Page 36 of Age of Shade

“I would have been angry too.” Asher’s head shakes slightly, his voice a low, strained prayer in my ear. “None of this is your fault, Adina.”

The gaping, hollow wound in the center of my chest, the one I try my best to ignore, is raw now.

“Maybe,” I concede, lifting my shoulder in a feeble attempt at indifference. “By the time I turned sixteen, I’d been in over a dozen foster homes. There aren’t many families willing to take in kids like that, so I landed in a group home in Albany. There were about thirty girls living there, and most of us were troubled, bad kids. The ones no one wanted. Really early on, I got on the wrong side of this group of girls. They absolutely ran the place and they started going after me pretty badly. The staff wasn’t being paid enough to care.”

Asher curses quietly, tensing as though he’s ready to protect me.

I smile tightly. “Yeah. Our tax dollars at work, right?”

“Don’t.” There’s a harsh edge of anger to the word. “Don’t minimize this, Adina.”

We’re getting close to the point of no return, to the biggest, hardest truth of all of this. I push forward. “Either I took their shit and got beat on, or I told someone and got beat on harder for being a snitch. I couldn’t win, you know? I ran away, but I didn’t make it long on my own. Only a few weeks after I left, it started getting cold. I went to a shelter, but they realized I was a runaway and called the police, who then brought me straight back to the group home.”

I’d laid on my side, sobbing into the back seat of the police cruiser and begging them not to bring me back. I couldn’t bear to go back to that place, where every single person hated me. Nobody wanted to get on the bad side of those girls, and they’d rather trip me on the stairs than be tripped themselves. I was their designated punching bag, and nobody wanted to nominate themselves as my replacement.

I understood, but that didn’t make it any easier.

“When I was seventeen, I kind of lost it. In retrospect, I think I must have been really depressed…”

That last day at the group home, when those girls pulled me into a supply closet to cut off my hair and beat me for taking the last orange juice carton at breakfast, something in me snapped. I didn’t care where I went or what happened to me, but I couldn’t take it anymore.

“I ran away again, only this time I did it a little better. I had enough money to get on a train to the city. There was some shitty telemarketer job I thought I could get with my fake ID. That didn’t work out, and neither did any of my other half-baked ideas. That was it for me. I couldn’t go back, but I was also terrified of asking for help. I really thought nobody cared.”

I open my mouth, then close it again. This is it, the part where he comes in, because I was wrong about nobody caring. Asher cared. He didn’t even know me, but he saw me. Something made him stop, something made him risk letting a homeless runaway into his practice unattended. A part of me was hoping I would get to this part and he would realize on his own. That, maybe, he’d pick up on all the little fragments of me he’s gathered from my time as his girlfriend and as Allison, andknow.

Then, slowly—miraculously—Asher’s arm curls further around me, and he’s pulling me over to face him.

My heart is lodged in my throat, and the fear and hope swelling inside me have grown so big that they take up all the room in my chest. I can barely breathe. When I can finally see his face, there is no anger or shock. He’s sad for me, grief-stricken, but he hasn’t realized why I’ve stopped talking.

“Asher—” A desperate sob escapes my throat. I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

His hand cradles my face, and he leans forward to kiss me gently, with such tenderness it makes my battered heart ache.When he pulls away, he doesn’t go far. “I love you.” He says the words like he’s never meant anything more, low and desperate and deathly serious. “I’m in love with you, angel. You’ll never have to be alone again. Not if you don’t want to be.”

Oh god.

Never have I wanted anything more than to hear someone say those words to me. I’ve been alone for so long, walking through this city like a ghost, because I was too scared of getting hurt again to try and connect with anyone. Maybe I didn’t know how.

The resolution I was so recently filled with has gone cold. Asher doesn’t know everything, not yet, but helovesme. He knows where I come from now, knows enough to understand, right? I’ll tell him. I will. I’ll tell him, and it’s going to be okay. Not now, though, because in this moment there’s only one possible thing I can say.

“I love you too.”

Triumph flares in those bright-blue eyes, and then he’s kissing me again, pressing me back into the pillows with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs. It’s raw and messy and frantic. We’re claiming each other, and never in my life have I been so sure that something was right.

Maybe—justmaybe—I was meant for this man, and he was meant for me.

Maybethe whole universe has been conspiring, subtly putting things in order so we’d find each other, and now that we have…

Maybethings will turn out okay.

Maybe.

Despite what I just told him and the things I still need to say, I’ve never felt freer than I do right now. Hope is blooming inside me, and when Asher draws back, panting, to press his forehead against mine, in seconds I’ve pulled him back in.

“Please,” I whisper against his lips, and the muscles low in my belly knot when his cock—already hot and hard—twitches against my hip.

He groans quietly as I smooth my hands up his arms, trying to erase the sudden tension I feel there. He’s strung tight, holding himself back. “We don’t have to do this now.” His voice is like gravel.

I get why he’s apprehensive. After all, I was crying all over him a few minutes ago. I told him things I’ve never told anyone, things I’ve barely dared to think about myself. “I’m okay. I swear.” My hands find his face, and I force him to meet my eyes as my pulse throbs unevenly. “I’m just… I’m so sick of holding back.”

---