Warily, he searches my eyes. “You put your phone on, and it brought them.”
“But I didn’t mean to. I thought it was okay, but my editor who sent my phone put something on it that I didn’t know about. I swear I didn’t know. I was fooled…”
I trail off. The hopelessness in his face is fucking killing me.
It’s all just words, and Kiro doesn’t care about words. My actions make me a liar. I brought them. I said it wouldn’t happen, but it did. “Kiro,” I plead.
“We should get the canoe and go.” He takes my arm and leads me to a tree at the shoreline. The canoe is still there, across the stream. “I’ll get it. You’ll wait here.”
“I don’t get it. You don’t trust me, you think I’d send people after us like that, but you want me to stay with you?”
“You’re my mate.” He reaches out to take my hair in two bunches, like two ponytails, and pulls me to his chest. He kisses the top of my head. I think he’s relieved I’m okay. He pulls away. “We have to go.”
Fuck.
He never expected anything better from me. He doesn’t think to ask for more for himself. Not trust, not affection. Certainly not love.
I look up into his beautiful, bloody, bee-stung face. The world sees a savage, but I see a man so achingly alone that he’ll have me even if he can’t trust me.
It breaks my heart.
I slide my thumb along his cheekbone. “You have blood here,” I whisper. I urge him to the water’s edge. “Come here.”
He comes with me. I pull the shirt from his head and bend over to dip a corner of it in the water and clean his face. He stands still as I do it, eyes shut. It’s as if he doesn’t want to scare me off from this small act of caring.
I inspect the cut on his forehead. It’s small. Only an overzealous doctor would stitch it.
“It looks okay,” I say.
I wet the cloth in the river and use it to clean his face a bit more. He sucks in a breath as I swipe a bit of mud off his chest. So many scars. I find I want to kiss the scars of this beautiful, wounded, savage boy who thinks he’s not worth loving.
I scrub a little harder. I can feel the enjoyment in him. I love the enjoyment in him. I love caring for him like this. Being a team.
“We have rubbing alcohol in the first-aid kit. That would be good for your head.”
He nods.
Words mean nothing to him; he said as much before. But my caring for him means something. My giving a shit that he has blood and mud on him means something.
Nobody ever gave a shit about him. Maybe that’s why he felt so fiercely toward me in the institute. It probably seemed like I was acting as his mate.
“Close your eyes.” I wet the cloth again and clean a streak of mud from his temple. A warm glow spreads in my chest, lighting dark corners, like tendrils of warmth and light, connecting the disconnected cold, dark bits that I had hidden away.
I press my other hand to his cheek, but this isn’t a clinical touch at all. It’s affection. It’s me not getting enough of Kiro. It’s me maybe never getting enough of Kiro.
He opens his eyes.
“Didn’t I tell you to close your eyes?”
He closes his eyes. “Yes, Nurse Ann.”
I slide my hand across his whiskers. The warmth spreads deeper, hotter.
My wild affection for him exists the way a mountain does—it’s just there, damn everything else.
“We should move on,” he rasps.
I touch the spot next to his eye. And then I get up on tiptoes and kiss his nose.