CHAPTER 28 - BRUISES

DOMINIC’S POV

Her car won’t start.

I know this because I can hear her turning the ignition from inside the kitchen, the engine catching and failing in that rhythmic mechanical cough that means the battery is dead or the starter is gone.

I know I should let her call a service or take the bus or solve the problem in any of the dozen ways that don’t involve me being alone with her in a confined space at 7:45 in the morning.

I pick up my keys instead.

She’s standing in the driveway looking at her phone when I pull the car around, and the morning light is catching the edge of her jaw and she’s wearing another high-necked shirt.

I know why she’s wearing it because I can see the shadow of a bruise creeping above the collar on the left side – my son’s mouth, my son’s teeth, my son’s claim stamped into the skin of a girl I can’t stop thinking about, and the thought process required to observe that bruise and feel nothing is a muscle I’ve been exercising for twenty years and it’s failing.

“Get in,” I say, and she does, and the car fills with her scent.

I put the car in drive and focus on the road with the kind of deliberate attention that I normally reserve for keeping my wolf behind a locked door.

We don’t speak for eight blocks.

My hand is on the gear shift and her eyes keep drifting to my forearms where I’ve rolled my sleeves – a habit, not a strategy, except that nothing I do around this girl is purely habitual anymore, because my wolf has opinions about her proximity that are getting harder to file under professional restraint.

I parallel park outside the humanities building with a precision that serves as evidence that my hands are steady even when the rest of me is not, and she reaches for the door handle and I say it before the thought has finished forming.

“The marks on your neck. Cover them better.”

She freezes with her hand on the handle and I can hear her heartbeat spike from the driver’s seat – one of the many things my wolf provides that I did not ask for and cannot return – and she doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at her and the sentence sits between us doing the work of a much larger conversation that neither of us is prepared to have.

She gets out and closes the door and I watch her walk into the building in my rearview mirror and I sit in the parked car for four minutes breathing through the scent she left on the passenger seat.

***

She comes to my office at 3 PM for the paper review, which I assigned because I am a professor and assigning work is what professors do and not because I wanted a reason to have her in my office with the door closed – except that the door is closed and she’s sitting in the chair across from my desk and her paper is open between us and the fiction of academic purpose is so thin that a strong breeze would tear it.

I stand and move behind her to review the essay over her shoulder because this is academically appropriate and absolutely necessary and has nothing to do with the fact that the position puts my chest six inches from her back and my mouth level with her ear.

I point at a passage on page three and my arm extends past her shoulder and I can feel the warmth of her body radiating through the gap between us, and when she turns her head to look at the passage I’m pointing to, our faces are close enough that I can see the individual lashes on her left eye and count the flecks of green in her hazel irises.

“Your argument breaks down here,” I say, and my voice is steady because twenty years of control has made steadiness my default even when my wolf is pressing against the inside of my skull so hard that my vision is threatening to shift amber. “The connection between domestic confinement and psychological liberation needs stronger textual support.”

She turns her head further and her mouth is RIGHT THERE – close enough that I can feel the warmth of her breath against my lips and see the slight part of her lower lip and count the heartbeats in the pulse at her throat, which is fast, which is very fast, which tells me things I should not be cataloguing about my stepdaughter’s autonomic responses to my proximity.

I hold. She holds. The distance between our mouths is measurable in millimeters but neither of us closes it and neither of us increases it and the tension of the held position is so acute that I can feel it in my molars.

I straighten up. The distance returns. The professional mask reinstates itself with the efficiency of a system that has been rebooted thousands of times.

“Rewrite the conclusion. Bring it to my office Thursday.”

She doesn’t stand.

She looks at me over her shoulder with an expression that is doing catastrophic things to the structural integrity of my restraint, and she says two words that land in my chest like a lit match.

“Make me.”

I pick up my red pen and walk back behind her, then I lean down and I take her hand – her writing hand, her pen hand, the hand that was gripping my son’s shoulders last night based on the scratches I saw on his arms at breakfast – and I wrap my fingers around hers and position the pen against the paper.

“The conclusion should reference the thesis from your introduction,” I say, and I guide her hand across the page in a slow, deliberate stroke, and my chest is pressed against her back and I can feel the ridge of her spine through her shirt and my wolf is howling so loudly inside my skull that I’m surprised she can’t hear it. “Connect the final argument back to the original claim.”

I guide her hand for another line and another and my handwriting is overlaying hers on the page, red ink over black, and I am acutely aware that I am hard against the small of her back and she is acutely aware of it because her breathing has changed and her hand has started trembling in mine, and neither of us acknowledges the rigid length of me pressed against her spine the way neither of us acknowledged the almost-kiss, because acknowledging it would require acting on it and acting on it would mean crossing a line that I have spent two decades building.

I release her hand and step back and she stands on legs that are visibly unsteady, and I look at the chair she was sitting in and the seat is wet – a dark, unmistakable spot on the leather that we can both see and that constitutes physical evidence of a response that no amount of academic pretense can explain.

She sees it. She sees me see it. Her face floods red and she grabs her bag and leaves without a word, and I stand behind my desk looking at the wet chair and the red ink on her paper and the ghost of her scent hanging in the air, and my wolf is clawing at the inside of my chest so hard that the pen in my hand snaps.

Mark her!

Another pen. That’s the second one she’s cost me.

That night, through the wall of my study, I hear my son’s bedroom door open and close, and the sounds that follow tell me he’s inside her again – or she’s inside his room, the distinction matters less than the fact that the girl whose hand trembled in mine this afternoon is being touched by someone else twelve feet from where I’m sitting, and my wolf can smell her arousal through the drywall and it’s making my fingers dig trenches into the arms of my reading chair.

In the morning, she comes down to breakfast in shorts and I see it – a bruise on her left thigh, four finger-shaped marks that I recognize as my own from the dinner table, from the four seconds I gripped her knee while her mother’s back was turned. And on her right thigh, a matching set of bruises in a slightly different configuration. My son’s hand. Same position, opposite leg.

She sees me looking. She pulls her shorts down half an inch and sits at the table and my son walks in and kisses the top of her head on his way to the cereal and her mother says “Love you, baby” from the stove.

I open my newspaper and read the same paragraph four times while the bruise on her left thigh – mine – and the bruise on her right – my son’s – disappear under the edge of the tablecloth, and the wolf behind my ribs presses forward so hard that the newspaper crinkles in my grip.