“I believe you,” I whispered. “I trust you.”
He flinched. Actually flinched at my reply.
A long and uncomfortable silence followed those words. Words that were tattooed between us. That meant something pivotal.
And then he moved, taking me into his arms, my head pounding at the brutal movement.
“We need to get you clean,” he grunted, walking us out the door and across the living room toward my bathroom. He glanced down at me, his face still shuttered, as if it was a void for all emotion. “As clean as I can make you after that, at least.”
The words were yanked out of him. Ugly. Full of self-hatred, like he was disgusted at what he’d done to me.
But my brain was still swirling. Still soft at the edges from everything that had happened. I couldn’t process it all properly. I’d have to store it away for later inspection. Have to figure out a way to show Gage that I wasn’t as clean as he thought I was.
But there wasn’t enough room for more pain right then.
He set me on my unsteady feet, holding my hips for a long moment as if he sensed my need for him to anchor me. He kept eye contact the entire time. It was a strange thing, the way he did that. A lot of people—all of my lovers included—couldn’t handle the intimacy of holding on to eye contact. A lot of Eastern cultures believed that a soul could be sucked out from the eyes.
Of course, in our Western society, we considered ourselves too dictated by science and logic to believe such things. But I’d always thought it was a throwaway from that ‘illogical’ belief when those in our contemporary society always seemed to shy away from constant eye contact, always breaking it when it went past the socially defined norms.
And I was right.
Because Gage was sucking out my soul with his eyes.
And I was letting him.
All I wanted was his in return. But I reasoned that it was going to be a lot harder than that, because he was more damaged than I was. That became apparent after he turned on my shower and his cut hit the floor. Then he peeled off his henley.
Then I saw it.
Saw him.
Not all of him.
Not even a majority.
Just the tip of his proverbial iceberg.
I may have been out of it, everything about me soft and falling apart at the edges, but the sight of his naked skin once he’d taken off his cut and shirt punctured my mind. It tore through it, brutally yanking me back to stark reality.
His arms were huge. Muscled. Carved from marble, it seemed. But not smooth and flawless like any kind of polished stone. No, it wasn’t the absolute beauty of his form that jerked me into lucidity. It was the ugly, brutal evidence of what life had done to him, etched into his skin.
I’d always assumed his arms would be enveloped in the same tattoos that covered his hands, right up to almost his fingertips. I hadn’t had much of a chance to inspect the designs on his skin, considering every moment with him up until that point didn’t give way for calm inspection. Every moment between us was injected with brutal chaos.
But now the storm had hit, tore through everything inside me, though there was no evidence of it on the outside. The inside was that same chaos that lurked behind Gage’s eyes.
That chaos I now knew went so deep that he wore it on his skin. There were tattoos, but most of them were obscured, slightly warped.
Because of what else decorated his skin.
Scars ribboned up both his forearms, starting just above his wrist and snaking almost to his shoulders.
I’d never seen anything like it in my entire life. A road map of pain. Of brutality. Because the puckered and raised skin communicated an almost unthinkable amount of pain to have that evidence carved into your skin. My stomach roiled at the utter agony Gage must’ve experienced to achieve that kind of scarring. On both of his arms. Some patches were fainter than others, and there were small areas of naked, untouched skin, but it was hard to look at. Almost impossible, but I had to. Because it helped me understand that dark emptiness in his eyes. Why I’d found his face, his entire presence something more than the beautiful masculinity people would see if his scars were covered.
I saw the pain in it because I recognized it.
Because I wore it on my skin too. It was just invisible.
He was watching me with that cold and cruel gaze that made him look like a psychopath. That made my intrinsic survival instinct flare up, telling me I was in danger, real and visceral danger.
He was waiting. When he’d peeled off his shirt, he’d known what he’d be exposing. And now he was challenging me, daring me to do something. I didn’t know what. Likely he expected me to say something. To ask him something. Surely that’s what people had done previously, wanted to point out the most uncomfortable part of his life, make it define him.