I Found You. Jane Lark

that made me feel safer than I’d felt in an entire year, or maybe longer. Nothing in his eyes had said he’d brought me back here because he wanted sex. He’d said he was a nice guy. Those words were still swimming around in my muddled head.

      Was I going mad again? Had I really injured Declan? My eyes shut for a moment as images whisked through my brain and swept away. I couldn’t grasp hold of them. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to get away.

      But I had got away. I’d gotten here. I had nowhere else to go.

      I was suddenly very aware of the pace of my breathing. It felt too fast. I remembered seeing people breathing into paper bags when they hyperventilated and focused on breathing in the same way, trying to slow it down. I stripped off Jason Macinlay’s top, then my t-shirt. Then I took off my sneakers and jeans.

      I hadn’t put on any underwear in my haste to get out.

      I got into the water. It was really warm and the heat absorbed all my pain, physical and mental.

      Pictures of the black water I’d seen beneath the bridge, swelling and rocking, played through my mind. I imagined it absorbing me, a great dark, thick, fluid weight.

      It would be so much easier to slip beneath the water. I didn’t have the courage or the strength to go on. How could I begin again?

      A knock struck the bathroom door. Then it opened. Jason Macinlay walked in.

      “Shit, sorry… You should’ve shouted.” His eyes skimmed over my body before he turned his back. He wasn’t so saintly then.

      I sat up, the water swilling around me. “It’s just a body. You must’ve seen a hundred naked women.” He was too good-looking to be inhibited, surely. He’d probably had tons of women in his bed.

      “I brought your coffee.”

      “Yeah, I guessed.”

      He held it out, without turning. He felt awkward about me being here, I’d seen that the minute we’d got to his front door. I knew what it was like to sleep on the streets, though, and he was right, it was freezing. But what I’d said to him in the elevator was true. I trusted him. Probably more than I’d trusted any other guy––no one had given me their sweaty top before, when I was cold.

      I took the cup from him, and put it on the lip of the tub. Blood dripped into the water. “My hand’s bleeding.” It was shaking too.

      He looked across his shoulder, at my hand, nothing else. “I’ll find something. I’ve got a first-aid kit. There should be a bandage in there.” He went again.

      The cocaine I’d taken with Declan was still spinning through my nerves and my heartbeat lifted my breasts a little as it thumped, while my damp hair brushed the skin on my back and shoulders. I had a sense of déjà-vu, though I could never have been here before. But it was like I was meant to come to this place.

      I picked up the coffee with my left hand, my good hand, and sipped from it. Warmth ran into my blood. The cold had got deep inside me.

      “I turned the heating up,” Jason said, as he came back in. “Do you want to pull the shower curtain and just stick your hand out.”

      I looked up at him and met his deep brown gaze.

      He had large eyes, strong features, and broad lips, and his dark brown hair was cut close to his head but it wasn’t gelled.

      He looked good. He’d probably broken a few girls’ hearts back in Oregon.

      I didn’t bother with the shower curtain, I held out my hand as his gaze clung to my face, like he was trying desperately not to look down.

      He needn’t worry. I was used to being naked with men. My body was just flesh and bone. I knew he wanted to look down, all men wanted to look, it was in their nature. Well, unless it wasn’t women they were into.

      With a deep sigh his gaze fell to my hand as he gripped it. “Okay, I mixed boiled water with the antiseptic so it’ll take a moment to cool.”

      He put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it, holding my hand and looking at the gash.

      I couldn’t imagine Declan ever doing anything like this. He’d have told me to fucking get on with it and stop moaning.

      But I hadn’t moaned had I? Jason Macinlay had seen the blood and asked about it. I shouldn’t feel guilty then that he was helping. But I did. This was my own fault. I should be fixing it.

      “It could need stitches.”

      “I’m not going to a hospital. I can’t stand those places. I’ll be fine.”

      I took my hand from his and he looked up, his gaze caught on my breasts then lifted.

      See, a man, he couldn’t help but look.

      He met my gaze, and I knew he knew I’d seen him look. There was color in his cheeks. It made me want to laugh. He didn’t look like he’d had that many women when he blushed, but he was gorgeous, surely he must have had a few.

      His brown gaze held mine. “Okay, no hospital.”

      I gave him my hand again.

      His touch was really gentle for a man. I bent up my knees in the tub and wrapped my other arm about them, watching him. He had some antiseptic in a cup and dunked cotton-wool pads into it, then wiped the blood from my hand, while he rested the back of it on his knee.

      I couldn’t remember anyone ever paying so much attention to one of my hurts. “Did your mom do this for you when you were a boy; is that how you learned to treat wounds?”

      His brown eyes looked up and said he didn’t appreciate the comment.

      “Have you got a big family then, back in the hills?”

      “The hills?” His eyebrows lifted, and then he answered in a dry tone. “Very funny… I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere, you know. It’s a small town, not a shack.”

      “With a small town society and small town views––”

      “And moms who teach you how to clean a wound if you get injured… What’s so bad about that?”

      “Nothing…”

      His brown eyes looked hard at me for a moment. But those eyes were easy to look at, and he had long dark, almost feminine, eyelashes.

      “Right. So just let me get on with it, Rachel…” His gaze fell to my hand again, then after a moment he glanced back up. “Do you have a family somewhere?”

      Yes, but not that I cared to speak of. I felt my lips compress.

      His eyes hovered on mine for a moment, asking unspoken questions, before they dropped to look at my hand once more.

      His touch was caring, as well as gentle.

      He looked up and saw me watching, then smiled, suddenly. He had a nice smile too, a really open-hearted smile.

      This was a genuine guy. Someone like Declan would eat him alive. “So you don’t like your job?”

      “I don’t know. There’s so much frigging office politics, I can’t keep up with it. I think I need to be a bit more cutthroat, but I’m not that type. I can’t be bothered with all the backstabbing, and I have an asshole for a boss. So I spent three years in college, and now I’m the office nobody.”

      Yeah, Declan would definitely eat him alive.

      “Talk to me about it. I can teach you backstabbing…” I shouldn’t have said that, the image and sound of the mirror splintering pierced my mind, and I felt the shard gripped in my hand as it sank into Declan’s flesh.

      I felt sick. I let my forehead drop onto my knees, while my hand still rested in Jason Macinlay’s secure grip, and my arm hung outstretched to him. My other hugged my knees.

      “Where do you come from, Rachel…?”