Light the Lamp (21 page)

 

Noelle had been
a goddamn virgin, and I hadn’t had the first fucking clue. She hadn’t acted shy or seemed nervous. She didn’t cry or mention that she’d been in any pain. She’d seemed like a woman who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it.

I looked down. Blood covered the condom, and there was some spattered on her curls and the inner part of her thighs. I sat up for a better look and found red spots on the bed beneath her, too.

She blushed, but she didn’t try to hide herself from me. Shouldn’t she be covering herself up? It had taken a long time for Liv to get past her initial shyness with me, but this was just another way Noelle wasn’t Liv, one of many things that proved how very different they were.

That lack of inhibition had surely played into how I had completely missed any sign of her innocence. She had been so ready, so eager. She hadn’t tried to hide her body in any way, and she hadn’t been shy about looking at mine. Or about touching me. She’d reached out and grabbed my cock without the slightest reserve.

“
You should have told me,” I said finally, agony lacing my words. “I would have been gentler. I would have…” I wouldn’t have fucked her like a man who was only worried about himself. I would have made love to her.
 

It had been so long since I’d been with a woman—not since Liv’s death—that I had been as eager as a teenaged boy the first time he was with a girl. Noelle deserved better than that. She deserved for her first experience to be sweet and slow and loving. There was a time and a place for a quickie, but this was definitely not it.

“
I didn’t want you to be gentle,” she said. “I wanted you to be raw, to let me see the part of you that you keep hidden from me.”
 

How could she know what kind of sex she wanted if she’d never had sex before?

I bent over her, cupping her face in my hands while I kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. “I’m going to be tender with you now.” She opened her mouth to argue, but I put my finger over her lips to stop her. “Let me, Noelle. Let me take care of you. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I didn’t even care that it sounded like I was begging. I hated how I’d treated her, and I needed to make things right.

I got out of bed and went into the en suite to clean myself up.

“
I want to take care of
you
,” she said, but it sounded as though she’d stayed in bed, at least. She wasn’t right behind me.
 

I wet a cloth and grabbed a clean towel for her. “You already have,
älskling
.” In more ways than I’d ever imagined.

She was still lying there when I returned, her legs drawn together and her knees bent and turned to the side. I sat on the edge of the bed and slid the towel beneath her. Then I gently nudged her legs apart and used the cloth to clean her, watching her eyes intently for signs of pain. She lay there and let me take care of her. She didn’t flinch or pull away, letting her breathing be the only indication of any discomfort. She just stared at me.

Her face was blank, thoroughly unnerving me. I could handle fear or pain or lust or confusion or any number of other things. But this? This was nothingness. How could I respond when she wasn’t giving me any sign of what was going through her head? How could I repair the damage I’d done?

“
Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said after a moment, taking the used cloth back to the bathroom.
 

She drew her legs together again and turned on her side, facing me with her knees tucked up near her chest. “You barely let me take away a brick before you put your wall up again.”

“
I don’t understand what you want from me,” I said, dragging a hand down my face. The stubble lining my jaw was getting out of hand. I needed to shave almost as much as I needed to get a handle on how to read Noelle. “You keep talking about this wall, like it’s something physical between us.”
 

“
It feels physical to me. It’s as big and solid as you are, and I can’t get through it or go around it or see over it.”
 

“
But I’m right here.” I touched her arm, letting my hand slide down its length until I reached her hand. “There’s nothing between us.”
 

“
That’s at least part of the problem. You don’t see it or feel it, but it’s there.” Noelle laced her fingers with mine. “Every time you get close to sharing some deeper part of yourself with me, as soon as you realize what’s happening, you shut it off. You won’t let me in.”
 

“
Because I’ve seen what it does to you. I held you that night while you fell to pieces. I don’t ever want to be the cause of that.” If she ever fell apart like that over me, I’d never get over hating myself. I’d spend an eternity trying to put her back together again.
 

“
It’s only temporary, though. And it’s what I do. It’s how I help.”
 

“
I don’t want you to help me like that.” I didn’t want her to help
anyone
like that. I wanted to wrap her in Bubble Wrap and keep all the negativity of the world away from her so she would always be full of sunshine.
 

“
You don’t want me to help at all,” she said. “You want to give me a home and food and clothes and a thousand other things I’ll never be able to repay, and you want me to let you do that without giving you anything in return. I can’t keep doing this, Liam. I feel like a leech, like I’m taking and taking and never doing anything, and I’m going crazy.”
 

“
I don’t want you to go crazy. I just want to take care of you. You haven’t had someone around to take care of you for a while, and I want to do that. To be that person.”
 

“
And I want to be the person who helps you deal with the things that hurt you. Let me in. Talk to me.” A few tears welled in her eyes, ready to spill over. “That’s who I am. It’s what I do. It’s part of me… It’s what makes me the person I am.”
 

