Falling into You (Falling #1)(41)

I respect the hell out of her for how hard she’s working to be okay. I just wish she’d let me show her how to let go, how to let herself hurt. I want to take her pain.

She’s plopped down onto the couch, and I can see the exhaustion in her eyes, in her posture. I leave her sitting on the couch, head back, legs splayed out. Making sure my room isn’t a complete pigsty, I change the sheets and add an extra blanket, then go back out to tell her she can crash in my bed. She’s already passed out in the position she sat down in. I lift her easily. She’s light as a feather, like an actual, factual fairy, made of glass and magic and fragile porcelain and deceptive strength. I set her in the bed, tug off her shoes, then debate whether to take her pants off for her or not.

Selfishly enough, I decide to go for it. I mean, I know I hate sleeping in pants, so I can’t imagine she does either. I pop the button, slide the zipper down, grip the denim at her hips and pull. She wriggles, lifts her hips, and I pull them down to her knees. The sight of her thighs and her pale cream skin is almost too much for me to take, especially with her tiny yellow thong, barely disguising the tender V in which I want so desperately to bury my face, my body. I can’t help my fingers from tracing a featherlight line across her thigh, just a brief touch, but too much. And not nearly enough.

I jerk myself away and scrub my hands over my face, through my hair, fighting for control.

I turn back, close my eyes and peel her jeans off the rest of the way.

As I’m in the process of pulling them past her toes, she speaks, muzzy and sleepy and ridiculously goddamn cute. “You’ve already seen me in my panties. Why the shy guy now?”

I settle the blankets at her neck, and she presses them down with her elbows on the outside, staring up at me with long fluttering lashes and tangled strawberry blond hair wisping across her perfect features. I back away before I give in to the temptation to brush the hair away with my callused fingertips. I can’t read the expression on her face. She just looks so fucking vulnerable, as if all the hurt is coming up and boiling over and she’s barely keeping it in, now that sleep has nearly claimed her.

“That was an asshole move,” I say. “I shouldn’t have done that. You were asleep, I didn’t want—”

“It was sweet,” she says, cutting in over me.

“I’m a lot of things, Tinkerbell. Sweet ain’t one of them.” I brush my hand through my hair, a nervous gesture. “I only closed my eyes so I wouldn’t feel you up in your sleep.”

Her eyes widen. “You wanted to feel me up?”

I don’t quite succeed in stifling my laugh of disbelief; she doesn’t understand how bad I want her. Good for her. She can’t know.

I take a step closer to her, next to the bed, and I just can’t summon the strength to resist. A strand of hair lays across her high, sculpted cheekbone. I brush it away, mentally cursing my weakness.

“You have no clue, Nell.” I back away before my mouth or my hands betray me further. “Sleep, and think of blue.”

She snorts. “Think of blue?”

“It’s a technique I learned to keep bad dreams away,” I tell her. “As I fall asleep, I think of blueness. Not things that are blue, just…an endless, all-encompassing sense of blue. Ocean blue, sky blue.”

“Blue like your eyes.” Her voice is unreadably soft.

I shake my head, smirking. “If that’s what brings you peace, then sure. The point is, think of a soothing color. Picture it floating through you, in you, around you, until you are that color.” I shrug. “It helped me.”

“What do you dream about?” Her eyes are awake, and piercing.

I turn away and flick the light off, speak facing away from her. “Nothing for you to worry about. Bad things. Old things.” I turn back to glance at her, and her eyes are heavy again. “Sleep, Nell.”

I close the door behind me, and retreat into the kitchen. It’s nearly five in the morning by this point, and I’m beyond exhausted. I was up at seven yesterday finishing a Hemi rebuild, and the guys are going to be here to start working on the ‘Stang around eight. I end up writing a note and leaving it taped to the frame, saying I won’t be in today. They know what to do. Perk of being the boss, I guess. I trudge back up the stairs and slump back on the couch, eyes heavy, but brain whirling.

I’ll never get to sleep at this rate. I curse under my breath, trying to banish images of Nell’s naked thighs, begging to be caressed. It’s not working.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the top drawer of my dresser is a little white medicine box. I keep it for times like this, when I can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking. It’s a holdover from the bad old days. I roll a pin-thin joint and smoke it slowly, savoring it. I rarely smoke these days. I don’t even remember the last time, to be honest.

I gave up hard drinking, gave up cigarettes, gave up pot, gave up a lot of other shit when I decided to get my life straight. But every rare once in a while, a little bit of weed is a necessity. I pinch off the cherry and stow the kit, and I’m finally laying down on the couch, fading away, when I hear it.

Strained, high-pitched humming. An odd noise, scary, tense. As if she’s struggling with every fiber of her being not to sob, teeth clenched. I can almost see her rocking back and forth, or curled into a fetal position.