Page 17 of Need Him Like Oxygen

Right.

As if the tales of Davide’s fucking skills weren’t practically legendary in Brooklyn. I mean, the tales of his head game were just as widespread, but, yeah, he only joked about it because we both knew the man was, apparently, some sort of sex god.

Not that I cared.

Or had ever wondered about what he was like in bed.

Or what he was packing.

Nope.

My mind definitely never went there.

“Those meds kicking in?” he asked as I tried to ignore the way his fingers were no longer stationary on my hip, but were instead searing a trail down my hip and my outer thigh. It was a whisper of a touch. But I felt every freaking centimeter his fingers traveled.

“Yeah,” I said, the throbbing just slightly more tolerable. Enough that I wasn’t actively crying anymore, at least. Which was a win in my book. I’d cried more in this one night than I had in the past fucking decade. Or maybe ever. I was pretty sure I didn’t even cry much as a baby. My mother would never have responded to my wails anyway.

“Close your eyes,” he suggested, his fingers still working their soothing magic up and down my hip and thigh.

That sounded like a good idea to me, so I let my lashes flutter closed, getting lost in the warmth of him beside me, the feel of his fingers on me, the scent of him all around me.

That, mixed with the meds cutting my pain, and I practically wanted to purr at the comfort I felt enveloped in right then.

I was mostly asleep when I heard Dav’s voice break into the floating bliss I was enveloped in.

“I’m gonna track down each one of the motherfuckers who put their hands on you,” he said, voice a whisper, likely thinking I was out cold. “And I am going to skin them fucking alive for this.”

If you only ever knew Dav at the surface level, you would be apt to roll your eyes at that declaration. No one would blame you. Dav had a lot of, well, surface. A lot of joviality and bravado, this extroverted shell that appeared so open and lighthearted.

But those of us who’d been in the trenches with Davide knew that all that surface was just there to hide the depths inside of him.

A well that was fed endlessly with darkness and violence.

I had no idea what had happened in Dav’s past to create the kind of rage and bloodlust you could find inside him at times.

I just knew it existed.

And when he was saying dark things like that, he wasn’t just saying things. He meant every last word.

Normally, I would bristle at the idea that a man, any man, would suggest that I needed him to fight my battles for me.

Somehow, though, as I drifted off to sleep, all I could think was how nice it would be for someone else to pick up my fight for me for a change.

CHAPTER FIVE

Dav

I stayed there in the bed until her eyelids started to twitch as she drifted into the depths of REM before slowly untangling myself from Cinna and making my way out of the room.

I hadn’t slept.

I’d been too worried about her, constantly opening the door to check and make sure she was still breathing, not trusting that she didn’t have some kind of brain injury.

It was pure paranoia on my part, but I couldn’t reason with my anxiety until I finally heard her whimpering, letting me know she was awake.

I’d had the pills for hours at that point.

If you had a roll of cash and someone willing to go out and find a dealer, you could have just about any kind of pain medication you wanted. The clean shit. Nothing laced in it.

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