Page 78 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
Now I am in bed under a heavy gray blanket with a low fever and a clean bill on everything else. The bruises along my ribs are the color of weak tea. The cut at my brow has faded to a thin pale line near the older scar at my temple. Everything stitched. Everything closing.
What is not closed is the way Chloe returns to the edge of the mattress with a folded cloth in her hand and a small white bowl of something steaming on the nightstand.
She presses the cloth to my forehead. It is cool enough to make me close my eyes for a second. Then the back of her hand goes against my cheek and stays there.
"I’m supposed to be taking care of a baby," she says, dry as toast. "Not nursing a grown man through the sniffles."
"Then wait until I am healed," I tell her, low, eyes still half closed, "and I will give you one to take care of."
She makes a sound that is half laugh and half scandalized squeak. "You're so nasty."
"Always. You have not complained yet."
A beat. Her mouth softens. The cloth pauses against my temple.
"Yeah, well." Her voice goes warm in that way that undoes me. "I like it more than I should."
I open my eyes. Gray-green meets brown. I get a hand around the back of her neck, careful, because she is precious and because my arm is not at full strength yet, and I draw her down to me. Her dark hair falls around my face. The kiss is slow. Fever or no fever, my mouth knows what it wants. I taste the tea she has been drinking. Honey. Something floral. She makes a small noise against my lips and I file that sound away for later, when she is not on duty as my nurse.
When she sits up her cheeks are a shade pinker than they were a minute ago.
"You are flushed," I observe.
"That’s the fever."
"Mine, perhaps. Not yours."
She swats me with the cloth.
The door bangs open without a knock first. Or rather, there is a knock and then immediately the door, no waiting betweenthem, which in this house is the universal signal of one specific small person.
Rhea stands in the doorway with Beom-Beom dangling by one paw at her hip, the bear's damaged ear flopping. Her braids are a little crooked on one side. She wears the expression of a kid who has come to deliver a verdict.
"You two are doing cringe things again," she says, deadpan.
Chloe loses it. Full laugh, head back, the kind of laugh that lights a room and is half the reason I want to be in any room she is in. She holds both arms out.
"Get in here, you."
Rhea pretends to resist for exactly one second before launching across the rug, Beom-Beom flung onto the blanket ahead of her like an advance scout. Chloe catches her around the middle, rolls her sideways onto the bed and digs fingers into her ribs. Rhea shrieks, kicks, laughs until her face goes red, grabs for a pillow as a shield and fails. Beom-Beom catches a stray elbow into my chest. I rescue him and prop him up against my hip like a small witness.
"Mercy," Rhea gasps. "Mercy, I take it back, the cringe things were fine, they were normal."
"Too late," Chloe says, but she stops tickling and just holds her, one arm slung across the kid's chest, her chin on the top of Rhea's head.
The room settles. Breathing slows. Beom-Beom keeps watch from my hip.
Then Rhea's face changes. The laughter thins out of it. She is still tucked into Chloe's arm but her eyes have moved to me, and they are serious in a way a seven year old's eyes should not have to be.
"How are you, brother?"
I do not rush the answer. I want her to feel it land.
"I am more than ok."
She nods like she is weighing whether to believe me. Then she does.
"I am glad." A pause. "You are getting your life back, piece by piece."
