“I know what it means,” he cut me off. His chest rose and fell slowly against my cheek. “You talk in Spanish in your sleep.”
I did? “I do?”
“Yeah.” Neither one of us said anything for a moment until he asked, “Why do you pretend like you don’t know Spanish?”
“I don’t pretend. I’m just not speaking it now just in case they’re listening. I’m paranoid. And why would I have said anything to you when you barely talked to me in English?” I thought about it. “We, my family, never spoke it in public, just at home.” That was why I had never been allowed to call my grandma Abuela. So that no one could pinpoint their accents.
He made a sound in his chest that I was going to hope was acceptance.
“You smell nice for having not showered,” I mumbled.
“I told you, I don’t need to sweat as much as you do, and it doesn’t have an odor.”
“Lucky,” I muttered.
His head tipped down, his chin brushing my temple. He sighed right before he lifted his arm, moving it to the side and— I heard the zipper, then felt him shift a bit before he tugged the opened sides of the hoodie wide and wrapped them around me. Like a taco, and I was the filling.
I blinked.
Oh shit.
I was T-shirt on skin with a beautiful man.
And not just any beautiful man, but The Defender. The fucking Defender. A gorgeous pain in the fucking ass. One who was taking care of me.
People would pay millions for this. If I had them and I hadn’t gotten to know his real personality, I would too.
Could he really be such a dickhead when he went to this extent?
I dropped my head and even caught my breath… until my teeth chattered and I shivered again. I swallowed, deciding to try and get my mind off this, so I asked the first thing I thought of. “Are you a cyborg?”
I felt his huff more than heard it. “No.”
Turning my head a little, I lifted my hand—and I was going to blame the fever on messing around with the hormones controlling my brain—and with the tip of my index finger, I lifted his lip a little. It was firm and soft at the same time.
I tapped his canine tooth with my fingernail. It felt… normalish. It wasn’t like I ever poked at my own teeth.
Moving my hand, I nudged at a spot on his jaw with the pad of my finger, and still, he let me.
Then I gently knocked on the part of his collarbone that was exposed from his unzipped hoodie.
“What are you doing?” The Defender asked slowly.
“I don’t know, making sure you’re not.”
I heard the deep breath he let out from his nostrils. I felt the shift of his muscles beneath my legs and beside my arm. I barely heard him say, “You can call me Alexander.”
I tipped my head back. If my eyeballs weren’t so dry, I was pretty sure they might have bugged out.
Those bright eyes went squinty. “Tell anybody and—”
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. “You’ll render my limbs, I know,” I whispered, stunned.
I sounded his name out on my tongue. A-l-e-x-a-n-d-e-r. Huh.
It was so… so… normal.
“It’s a nice name. Very solid, very fitting,” I whispered, wondering now if this was some kind of delusion or something.
Maybe I was dead. Or I was dreaming.
“Not Alex. Not Xander. Alexander,” he muttered, already sounding like he was regretting his decision to give me that much.
Maybe it wasn’t a dream.
“Alexander, got it,” I confirmed weakly, reeling and trying to play it cool.
He had a name. Like everybody. And it wasn’t Goliath or Stormkiller or something that sounded like a mathematical equation.
It was Alexander. Not Xander. And even though he said not Alex, I already saw him as that more.
This felt monumental.
The question spilled from my mouth before I could stop it. “Do you have a last name too?”
“What do you think?”
“That you do.” I swallowed and gave him a little more information. Just a little. Just in case this was the end, I wanted him to know the truth. “My real last name is Castro, but we legally changed it when I was fifteen to Garcia. I’ve never felt like a Garcia though. It was just more common.”
His thighs bunched under mine, and his breathing was slow as he said quietly, “I know what it is. I know your middle name too.”
It was my muscles that tensed then. “You… found my birth certificate?” Other than the paperwork from when we legally changed our names—which I knew for a fact I didn’t have at the house—that was the only thing in the world that had my full, real name on it. My original birth certificate before my mom had signed her rights over to my grandparents. I thought I had stored it in my safe deposit box along with that letter I should have burned a decade ago but hadn’t. I really needed to stop thinking about it.
He didn’t reply.
When the hell had he had time to snoop and find it? I couldn’t believe I’d gotten so sloppy that I’d had it at the house. Fortunately, all he would have seen was my last name. And my real middle name: Ximena. He-men-ah. For my grandpa’s mom. I had kept that too throughout my life. It was the Altagracia that I’d had to dump when we’d changed our last name after my parents had done what they did. I had gone from Altagracia Castro to Gracie Garcia.
I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal that he knew that. What did it really matter at this point?
Turning my cheek, I buried my face a little closer into his firm chest. I had no energy. I wasn’t hungry either, and I was always hungry.
The arm that had been resting beside his body shifted, and before I knew it, those long fingers were grazing my cheek.
If I could have sucked in a surprised breath, I would have. “Your hand feels nice,” I told him honestly.
“It’s only a hand. Your face turned red. I thought your fever might be spiking.”
“No, I just miss human contact,” I admitted, stopping myself from leaning into his touch more than necessary. I’d already put his arm around me. Sure, it was for warmth and because I didn’t feel good, and even though he hadn’t done anything to save me from those assholes because he couldn’t, his presence still made me feel safer than when I’d been alone.
And that was something.
It was a hell of a lot.
“You sound like Cookie Monster.”
I wanted to laugh, because he was right, but all I did was kind of puff a little bit of breath out.
“Did they leave you alone after they took me?” I asked quietly.
His body tensed, and I knew that was all I was going to get.
Nausea rolled through me, and I needed to focus on something else instead. “I asked them to,” I told him, feeling bile rising in my throat.
“I know you did. Two of them kicked me. That’s all,” he answered surprisingly fast, his breath a warm puff against my hair.
I nodded, thinking about how I’d yelled out of desperation. I swallowed the memory and the hurt down. The shame too. Because anybody would have yelled for help, right?
Except maybe not him.
But he wasn’t here to save me.
I wasn’t his responsibility.
Even he’d said he wasn’t being nice. He was being decent. To not smell my stinky decaying corpse.