I didn’t shut up.
I kept going in a whisper.
“I didn’t like to see you suffer.”
His hands pressed in and he clipped low, “Shut up, Faye.”
I didn’t shut up.
I kept talking.
“I wanted it to stop.”
“Shut it.”
“I wanted it to stop. I wanted you to be free.”
His face got closer and he growled, “Shut it.”
I again didn’t shut up.
I gave him all of me.
“I wanted you to notice me.”
He used my head to yank me into him then one of his arms closed around me so tight I couldn’t breathe, his other hand curled around the side of my head, pressing my cheek to his chest and he bit out, “God damn it.”
My fingers curled into his sweater at his sides and I kept at it but I had to do it on a breathless wheeze. “It was stupid. I knew it when Benji and Serenity started turning up stuff so I tried to stop them –”
His hand flexed into my scalp but his arm around me loosened slightly as he whispered in a voice that seemed torn out of him, guttural, leaving damage in its wake, “Seriously, Faye, f**kin’ shut it.”
I shut it.
He held me close and I held onto his sweater for what seemed days before I felt him shift but only his head so his lips were at the top of my hair.
“Fuck me, what am I gonna do with you? Even when I wasn’t with you, you tried to take my goddamned back,” he muttered there and it was not a question for me so I decided not to answer.
His hand slid from the side of my head to my jaw, he tipped my head back and I hesitantly looked into his face, relieved to see he was no longer pissed way the frak off but that didn’t mean he wasn’t openly troubled.
“You f**ked up, Faye.”
I slid my lower lip to the side and bit it before letting it go and whispering, “I think I got that.”
“Now is not the time to be cute,” he warned.
I pressed my lips together.
He closed his eyes and pulled breath in through his nose.
Then he opened his eyes and ordered quietly, “You get on your computer and you talk those two down. I don’t give a shit what you gotta do. Get their promises. Get them to vow on whatever geek shit you guys hold sacred that they are not gonna do one more thing on this gig. You have to, you tell them I’ll hunt them down and arrest their asses for whatever bullshit I can dream up with illegal wire taps and hacking. Then we hope they haven’t got on radar. And we hope more they haven’t put you on radar. Because knowin’ that shit happened to Misty when my ring was on her finger, I didn’t want it there or not, eats at me every f**kin’ day. That shit happened to you, it’d kill me but not before I hunted down the man who did it to you and I made sure he was dead. I am not jokin’, not even a little bit. So get on your computer and sort their asses, baby, and do it now.”
Cautiously, my heart beating hard even as it hurt, for him and for Misty, I asked, “Did that really happen to Misty?”
“Question and answer time is after you sort those two. Not now. Go, Faye, and don’t make me tell you again.”
One could say he was being supremely bossy in a way I did not like.
Still.