“Stop it, Dead Man!” I lunged at him, throwing all my weight at Mateo and knocking him onto the grass beside Jack.
Mateo caught my wrists in his grasp before I could do any more to him, his dark eyes roaming endlessly over my body as he hunted for injuries.
“I’m fine, thanks to Jack,” I said. “And my melons. They saved me too. Now let me go.”
Mateo didn’t release me, looking like he wanted to fold me up, put me in his pocket and run as far away as he could from here before anyone could catch him. But as I tugged on my wrists, he slowly released me and I crawled over to Jack as he started to rise, grabbing his head in both of my hands and kissing him on the mouth. Kissing him felt like the rightest thing in the world, like two dots being connected by a line in a dot-to-dot. We were meant to be joined to help make a bigger picture, it was fate.
He stilled, his hands coming up to grasp my face as he sank his tongue between my lips and my tears broke free, sailing down my cheeks like little boats on a windy river.
A furious growl sounded behind us and Jack was ripped away from me by the hair, leaving me in the damp grass as I looked up at Niall in fury and he waved the remote around in a threat to the others. “Get offa my wife.”
“He saved my life.” I pouted.
“And you almost cost her it with your fucking booby trap, bastardo,” Mateo hissed as he got to his feet.
Jack remained silent, not even bothering to try and break Niall’s grip on his hair as he started at me with blood dripping from his back onto the grass and a passion in his eyes that made me ache inside.
“Quiet down,” Niall snarled, letting go of Jack and starting to pace around us all in a circle. “Yer all so fuckin’ chatty, just pipe down and let me figure out how this is gonna go.”
He swiped a hand over his face, seeming all antsy pants and I crawled closer to Jack, moving around him to inspect the bloody wounds on his back, my throat welling at the sight of his pain. I’d dealt so many hurts and aches out to people in my life, but I didn’t like to see my giant bleeding.
Niall kept looking at me with a panicked horror in his eyes before his gaze shifted to Jack then Mateo. Round and round, even pausing on Brutus who had come to sit beside me, sniffing the blood on Jack like he was tempted to have a little lick. He was drooling a lot, so he probably really wanted to make him feel better, but I kept nudging him away every time he leaned towards Jack’s wound, not wanting his licks to give him more ouchies.
“He needs stitches,” I said with a frown, tracing my finger around the wounds in a big circle and Jack relaxed into my touch. “I could do it. I just need a needle and thread and – oh they are quite deep, aren’t they? – maybe some gum to stick the holes shut first? Some strawberry gum because that’s probably less hurty than mint-”
“I’ve got it,” Niall said, snapping his fingers and pointing between us all. “It’s makin’ some kinda sense now, what my nephew was saying about him and his girl. How he lets his boys fuck her too. It ain’t about the fuckin’ – that’s important, mind, but I can see how it’s more than that. My damn crazy arse will end up killin’ my Spider one way or the other if I don’t have more eyes on her, you see? I already fear I ain’t up to the job alone. I couldn’t keep Ava safe after all. And that probably ain’t the only booby trap in this house, but fuck knows where the others are, because I was likely on a blood high when I fixed ‘em elsewhere. Do ya see what I’m saying, Mateo?” Niall gripped his jaw, making him look up at him. “Is that making sense to you like it is to me?”
Mateo frowned then jerked his chin out of Niall’s grip. “You want her protected from yourself.” Dead Man looked to me, and I smiled shyly under the blazing scrutiny of his dark eyes, my tummy all of a flutter.
“That’s right. And Jack went and protected her from me, didn’t ya lad?” Niall approached him, petting him on the head. “Look at you. All those muscles. All nearly seven feet of ya. How many men could you take on at once? How much time could you buy her to run? Enough, I’d say.” He smirked like he was the cleverest man on the planet then looked to me. “What do you say to that, Spider? You like these men, don’t ya?”
“I like them lots,” I agreed, biting my lower lip. “I feel like…like we’re…” I couldn’t get the words out past the lumpy bump in my throat, feeling suddenly self-conscious in case these men didn’t feel the same as me, in case Brutus didn’t either. I was getting so attached to them all, so deeply, impossibly attached like I hadn’t to any people I’d ever met ever before. And if I admitted it out loud, they might go pop like the weasel. They might vanish before my very eyes and I’d be lost and alone again.
“Say it, chica loca,” Mateo encouraged, shifting closer to me on the grass.
“Rook,” Jack urged and I looked to him too as Brutus let out a yap like he wanted to know as well.
I cleared my throat again and again, shifting on my butt and picking a handful of grass, sorting through the blades.
“Come on now, Spider,” Niall encouraged. “Don’t hold out on us.”
I shut my eyes, scrunching them up super tight as I forced the words to wrap around my tongue, praying that when I opened my eyes again, they’d still be there. That they wouldn’t be stolen away from me, and I’d realise they were always just a figment of my overactive imagination. Because I was sitting in the wish I’d made for myself all those years ago on my birthday, blowing out a candle on my little red velvet cupcake. I’d wished for adventure. But underneath that wish had been something so much deeper. I’d wished to feel accepted, to feel loved, and with these men, I felt more love than my little heart could take. But I wanted to try and keep hold of it all, to find a way for my heart to stretch and accommodate all those fuzzy warm feels, because if I didn’t, they might escape out of my chest and blow away into the trees to be eaten by an owl.
“I feel so happy here. So, so happy,” I blurted. “All of you are my favourite, each and every one, and I don’t know how that’s possible because usually a favourite means one, but to me it means five. I’ve never ever felt so loved or content or like myself in any other place, and I think if one of you were to die, I’d die too. I’d cut my throat and let myself bleed and bleed until I went with you. Because I need it to be us. All of us. Or none of us.”
My words were met with silence and a crow cawed somewhere in the woods, laughing at me. I bowed my head, heat rising in my cheeks as I kept my eyes tightly shut. They were gone, weren’t they? Pop and away. I’d made them up, of course I had. Just like I’d made up imaginary friends when I was little. They were too perfect for me, of course they’d been fake. They couldn’t be real, because if they were real that meant life was being good to me, and it was never good to me. Life was a rocky railroad and my train was about to fly off the tracks into a canyon.
“Rook,” Jack said softly, taking my hand and I gasped, my eyes flying open as I found him still there, still bloody and hurting, but his eyes so full of love that it made me want to cry.