by Quinn, Cari
The pleasant tone fooled me for a full thirty seconds until the good doc’s question permeated my brain. “I’m pretty sure I fuck for the same reasons everyone else does. I might be broken in a lot of ways, but I still have basic physical desires.”
That knowledge had caused me plenty of heartache last winter, but the last eight months had changed me. Tray had changed me. As much as I might sometimes want to brain the guy with one of Carly’s slotted spoons, I couldn’t deny all the ways he’d helped bring me closer to the regular person zone.
Closer was the most I could hope for. Even that was a freaking miracle.
“There are more reasons to copulate than physical needs.”
From sexual activity to fucking to copulation. My head was spinning. “I know that. Some people just use it as an excuse to spoon. Or spork. Or whatever the hell it’s called.”
“But not you.”
“I don’t like getting hot when I sleep.” I pushed to my feet. “Look, Doc, awesome sesh. I’ll see you next—” Lifetime. Century. Millennia. “Week,” I finished, bending to grab my backpack.
Dr. Phelps rose. “I’d like to ask you again to reconsider having Tray join us.”
I stopped dead and shot her a glare over my shoulder. “Why? He’s fine. He’s not like me.” No one was.
“I think your relationship could benefit from couples’ counseling. What one partner endures affects the other. You said he went through some troubles of his own. Perhaps if you shared your difficulties together, you could reach a new level of understanding. With my help, of course.”
“No. He’d never do it. He’s fine,” I repeated. “He’s annoyingly well-adjusted, even with his ‘difficulties’.”
“He’s your touchstone, Mia. I truly think any breakthrough you achieve would be facilitated by his involvement.”
“You just want to tell him I mentioned fighting again. I’m not stupid.” I hitched up my backpack and headed for the door.
“Mia, constantly deflecting blows that aren’t intended will hinder your recovery.”
Fighting metaphors and a mention of my “recovery”—who the fuck recovered from being imprisoned in a pretty cage at fourteen, I wanted to know—were a recipe to send me slamming out of Dr. Phelps’ beige wonderland.
I’d be back. She knew it. I knew it. But still, we played the game.
On the way out of the building, I stopped in the ladies’ restroom. It was a lovely purple with sweet-smelling soap and creamy lotion for hands stressed from the rigors of digging into broken brains and hearts. I bypassed the fancy female stuff and dug out dark red lipstick and eyeliner from my bag. I’d taken to wearing them occasionally, mainly because I knew Tray liked it when I wore girlpaint. He never actually said. He wouldn’t. So I did it for him, in my own way.
I layered the makeup on until my eyes appeared soaked in black. Rubbed the lipstick over my lips until they swelled from the pressure.
A quick look in the mirror proved I looked badass on the outside though I felt positively numb inside. But appearances were important. Sometimes the most loving thing you could do for someone you cared about was to act as if you were okay. If you made them believe the cracks you’d sewn together with cheap thread were holding, maybe eventually the lie could become truth.
I capped the tubes and marched out, head held high, chest still so tight that I didn’t dare take a deep breath for fear my ribs might shatter.
Out on the street, I hailed a cab. Tray was probably still studying his huge stack of science books in the library, but he’d be home sooner rather than later. Just to be safe, I wouldn’t take the time to walk home in case he left school early. It wasn’t much, but at least I could be physically present for him, if not always emotionally.
As the cab swung to the curb, my phone went off in my bag. A text ringtone, not a call. My stomach dropped to my sneakers. Shit. It wasn’t the right time for my hang-up caller. They called religiously between eight and nine a.m. and eight and nine p.m. I’d learned to keep my phone off at those times. So maybe it was Tray.
Just like that, my muscles unlocked and warmth surged through my general heart area. I still wasn’t fully convinced I had one. Maybe the whole concept of that organ was an urban legend, built to give girls like me something else to feel inadequate about.
Like I didn’t have enough.
The cabbie leaned across the passenger seat. “Hey lady, you getting in or what?”
