What He Shields (What He Wants Book Seventeen) (7 page)

He fucked me hard and fast, his hips bucking
into mine, filling me.

We came at the same time, him unloading into me
as my pussy clenched around him, my orgasm rocking me so hard that I shivered
when it was finally over, when that last wave of incredible euphoria had finally
finished sliding through my body.

Noah collapsed on top of me, both of us
panting, and I ran my hands down over his back and squeezed my eyes shut tight,
letting the reality of what had just happened wash over me.

It was one of the first times Noah had begun to
let his walls down.
 
And in order to
do that, he’d needed to exert control in other ways, i.e. by whipping
me.Was
this what he would expect
now, every time I inquired about his past or asked him something personal?
 
Would it take me being vulnerable, for
him having control over me, for him to let his guard down?

It was a disconcerting thought, and I didn’t
know what it meant for our future.

How could you have a healthy marriage if those
were the rules?

And yet underneath all of this swirling
confusion, another reality burned bright and hard.

It was the best orgasm I’d ever had in my life.

***

When we got back into the car Noah’s mood was
lighter.

We hadn’t resolved anything and yet, somehow
we’d both gotten a release.

We were hallway home when my phone buzzed with
a text.

“Who is it?”
 
Noah asked, looking over at me sharply.

“It’s John,” I said.
 
“The man from this morning, the one I’m
supposed to meet with tonight.”
 
I’d
never replied to his earlier text, and now he was following up, asking me if I
would still come tonight at six.

Noah didn’t say anything.

“Noah,” I said softly. “Nothing is going to
happen to me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What kind of person would I be, Noah?” I asked
him.
 
“If I just ignored what
Mikayla had told me, if I just forgot about it?”
 
I remembered how it felt to be locked in
that club for even just a few hours, the heaviness of the air around me, the
hopeless feeling as I’d been led to that auction.

Noah sighed.
 
“This is that important to you?”

“Yes.”
 
I nodded, waiting for him to give his verdict.
 
If he
forbid
me
again to go and see this man, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

“Fine,” he said.
 
“One meeting.
 
One time.
 
That is it.
 
I will go with you.
 
We will stay for fifteen minutes.
 
And if I get any sense that he is full
of shit, or trying to manipulate you in any way, you will have no further
contact with him.
 
 
Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, dizzy with relief.
 
“Yes, I understand.”

I texted John
back
,
telling him I would be there at six.

Noah reached for my hand, his fingers
tightening around mine as we came to a stop at a red light.
 
“Charlotte,” he said.
 
“What just happened back there, in that
room…
”

I put my hand on his knee and squeezed it
gently.
 
“Noah, those things that…
those things that happened to you.
 
They weren’t your fault.
 
I
hope you know that.”

He kept his gaze ahead, watching as a family
crossed the street in front of us, a couple with their children, the boy riding
a scooter, his helmet askew on his head, the other little boy eating an ice
cream cone that had dripped all over his shirt.
 

Finally, Noah tore his gaze away and his eyes
locked on mine.
 
“You are good,” he
said.
 
“You are sweet and pure and
kind, and… ”
 
He trailed off, his
thumb grazing the back of my hand.
 
“When
I hear that voice, the one that tells me I’m worthless, that I’m a monster,
that I’m not worthy of anything, it is you that brings me back.
 
You would never be with anyone
horrible,” he said.
 
“You would
never be with someone who was unworthy of you.”

“Oh, Noah,” I said, my voice catching at the
thought of those horrible things, the ones he’d been told when he was younger,
running through his head on a constant loop.

I shifted on the seat and moved toward him, but
his phone rang, and he reached for it, his hand leaving mine, his demeanor
changing in an instant, so quickly it made me question if there had even been a
moment of closeness there at all.

“Cutler,” he barked.
 
“Yes… yes… you did?
 
What the fuck was she doing
there?”

The light turned green and Noah turned the car
around, doing a U-turn in the middle of the street, all business again as he
pulled into the traffic that was streaming by.

We began heading uptown, my head just as
confused as my body was satisfied.

***

Clementine had found Lilah at a movie theatre
on 57
^th
Street, sitting in the back row, eating a carton of popcorn
mixed with Milk Duds.
 
There was a
movie playing on the screen, one of those animated children’s movies that had
Oscar award winning actors playing the voices of the characters and would end
up making a bazillion dollars.

Clementine said Lilah had seemed dazed and
disoriented, and there
there
were scratches all over
her face.
 
When Clementine asked her
what had happened, Lilah said she couldn’t remember, but she thought maybe
she’d put the scratches
there
herself.

Clementine took Lilah to the hospital for a
psych eval, and Noah drove us there to meet them, gunning the engine of his
car, tapping his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel at every single
red light.

“I don’t understand why Clementine brought her
to the hospital,” I said as we pulled up in front of the hospital.
 
The wind whipped at my hair as I stepped
onto the sidewalk, a uniformed parking lot attendant opening the door for me as
another swooped in to take Noah’s car to the valet lot.

