Are there perceptions? Yeah. Are there a lot of misconceptions?” he asked. “Fuck yeah.”
He searched my face and said finally, “There’s a fuckton of good things about it, too, baby. We keep each other close; we keep each other safe, and sane, and we’re always there for each other. This is a family in a truer sense of the word than there’s ever been. Do we always get along? No. Are we always there for each other? Without fucking question.” He gave my shoulders a little shake and said, “You’re with me; you’re part of that family.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said quietly.
“You don’t have to say anything right now, not even ‘thank you.’” He kissed my forehead, and I felt the tension drain out of me, my eyes slipping closed. “Taking care of you has been and is my pleasure.”
“You’re going to make me cry,” I whispered, eyes misting.
“No tears, beautiful. No need. I’ve got you,” he said pulling me into a tight hug.
We stood like that for a solid minute while I gathered my wits, then he led me over to be properly fitted for a damn helmet.
I was a bit emotionally exhausted, though for a far better reason than grief, by the time we rode back down his driveway, dusk just beginning to settle.
Fenris had insisted, as soon as our purchases were made, that the girls help me get into them so that I was safe to ride. I was still speechless at how much he had casually spent on me. Shocked didn’t even begin to cover it. I don’t think my ex-husband had ever spent so much at once on me the entire time we were married… and it was all in the name of ensuring I was safe. Cared for; and I felt so… loved.
When I’d asked Fenris to love me that first night we’d had sex, I’d meant just my body. I guess he was just an all-or-nothing kind of a man, and to be completely honest, I could appreciate that. I was finding it hard, after all of this, not to love him, too.
Too fast? Maybe.
Too right? Absolutely. It absolutely felt so right. The only thing I think I’d ever felt so surely that I never once second guessed it. That did not make it, in any way, less scary than it felt. Certainty, did not, in every case, negate fear.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked and tucked the smashed penny we’d gotten at the Ballard Locks into the palm of my hand. I smiled and laughed a little. I didn’t know why, but Little Bird was absolutely enamored with the things. The souvenir pennies. She’d gotten so excited when she’d found the machine that made them at the Locks’ gift shop that she had insisted that she get one of every design it offered.
Dump Truck had humored her without question, producing pennies and quarters from the depths of his pockets as though he kept them on hand for just such an occasion, and with her enthusiasm over them, I had to believe that was exactly why he held on to such copious amounts of pocket change.
“Today was a good day,” I said and Fenris nodded, turning me around gently and taking my new leather jacket from my shoulders to hang it beside his from the pegs set inside the back door.
I was glad I had worn a plain, fitted white tee beneath my sweater. It had been too bulky for the jacket to slip over and had come home in a Harley-Davidson store bag in one of the saddlebags on Fen’s motorcycle. That bag now hung next to our jackets as he smoothed his hands over my shoulders, digging his thumbs just so between my shoulder blades alleviating the tension there just a bit.
What he did next, bringing his lips to the side of my neck, was the real magic trick to make all of the tumult I was feeling drain away.
It was so simple when it was just he and I like this, in his kitchen, leaning back into his broad chest as he gently kissed my neck. His arms pulling me tight against him, rocking me gently, swaying us as though we slow danced to music that only he could hear.
“I have to go back to my mom’s place eventually,” I said, and the mere thought of leaving this place, this refuge, this idyllic place where I felt so loved and so safe… it broke my heart.
“So, we