Page 63 of Carrick
A few minutes later, Carrick reached up and shut off the water. The sudden quiet filled the room, thick with steam and everything still echoing between us. Then he hooked an arm beneath my legs and stood in one smooth motion, carrying me out of the shower like I weighed nothing.
I didn’t protest. Didn’t tease. Just wrapped my arms around his neck and let him take me where he wanted.
He set me gently on the edge of the counter and grabbed a towel, drying me with slow, methodical care—as if every inch of me needed his attention. And maybe I did.
He toweled my hair, careful and slow. Knees bent in front of me, he dried my arms, my thighs, the curve of my calves. When he reached my ribs, his hand paused.
“You okay?” he asked, voice low and steady.
I looked at him.
At his eyes.
And for the first time in what felt like forever, I didn’t feel the need to pretend.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I really am.”
His shoulders eased. Just slightly.
I reached out and trailed a finger over the fresh scratches I’d left on his neck from where I’d reached back and grabbed him, blooming red in jagged streaks.
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” he said, catching my wrist and bringing my hand to his lips. “I like being marked.”
He kissed the inside of my wrist, slow and lingering—not sexual, not possessive, just a quiet gesture that settled somewhere deep inside me and refused to let go. It wasn’t about dominance or submission anymore. It wasn’t aboutbreathless begging or who held the control. It was shifting into something else entirely—something heavier, something that felt dangerously close to real.
I didn’t know if I was ready for what that meant, didn’t know if I could hold it without breaking. But I knew one thing with bone-deep certainty: I wasn’t ready to walk away from it either.
13
Carrick
Bellamy didn’t flinchwhen I pressed my lips to the inside of her wrist. No quip. No retreat. Just stillness—eyes locked to mine, like she was handing me something fragile and true. Not shattered. Not breaking. Just open. And somehow, that was more intimate than anything else.
Steam curled between us, soft as breath, cloaking the silence in something reverent. She sat on the counter, towel-wrapped and bare, legs dangling, body suspended in the afterglow like she hadn’t quite returned to herself yet. The air throbbed with the ghost of what we’d done—heat still clinging to every exhale.
I felt it in her. That quiet ache after the storm, where everything inside softens but nothing feels certain. So I reached for her—slow, deliberate. Her damp thighs brushed my forearms as I gathered her in, and she didn’t resist. Just tucked her head against my chest like it was the only place that made sense.
And maybe it was.
I carried her in silence, the hallway short but heavy with meaning. Each step marked a shift—not distance, but depth. A quiet crossing from aftermath into something more.
She tensed as we passed into my room—barely. A breath caught. A shift in her touch. No words were needed. This place was mine. And entering it meant stepping deeper.
I set her on the edge of the bed, my hands lingering at her waist. A silent I’ve got you. She didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. I reached for the thick woven blanket at the foot of the bed and draped it over her shoulders. She gripped the fabric slowly, like the weight of care was something foreign.
I didn’t back away. I knelt—not to offer myself, but to stay close. To stay steady. Her knees were drawn in, posture too still. She looked like someone bracing for impact—trying not to be what broke next.
I knew that shape. I’d been it. “I need you to stay in here with me for a while. You’re not ready to be alone just yet. Not like this,” I said quietly, the words low but firm.
Her gaze shifted, not fully to me, just enough to acknowledge the space I’d stepped into. “I’m fine,” she replied. Too fast. Too flat. A lie spoken like truth by someone who’d done it too many times before.
“I know you think you are,” I said, leaning in slightly—not enough to crowd her. “But that scene pulled something deep out of you. Don’t pretend it didn’t.”
She didn’t argue, but her grip on the blanket tightened. “I’m not broken,” she whispered, eyes on the floor now, her voice wrapped in barbed wire.
“I never said you were.”
