Lexi
The friends we have as children shape us. Some of them we keep forever, some of them we lose along the way... but all of them leave something behind... or in his case, take something as they leave.
Mason Jennings held my heart in his hands at...
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I'm warm.
Warmer than I should be.
I start to roll onto my back only to realise my arm is caught underneath a weight I can't identify with my eyes closed.
So I pry them open and am greeted with a head of blond hair attached to the body which is currently holding my arm hostage.
I'm startled slightly by Lexi's presence and jerk enough to disturb her. I panic that I've woken her up and so pull the covers higher over her shoulder in an attempt to help her drift back off to sleep.
I hold my breath as she rotates her head, rearranging its position on my pillows and pushes herself back so her body is cradled by mine. I work very hard to ignore her ass settling against my groin. Very hard.
Maybe stop thinking about hard things dipshit?
I release a quiet groan to myself and turn my attention to Lexi's face instead of focusing on her ass. Even asleep, without her bright blue eyes to consume me, she's utterly gorgeous. Strands of her blond hair fall over her face as she sleeps, the remainder of which are spiralled across the pillow and my chest. Lexi's face is the essence of peaceful. She looks like the picture perfect girl next door.
What a shame pictures say a thousand words. What a disappointment that the words associated with her picture are not perfect.
I reach over her with my free hand and push the hair that's covering her eyes away from her face, back behind her ear, sighing deeply as lean back.
Because if there was ever a girl in my bed when I woke up, it was because I'd slept with them the night before. But I hadn't slept with Lexi and yet I'd never felt more content to wake up beside someone.
It's both terrifying and exciting.
I spent last night holding her to my chest in the shower, desperate to live in that moment for just a minute more. Eventually though she started drifting off to sleep so I found her a towel and a shirt of mine with some sweatpants that are way too big for her but did the job. I suppose I could've driven her home but she was already half asleep and after not seeing her for a week, I couldn't bring myself to send her away.
So here I lay, my body wrapped around the girl of my childhood dreams who now resides in my worst nightmares.
Nightmares not of what her choice to protect me led to but nightmares of what occurred because she chose not to protect herself.
The thought of someone laying their hands on her makes me feel violently ill. Something which I can't escape because I know it happened. I know more than even she perhaps realises I do.
It wasn't difficult to join the final dots over the past week. Lexi's step-father abused her physically, that I was told by her directly.
Yet she told me with fewer words in her room, on the sidewalk outside a class and with her reactions to touch that her pain runs so much deeper - that she experienced so much worse that slaps and kicks. She told me once I can steal what's already been stolen from her... but all I want is to give it back.
