Page 18 of Bond Strength

“Hopefully it can dry out.” He placed the charger on the table. “But we’ve got to sop up the flooding before it gets any worse. Do you have towels?”

I stood there unmoving, staring at the droplets of water dripping off the charger to my battery. The flashlight illuminated it in stark detail. I needed to get towels. Needed to stop this flooding. Needed tobreathe.

The charger was ruined.

That’d set me back…fuck. My mind screeched to a halt. Just white, screaming nothingness. All the work, the constant hours, the endless tooling around. My chest felt crushed, like a dying star had dropped right onto it, and I still wasn’t moving.

“Dec, are you okay?” Noah asked.

I opened my mouth, but the words weren’t coming out.

Without that, I’d never end up in the direction I’d wanted. My chance of working in the field I’d longed to had been drowned in a storm.

“Hey,” Noah said, stopping in front of me. He was inches away, and he placed a hand on my shoulder. The careful touch made my skin scream, but still the words wouldn’t come out.

I needed to either be isolated in a bubble or crushed until this terrible feeling was squeezed out of me. However, the panic flared so goddamn loud in my mind. So damn loud. Each time I tried to push words out, they stopped before they had a chance to leave my lips, like an invisible barrier existed.

Instead of trying to speak, I took one step to close the distance between Noah and me. It was a gamble, but once upon a time, he’dknown me better than anyone. I leaned against his chest, needing him to understand.

“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice hoarse. Thick arms wrapped around my waist, and he squeezed me tight to him and didn’t let go. Noah didn’t budge, just held me with the force I’d desperately needed. The must from the basement invaded my nose, mingling with a different musky scent that made my body tingle, along with the woodsy cologne that belonged to Noah. His arms were muscular and strong, and the flat surface of his chest was warm. I all but sagged against it as he hugged me like he tried to put my jumbled pieces together again.

Slowly the panic pinging around in my brain receded.

Noah hadn’t moved, standing in this quiet dark with me as the slow trickle of water reminded me what had triggered this in the first place. Yet with the way he enveloped me, his body so much bigger than mine, my autonomic nervous system responded, and the first tendrils of calm filtered in.

This was a setback.

I still had the information from the battery. The demo needed repairing, and that was simply a setback.

That wasn’t a worst-case scenario.

I sucked in a shaky breath and didn’t bother removing myself from his embrace. We stood like this as my processes chugged along, gradually shifting bit by bit. Right now, the contact was the one thing keeping me stable. “Thank you,” I whispered, the first words I’d managed in…who knew how many minutes had passed.

I kept my head against his chest, not looking up at him, absorbing the heat that was bringing me to life, even in the middle of the inky dark with a few slashes of light from the flashlights. Why had I avoided Noah so long when he could feel like…this? Most of the time, when I was near him, my skin prickled, my heart accelerated, and his presence got me discombobulated.

But in a single motion, he’d managed to put me back together, and that was nothing short of a miracle.

“We represent the Lollipop Guild…” Noah sang in an obnoxiously high-pitched voice.

I glanced up at him. “What the fuck?”

“Just welcoming you to Oz,” he teased, though his voice grew softer around the edges. His chest rumbled with his laugh, the vibrations traveling through me.

A snort escaped me, and the edges of my mouth lifted on their own volition. Somehow, he’d snapped me out of the panic-induced spell that had gripped me. Gratitude flushed through me, along with awareness I was still pressed up against his body, those strong arms still wrapped around my body. My cock took notice too, a slight zing. Well, that was new.

I’d never experienced any urges like this toward him.

Granted, since I was of the age to have those urges, he hadn’t been pressed up against me like this.

I clamped my teeth down on my lower lip, trying to process what had happened.

Wait, water. Flooding.

“We should get the towels,” I said, even though I didn’t want to leave this cocoon. Now that I knew Noah could calm me, it’d be impossible to expunge that knowledge from my mind. The comfort, how he’d managed to silence my brain with his crushing touch, made me see him in an entirely different light, and I didn’t quite hate it.

“Right.” Noah didn’t move either. Was it his turn to devolve into a crippling panic, and we’d be stuck here for the next century, neither of us willing to pull away?

The idea held appeal.

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