Breathe Me (A 'Me' Novel) by Jeri Williams

couldn’t look at him. If I did, I might’ve actually died. Instead, I tried to pretend he wasn’t there and continued to try and control my breathing.
    It wasn’t working.
    He sat down next to me and pulled me into his lap. I had never been cradled before, so I froze in his arms, not sure how I was supposed to act. It felt strange but…nice.
    “Relax, Har, breathe with me. In then out, in then out, come on.” His voice was melodic in my ear.
    It may have been his soothing voice or his strong, warm embrace, or both, but I listened to him and closed my eyes. I matched my breathing with his, in and out, in and out. I don’t know how long we sat there. I was surprised no one came in. I could only imagine what they would have said if they had made it past the entrance.
    I felt my breathing return to normal and my pulse calm down. I slowly opened my eyes and began to realize what had just happened, what my stupid fear had done, what I allowed it to do. Panic of a new kind crashed into me like a tidal wave, drowning me. One way to make a guy less interested in you was to have a full-on meltdown on a dirty bathroom floor in front of him. There was no way Deklan would want anything to do with me now. I mean, who does that?
    My body stiffened under his embrace as I frantically searched my fuzzy head for an escape route. One that would allow me to at least look cool and aloof, like what just went down was not big deal.
    “You good?” He looked down at me, and I couldn’t force myself to meet his stare. I scrambled from his lap and stood only to stare at my feet and mumble that I needed a minute.
    “All right, but I’ll be waiting, you got me?” He gave me the look . The one that said, “I want to know what the fuck just happened.” I nodded and waited for him to leave, then glanced around frantically for…something. There was a window just off to my right, shitty, but I had no choice. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I passed, and I looked the same—same simple T-shirt and jeans that I always wore—but it wasn’t what I wore that made me look hard. It was my eyes. I had perfected the hard, cold stare, but right now that stare wasn’t there. The eyes that looked back at me were the ones that no one saw, the soft, scared, wounded animal eyes that I kept under lock and key because if people saw them, they would make me their prey, like I was to my monster. No thank you.
    These were the eyes that Deklan had seen.
    Without another look, I headed for the window.

Chapter 12
    Harley
    “You giving me your ass to kiss already?”
    I froze with my legs and ass hanging out the bathroom window that I was trying to make my getaway through. Arms encircled my waist and helped me the rest of the way out, easily lifting and turning me simultaneously to face a pissed-off Deklan.
    “What the fuck? You bailin’ on me?” He slid me down his hard body until my feet touched the ground but made no indication of letting me go. I didn’t know how to respond to his accusation. I was leaving. How was I going to explain to him that it was just better we didn’t become anything more than this? People who occasionally ran into each other.
    “It’s getting late. I really should be going.” I tried to step around him, but he blocked me and I stepped back. “Look, thanks for…that back there, but…”
    “You gonna tell me what ‘back there’ was?” His hard gaze penetrated me, making me feel judged and ashamed.
    “Nothing. Sometimes I get like that. It’s nothing…I’m fine,” I stammered. Why couldn’t I make up something like I normally would have, if this had been someone else? Because I wouldn’t have let it get this far if it was someone else, that’s why. His eyes drilled a hole into me whenever he looked at me and found the scared, little girl hiding in the dark corner of my being. I hated it and cherished it.
    “I know panic, and I know panic brought on by fear,” he stated.
    Again, I wasn’t sure how