DEKKER

 

THE KNOCK ON MY FRONT door startles me. The papers on my lap from when I fell asleep on the couch flutter to the floor with the jolt of my body.

I’m in that just-woken-up, confused and freaked-out phase where I wonder who in the hell is knocking on my door at one in the morning.

Who the hell did the doorman let in on my list that would come at this time of night?

Chad? My sisters?

Oh my God. Something is wrong with my dad.

My pulse pounds wildly as I run to the door, every horrible scenario playing out in my mind in those thirty feet. It’s when I look in the peephole though that every part of me stops and freezes.

Hunter.

I almost want to laugh at the sight of him. I put him on my approved visitors list three years ago with the hope that one night he might make his way to my place. To fight for me.

I never took him off.

When I open the door and come face to face with him, my smile falls.

His shoulders are slumped, his face pale and hollow, and his eyes troubled.

“Hunter? Is everything okay? What are you—?”

He steps into me and holds on for dear life. His arms go around me, his face is buried into the crook of my neck, and his body shudders with an emotion I can physically feel.

“Hey. What happened?” I ask. His actions have taken me by surprise—especially from him, his need so palpable that I immediately slide my arms around him, hands running up and down his back, and my lips pressing a kiss to the side of his head.

We stay like this as he holds me, and I feel helpless.

“I just needed you.” Those four words said in his broken rasp as the heat of his breath hits my shoulder, are all I need to hear for my heart to constrict. There is much more between us than just sex. So much more shared than a physical act meant to bring two people together.

“I’m here,” I murmur to him. “I’m here.”

My mind races over scenarios—he was cut from the team, something happened to his family . . . over and over—as we stand there in this silent desperation.

“Christ, Dekk.” He runs a hand through his hair as he walks to the windows and then back to me. His shoulders sag. He stares at me with total defeat.

“Are you okay?” It’s one of a million questions on my mind and the safest of them all. He’ll talk when he wants to.

“Yeah. I think.” Tears well in his eyes and the sight of them—of a man completely vulnerable when I’ve never seen him that way before—undoes me in ways I can’t quite fathom.

They say he trusts me.

They say he needs me.

It’s a poignant thought that gets thrown to the wayside to be thought about later when he’s gone and I’m alone . . . but right now, he needs me.

“I was going to go home . . . but . . . it’s just. I didn’t know where else to go.” His voice is barely audible, his admission mixed with the confusion in his eyes, enough in itself to tell me what he needs. To remind me out of the blue of something my mom used to say to us when we were at a loss for words. “I needed you.”

Those three words slide around my heart and embed themselves in my soul.

He came to me.

He needs me.

“Come with me.” I reach a hand out to him and even though he stares at it with question in his eyes, he takes it.

I lead him down the hallway of my apartment toward my bedroom. If I’d told anyone I was taking Hunter Maddox to my bedroom with no intention of taking my clothes off, they’d think I was mad.

But I am.

And he’s so lost in his own head, in the heartache overwhelming him, that he doesn’t think twice when I turn the covers of my bed down, climb in, and pull his hand for him to join me. With his eyes on mine, trying to relay a story his lips won’t yet speak, he toes off his shoes and climbs in with me.

His arms go around my abdomen, he lays his head on my chest so I can rest my chin on it, and he holds on.

We lie like this without saying a thing, just me providing comfort and him taking whatever it is he needs, until his breathing evens out, and eventually he falls asleep.

With my hand running up and down the length of his back and the realization of how damn good it feels to be needed, I slowly drift off to sleep too.