Monster in My Bed

Chapter Forty | Let's Decorate the Prison

I felt the warmth of the sun resting on my face before I saw it. It was a comforting heat that just grazed over my skin giving me a similar sensation to the little shivers I felt when Matteo touched me. It made me want to wake up and not contemplate ending my own life to escape my very unfortunate situation for once. However, the light is not what woke me up. The soft touch of a thumb running across my pouted bottom lip did. It was a simple gesture, but it had sparks shooting all the way from my mouth to my stomach.

My eyes fluttered open to see the man who was acting much calmer than I could have ever anticipated. I expected to be woken up by a shouting match, so waking up to my mate being amused simply by my sleeping self was fine by me. Although, it did make me worried that this was the calm before his storm.

"I'm so upset with you, but I'm so in love with you. It's very troublesome," Matteo admitted, turning my tired pout into a frown. "I want to scream at you for being so reckless, but I hate raising my voice at you and making you upset. I simply do not know how to explain to you how much I hated what you did last night and how angry I am that you did it."

"Well, that worked," I muttered, feeling the heavy weight of guilt fall on my shoulders. I could hear the genuine disappointment in his tone and how he was strategically piecing his words together to make sentences that would cut me like a knife but not kill me. This was a side of Matteo that I'd slowly begun to recognize after he flew off the rails during our last major fight. The image of me sitting terrified in our shower surely was an image that was burned into his conscience. I was just glad Matteo was man enough to not repeat his mistakes, well, not all of them. Minor, inconvenient fights now ended with Matteo simply stating his opinion and not bringing it up again. To be honest, I think he was afraid he was going to have a repeat of losing control of his anger.

Dropping his hand from my face, Matteo pushed himself away from me and rolled out of bed. I sat up in confusion as I watched him stand up and walk over to the closet to retrieve a shirt for his bare torso.

"What are you doing?" I asked. He slipped the white shirt over his head and pulled it down over his chest. He continued to rummage in the closet for a moment before pulling out a pair of dark wash denim jeans.

"I have to prepare a group to cross into Vindicta by the end of the week, Kaia. We know patrol routes, but that's really nothing in the grand scheme of things." His response made me want to huff like a child. It was short, and I knew he kept it that way to manage his temper. The calmer he came across, however, the angrier it made me. I didn't want to fight, but I didn't want him to just blow off what I had done as if he didn't care.

"Aren't we going to talk about last night?" I dared to question. He slipped on his jeans and buttoned them. I caught the way his hands seemed to grip the material tighter and his jaw tensed in anger.

"Is there a point?" He countered making me bite down, grinding my molars. His dark eyes bored into mine, daring me to respond to his very rhetorical question. "You'll probably just do it again, so I don't see one. You knew how stupid it was, how much I do not want you out there by yourself when your life could be taken away like that," he said, adding a snap with his fingers, "but you did it anyway. No amount of breath that I waste arguing with you about it is going to be enough to make you see how irrationally you act." If I was a baby, I would have probably started crying. For some reason, it hurt me more when he expressed his disappointment like this than when he was yelling.

"But you can't even try to have a conversation about it?" I snapped, feeling my emotions start to get the best of me. I lowered my gaze to my hands fondling the bedding as a burning sensation fizzled in the back of my throat. "At least I expected to have one," I muttered, more to myself than to him. It was odd to think that I, of all people, wanted to talk about something I had done wrong. Usually, that was Matteo's thing, and I couldn't help but feel like we had switched places.