#18 in TeenFic
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❝Don't,❞ he pleaded softly, offering her a tiny smile, ❝please don't make me a promise you will never be able to keep.❞ He released a quiet but deep breath, leaning forward even more, tilting his body towards her, until thei...
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| Chapter 26 |
| predator and prey |
BREE stood in front of the bathroom mirror after her last lecture for the day was over, running her hand over her hair, letting her fingers slip into her tresses, losing her touch to the place that Nick's cheek had rested against, to the place his lips had brushed, to the place he'd breathed words of comfort into.
Blinking hard at her reflection, and with a single determined shake of her head, Bree reached for the tap and wrenched it open, the gesture rough and jerky. A contradiction to the calm, gentle persona she otherwise embodied.
Bree's eyes followed the steady flow of water as it streamed into her cupped palms, filling up to the very brim and then spilling over the sides of her thumbs. She jerked back her arms, mercilessly splashing her face with ice cold water. Whatever it took to kick-start her brain. To knock some common sense back into her.
What had she been thinking? She barely knew Nick!
Had she even been thinking in the first place?
It didn't matter that she seemed to be able to read him during the times that he chose to draw back from her and crawl back into his shell. It didn't matter that he made her shed off the cloak of oblivion, see past the surface of his exterior, and seek the tiniest details that made him Nick with hungry eyes. It didn't matter that there was something in Bree that seemed to form a natural bond with something in Nick, didn't matter that she had come to care about him in such a short period of time.
Bottom line was, she didn't know him. Not really. And it was pretty scary, if not insane, to feel so much concern for somebody who she knew so little of.
Fact was, Bree could probably count on her fingers what she knew about Nick Fraser. And to lean into his embrace so willingly, to speak to him about deep fears, to ask him what frightened him in return, to point out that she could see he was afraid of their growing closeness... was simply unacceptable.
She was smarter than this. More laid-back than this. She liked simple. She liked average. Bree Salvare didn't do deep soul searching, didn't do philosophies, didn't do over-thinking, didn't do complications or paradoxes.
But here she was, being challenged to do those very things by him.
He was like that, this Nick Fraser she'd acquainted herself with. He was bitter and guarded in the very places that he also was protective and tender.
Where Bree lived on the surface of everything, while at the same time more than aware of the ugliness that coexisted underneath... it appeared that "underneath" was the place where Nick saw life from. As if all he could do was glance up at the good that floated above, but not reach high enough to touch it.
