Thorns

Chapter Eighteen

"Are you ready to go in yet?" Salem asked, looking over at me from the driver's seat of the Transporter Vehicle. We had arrived around twenty minutes ago or so, but for some reason I wasn't able to bring myself to walk in.

Salem had driven us to my house himself, thankfully. I was pretty sure that he had remembered how uneasy I made both myself, and him, feel last time I had been inside of a vehicle driven by a complete stranger. It was much easier to trust Salem behind the wheel of a huge piece of machinery than it had been to trust a man I had never even met before.

Not to mention, last time Ivan had been pressing a knife into the side of my neck.

"Um, maybe just give me a few more minutes..." I gulped. I gripped the tops of my thighs to stop my hands from shaking. When I glanced down, I noticed just how white my knuckles were. Red rings formed around the pads of fingers as they dug into my legs, and I tried to focus on the physical pain I was causing myself.

It was easier that way. Physical pain would never be anything more than pain. It wasn't complex or confusing, and all that it could ever do was hurt. Even if every single one of my limbs were shattered, it would still be nothing more than a small scrape compared to the damage emotional pain could cause. After all, getting pricked in the hand with a thorn was much simpler to clean up than putting everything inside of me through a blender, and then pouring it back down my throat.

My heart pounded rapidly in my chest, and I wondered how much more of this I could take. I took a deep breath, praying that the unpleasant tingling in between my ribs would soon subside. Never in my life had I wanted to reach down my throat and scoop out my insides more than I did right now.

"If you don't calm down soon, you're going to give me an anxiety attack." Salem chuckled, although I could tell he was far from joking.

I wasn't sure why I was so nervous in the first place. I had been excited up until the moment we had parked in front of my house. I remember I had seen Maeve laughing with Mom through the window as we pulled in, and the sight of them had caused my heart to twist.

I guessed that it had wounded me so badly because I loved them, and it had looked like they were getting on just fine without me.

Well, I loved that they loved me.

I knew it was selfish, but it was human nature to crave everything a family was supposed to provide. They were supposed to love me, they were supposed to grieve for me, they were supposed to miss me, they were supposed to care about me, and everything I received from them was supposed to be completely unconditional.

But at some point, I knew they would have had to move on. They would have had to accept my arrest, and find peace with the fact that they probably would never see me again.

"Okay, Peachy, look at me for a second." Salem solaced as he pushed himself up a little further in his seat. He turned his body so he was facing me, and I watched as a look that closely resembled something maternalistic passed through his eyes.

Salem placed his hands tenderly on my shoulders. Oddly enough, I was too fixated on his soft gaze to even bother shaking away his touch.

"Can you tell me what it would look like if you weren't panicking right now?" Salem asked gently. I noticed how even while I was inundating him with my merciless apprehension, his blue eyes still sparkled with an undying amount of warmth and compassion.