Flash: Who Did This to You?

Photo by Roman Denisenko on Unsplash

“Who did this to you?” my not-my-boyfriend boyfriend growled when he found me washing up.

I rolled my eyes, then winced as the water hit the worst of the street-rash on the arm. “I already took care of it.”

Jeremy raised overprotective to heights which would make the dark romance mafia billionaire book-boyfriends look tame. Tall, blonde, square-jawed, strong, famous, and rich, he could one-two punch out the lights of a paparazzi who got too close then one-two blacklist them by buying out their newspaper. “No” wasn’t a term he understood, which worked for me, because my walls rivaled the Great Wall of China and obnoxious persistence was the only way to drill through.

My formative self-protection was necessary in my line of business, and level of magick.

I’ve never run into the overprotectiveness before in my life. My parents raised me free-range and feral, keeping me fed, clothed, and covened but that was the end of their care.

Jeremy … he treated me like I was breakable. He, a mortal, a normal human, who I rescued from the jaws of something which wasn’t special effects during the filming of his latest blockbuster, which he knew for a fact wasn’t in the script because he was the director, cherished me like I was a treasure.

He came over, lifted my chin with a finger, looking at where a claw had grazed a cheek and the cuts across my head where I had decided the best way to get the monster off of me was to headbash it. Not my brightest moment; the scales were sharp.

“Okay, then can I take care of you?” he asked softly.

He never had asked permission to help me before. I nodded dumbly, tears leaking out the sides of my eyes as I something inside of me stopped fighting.

(words 304; first published 5/23/2026)