Page 159 of Broken Pieces
One rides high on his ribs, another lower down, near his spine. His knuckles are red and look split. Dried blood crusted along one. There’s a mark on his shoulder blade, red and angry. One that landed with intention.
He shifts slightly, reaches for a mug, and I see more.
And still he’s just standing there. Making coffee. Completely calm.
My mouth goes dry. I swallow the lump that’s rising.
Part of me wants to crawl out of bed and run my hands over every one of those marks, count them, kiss them, curse whoever left them. The other part wants to scream at him until my voice breaks.
I stare, breath snagged halfway in my throat, chest tight around it.
He reaches past the kettle to grab a second mug, and that’s when I see the rest of him.
The bruises across his front make the ones on his back look like nothing.
A mess of deep purples and sickly yellows blooming across his ribs. There’s a cut under one pec. The skin around it’s inflamed, the kind of swelling that fucking hurts to move.
And then there’s the outline of his cock beneath the worn cotton of his boxers. Hanging to the left, thick, even though he’s soft. He’s not hard, not even close. But fuck, I feel the heat crawl up my spine, anyway.
I swallow hard, and my mouth suddenly dries.
Zane doesn’t know I’m awake. His jaw tenses like it always does when he’s trying to hold something in.
“Zane?”
My voice cracks. I clear my throat and repeat it, louder this time, trying to steady it.
He glances over his shoulder, casual as fuck, as if I haven’t just woken up to a battlefield mapped across his body. He grabs the mug from the counter and walks toward the bed.
“Morning,” he says, too fucking casual. Handing me a coffee, as if he didn’t come back torn apart.
I wrap my fingers around the mug, more to keep my hands from shaking than anything else.
“What happened?”
He shrugs, and the motion makes him wince, before he covers it with another bullshit line.
“Got into it with some guy. It wasn’t a big deal.”
The fuck it wasn’t.
I narrow my eyes, searching his face for something. A twitch. A crack. Anything that proves this is hitting deeper than he’s letting on.
“You got jumped?”
“Sort of. Doesn’t really matter.”
“Zane—”
He cuts me off with a stare. Cold. Exhausted. A silent warning to drop it. His silence feels sharper than any words, as if saying it out loud would make it too fucking real.
“I handled it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He takes a long sip of coffee. Eyes forward. Mouth shut.
And I sit there, heart breaking, because he’s right here and I still can’t fucking reach him.
