Page 4 of Linger

“Like surveillance. Protection. Rescue,” he answered vaguely.

I thought about the scars on his side and back—scars I’d felt and traced over during our nights together—and felt my breathing even out as things started adding up in my mind. “Were you in the military?”

Gray eyes snapped to mine and hardened. “No.”

I nodded, accepting the lie he so clearly wanted me to believe, and whispered, “Your turn.”

He studied me for a while longer, indecision drifting over his face and worrying me that I’d stepped too far, that he was about to leave, before he asked, “What do you dream about?”

“What?” The question was little more than a stunned breath. Not because it shocked or surprised me, but because he had an uncanny way of asking innocent questions that threw me into chilling nightmares I struggled to escape.

Diggs hesitated before lifting his hand to my face. Pushing my hair behind my ear, the tips of his fingers trailed along my cheekbone and over my jaw as he explained, “Most of the nights I’ve come to you, you’ve been so damn tense and gripping the comforter like a lifeline.” His large palm cradled my neck when he repeated, “What do you dream about?”

“Demons.” The word fell from me like a dirty secret even though it was far from that.

“And am I one of them?” he asked, seeming to understand the demons I dreamt of weren’t the Biblical kind.

“We wouldn’t be here if you were.” When Diggs nodded in acceptance, I asked, “Can I ask how you got your scars?”

A harrowing sort of look I felt in my bones passed over his face, and for a long time, he just held me.

Just as I was about to say he didn’t need to tell me, Diggs murmured, “That isn’t something we’ll ever talk about.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” My stomach dropped when Diggs deftly maneuvered from under me and climbed off the bed. Panic clawed at my throat and made it difficult to form words as I watched him agitatedly drag his hands through his hair as he rounded the bed to grab his jeans. “Diggs, I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” he muttered as he turned, looking for his shirt.

My lips parted as I struggled for something to say—anything. But I just stayed knelt on the edge of the bed, helplessly silent, a pit in my stomach, heart painfully twisting, as he dressed.

“That’s why,” he said tersely, his wickedly handsome face shifting toward me and making my chest ache at the clash of emotions there. The worry and determination and sorrow. “My scars, who I am, that’s why I should’ve never stayed. Why I can’t.”

“I don’t—” I choked out, my head shaking as I wet my lips. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry I brought them up. They don’t bother me if that’s what you’re worried about.”

A bitter laugh left him. “That isn’t—fuck, Tree.” He gripped at his chest as if to let me know he was talking about something so much deeper before he was erasing the distance between us. Cradling my face in his hands and capturing my lips in a kiss that sent me spinning.

Because the kiss was soft and tender, and he was holding me as if I were delicate and precious. But the storm of emotions rolling off him was bleeding onto me, making me shake with the strength of it.

“You’re good,” he breathed against my lips before placing another kiss there. “You’re so damn good.”

Chills danced along my skin when I felt him grab my hand, and then my heart was racing this thunderous beat when he repeated the same action he had every other night. Slowly, delicately drawing his nose across the length of my forearm until he reached my wrist.

My body swayed toward his when he abruptly released me and stalked across my bedroom. But just as he got to my doorway, he hesitated, the way he always did.

This time longer than the others.

And then, with a glance at me from over his shoulder and a whispered “I’ll find you,” he was gone.

DIGGS

Women had never been a distraction.

I didn’t care to get to know them while giving them nights they would never forget. I didn’t waste time thinking about them once we parted. I didn’t have to worry about what it meant that I couldn’t stay away because I’d never had the urge to revisit one...

Before.

But the past month had been a blur of nights with a girl I couldn’t seem to stay away from. A girl who had me walking around in a haze because the smallest thought of her consumed me. A girl I desperately wanted to know on every level, even though my scars begged me to push her away.

But every time I tried reminding myself why, flashes of our previous night together would assault me, gradually stealing my focus until everything around me disappeared.

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