Ignoring him, I grabbed my phone and read the text from an unknown caller. My hang-up caller was also unknown, but this was a new number. The three-word-message blurred under my intense focus, but it repeated in my head even when my eyes went blind.
I see you.
Before I could do anything except make the text disappear from my screen, another one came in. I breathed through my mouth, nearly panting, until I saw the new message was from Tray.
I can make dinner. You on your way home?
Home. As if we were a normal couple with a normal life and a normal dinner routine. My thumbs moved to reply before I stopped them. Dammit, no. I couldn’t keep pretending I was the little woman. Clearly, I had issues the usual girls he dated didn’t.
Like stalkers and a past so lurid that reporters had chased me for weeks, trying to get me to tell my side of the story.
Except there weren’t two sides to this one. Darren was dead by my hand. Darren, the gorgeous monster who’d kidnapped me and made me live in a mansion and dressed me like a doll in beautiful clothes for three interminable months. I’d had sex with him and sometimes I’d even come. I was that girl, utterly fucked in the body and the head and everywhere in between.
Tray acting like I was a regular chick didn’t make it so.
I loved that he wanted to make dinner, but if I made myself available to him constantly, I would lose the version of myself that I’d fought so hard to reclaim. It was already happening. Next thing I knew, I’d start buying tanks topped with lace, for fuck’s sake. I’d skip shelf bras for push-up ones that made my tits look like airborne missiles.
The bottom line was I wouldn’t be what he wanted forever. I still couldn’t figure out how I’d been what he wanted even for a moment. Maybe I’d been able to pretend for a while that we could be a regular couple, even with our unusual interests. But those phone calls had reminded me swiftly that regular would never be a part of my vocabulary. And if I didn’t retain my sense of self, how would I pick up the pieces when he went away?
The cabbie sighed. “Lady, the meter’s running. You in or out?”
I needed to go somewhere just for me. Do something I wanted without checking in with anyone first. I didn’t have money to waste, but I had to get this frustration and helplessness out in a way that wasn’t fighting or fucking or therapy. That limited my options to exactly one.
“I’m in.” I tucked my phone in my backpack and slipped inside the cab. “Take me to Underground Ink.”
Two
The heavy bag in the corner of the living room taunted me. Just one hit. You know you want the pain. Come and get it, you stupid bastard.
I whipped off my shirt and stalked toward my intended target. I hadn’t put it there. This wasn’t my place. I was just a temporary squatter, though Mia hadn’t actually spoken those words. She didn’t need to. I understood my woman.
I couldn’t find her at the moment, but I understood her.
Balling my fists, I kicked out, barely checking the need to howl with pleasure, with relief, as the kickback sang up my calves. I didn’t fight anymore, even if I still trained like a fighter. That world wasn’t for me. I wasn’t old in the scheme of the sport, but I’d felt like I was aging by the minute every time I stared down an opponent in the cage.
There had been a time I’d loved MMA’s beautiful brutality. Years ago, back when I was fighting for reasons I still hadn’t fully resolved. To beat my father. To conquer him—and myself.
Sometimes they seemed like the same thing.
But I’d walked away. I turned my back an
d I was building a new life, taking classes in sports medicine. I wanted to help people, even if the person I most wanted to help insisted on shutting me out at every turn. She’d helped convince me that I shouldn’t slot myself into a role that didn’t fit anymore. Even without knowing the particulars, she’d helped me see that I couldn’t live in a world of denial when it came to my folks because my mother chose to live in an abusive situation. I had never told Mia exactly how abusive it was, but what she’d lived through had opened my eyes.
Life was too short to abide by things silently. I couldn’t do it anymore.
For years, I’d told myself that they were still my parents no matter what happened in their relationship. The hours I’d spent trying to convince my mother to leave the bastard—and the arguments I’d had with the bastard himself the last few times he’d dared to try to touch my mom in my presence—hadn’t added up to anything. So now I was walking away. If making myself an orphan was the only way I could take a stand against their dysfunctional marriage, then I would.
