Free Alpha Fighter by Ava Ashley Page A

strokes my hair with the other. "It's okay, Savannah. I'm here. It's okay."
    I cry harder. This physical contact is what I so missed just a few weeks ago, when I had my lonely eighteenth birthday in that dingy old motel. I sat by myself on a moth-eaten bedspread from the 1970s, trying to pretend that there was something helpful or positive about that birthday. I had picked up a stale cupcake from the day-old section of the nearby grocery store's bakery that morning, because it was half-off, but the frosting had hardened into a fossilized swirl of unnatural blue. The only birthday-themed cupcake left was for a little boy, so there was a plastic green dinosaur with a nine on its chest on the top of the frosting mound. I sat there on my bed, a birthday cupcake in my hand that was fit only for a pre-teen boy who had gone taste-blind, and felt like I was the only person in my world. Each dry bite of day-old cupcake tasted like sawdust sticking in my throat and no matter how hard I swallowed, I couldn't get the lump to go down. I gave up on the cupcake three bites in, but I had to drink a tall glass of water before I realized that the lump in my throat wasn't from the sub-par baked goods, but from the emotion I was trying to swallow down with my lonely birthday treat. But here I am now, suddenly not alone anymore.
    I'm not sure how long we stay like that, but I feel simultaneously very safe and unbearably, unendingly sad. I finally understand heartbreak.
    But better that I feel heartbreak without having gotten to love at all, than that I destroy the man I love by letting myself love him.

Chapter Twenty-One
    Cooper
    I have had an easier time getting heavily-trained, grown men to crack during military interrogations, completely without violation of the Geneva Convention, than I have had getting Savannah to open up about her past and her story. I'm getting to know Savannah, and she's the most beautiful girl I've known in a long time, inside and out, but I still know no more about what's haunting her. I still don't know what her personal demons are, but I know they're big.
    I'm really starting to feel for this girl, though, and I know that whatever her deal is, she's already hurting enough. She doesn't need me to add to that by prying into her business and pushing her to tell me more. So when I find her in a heap on her bed, crying like her world just ended, I don't try to get her to tell me what's wrong. I want to know more than anything, because I feel this need to fix it and make everything better for her. But I know she just needs some comfort. Instead of pushing her, I just hold her in my arms.
    She's this beautiful, strong woman with this beautiful, strong body, but at that moment, she felt so frail, so vulnerable. She felt as delicate as a china doll and looked infinitely more beautiful, even with the tears streaming and her face flushed from crying. Even though I was sitting there, on a passable bed with a halfway decent mattress and a beautiful girl's head in my lap, her shiny black hair splayed out over my legs, I didn't want to fuck her.
    Any other girl, I'd either fuck or send home. But not Savannah. She's the kind of girl that's so beautiful you just want to stare at her, and so special you don't even want to fuck her— you just want to hold her, instead. And, when she's ready, make love to her slowly and gently and missionary style, just so that you can look her in the eyes the whole time. 
    When Savannah stops crying, I let her have some time alone to calm down a bit and clean herself up. She comes out of her room fifteen minutes later, looking a little sheepish but otherwise normal. I figure the best thing to do is not to say anything about earlier and let her bring it up if she wants to. As I guessed, she doesn't. But she seems grateful that I don't, either, and even invites me along to jog the pregnant lady's fat dog again.
    "What?" I tease, "You actually want me to come?"
    "Nah," she teases me right back, grinning,