Always There

Chapter Seventy-Four

Our eyes meet, and I have to try so fucking hard to stare just at her face and not any lower.

"The water should be warm enough for you now, honey," I tell her. My voice is shockingly gruff.

Blossom stares up at me innocently through those long eyelashes of hers. "All right. You'll be waiting right here, right?"

I nod at her, and it takes far more effort than it should.

I then give her an encouraging smile. She takes a moment to grin back at me before carefully, she turns on her heels, slides the shower door open, and steps into the shower.

The moment that her back is to me, I look away from her face.

I look somewhere far lower.

God, that ass. There are very few things that make me want to sin more.

The shower door slides shut behind her and I bury my face into my hands, trying my very best to stifle the groan that escapes from my lips. I'm a nineteen-year-old man who hasn't had sex in more than a month, and staring at my ex-girlfriend's naked body—the most phenomenal body I've ever seen—is certainly not helping my situation.

I'm only given a moment to process all of my thoughts and feelings before the shower door slides back open to reveal Blossom to me.

She's somehow even more soaked than she was when she showed up at my doorstep as she now has water droplets running down her body, but now that she's warm again, there's colour in her cheeks. Her hair is impossibly long now that it's completely straight from the water, and it makes me wonder if she's ever going to cut it.

Seeing her like this? So vulnerable and fragile as she stands in front of me, naked in my shower, still shaking from the way she had just been sobbing on the floor of the hallway just a few minutes ago?

It causes a surge of emotions within in me, so strong that I nearly collapse.

I need this girl in my life again. She's my everything. I would doing anything to assure that she's safe, happy, and healthy. Fucking anything. I fucking hate that she was in such a terrible situation today, and it breaks my pathetic fucking heart to know that she may've ended up sleeping on the sidewalk tonight if she hadn't worked up the courage at the last minute to come here instead.

But know what breaks my heart even more?

It's the fact that I hurt her so badly that for a moment, she really considered sleeping on the streets in the pouring rain over coming to me to ask for help.

I think that that really shows how badly I fucked things up between us.

And maybe I'm finally able to understand what I did wrong.

That's a good thing, right? Isn't this what Blossom wants? For me to understand?

Perhaps I'm finally starting to become the man that Blossom needs me to be.

"Bryce?" her soft voice asks, breaking me from my thoughts yet again.

"Yeah?" I respond.

Blossom stares down at her feet, as though she's anxious to see how I'm going to react to what she's going to say next.

She lets out a small sigh, and then meets my gaze again to ask, "Will you wash my hair for me?"

I freeze, because this is definitely not the type of question that I had expected for her to ask me right now.

But when my eyes meet hers and I see the vulnerability shining there, there's absolutely no fucking way that I could even consider saying no to her.