Page 90 of Unreasonably Yours


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The fear of Toni seeing me like this is enough to bring me back into my body. Enough to propel me from the bed on shaky legs and out into the cold night.

Sucking in lungfuls of crisp air, I grip the banister so tight my palms ache, watching my breath form clouds that float out toward the shining lake.

Today had been a nearly perfect day. No reason for my mind to fall into dark places, nothing that would’ve triggered the nightmare. Not that any of that mattered.

Sometimes, the mind didn’t need a reason to fling opendoors you’d rather stay closed. And sometimes, good times—or rather the fear of losing them—was trigger enough.

“Cillian?” I jump at Toni’s voice, so lost in my spiraling thoughts that I didn’t even hear her open the sliding door. “What’re you doing out here?”

“Um...” I start to answer, reaching for something reasonable to say. Instead, my fuzzy mind latches onto the fact that she’s out here in nothing but her sleep shirt. “Doll, it’s cold, go back inside.”

Considering I’m only in my boxers, she gives me the look that statement deserves. “I have more on than you do.”

“I’m good.”

She closes the space between us, resting her warm hands against my chest. I begin to shiver. “You’re freezing,” she says, voice laced with concern.

I want to reassure her, tell her I’m fine. This is fine. I’ll be fine. Anything to keep her from seeing the fault lines this exposes. But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out.

Toni slides her hands down my arms, tangling our fingers together. “Come back to bed.”

I don’t let go of her hand until she pulls me onto the mattress with her. And that’s where we stay, her arms around me, our foreheads pressed together, long enough for my skin to forget the cold and for the fog of unwanted memories to lift.

“What're you thinking?” she whispers, one finger tracing the lines between my brows.

For a heartbeat, I consider lying, afraid of what her answer may be. “I'm wondering what you see.” Saying it feels like opening an old wound, inviting her to pour salt into it. All I can do is hope she won’t.

Rather than give me a fast answer, she moves to sit on her knees beside me. I reposition, propping my back against the pillows to better see her.

Toni studies me, her sharp gaze peeling back my defenses with each passing second.

“You,” she says matter-of-factly. “I see you, Cillian.”

Not all of me. I’ve held back, kept the things I feared were too much packed away. But, for the first time, I let myself wonder if maybe she could. If I showed her, would she reject me as others had?

I don’t have the chance to linger on that question. The feeling of her fingers tugging the tie from my hair, quickly followed by her lips on mine, grounds me in this moment.

She trails that pretty mouth down my jaw to my neck. I shiver as she nibbles at my pulse, tracing her tongue along my collarbones. When her lips press against the scar above my heart, I suck in a breath.

“Sorry. I?—”

I press a finger to her lips, cutting off her apology, shaking my head. “No. It's...”

Most people I’d been with avoided the scars, especially once they knew their origin. Even Kevin, whom I spent years with, rarely acknowledged them, his hands always skirting around their edges. A strange desperation takes hold of me, a need for Toni to not only be someone at my edges.

Words failing me yet again, I take her hand, pressing her palm to the map of scars along the left side of my torso. I guide her touch down over my boxers and to the wreck of my thigh. Inviting her, intentionally, to the places where I’d been torn open.

Toni doesn’t recoil when I release her hand. Her fingers travel over the uneven skin as though she could read the story from the marks it left. My own dialect of Braille that only she’d been willing to learn.

She scoots down, her lips now following the path her fingers had. Methodically, she kisses every ridge, everybump, from my side, down to my hip, slipping my boxers off as she makes her way to my thigh.

My lungs and eyes burn with the effort of holding on to some kind of composure. Part of me wants to weep. Part of me wants to run.

Once more, she studies me, moving to rest between my thighs. In the low light, her brown eyes are dark pools.

“I see you,” she repeats. “And Cillian, you're beautiful.”

I open my mouth—to say what, I don’t know—but she presses her fingers to my lips, silencing me. Saving me. “Shh.”