13. Beau

Chapter thirteen

Beau

O pening my eyes the next morning is a big nope.

Trying to get out of bed to empty my bladder is even worse.

I basically drag my sorry, bruised, near-broken carcass down the hall and then fall back to sitting on Ignacia’s bed. She didn’t kick me to the guest room last night even though I was disruptive enough, spending half the night patching myself up and getting insulin delivered because I couldn’t get a pump on short notice, no matter how much money I had. One will be arriving by nine this morning. Last night, I understood there are real medical emergencies in the world, and flying in a doctor who’s head of such and such just because I can afford it will be a dick move when the world needs every available doctor working every available hour they have.

In short, this morning, I feel like an epic death, but I’m still alive. Hell must have been closed for business last night and I got denied entry.

I’m kidding. Goodness. Hell is more of a metaphor for people these days, even if they are religious, and I don’t believe in it.

Now that Ignacia’s heard I’m awake, I hear her steps on the stairs. I don’t have an alarm set, but normally, I’m up at the butt crack of dawn. Jesus. I’m starting to use her words.

I’m pretty good at sleeping for ten minutes here or there and being awake on my internal clock just fine. But not this morning. This morning, I feel like a bunch of ground-up bones dumped into a sack. Taking a dive off that roof was about as fun as tweezing out all my pubes.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and debating how I’m going to get downstairs to get dressed and showered and become the tough as ass—fucking again, damn it—bodyguard I need to be and how I’m going to finish this job with a barely functioning body when Ignacia appears holding a vintage tin tray heaped with food.

“What are you doing up? Get back into bed!” she chastises.

“Oh, lovely. Breakfast in bed. Thanks, but no thanks. You don’t need to treat me like I’m an invalid.”

“Your tongue still hurls out insults just fine, I see, and the fall didn’t affect your lovely, sunny personality.” She sweeps the tray onto her side of the bed, which is neatly made. “I made it all healthy. Oatmeal, a banana, and chai tea because I know how much you love it.” She winks. “Kidding. It’s coffee. I went out and got some.”

“You went out?” No! No, no, no. This is what happens when I let my guard down.

“I did, yes. To the grocery store in town. A very small, perfectly safe town.”

“You’re not supposed to go anywhere without me,” I grit.

She lifts a shoulder, and her brows shoot to her hairline. “Umm, have you noticed that you’re barely alive? You look like you went out to the woods and got into a fight with a trollicorn.”

For the love of all the hairy beasts, I can smell the coffee, and it’s temptingly delicious. “A what?”

“Like a mix between a troll and a unicorn. Except the troll was the dad, and he was kind of nice, but the unicorn was the mom, and she wasn’t nice at all. I think those things are terrifying, actually. They’d mean so much business with that horn. Trolls just get a hard time because they’re not so easy on the eyes, which is plain mean. I think they’d be okay, or at least, there should be good ones in the world.”

“You do know trolls are a fictional invention, right?”

“That’s what you think,” she huffs. “You could be wrong, you know.”

“I think their existence would have been proven true by now if it was ever going to happen.”

“They could just be hiding,” she insists.

I scoff. “Not many places to hide with the rate humanity is destroying the planet.”

“Goodness. So crabby this morning when you’re hurting.”

“I am not—”

She chuckles, cutting me off. Shaking her head, she walks around the bed and touches my cheek. Not the scraped-up one, but the other one. Then, she tilts my face to the light, and I’m so shocked that I just sit there and let her. “Ouch. I’ll get you some more ointment for the scrapes. How’s your side doing?”

“It’s fine. And the bandages are still okay. No more bleeding after last night.”

“You’re sure nothing is broken? Would you tell me if it was?”

“No, but I would call in a doctor, and I haven’t yet.”

“Your pump isn’t here yet,” she points out.

“It’s not nine yet.”

Her eyes drift to the ancient digital alarm clock on her nightstand. Hers. God. They’re both hers. This isn’t my bed, this isn’t my house, and Ignacia isn’t mine in any way.

Her fingers skim down my cheek, making me shiver and ache worse than the bastard roof. Then, she grasps my chin. “You’re going to let me take care of you today. I want you to stay in bed.”

“There’s zero chance that’s going to happen.” Gross. I can’t think of anything worse or more humiliating than being taken care of.

“Do you ever think a hug might fix a lot of things? Like a real one? That if someone cared about you, it might actually fix the things inside you that hurt instead of tearing you up even worse?”

Sweet, innocent, lovely Ignacia—the woman with the pealing laughter and the joy and the sunshine where none should exist. She still believes there’s good in the world, and for her, there can be. But she wants to convince me that, for me, it’s possible, too.

“No.” My voice is flatter than my body after the impact of hitting the ground and also deader than I should be right now.

“I know that for most people who act like they have no souls, it’s a thing that happens to them throughout their life. It’s a thing the world does to them. The pain just stays on the inside, scarring them up, even if they’re immaculate on the exterior.”

“So you’ve said.”

“It’s okay to be that way. But it’s okay to not want to be that way as well.”

“By that definition, I’m perfectly fine, so that’s quite faulty logic.”

She shrugs, grinning at me with more sunshine than what’s shining through the window we crawled through last night, and it’s getting pretty sunny out as the morning ticks on.

“Get back into bed.” A pillow gets plumped behind me, and she pats it and eyes my legs. “Don’t make me swing them up and in myself.”

I sigh. “Ignacia.”

“Here, try the coffee. It’s good. I got cream, too.”