I also intended to not have a dysfunctional relationship of my own, despite how difficult Mia made that some days. She was worth the fight.
With my parents, not fighting was the kindest thing I could do for them—and for me. It wasn’t my battle to win. They understood where I stood, and if things changed, they knew where to find me. Until then, I was finished. I wouldn’t watch my mother do a suicide-by-husband, not after watching Mia struggle just to get through the day. She was a survivor. My mom was an endurer. My father held all the blame, but my mother had to choose to walk away.
She hadn’t and probably never would. So I was. Finally.
I leaped at the bag, doing a series of razor kicks and punches until my muscles screamed. My fights were mostly mental nowadays. I worked as a trainer at my old gym and that was enough. Yet Mia seemed to want to crawl right back into the fighter’s sandbox.
Yeah, my girl was a fighter too. Or she had been up until shortly after we met. She’d dropped out of the sport just after I did, and though she never mentioned going back, I could tell it was in her head. She thought she was so impossible to read.
Not to me.
I kicked and punched the bag, circling it until my knuckles throbbed and my calves burned. Harder and harder, I attacked it, pouring all of my frustration into the blows. She wouldn’t fucking talk to me. That was all I wanted.
I knew she’d faced some horrible shit in her past and she couldn’t just tuck it away. I didn’t want her to. But what I did want—for her to lean on me, to trust that I could handle whatever was brewing behind those gorgeous dark eyes that were both my devastation and my salvation—might never happen.
At first, it had seemed like we would be okay. She gave so much of herself physically to me that I started to tell myself I didn’t have to have all of her. A little bit was enough. Besides, the books had said progress would be slow. Two steps forward, one step back. We could spend hours together, sleep in the same bed and share the same oxygen and the same painful pleasure, but she might never let me at that part of her she held sacred.
Her thoughts. Her mind. Her heart.
I’d thought I could deal. But lately, it had been one long continual slide in reverse, starting shortly before I’d found the calls on her cell. I hadn’t been snooping. All I’d wanted was her sister Carly’s new number.
Instead, I’d found the long list of calls from an unknown number.
A few days later, I’d told Mia I was moving out of my parents’ building. Bad timing or good, I still wasn’t sure. When she’d asked me, half-assedly, if I wanted to move in with her and Carly, I’d said yes, because some sense of self-preservation or just good old-fashioned possessive instincts had insisted I needed to get closer to Mia instead of stepping away.
Living together hadn’t stopped the questions in my head. Who was calling her so much? Why hadn’t she called them back? Or was she seeing them—him—in person?
“Fuck.” I shoved the bag out of my face and sent it careening into the wall, taking out a chunk of the plaster with it.
Something else I’d have to fix. At least that I could fix.
Grinding my damp palms into my eyes, I braced as the knob turned. The door flew open and bounced off the wall, probably opening up another crack. Mia never eased into places. She came in balls out every time.
I dropped my hands and turned to meet her, my lover and my opponent all in one.
From her combative stance, she wasn’t startled to see me standing there with my hands clenched and my shirt off. Perspiration poured off me in rivulets, soaking my hair, running down my back to my waistband. I wore sweatpants, like any good gym rat getting his sweat on.
Or a dumbass boyfriend who’d sent a text five hours ago about dinner and hadn’t even been given the courtesy of a two-word reply.
Carly was at work, and Vey was staying overnight at the groomers, so why bother getting back to me? Dinner would wait. I would wait. I’d promised her that, and she knew I wouldn’t take it back no matter what crap she pulled. She trusted me that much.
Or maybe she didn’t care if I walked.
Her lips parted then she shut her mouth again. Somehow I could still make out the slightest change in her features even though the room was almost pitch black. Twilight was my favorite time of day. The rolling dark turning the sky red before night descended, full and absolute. Covering up all the shit we didn’t want to deal with in the light.
