Page 6 of Sinners Keepers
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I jerked awake, shooting up in the bed. It always feltsoreal, because at one time it had been.
Even in my nightmares, the pain of knowing this man had been all I ever wanted overshadowed everything else.
Alec's steady voice cut through the dark.
"It's okay, Bee," he said, flicking on the dim light. His hands were strong and steady on my body as he pulled me into his solid frame.
This was a nightly thing, but he never seemed to tire of reassuring me that we were in the here and now, despite my embarrassment surrounding the dreams' effect on me.
“Shhh,” he comforted, stroking my hair. “Go to your happy place, Hunny Bee. I’ve got you.”
I sucked in a steadying breath, thinking immediately of the smell ofhissheets. The cedar candle burning in the corner of the room.Hishands on my body.
My chest burned, unsettled. I felt the all-consuming urge to sob into Alec’s chest, but no tears came.
I was so utterly alone without him. Without Ijah.
He’d been my undoing, and still… he was the happiest place I’d ever known. Nothing could replace what we had before that night, or make me stop missing the person who I thought wasitfor me. It almost didn’t matter that none of it had been real, because nothing else in my life had ever made me feel the way Ijah did.
I wondered if Alec had any idea how pathetic I actually was.
He pulled back from me, gripping my shoulders in his hands and studying my face as if trying to read my mind and decipher my inner thoughts. I wished that someone could pick them apart for me, because I sure as fuck couldn’t wrap my mind around being so fucked in the head that I was still pining after a man who’d used me and lied to me, then shot me in cold blood.
Everything felt wrong now and I wanted to freak the fuck out, to run so far a-fucking-way. But I couldn’t do that. I’d tried, even before all of this. That was one of the reasons why I’d wanted my dad dead so badly. There was nowhere I could go that he wouldn’t find me. He’d shown me that time and time again.
“Happy place not cutting it this time?” He asked, gently massaging my shoulders now.
“I’m not sure I have a happy place anymore,” I admitted.
He stayed silent for a moment. “Then I guess we’ll just have to make here and now your happy place,” he decided, his voice gruff from sleep. It was so fucking sexy that I almost wanted to ask him to use his mouth and hands to remove every memory of Ijah from my body, but that was ridiculous. Desperate.
Iwasdesperate, though.
“Why are you here?” I asked the question I’d been rolling around in my mind for days now.
“Because I want to be,” he said, and as if that settled it, he stood and crossed the room to rifle through his overnight bag. He found what he was looking for and climbed back in bed next to me, placing a permanent marker in my hand.
I looked at him confusedly.
“When I was a kid, I had terrible anxiety. My aunt used to have me do this grounding technique. I’m going to teach you, then we’ll go back to sleep. Deal?”
“Sure,” I said, uncapping the marker, unconvinced that anything could settle me, but especially not an art project.
“I don’t have any paper, so…” He trailed off, pulling his shorts up until the hem reached the crease of his thigh. At a glance, this was one of the only stretches of skin he had not covered in tattoos. I had to force myself not to drool over his quads. I knew he was trying to distract me from my spiraling thoughts.
Consider me distracted.
“I want you to pick three things in the room you can see and draw them here,” he tapped his bare thigh.
“You want me to drawon you?”
He gave me a stern look. I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling, relenting.
I looked around the room. The first thing I spotted was the empty paper cup from the tea he’d brought me earlier in the day, still perched on my bedside table. With a trembling hand, I gave it my best effort, managing to sketch an exaggeratedly thin outline of a disposable coffee cup and plastic lid, complete with a terrible rendering of my favorite Chinese restaurant's logo on the front.
I lifted my eyes to his. “Go on,” he encouraged.
