Page 30 of Into The Light
The hard labor of the day finally catches up to me, and my own eyes begin to droop. "Panzer, Pass Auf."PAH-ss OW-f—watch out, be on guard.
Chin on paws, his eyes snap open and his ears prick up—no one and nothing will get within a hundred yards of him without him knowing. Even if he drowses off a little, he'll keep guard all night long.
I linger in the lulling in-between, not quite asleep and not quite awake for a long time, wanting and needing to relish every second of contact with Noelle that I can get.
If this is all I ever have with her, it's still far more than I could ever hope for, or dream of, and far more than I deserve.
At some point, I fall asleep.
Six
NOELLE
Awareness comes slowly, gradually. The first thing I become aware of is a contradiction of sensations: cold and warm. A bird chirps somewhere close. A jet scuds noisily overhead. A car horn blips as someone keys their locks.
I'm not in bed. At first, that's all I know. I'm stiff from being in one position for a long time, but even before I reach full consciousness, I'm aware that I've slept better than I have in a very long time. I just don't know why, yet.
A soft, gentle snore whuffs a hot breath onto me, startling me. Which is when I become aware of where I am, and with whom.
Bear.
His apartment.
The cold is the air around us—a thin fleece blanket has been draped over my hips and legs, but my upper body is exposed. I crack an eye open—the door is still wide open, and Panzer lays in the opening, curled into a giant comma shape, facing the outside. His eyes are open, nose twitching, ears perked up, swiveling. Watchful, alert. God, what an amazing dog. I'm so glad Bear saved him.
The warmth is coming from Bear—he radiates heat as if he's a furnace. He's scooched low on the couch, his butt half off, long legs hanging over the far end of the coffee table, head lolling to one side. My cheek is on his sternum, my hand on his belly. His arm is a heavy weight draped across me like a weighted electric blanket. His hand curls across my belly.
I'm comfortable and warm, covered in a blanket, with his huge body a radiator and a mattress in one, while he, still in jeans and boots, is in what looks like a horribly uncomfortable position, exposed to the cold. He held me all night long rather than move to a more comfortable position.
I take the opportunity to study him. Slack and asleep, his features are boyish and smooth. A small white line bisects his left eyebrow. Another peeks out from the line of his beard along his right cheek. Yet another tugs the left corner of his lower lip down ever so slightly. His beard is a ticklish frizz-bomb, and his hair sticks to his lips and drapes off to one side. I use the moment to pinch the ends of his hair in my fingers—split ends, dry strands. I wonder if he even knows how to tie it back.
I wonder if he'd let me clean him up a little? I decide to ask, at some point. I could show him basic hair and beard care.
Somehow, that thought leads to images of Bear in the shower, his huge bulky body bare and wet—bare Bear. I snicker to myself at the wordplay, biting my lip to keep from waking him. I try to dismiss the image of him in the shower, but it's a tricky, demanding image. It makes my belly flip-flop and my core go damp and hot.
I haven't even thought about sex in a long time. After Brennan's betrayal and our subsequent divorce, and then the single idiotic date I went on, that part of me just sort of went dormant. I focused on work and whatever errands and factors my family demanded of me.
Bear is waking up my libido, however. Quickly.
He's unlike anyone I've ever met by several orders of magnitude. Physically, obviously, but in every other way as well. He’s unfathomable. I just never know what he’s thinking, and even when I ask and get an answer, I sense that for as much as he says, there’s ten times more beneath the surface that he just doesn’t know how to express or is unwilling to.
His past should terrify me. He's been stabbed more times than he can count? And he just shrugs it off as no more than “a poke." I don't even like getting a darned sliver.
He was in a gang. He's done a lot of bad stuff, enough, according to him, that he felt a ten-year prison sentence was fair for the crimes he committed.
So…why am I so comfortable with him? Why am I so utterly unafraid of him? His life has been violent. He has been violent.
When I hit people, they break.
Yet here I am, having slept in his arms like a baby. Safe. Warm. Content. Protected.
But how could he fit into my life? What would that look like? My conservative, church-going, straightlaced parents would not understand him. My sisters would turn up their noses, at best. My brothers are wild cards—who knows how they'd react if I brought him home.
The girls—Raina, Ashlynn, and Kyle—love him. They think he's cool as heck, although, in the text thread, they used the F-word instead of heck. I mean, the way he sent those collar-popped dweebs running scared with a glare, a growl, and two words was the highlight of their week. My friends, however, are the most accepting, open-minded, and loving people I know. So it's no surprise they get my attraction to Bear.
Could I try a relationship with him? Would he want that? It's hard to tell. This is the most contact he's ever initiated, and he's asleep. And even asleep, his hand is carefully placed. I have no doubt that's on purpose.
I get the sense that he battles some serious self-worth issues. Which is understandable, given his life: abandoned as a child, homeless, surviving on the streets, forced into a life of violence, and then framed for murder. Goodness knows any felon must have a hard time finding a place in the world post-prison—I know enough to know I don’t have the slightest clue what that's like.
