Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,75
didn’t want to cry in front of, Jamaal would head the list. But there are some things in life you can’t control, and this particular burst of emotion was one of them.
Covering my face with my hands didn’t seem like enough, so I bent over double, pulling my knees up and burying my face against them as I hugged them. I felt the sheets sliding away from my skin, but I was too distraught to care. I imagined a manly stoic like Jamaal was appalled enough by my outburst not to notice the expanses of skin I inadvertently revealed. These were not delicate, ladylike tears. These were wrenching, noisy, messy sobs.
I expected Jamaal to sit there and look befuddled, or maybe even to beat a hasty retreat so he didn’t have to witness my meltdown. When I felt the tentative touch of his hand on the bare skin of my back, it was almost enough to startle me into silence. However, this meltdown wasn’t about to let a sympathetic touch derail it.
Surely now Jamaal would retreat, I thought, but he remained beside me, his hand stroking gently up and down my back, more confident now that I hadn’t rebuffed him. For his sake—and yeah, okay, for the sake of my own dignity—I tried to get a handle on myself, but it seemed like the harder I fought to suppress the tears, the more determined they were to escape.
Jamaal slid closer to me on the bed. He slipped his arm around me and pulled me against his chest, one hand on my back, one on the back of my head. I resisted for all of about one and a half seconds, then melted against him, clinging to him as if he were a life raft in a stormy sea. He rocked me back and forth like a child, and he made no obvious attempt to get me to stop crying.
His acceptance of my tears, and his strong, silent support, warmed me from the inside out. And that was before he started singing to me.
I’d only heard him sing once before, but it was one of those rare moments in my life that I’d have loved to bottle up so I could experience it again. His voice was a lovely unpolished baritone, and the tune had the soothing lilt of a lullaby, though I didn’t recognize the language.
There was a part of me that felt faintly ridiculous about cuddling up in a man’s arms, being rocked like a baby while he sang me a lullaby. That part of me was drowned out by the part that was touched and moved beyond words. Jamaal was not a man from whom I expected tenderness, and that was hardly surprising in light of the horrors of his life. But it was moments like this when I knew for sure that all the years of abuse he’d endured, and all the torments of trying to control his death magic, had not destroyed the decent human being he was destined to be, no matter how hard they had tried. There was a reason I felt such a strong connection to him, a reason I felt the need to reach out to him even when he tried to hold himself aloof.
My tears ran their course, slowing to sniffles and hiccups, but Jamaal didn’t let go of me, nor did he stop singing. I took as many deep breaths as I could manage. My head felt swollen and achy, my nose was completely stuffed up, and my chest hurt from the violence of my sobs. And yet for all that, I felt almost . . . peaceful.
Finally, the song ended, and I reluctantly extricated myself from Jamaal’s arms, wiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands, unable to look into his face when I felt so raw.
“That was beautiful,” I said in a scratchy whisper I could barely recognize as my own voice.
“Matilda used to sing it to me when I was very little,” he said. “I should hate it and want to burn it out of my memory, but it’s stayed with me all these years.”
Matilda had been his owner’s wife. She’d been unable to have children of her own, and had treated Jamaal like a surrogate child—right up until the time she found out her husband was Jamaal’s father. Then she’d insisted that her husband sell both Jamaal and his mother, and both their lives had gone to hell.