She was wrong. Smiles and laughter—that was who she was. It was her lightness and goodness and big heart.

I couldn’t let anything take those parts of her away. Especially not me. “I’m not very good at talking about these things,” I hedged. “I had a great childhood. There wasn’t much negativity, so I never had to talk about it.” Not until Liv and our baby died and the team psychologist tried to get me to open up. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about that. I hadn’t done a very good job of even talking about Liv then, either, and that was with someone who wouldn’t take it all in like Noelle would. Someone who was trained to help me process it all and didn’t feel the emotional burden himself.

“
You have to start somewhere. Why not with me?”
 

The anguish in her voice was enough to do me in. I was falling for her, harder and faster than I had ever imagined possible, and yet I was hurting her by trying to help her.

“
Tell me what you need from me,” I begged. “Anything. Everything. Tell me so I can understand and make it happen.”
 

“
I need a reason to be in your life,” she said. “A purpose. Something more than just being your lucky charm. I have to be useful, Liam.”
 

A purpose
. I couldn’t think of a time in my life when I’d felt more at a loss than I did right then, trying to figure out how I could give Noelle a purpose for remaining in my life.

“
Okay,” I said. “We’ll come up with something. Together.”
 

She didn’t smile and laugh. She didn’t nod and agree. She didn’t do anything but blink and say, “The week is almost up.”

The week where she could back out and leave if she didn’t think this was going to work. That meant she was leaning toward leaving. Soon.

“
Don’t make up your mind to leave me already,” I said. “Give me a chance.” I wasn’t sure when it had switched in my mind from her simply leaving to her leaving
me
.
 

“
Okay.” Her eyes were still filled with that lifelessness, ripping me apart inside, but at least the tears were gone.
 

I pulled my hand free from hers and stroked the backs of my fingers down her cheek. How could I bring the life back into her eyes, the smile back to her lips? The only answer seemed to be to help her find a purpose for staying with me, but that wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do. I didn’t know where to begin.

“
Liam?” she said after a moment.
 

“
Yes,
älskling
?”
 

“
You said something earlier, while we were…” She shrugged, blushing. “In Swedish
.
Jag älskar
something. What did it mean?”
 

I love you
. I couldn’t have said that. I was falling for her, yes, but I wasn’t so sure it was love. Not yet. Not so soon. But I must have said it. Where else would she have heard it?

I wasn’t ready to tell her what it meant, since I wasn’t positive it was truth. Besides, whether I loved her or not, I didn’t think I’d be able to stop her from leaving me simply by telling her that. She needed more.

“
It’s just another way to call you sweetheart,” I lied, my stomach filling with knots as the words fell from my tongue.
 

“
Okay,” she said again, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. Had I just added another layer of bricks?
 

Noelle had told me before that I couldn’t dim her light. That no matter how much of my darkness I brought into her life, her light would still be just as bright and powerful as it had ever been. She’d believed it, too, but she’d been wrong. I was sucking all the goodness and light out of her, and she was letting me do it.

Maybe I should let her leave, after all. It would probably be better for her in the long run.

The thought of moving forward in my life without her in it, though, was unbearable.

 

I felt a
little better about the state of things between us after talking to Liam, even if he still hadn’t come up with something I could do for him—something he would
let
me do—that would give me a purpose in his life. At least we’d talked and he’d really listened and tried to understand what I needed.

I couldn’t help but regret, at least a little bit, that I’d had sex with him. It wasn’t the sex itself that I regretted. I’d hoped he would open up to me after we’d been intimate like that, but he hadn’t, and now I felt as though I’d used him.

After all that talking he still wanted to help me to climax, claiming it was his duty to be sure I enjoyed sex as much as he had. I wasn’t really in the mood anymore, though, and I knew it would only make me feel even more as if I’d used him, whether he’d enjoyed it or not.

Still, I just wanted to
be
with him. Touching. Cuddling. There was something intrinsically comforting and pure and right about the sensation of his arms around me. I wanted to make it last, to latch on to this as long as possible. I convinced him instead to lie down beside me and hold me for a while.

We didn’t talk much. It was one of those perfect, comfortable silences that we sometimes had, the ones that allowed us to breathe. He pulled the blankets over us and drew me into his arms, and I rested my head on his shoulder. I twirled my fingers through the hair on his chest as long as he allowed me to. Mainly, I just listened to him breathe, felt the rise and fall of his chest beneath me, waited for the rhythm of his heart to fall in line with mine.

He was with me, holding me exactly like that, when I woke up the next morning. The sun streamed in through the window, combining with the blankets and his body heat to make me feel so warm and snuggly that I never wanted to move again. I was pretty sure I must have been a cat in a former life.