“Ready to go home?” Zach looked up when she came out of the bathroom, still tugging up the sweats.
Home. She didn’t have a home anymore, she remembered. She couldn’t ever go back there again. Part of her was gleeful at the thought, but another part ached with a loss that made no logical sense at all. Zach slipped his arm around her waist, tucking her discharge papers into his back pocket. She made her best effort not to wince at the pain as they made their way down the hospital hallway, ignoring the eyes of the cop, who was still filling out paperwork at the desk and talking to the social worker Lindsey had kicked out of her room.
“It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Zach murmured, pushing the button for the elevator, his hand moving up to cup the back of her neck, massaging with his thumb.
She nodded, stepping in as the doors opened, and couldn’t believe how much she wanted to trust him.
* * * *
“I should have stayed at the hospital!” Lindsey groaned as Zach turned off the alarm and flipped on the light next to the bed for the thousandth time that night.
“Open your eyes,” he insisted, pulling her arm from across them.
She sighed, blinking at the brightness, shaking off the dream she’d been in the middle of-something about swallowing small blue marbles, one after another, until she felt impossibly full. His gaze moved over her face, flickering between each of her eyes in studied concentration.
“Okay,” he said finally, giving her a reluctant nod. “We can go back to sleep.”
“Ha.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Aren’t you supposed to heal best while sleeping? I don’t think getting up every two hours constitutes sleeping!”
“Sorry, baby.” His smile was infuriating as he reached for the light switch. “At least we don’t have to get up in the morning.”
“You’re worse than any nurse,” Lindsey muttered, yanking the sheet up over her shoulder and turning away from him. The weekend, she realized-no school for her, no work for him. But what about Monday? What then? Would everyone know what had happened? Her reputation had been in shreds for years, so she didn’t care a bit about that, but whatever she’d done before had been her choice, she reasoned. This time…
“You cold?” Zach pulled the comforter up to join the sheet at her neckline when she shivered.
“No.” She winced at the pain of his touch on her tender back. “Yes. I don’t know.”
He lowered his head to touch hers in the darkness, kissing the top of her ear. “I wish… ”
“Don’t say it.” She didn’t think she could stand another ounce of kindness or pity.
Zach sighed, his breath warm on her neck. “I don’t think I have the words, anyway.”
“Good.”
He feathered kisses over the back of her neck, pushing her long hair out of his way. “Sleep… ”
“I was,” she sighed as he settled in behind her, pressing his chest to her back, forgetting, she knew, but she couldn’t help her gasp of pain at the sudden pressure.
“Ah damn!” He moved back a little, his big hand resting on her hip. “Oh damnit, Lindsey. Damn them!”
His sudden change, the vehement anger in his tone, startled her. The Zach she knew didn’t get angry, not really. The hand moving over her hip shook, and she knew it was trembling with rage.
“I could kill them.” He whispered it under the cover of the darkness, as if he’d been afraid to speak the words aloud before, in the light, with all its possibilities. “With my bare hands.”
She believed him. “It was my own fault.”
“No.” His grip tightened, and his hand would have made a fist if he hadn’t been squeezing her hip. “I don’t care what you said about the little games you play-played,” he made his insistence on past tense perfectly clear, “with these guys.” His voice broke and she heard nothing but his breath, harsh and uneven, for a moment. “No one deserves what happened to you. You didn’t do this to yourself, Lindsey. You didn’t beat your back into a bloody pulp, or… or…”
It was like he couldn’t make any more words. She gave a strangled little laugh that sounded more like a sob to her ears. “Didn’t I?”
“No,” he murmured, pulling the sheet aside, exposing her back to the air. “Oh my god, no, sweetheart, no… ” His lips moved over her back, kissing the wounds there. The deeper ones he had carefully bandaged before they’d gone to bed, but there were too many to cover completely, and it was the shallow ones he kissed now, over and over. It reminded her of those few memories she had of her father, of falling down and him putting on the Band-Aid, kissing it and making it all better. “Please don’t believe it. Not for a minute. You didn’t ask for this. It’s not your fault.”
She didn’t believe it-couldn’t-and she cringed away, rolling to her belly and clutching the pillow. He didn’t stop touching her, his fingers grazing lightly, cautious, as if he were petting a shy animal, his lips murmuring words against her back, and he kept on whispering those awful, painful words.
“I know you’re hurting.” His breath was too warm, too human, too comforting. It made her want to cry and she fought it-hard. “God, baby, I could tell from the first minute I saw you. It shouldn’t be possible for a girl your size to be carrying around so much pain.”
“No,” she choked, begging him to stop, knowing he wouldn’t. This was worse, his tenderness, his kind words, worse than the rape, worse than anything.
“I just want to love you.” His forehead pressed against her lower back, and the sting she felt there was the salt of his tears. That realization broke her-Zach, crying, in pain-and all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and die.
“I don’t deserve you.” She sobbed against the pillow, the dam breaking, her body shaking with it. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Oh, baby.” Zach moved in beside her, taking her, fighting, into his arms. She tried to resist, shaking her head, pushing back, but he was too strong for her. “Please,” he murmured into her hair as she began to give, letting him hold her. “Let me love you. Just let me love you.”
“I can’t.” Her strangled cry muffled itself against his chest, and he rocked her, back and forth, into a bed covers cocoon in the dark. “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t care.” He tucked her head under his chin, as if he could get her even closer. “Lindsey, I know more than you think I do. And I don’t care. Baby, I don’t care what you’ve done, how many other guys you’ve been with, the lengths you’ve gone to…just to hurt yourself.” She tried to make herself smaller against him, as if she could hide from his words.
“God, baby, you’re so full of that spite.” His words made her feel cold, achy, as if she had the flu. “Watching you do this to yourself… it’s like seeing you eat rat poison, but you think you’re hurting someone else, don’t you? You’ll show them, right?” He squeezed her tighter when she snorted and nodded through her tears. “And all the while you’re just killing yourself…”
“I know.” She drew a shuddering breath. “But I don’t care.”
He sighed, kissing the top of her head. “Because if no one else cares… why should you?”
She nodded, holding back a full-blown sob, her throat closing off any words.
“I care, Linds.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissing her wet cheeks. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.”
Burying her face against his chest, she gave a deep, shuddering sigh, sliding her hand down over the hard, flat surface of his belly, reaching under the sheet to find his cock, soft in a nest of dark, kinky hair.
“Lindsey!” Zach jumped, startled, at her touch. “Oh, baby, no, no… ” He took her hand, pulling it up to his waist, wrapping it around him. “It’s so not about that.”
“It’s always about that!” she choked, trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t let her. Instead, he held on, rocking, until sobs racked her body, trembling them both. It was a while-to Lindsey, it felt like forever-before they subsided into little hitching noises, the same kind she used to get when she was very small and had been crying a long, long time. Zach kissed the top of her head, using the sheet to wipe the tears from her face, his chest.