“You wake up in a bad mood all the time or just when you think of me bangin’ another bitch?” he asked.
Needles pierced through my brain at his last four words, the pain so severe, I flinched and felt nausea roil up my throat.
“Hey,” his voice came soft at me. Soft and close.
I opened my eyes and saw him in my space, his face dipped to mine.
“What’s the matter with me?” I whispered, my recent uncontrollable and totally irrational behavior filtering through my conscious, freaking me out.
“You get you’re mine?” he asked back instead of giving me an answer.
I was not ready to commit to that verbally so I just stared at him.
He let that go but kept talking.
“If you’re mine, I’m yours. Not even gonna think of another man’s hands on you, much less anything else.” His jaw tensed even as he continued, talking mostly between his teeth. “Tear the room apart if I did.”
“This is freakadelic, Abel, and not in the good way freakadelic can be.”
His head twitched as his brows drew together.
“Freakadelic?” he asked.
I nodded once. “And not in a good way.”
He shook his head, but his features softened, most specifically his mouth.
Oh man.
Definitely.
Unbelievably.
Beautiful.
Uh-oh.
“I’m here,” he stated.
“I can see that,” I replied.
“And you’re here.”
“That I am,” I confirmed unnecessarily.
His face dipped closer. “We’re together, Delilah, nothin’ else matters.”
At that, I pulled in a soft breath, and as I did, his eyes dropped to my mouth as if he could hear it even though it was silent.
They moved back to mine. “Now you got ten minutes. I get time today, I’ll put up a curtain or somethin’, give you some privacy while we’re here. But until then, I’ll give you the room.”
After saying that, he turned, moved to the kitchen, flipped on the light switch that illuminated that space, then he went to the door and out of it, giving me the room.
It was then I realized he was talking about the bathroom area.
I bent to retrieve the toothbrush that caused my first-thing-in-the-morning psycho behavior and hurried to the bathroom area, not about to waste my opportunity for some privacy for my morning business.
I took care of it, including washing my hands, brushing my teeth, and splashing water on my face, before I turned to the room, still drying my face with a clean hand towel I’d grabbed from the shelves.
It was then I spied my purse and my body grew solid.
I stared at my purse over the hand towel I had pressed to my face as all the events of last night washed over me, every freaking whacked-out, impossible-but-they-still-happened one.
He’d saved my life. He might have saved me from getting raped, but he’d definitely saved my life.
He’d protected me, and of an instinct I didn’t know I had, I did what I could to protect him.
We’d both nearly died last night, and the last thing I knew before showering and hitting the sack was that he was out with his friends hunting a fucking werewolf.
But before he came home, he found my purse.
He found my purse.
Something I hadn’t noticed, even if I couldn’t believe for an instant I didn’t, came clear in that moment. It was so enormous, I dropped the towel and stumbled to the armchair, leaning a hand heavily into it, taking my weight in my arm, holding myself up, my eyes never leaving my purse.
It was gone.
“Holy shitoly, it’s gone,” I whispered.
I’d lived with it since I could remember. “It” being what my mother was convinced made me nuts. It convinced her enough to make me go see psychologists, three of them, all of them declaring I was attention seeking and, due to that, had an eating disorder and needed long-term psychological care and medication.
I was of a healthy weight. I didn’t starve myself, didn’t binge, didn’t purge. I also was a good kid. I could be sassy. I could get in trouble, but nothing bad.
I just constantly felt “it,” but didn’t know what “it” was.
When Mom tried to force therapy and drugs on me when I was eleven, Dad stepped in, doing the impossible—an antisocial, antiestablishment biker winning custody of his daughter.
It took him four years and three appeals, but he did it. And while he was doing it, he’d managed to put up court-ordered obstructions to Mom medicating me (but, alas, I was forced into therapy; however, this was an hour a week I didn’t have to put up with my mother, and my therapist was an all right guy, so it didn’t scar me).
“That hunger inside you, little girl, you’ll quench it,” he’d told me when I’d shared it with him. The gnawing pain, the desperation to get it gone, the lifelong struggle to learn to live day to day with it, like someone with a chronic illness learning how to cope and live life even though the debilitating symptoms never went away. “You’ll know it when you find it and I know my Lilah. You’ll get it, fight for it, earn it, beg for it, but in the end, you’ll win it and you’ll be whole.”
Dad had been wrong.
I hadn’t known it when I found it.
Looking at my purse, I knew.
The pain was gone.
I’d found it.
My God, I’d found it.
Moving from the chair to the table, I snatched up my purse, digging inside even as I aimed my ass to a chair and collapsed into it.
I pulled out my phone, activated it, hit the buttons, and made the call.
I put it to my ear.