urge to spray my guts all over the walls, so there’s progress.
“Allie called into work for you,” he says in a deep, sleepy tone.
“I know. I saw the message on my phone.”
He lifts his head and looks at the clock before frowning over at me. “How long have you been awake?”
“Long enough to do a full inspection of your very naked body. I can’t believe I haven’t taken a closer inventory sooner.”
His lips twitch, and he tucks his hands behind his head before kicking the sheet off of him completely, baring his divine body for my eyes to soak in.
“Inspect all you want.”
He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, joking around, but I have a million questions. Like why he has tattoos over all his scars, and how he managed to tattoo over them so thoroughly.
“All of your tattoos mark scars, but I thought it was hard to tattoo over scars because of the scar tissue.”
He doesn’t act affected, but I notice the subtle way he tenses. “Ruby’s dad is one hell of a tattoo artist, and after several, long, tedious sessions, he managed to cover them all. I flew out to his shop in Vegas when I wanted ink.”
“And that didn’t hurt to do because you couldn’t feel,” I surmise.
His lips thin, but he finally shrugs. “I can—and could—feel extreme pain. But the tattoos weren’t extreme enough for me to even feel very much.”
My finger runs along the oddest scar—the one that looks like spider web. He watches me trace the outlines, and I slide in closer to him. It makes sense that he tattooed a spider web over it.
“What’s this one from?”
“It’s one of my bad decisions I told you about last night. Until I realized I could find pleasure from sex—sorry, but you’re asking—I thought could only feel extreme pain. So I found ways to inflict that pain just so I could feel something. That’s from a cattle brander that was heated. It looks a lot like a spider web, but it’s actually some weird symbol my mother’s rancher friend had. I did this to myself, so stop looking at me like someone marked me for life.”
My heart hurts, because feeling things is just something someone takes for granted.
He points to the snake head on his side. “That covers a jagged scar from a motorcycle accident.” He moves his hand to another spot on his stomach that is tattooed with some weird symbol similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Roughly translated, this means ‘one who can’t feel.’ It covers another spot where I burned myself with a pan.”
He stops explaining the marks, shrugging as if it’s not a big deal. It’s obvious he doesn’t want pity.
Leaning down, I run my lips over the spider web scar that hides behind the ink. His breath hitches just enough to draw my attention, and I look up as I kiss around the web, making sure my lips hit every bit of it.