Instead of encouraging her to say whatever she’d cut off, I bent at the waist and blew out a breath, gripping my knees to keep from picking up the nearest dumbbell and heaving it through the window. I didn’t consider myself a violent guy by nature, but considering I’d gotten my rocks off and padded my wallet by making people bloody for years, maybe I needed to do some soul-searching. In more ways than one.
Silence hummed between us, heavy with things neither one of us were willing to say. If I spoke right now, something would probably come out that I’d regret.
Eventually.
I knew she expected me to ask her where she’d been. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know if she’d gone off to clear her head after therapy or if she’d been off screwing some other dude. Worry had come first, as it always did. That something had happened. That she was hurt.
But she was here. Whole. Strong. Completely unreachable, at least by me. And I couldn’t bear to ask questions, in case she’d tell me the truth. Right now, I couldn’t take it.
I couldn’t lose her too.
I turned my back and picked up my shirt off the floor. Fuck this. I couldn’t handle any bullshit tonight. But where the hell could I go?
Since I’d been with Mia, I’d let some of my other friends fall by the wayside. The ones who only wanted to fight or fuck or were looking for a wingman for either. I hadn’t become a complete hermit. Some of the guys from the gym had remained close. And there was Slater.
Slater didn’t have a choice when it came to letting me crash on his couch. Best friend privilege. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone—how long until I gave in again—but if I didn’t get out now, I’d regret it. I just knew it.
I tugged on the shirt and mopped up my face with the hem. I needed a shower. Later. I’d worry about that when I got wherever I was going. Probably Slater’s. I’d stop by the bar first. Not the one where Mia and I worked. Another one. Someplace anonymous. I’d drink and brood and hope like hell that the alcohol would stop this burning in my gut.
When I turned back, I nearly collided with Mia. That had been weakness, needing to suck down one more greedy glimpse. She was right there, a heartbeat away. Her eyes huge as they locked with mine, as she shrugged off her backpack and grabbed the bottom of her shirt.
“No.” The denial was instantaneous. It had to be.
If I didn’t stop her before she showed me even one slice of her perfect skin, made even more so because it wasn’t perfect, then I’d give in. She was my drug and I wasn’t strong enough to resist a fix. Not wh
en I could smell her clean, pure scent and see the glint of gold at her ears that meant she was wearing the earrings I’d bought her. She so rarely let me buy her things. But those earrings, tiny boxing gloves, meant so much more to both of us.
We’d met because she’d wanted to fight me. Maybe it had been fate. I didn’t believe in crap like that normally. She made me believe in too much. Maybe that was why I held on so damn tight.
Without Mia, too many of my dreams would die.
“Yes.” She stepped closer and stood in the path of the streetlight outside the window. The beam lit up her eyes. Thick makeup shadowed them, made them twin black holes. Her lips were red and darkly sweet, like strawberries coated in chocolate.
I couldn’t—wouldn’t—take a taste.
She stroked my chest, her touch so much more sure now than it had been when we’d first gotten together. Back then, a no from me would’ve made her back off during sex. Or pre-sex. Or whatever the hell this dance was that brought her long, lean body so close to mine.
She arched against me and sank her teeth into my shoulder. It shouldn’t have made me instantly hard. I shouldn’t have grabbed her long braids in my fists and yanked her head back to claim that wild, hungry mouth with my own. This wasn’t the way. We needed to talk. I needed to shift back from her hips pressing so insistently into mine. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t. I knew what she craved because the same craving streaked through my blood.
Breathing fast, she yanked up her shirt, knowing I’d pull it off. I’d help her as I always did. Together, we were both weak.
And when my hands closed over hers and tugged the material higher, then when they greedily slipped lower to caress the flesh I knew as intimately as my own, I expected her to gasp. To beg. Not to twist away and pant as if I’d plunged a knife into her chest.
“What?” I jerked up her shirt again while she fought to pull it down. “Let me see.”
I drew her toward the window and turned her into the shaft of light, swallowing hard at the black tattoo outline covering her ribs. I had a tat in that spot too. Those bastards hurt. Even in the dim light, I could make out the roses and shaded gloves.