“Because Lilah was obviously in distress,” Noah
said.
 
“We have no idea what’s going
on with this girl, Charlotte.”

“You mean she’s unhinged because she slit a
man’s throat?”

Noah turned to me and gave me a glaring
look.
 
“No, because she has been
through a trauma.”

I knew better than to talk back.

Noah had told Clementine to head back to Loft
37 and that we would meet her there, so Noah and I followed the signs to the
emergency room, where they told us Lilah had been taken to the third floor
psychiatric department.

We took the stairs instead of the elevator,
somewhat of a relief to me, after what had happened the last time we’d been in
an elevator together.

When we reached the third floor, Noah talked to
the receptionist, who said she would go find the doctor.

Noah waited about thirty seconds for her to
come back before apparently deciding he’d had enough.
 
He walked past reception, heading down a
long hallway that had examining rooms leading off of it.

“Noah,” I said, following him.
 
“Slow down.”

A doctor with grey hair and a beard was walking
toward us from the other end of the hallway.

“Are you Mr. Cutler?” he asked when we met in
the middle.

“Yes,” Noah said.

The doctor nodded gravely.
 
“Please come with me, Mr. Cutler.”
 

I started to follow them, but the doctor turned
and stopped me.
 
“I’m sorry,” he
said.
 
“But I’m not authorized to
talk about Lilah’s case with anyone but Mr. Cutler.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” I said.
 
“I’m part of her legal team.”

“This isn’t a legal matter,” the doctor said,
admonishing me.
 
“This is a health
matter, and because of confidentiality laws, I can only speak with the people
Lilah has authorized me to talk with.”

And then I got it.
 
This wasn’t part of Lilah’s case, at
least not technically.
 
She wasn’t
here to be evaluated by an expert witness who would speak to her mental state
at the time of her boyfriend’s murder.

She was here to be evaluated for whatever it
was she was struggling with in this immediate moment.
 
This had nothing to do with the case,
and everything to do with her personal mental health.

“I’ll be back,” Noah said to me, and then he
was following the doctor, leaving me there in the hallway.

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, so I sat
down on one of the cedar plank benches that lined the walls.
 
The air in here felt stale, as if it had
been sitting for a while.
 
I guessed
that the psych ward probably didn’t allow their patients to have their windows
open, which probably accounted for the fact that the air felt so still.

I could hear the soft murmur of voices coming
from the different rooms, which all had heavy steel doors, some of which were
open.
 
Somehow the soft voices were
more eerie than if there had been screaming and moaning, or banging and
freaking out.
 

My skin felt itchy, and I reached down and
scratched my leg.

I had a lash across my ankles, a mark from
where Noah had whipped me.
 
That,
along with the marks on my wrists from last night, were sore and raw, and
looking at them left me with an unsettled feeling.

After Force, Noah had been so soft with me,
almost like he was afraid I was going to break if he was rough with me.
 
But now he’d gone the opposite way.
 
It was almost as if he’d gone to a
different level, taking his frustrations out on me sexually.
 
If we were going to keep going there, we
were going to have to make sure we figured out a way to hide the marks he left
on me.

The thought of having to hide that made my
stomach flip.
 
How was that
okay?
 
That my fiancé was leaving
marks on me during our sex sessions?
 
It made me uneasy.

“You have my journal.”

I looked up.
 
Lilah stood there, wearing a hospital
gown, her chestnut hair piled on top of her head in a messy topknot.
 
Her blue eyes were wide.
 
There were scratches on her cheeks, but
they did nothing to distract from her innocent beauty.
 
If anything, they only made her look
more vulnerable.
 
When I’d been told
she’d scratched herself, I’d imagined the scratches as deep gashes, the kind of
gashes that were ugly and made you want to look away.

But these scratches were thin and dainty, and
they made her look as if she’d gone crawling through some brush instead of
scratching herself while sitting in a movie theatre.

It made me instantly more mistrustful of
her.
 
She’d obviously been able to
control herself enough to make sure the scratches she’d put on herself weren’t
that bad.
 
And if she was able to
have that kind of control, didn’t it shed some kind of shade on her
motivations?
 
Like perhaps she was
more in control than people thought?
 

Although it didn’t matter what I thought.
 
As
soon as Noah got done talking to the doctor, we would know more about what we
were dealing with.
 

“You have my journal,” Lilah said again.
 
I followed her gaze to where the top of
her notebook was sticking out my bag.

“Yes.”
 
I made sure to keep my voice devoid of
emotion,
to not give her any reason to think that I thought what I’d done was
wrong.
 
“You left it in the hotel
room.”
 

“Did you read it?”

“Some of it.”

“Did you like it?”

“Excuse me?”

She gave me a knowing smile, and I felt a
shiver of fear run through my body, from the top of my forehead all the way
down to the tips of my toes.
 

“Did you like what I wrote in there?” she
repeated.
 
“About Ryan, about the
things we did?”

“I found it very interesting,” I said.