House of Payne: Rude by Stacy Gail Page A

side of her, hemming her in. “That look you gave me was from a girl who’d had enough.”
    In silence, the hand she held up to ward him off dropped.
    There was no way he could have known that. No way.
    “In that moment, that girl did the only thing she could do just to keep going. She shut herself down, went numb and made it so she couldn’t feel anything. No sense of rejection. No hurt. No bone-deep fear. No anger. No crushing loneliness.”
    “Stop,” she whispered. She didn’t have the strength to make it any louder.
    “No loneliness,” he repeated, ignoring her. “No desperation. No helplessness when it came to getting yourself out of there. You shut yourself down and went into survival mode, and that had nothing to do with me.” Then he tilted his head, as he seemed to reconsider. “That’s not entirely true though, is it? I was the one who made you kick into survival mode. I pushed you into feeling nothing.”
    Each word he uttered hit her like velvet fists—soft blows that hurt far more than she’d been prepared to deal with. A terrible tension built up in her inside of her, like a balloon filling up to the point of bursting.
    “I’ve always called it the Nowhere Place.” The words came out in a voice she didn’t recognize, a thin thread of sound almost obliterated by the pressure crushing her from within. But strangely enough the tension eased with the confession, and she sucked in a careful breath and pushed herself to keep going. “It’s like I can crawl inside myself when things get bad and there’s no safe place to go in the real world. I don’t have to do it much now that I’m an adult and I can be in control of my own life. But there were times when…” She shook her head again when that terrible pressure started to build once more.
    No.
    No.
    Letting out a little was good.
    Letting out everything would unravel the locks and barriers and walls she’d put up around all the ugly things she’d shut away. That unraveling would destroy her.
    Very slowly—as though he wanted to give her time to see him and make peace with what he was doing—he lifted a hand and rested it along her jaw, bringing her face up to his. “But there were times when…?”
    “Just… that there were times when I never wanted to come out. It’s no big deal,” she added with a supremely casual shrug when he looked like he had more questions. “What I don’t understand is how you’ve now come to recognize that look. Our first meeting happened a long time ago.”
    “It helps that I remember it like it was yesterday. And I now know that look intimately, because I saw it on my own face after my final tour. It was really strange,” he added, apparently not noticing how she froze in surprise. “I was in a hospital in Frankfurt, recovering from injuries I’d gotten on a mission that had gone… really bad. I was going to shave for the first time in something like ten days, and as I got ready to do it, I looked up in the mirror. What I saw was you.”
    “I had a beard?”
    “No, smartass.” Something weird and sweet curled through her when he bent his head over hers to press a kiss against her brow. “I saw that exact same blank look in my eyes, Sass. I was gone. Since I knew what I’d been through just to stay alive—what I’d had to fucking do —it hit me that the only way you could’ve had that same look in your eyes was if you’d been through your own kind of war.”
    Monstrous things, horrible things, pushed at the locks in her head. Not just nightmarish memories, though. Mixed in with that chaos was a flood of questions about him, questions that could lead to him sharing private facets of himself. She didn’t want that. It would make her relate to him. Crap, for all she knew, it might even lead to admiration for the man he’d become.
    The horror.
    But underneath that lurked a purely selfish reason she wanted to keep her distance. If she invited him to share intimate details about his traumas,