Everything for You (Bergman Brothers #5)(78)

To love them.

Maybe it’s because I’m so damn desperate to feel clean. Maybe it’s because I’m lonely and in so much pain, I can barely think about anything besides that. But rather than tell him to fuck off and, with what strength I have left, not so politely shove his ass out of my house, I hold Oliver’s eyes and tell him, “All right.”





“Fuck. Shit. Fucking shit,” I growl as I ease onto the shower chair and set the hand towel that Oliver left draped on it across my lap for modesty’s sake.

“How’s it going?” he asks on the other side of the door.

“Fucking peachy,” I call.

“All clear?”

“I’m decent if that’s what you mean.” I peer down at the towel. “Well, decent-ish.”

The bathroom door whips open. Through the fogged-up glass, Oliver is visible, walking in, wearing the shortest, tightest pair of swim trunks I have ever seen.

And of fucking course, they’re the most heinously vibrant multicolored floral print.

“I know,” he says, stepping in, sliding the shower door behind him. “They look amazing on me.”

I shake my head as he steps closer, inspecting the bottles, finding the shampoo and squirting it into his palm. “You did it just to torture me,” I tell him. “I have to sit here literally at eye level with—” I make the mistake of glancing where my eyes land on his groin and swallow roughly.

Oliver’s got a flush to his cheeks as he starts lathering shampoo into my hair. “Well, then I guess you’ll just have to shut your eyes and focus on relaxing if you can’t appreciate the beauty of my psychedelic hibiscus swim trunks.”

“The print’s seared into my retinas.” I shut my eyes, tip my head back. “Like fireworks, when you see them on the backs of your eyelids.”

“Man, I love fireworks,” he says. “That boom that just rattles your chest, colors splashing across the sky like a big flick of the cosmic paintbrush.”

I sigh as he steps behind me and scrubs my scalp. He takes his time, deep circular motions with his fingertips, before his touch eases down my scalp to the base of my skull, which throbs with a headache. Next he scrubs near my temples, massaging there, too. Then he detaches the showerhead to rinse it, his hands capable and steady, running through my hair.

“Next,” he says, stepping around me, dropping to his knees and organizing his tools to the right. Shaving cream. My razor. A small bowl that’s collected shower water to rinse it.

I shut my eyes, suddenly panicked, overwhelmed. It’s too much, too intimate.

But right as I open my eyes, as I’m about to tell him I can’t do this, Oliver pushes up on his knees and faces me with a beard of shaving cream, thick white gloop pasted across his eyebrows, too.

I snort an involuntary laugh that echoes around the shower. He looks ridiculous.

“Hey, now,” he says, striking a pose. “No laughing. I look good. Like Santa Claus who got Botox.”

“Stop,” I say hoarsely. “Stop making me laugh. It hurts.”

My back does hate to laugh. But my heart loves it, this moment that he’s here at my feet, being ridiculous for my sake.

“Oh, damn.” He squints. “Shaving cream in my eye.”

“Come here.” I wipe the shave cream that’s dripped over his eye, cup my hand into the shower water overhead, until it’s full, then gently rinse it, too, half washing away his ridiculous shaving cream beard, too. “There.”

His eyes crack open, then meet mine.

I tell myself to let go, my hand to stop cupping his face, my thumb to stop sliding along the sharp plane of his cheekbone.

But I can’t.

I just…can’t. I can’t fight it any longer. I feel…broken. My body, my resolve. I’ve built my walls so many fucking times, only for Oliver to crash through them over and over again, and I simply cannot turn him away again.

I lean closer. Oliver leans in too, until our mouths are so close. Until I realize I’d get a mouthful of shaving cream if I did what I want. Oliver seems to realize this, too. He jerks away, looking self-conscious. Like some freakish contortionist, he arches back deeply under the water and rinses his face.

If I attempted that right now, I’d die. Just die of pain.

I wait for my familiar envy, resentment, anger to flood my body, to wipe away my desire for him.

But it doesn’t come.

Instead, this horrible, awful ache settles in my heart, a knot slipping around it, tightening. I have the most terrifying thought—no, vision?—that this knot, insistent and tight, is the end of a tether, and that tether, gossamer fine yet tensile strong, stretches from my heart, through the air and space and fuck, even time, and its other end, its home, is a knot like mine, around another’s heart.

Around his.

Oblivious to my world-upending thoughts, Oliver straightens and shakes like a wet dog, sprinkling me.

“Oi.” I scowl at him.

“Like you weren’t wet already.” He grins, back to his playful self as he pushes up on his knees again, shaving cream in hand.

Eyes on his task, he lathers it on my neck, along my beard.

“Nice and steady,” he says as he grips the razor in one hand, my chin in the other.

I swallow. Oliver smiles a wicked sort of grin, eyes on his task. “Do you know how much self-control it’s taking not to sing Sweeney Todd right now?”