Page 63 of Burned in Stone
“Cash.” I touch his shoulder gently. “Baby, wake up.”
He jerks away from my touch, still caught in whatever nightmare has him. “I said no. I don’t want?—”
I suck in a breath. I know that tone, that kind of pleading. I’ve even heard myself make sounds like that. From nightmares where Gabriel’s standing over me and I’m trying to explain, trying to defend, knowing it won’t matter because he’s already decided what the truth is. But I never thought I’d hear Cash sound like that—this big, protective man who makes me feel invincible reduced to a scared kid begging someone to stop. My heart breaks for him.
“Cash, it’s me. It’s Mercy. You’re safe.” I keep my voice soft but firm. “You’re in the clubhouse. You’re safe.”
His eyes snap open, wild and disoriented. For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognize me, his whole body coiled to fight or run. His fists are crammed into his eyes like he’s trying to claw the dream away. I don’t touch him again—not yet. I know from ugly experience how direct contact can make waking even crueler. Instead, I shift, so he can see me as he comes back to himself. The muscles in his jaw tic hard, his breath heaving through clenched teeth. For a second, it looks like he’d rather die than look at me.
“Mercy?” His voice cracks.
“Yeah, baby. Just a nightmare.”
He scrubs his hands over his face, breathing hard. “Fuck. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” He freezes. The tent of the sheets is blatant, and when he glances down and realizes it, his whole body recoils as if shame is a radius of self-loathing. “I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”
I don’t. Instead, I draw my knees up, creating distance so he can’t mistake this for pity or revulsion. “You don’t ever have to be sorry with me,” I say, the words gentle but leaving no room for argument.
His breath won’t settle. He can’t even look in my direction. The sheets are kicked down and his skin glistens, the tattoo on his shoulder flexing as he tries to get a grip on himself. There’s a strange kind of violence in how hard he’s shaking. I understand it more than I want to—the body turning on itself, making you live through something again and again until you’re nothing but a raw nerve in human shape.
“Want to talk?” I offer.
“No,” he mutters, voice strangled. “Just—fuck.”
I watch him, see how rigid his muscles go beneath the shame. It’s not the nightmare that rattles him, but the vulnerability after, the way he can’t hide what triggered him. He tries to roll away. I block him before he can escape, palm flat to his chest, not pushing but grounding.
“Cash.” I make my voice a tether, real and calm. “You know I don’t scare easy, right?”
He says nothing, jaw tight, staring at a spot on the ceiling like it might swallow him whole.
“Whatever happened, whatever that dream was—I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere. Least of all because you had a bad night.”
He doesn’t answer, and for a while that’s fine. Maybe all he needs is for me to bear witness and not try to fix it—I’m not the only one who needs protecting. Cash has spent months being my fortress, my shield, the wall between me and Gabriel. But right now? He needs me to be his. So I sit in the quiet with him. I hold space. But then his breathing gets weird, and I realize it’s the other thing that’s bothering him. The obvious, insistent tent of the sheet, the aftermath of the dream still pulsing through his body.
I don’t tease him or make a joke, not this time. I just reach for his wrist and pull his hand to my chest, over my heartbeat, holding it there so he has proof I’m steady and real and absolutely not afraid.
His breath stutters. Then he launches up, clutching my jaw with both hands, kissing me the way you’d drink water after a week in the wasteland—desperate, brutal, like the only thing keeping him alive is drowning in me. I don’t pull back. I take it, every bruising second, every scrape of his teeth, every salt tang of tears. His hands are shaking so hard I feel the tremors through my skull.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, but the words are all broken up, smashed against my mouth. “God, Mercy, I’m so fucking sorry.”
I kiss him harder, refusing to let him apologize for something he can’t control. I want to claw the shame right out of his skin, strip him down to nothing but nerve endings and need. The taste of him is salt and sweat, and it fills my mouth with a hunger that’s not even sexual anymore, just elemental.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, biting his lower lip, dragging it until he gasps. “You hear me? Never apologize for surviving. Not to me.”
He grabs my face like he needs proof I’m real, and for the first time since I’ve known him, Cash’s mask is gone. Every defense. Every wall he’s ever built to keep the world from seeing what’s underneath. Now it’s just us, both of us ruined and awake, clinging to each other like if we let go we’ll die.
I push him back, crawling into his lap, straddling him and bracing myself with hands on either side of his face. He keeps trying to say something, but I cut it off with another kiss, swallowing every protest. His cock is steel-hard against me, straining, angry, like it’s the only part of him that survived the dream intact. I grind down, slow, shifting until the friction is unbearable.
He shudders, hands gripping my waist so tight I know there’ll be bruises tomorrow.
“Fuck, Mercy,” he says, and now his voice is more animal than human. “That feels so good. But you don’t have to?—”
“I want to,” I cut him off. “Let me chase the demons away. Let me be the one you reach for.”
Because this is what love looks like when you’ve survived. Not grand gestures or pretty words, but this—being present when someone’s falling apart. Holding space for their trauma without trying to fix it. Offering pleasure as an antidote to pain, not because you have to, but because you want them to remember they’re more than what was done to them.
“Can I do that for you?” I whisper, and he nods, grinding up into me and letting out a groan.
I kiss down his jaw, the salt of our tears mixing as I trail my tongue to his throat, his collarbone, the tattoo that reads DEAD INSIDE in an arc over his heart. I bite that, sucking until there’s a mark, and his whole body arches. His hands find my hair, anchoring himself as I work down his chest, pressing open-mouthed kisses to every scar, every bruise, every memory his brain tried to torture him with in the dark.
