It was too quiet in the room. Normally, he could hear Abby’s little breaths as she slept, but no, this time she was silent. Her head rested on his thigh. She wore one of his T-shirt—and only his T-shirt because it was rather warm in the apartment—just like she used to when they had been children.
Well, really, at barely twenty years old, she was still, and though he was almost thirty, he was not much more mature. He had felt that immaturity when he had seen the purple finger marks on her wrists and had chosen to be angry at her instead of her husband for getting herself into an abusive relationship. Ethan was glad he had chosen not to say the first thing that had come to his mind when he had seen them because she may have ran away from him and not asked for the help she had needed later, when her husband had nearly killed her.
Ethan slept her strawberry-blonde hair out of her face, careful not to touch the stitches on her forehead. The skin on the entire left side of her face was black from that bastard’s hands, but she was alive and warm. He told himself that that was all that mattered at the moment.
He tried to keep his mind from drifting toward memories of seeing those same bruises on her head from the hands of their own mother, someone who had—for reasons he had never understood—hated her from the moment she had been born. It was true she had not treated him well, but it was not until Abby had been born that he had known true cruelty.
They had felt so lucky when the state had let Ethan live on his own at the age of seventeen and take care of his ten-year-old sister. It had meant the end of the worst chapter in their lives.
But these fresh bruises on her face were a grim reminder of how those early years had scarred her—scarred him, even if he had not borne the worst of it.
There were spikes of pain in his chest as he remembered how she had cried into his chest, how she had told him that she was sorry over and over again--like it had been her fault. Ethan had wrapped her in his arms and told her that she was not at fault for anything, but he knew it was going to take so much more than that to get her to believe it. She needed time--more time than it would take for the bruises to fade--but he was going to be there. Even when she was sick of him, he was going to make sure no one else put such marks on her face again.
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