“Do I?” I asked him slowly.
He nodded back at the same pace. “Do you need me to tell you again?”
This motherfucker was serious. But so was I. I nodded.
That’s when I finally noticed that Alex’s beautiful cape was on the floor behind him. The sight of it almost felt sacrilegious. He should at least carry it and not drag it around.
Alex took another step into the room, then another and another until his shins bumped into my knees, and a half naked Alex in a skintight suit loomed over me, and he was nudging my jaw with his index finger. “Why’s your heart beating so fast?”
I lifted a shoulder and met his eyes. “Because I’m scared.”
His head jerked back a little, and the smile that came over his face… it tipped the edges of his mouth into the sweetest expression I had ever seen. He even let out a little huff, and in a move I wouldn’t have expected, he leaned forward, slipped his arms under me, and scooped me up. In the next second, I was on his thighs, on his lap, and he had a forearm bracing the middle of my back, and Alex was looking down at me with the most unbelievably affectionate look on his face. “We talked about this already. You’ve got nothing to be scared of when you’re with me,” he said, sounding absolutely serious.
It was too natural by then to lean against his side and let my head fall with a clunk against that spot between his neck and shoulder. “You say it like it’s supposed to be easy,” I told him. “You were gone for a long time. What did you have to think about for a month? Whether you liked me or not?” Did I have to sound so irritated?
“I thought we already covered that I like you.”
I frowned. “You sure haven’t acted like it sometimes.”
“I didn’t know what I expected you to be like, but it wasn’t like this. Alana’s husband doesn’t curse, Agatha is great, but she’s serious, and I’m pretty sure Achilles’s wife shits rainbows. Could you imagine me being happy with someone like that? You were ready to stab people to defend me. You like talking shit to me.” The son of a bitch smiled. “I thought you were okay when you didn’t run and leave me behind when they took us. Then you kind of won me over when you tried to protect me in that cell. And you’ve kept on winning me over since,” he said quietly. “I needed some time to think about what was best for both of us. That’s why I was gone.”
I frowned even more.
“I did,” he insisted. “I’ve been told my whole life what to do, how much I could say, how I should behave. Who I should be and so have you. Neither one of us always did what we were supposed to do, but for the most part, we did, didn’t we?”
Where the hell was he going with this?
“My brothers and sister both went looking for their mates the second my grandmother told them to. My mother and father barely knew each other when they got married. None of them asked questions, they didn’t argue; they went and found their partners, and have been happy since. You mumbled something before about wanting to have a choice, and I get it, Gracie. Better than you’ll ever understand. But unlike you, I was never lonely,” he explained calmly.
I closed my eyes.
“Until I was. Until I was on another continent and wondering what you were up to. Until I was in bed, by myself, and I didn’t like it,” he told me.
The urge to faint was right there in my heart but I held on to listen to him.
“I missed your three thousand questions and the way you hold my hand. I missed my little monster. Missed her a lot,” Alex admitted with a huff, like he couldn’t believe it but it didn’t bother him after all. “I was never going to leave you, but I needed to be sure, Gracie, of what we were going to be to each other. And once I was, I made myself think about you. How fair would it be for me, for my family, to take that kind of decision away from you?” he asked.
I pressed my head closer to him, not sure how to answer that.
“It isn’t, but I know you. And you’re not supposed to be anyone else’s Gracie, you’re my friend. My Gracie. I’m too heavy to be a good swimmer, but I’ll never let you drown. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never keep secrets from you again.”
“Alex…” I started.
“Hold on, let me finish. Then my grandmother called me, right when I picked up the phone to call you, and told me to give you a little more time. That I had to let you see that you could be happy here by yourself. That you could have friends and build a life,” he told me seriously. “If I’ve learned anything these last few months, it’s that I should listen to her if I don’t want her to break my back again. So I left you alone. I made it two weeks before I started craving Cheetos, and I only wanted to eat them with you around. You’ve ruined tuna and pears. Snow and laughing. Being by myself. Nothing is the same without you now.” He dropped his voice. “You little butthole.”
My world rocked. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t breathe. I thought that maybe I was never going to be able to breathe again.
But I did. “You mean it?” I whispered.
He squeezed me tight, giving me his answer that way.
I didn’t mean to say it but I did, and I know I sounded like I’d lost my mind. “You’re fucking scary, Lexi. You know that?”
The smooth skin of his chin brushed my temple. “You’re one of the only people on this world, in this entire fucking universe, who never has to be scared of me.”
I reached for the part of his cape I could touch and grabbed a handful of it. “But I am because nobody else has to trust you with other stuff. With the stuff you could hurt without even using your strength, you know?”
His fingers curled over my hip. “If I wouldn’t hurt a stranger that could use a foot up their ass, why would I hurt the only person I’m not related to that I’ve ever been able to be myself around?”
Oh boy. Oh boy. I pressed my face even closer to his chest, to that smooth fucking skin right there. I opened my eyes. “I don’t know where this marshmallow filling inside you is coming from, but I’m all about it,” I mumbled, hearing how shaky that came out.
Even my bones felt his laugh. “You know you have nothing to be scared of. I’m your sneaky shit.”
I grunted, and he laughed again.
“Come here. I’m going to tell you a little secret,” he whispered, and I sat up straight. His face was intense. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t mad. He was just focused. On me. “What my grandmother showed me was you crawling on the floor with a baby on your back. My baby. Our baby. It was so real, he smelled just like you.”
I leaned back. Way back.
Then I blinked up at him.
“There is no place I wouldn’t look for you. Seven miles deep in the ocean. On a planet in a distant galaxy. I would go anywhere for you if someone took you, Gracie,” Alex said, his voice intense. Then he leaned toward my ear again and said in the barest whisper, “I know your parents let you down, but I would never. All those things I promised I’d never do, wouldn’t mean shit to me if it came down to you or anyone we made together in the future. All those things we worry about Grandmother doing wouldn’t be anything compared to what I would be capable of. Nothing and no one is ever going to hurt you again. I won’t let it happen.”