Page 59 of Flawless

It’s not lost on me that he’s still wearing his condom, and the stickiness of it covered in my juices is sticking to my ass cheeks.

“Come on, let’s get you into the shower and then into bed,” Zenon says.

A shudder runs through me, and my entire body shakes. Nothing could ward off this chill because it doesn’t emanate from the cold.

Zenon lifts me into his arms and carries me to the bathroom. He stands me up and turns on the three showerheads comingfrom the tiled wall in three directions. The water is warm but he turns it up, recalling how much I loved hot water.

I think about all the men who never cared what I wanted or needed. They only cared about what they could extract from me, and how easily I could be discarded when they were finished.

I was not even worth an afterthought when they finished with me. I wasn’t a memory they would hold close to their chest or think about in the aftermath of the devastating actions they’d taken. I wasn’t an indelible mark scarred into the recesses of their brains that would make them regret their choices one day.

No, I wasn’t anything like that to them.

Yet, that’s all they were to me. An indelible mark that would scar me forever and prevent me from having a normal life.

The water heats up more and more, stinging and pelting my body. I close my eyes losing myself in the comfort of the heat as it washes away the day’s grime but does nothing for the memories behind my eyes.

Zenon’s hands do that; from the way that he soaps my body all over to how he massages my scalp as he works the shampoo into a lather and deeply into my hair and scalp.

Slowly, my head drops back, luxuriating in the way that his fingers bring me sweet relief. When he finishes washing and rinsing my hair and body, he leads me to sit on the shower bench.

I lean against the tiled wall as he washes himself. Minutes later, he grabs a few towels, wrapping himself in one and me in another. With the final towel, he wraps my hair and then carries me from his bathroom, down the hall, and across to the other side of the house.

Zenon lays me in my bed and then crawls in beside me. Holding me in his arms, he tells me, “I told you that I wasn’t going anywhere, Dani. You mean the world to me, and I’ll fightto make you know that. I’ll fight to make you strong enough, stable enough, and loving enough to fight for yourself.”

I sink further into his hold, but I still don’t speak. Maybe tomorrow I can explain to him what my breakdown was all about, but not tonight.

I’m exhausted from the emotional trip that I just went on. It caught me off guard coming out of nowhere.

My mind flies to and fro as it searches for a resolution to my problem. In the past, it never got quite this bad. Not after the drugs, anyway.

Never after the drugs.

It was too easy to pop some pills, smoke a joint, drink some wine, and do a few lines of coke. Those things, or a combination of them, would always alleviate the pain, storing that old hurt and shame in a locked closet to be taken out and looked at another day.

Tonight, though, I don’t have that option. I lick around the inside of my mouth, just desiring one drop of alcohol.

Lucky for me, there’s none in this house. I could hop into the rented Jeep that I’ve been using on the island and head to a store like I did before.

No, I can’t do that. I can’t do that to me or to him.

As if he can read my thoughts, Zenon’s arms wrap tighter around me, and he kisses my head.

“I’m not going anywhere, baby. Even when you’re at your worst, I’ll always have your back.”

His voice is heavy now, and I know that in a short while, he will drift off to sleep. Zenon always fell asleep before me in the past.

Yet, it’s me who begins to succumb to the prickly, grabby fingers of sleep. It’s me who sinks further into his hold, yawning and fighting sleep.

As Zenon rubs his hand up and down my arm, I struggle to stay awake. Finally, my eyes close, and I smile softly, thankful that I made it through another day. Another day, the battle with drugs and alcohol did not consume me.

My eyes fly open at some point in the middle of the night, and I stare into the darkness. Zenon’s arms tighten around me, and he mumbles something unintelligible in his sleep.

I turn around and lift slightly to look over his massive shoulder. The red digital lights on the alarm clock show that it’s a little after three in the morning.

“Hey,” he mutters when I lay down again.

Zenon’s eyes are super heavy and laced with redness from sleep.

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