That’s a hard freeze. “How do you know I like cream in my coffee?”

“Well, because you’re not a complete monster. Coffee is so dark and bitter and hard on the stomach without cream. You wouldn’t add any extra sugar to your diet. It was just a guess. If you’d told me you liked it black, I would have taken one for the team and drank that cup and got you another. There’s a whole pot downstairs.”

I humor her and move enough to get my legs back on top of the quilt. I mean to be all manly about it, but I can’t hold in a groan at the jarring pain that shoots through me. I’m not sure how long I’m going to be sore, but my body says a long time.

“Oh my god.” She scrambles onto the bed and kneels right on top of me, straddling my lap and legs without touching me. I’ll die if my body betrays me now and pops a boner. I swear to god. Not that Ignacia would see it past the folds of her long green dress, another one she’s sewn, but still.

I’m spared an untimely death yet again. It appears even my cock is too sore to function properly this morning.

She leans over, her sunshine scent enveloping me. Sunshine smells like warm flowers, warm grass, and warm hay, if you must know. And fresh coffee. The extra dark, extra greasy, extra tasty kind with a hint of chocolate and burnt undertones. The mug appears when she straightens, cupped between her hands. She sips first, captivating me as I watch her mouth, her lips, her throat, and her eyes.

“Mm. It’s pretty good, and I’m not a coffee person.”

“I thought you made it for me,” I quip.

“I did. But now you know it’s not poisoned,” she replies with a chuckle.

“I’d survive it. I’m not that easy to get rid of.”

“So you proved last night.” She slips the mug into my hand and waits for me to take a sip. I haven’t had coffee in way too long now, and oh! Oh, that’s good.

Basically, it’s sex in a mug good.

Fuck.

I don’t want to be thinking about that with the most beautiful woman in the world hovering right overtop me.

“Yeah? I told you it was good.” She grins, and then she sweeps forward, her lips grazing my forehead. I need to react, shove her off, get up, stop all this. Except I don’t. I can’t. I’d spill the coffee. My body won’t cooperate. “I’m going to run you a bath. I’ll put in some of those salts that help with muscle soreness. I think a nice hot soak is exactly what you need.”

Honestly? I’d like that.

And I’d like it even more if she joined me.

My mouth opens, but the usual I’m good, thanks doesn’t come out. Nothing comes out. Zero protests. Maybe the fall knocked more out of me than I thought.

We’re on the same wavelength with that one. “Are you sure you’re okay? Where are the bitter, manly protests?” she questions.

They died when I imagined you naked, pressed up against me, and riding me in a clawfoot tub full of soapy water—bareback, of course—because this is a fantasy that is never going to happen anywhere except in my head.

She’d ride me, and then I’d take her to bed, get her spread out for me, and feast on her sweetness for hours. Then, I’d help her upright and take her from behind. After we’re both exhausted, I’d hold her in my arms until she’s asleep, and then I’d trace my name onto her skin with such gentleness that she wouldn’t wake up. She wouldn’t have to in order to know she was mine.

Holy. Fucking. Fuckstacks. No.

No, I don’t go to stuff like that in my head. Writing my name on her skin? No. Bareback sex? Incredibly stupid.

“Hey. Seriously, are you okay? You look like you’re going to throw up,” she says, frowning.

Throwing up is the last thing I have on my mind, even if I should be disgusted with myself. I’m letting my brain conjure up things it never has before—sweet, cuddly things that people do together when they care about each other. When they want to make a home and a life together.

Ignacia is far more powerful than she knows. Trolls and unicorns don’t need to exist when people like her do. She’s an anomaly. She refuses to be chased away, and she won’t let me just be. She has to keep trying. On top of all that, she’s just herself. Deliciously herself. Somewhere, I lowered my guard just enough, and she slipped in. She has something over me now. Something that could hurt me. Something that will hurt me after I hurt her. It’s inevitable. I have no idea how it happened, but it did. It’s real, and it scares me. It’s a hairline crack in a heart that I promised myself would never break again.

“I’m not going to throw up,” I rasp and sip the coffee just to prove it. It tastes extra wonderful, which is like a kick to the sack I don’t need right now.

“Are you absolutely positive you don’t have a concussion or any internal damage?”

“Not really, but I think I’m fine.”

“My god.” She gets off me, her dress swirling and swishing, her head shaking hard enough to send blonde hair flying all over. “Are you okay with what I brought for you? Do you need something else? A whole bottle of ibuprofen, maybe?”

“A whole bottle? No. Just two.” Ugh, yes, I asked her. I asked for something. But whatever. It’s not a weakness.

Ignacia is a weakness.

The way I’m attracted to her is a weakness.

The complete, utterly fucked up, non-cold, hard deadness I feel inside is a weakness.

“It’s okay to have an off day. A few hours off to just enjoy a cup of coffee and a hot bath. You don’t always have to be all muscly and hard and powerful. You don’t need complete and absolute control over everything.”

Ugh. I can stomach the oatmeal and get that banana down, but I am not having this conversation. “Ignacia?” I call out.

Her face softens. She angles toward a beam of sunlight as she steps around the bed, and it highlights all her soft brown freckles and turns her skin to flawless cream. “Yes?” Her eyes are the bluest things I’ve ever seen in my life. And her beauty is the truest thing I’ve ever known, both inside and out.

“Next time you want to sit up on the roof, tie a rope around your waist and anchor it in here. That’s not up for discussion, even after I’m gone.”