by Raven Scott
“No, no, I know what she said. Natasha, sweetheart, no.” Shaking his head, Erik inched forward in his seat slightly, and a certain disgust shimmered in his gaze. Engulfing my hand in both of his, he raised my fingertips up only to pause midway with a slight hitch in his breath. “There’s no way. I’m not interested in that enough to notice more than how nice your hair looks all the time.”
“You’re a good man.” The compliment made Erik’s cheek twitch, and he massaged my fingers absently as my mind puttered along sluggishly. Little snippets flashed behind my eyes when I blinked, but it all cut off into black at no point in particular. “What if you get bored of me?”
“Then I’ll tell you to your face. I’ve failed missions before, Natasha, but they say you fight ten times harder when you had a great cause to fight for.” My heart fluttered when he squeezed my hand firmly but not tightly, and he pursed his lips in determination. For a second, he looked the way he must’ve right before he jumped out of a plane or something— fierce, ready, resolute— almost single-mindedly focused on the objective.
Erik was not going to give up without fighting for his life, and I . . . I had to fight just as hard.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you’re right, Erik.” Wiggling a little closer, to the very edge of the bed, I sniffled a breath in preparation Erik frowned under tightly knit brows. “Well, about Carlyle. He found my mom, but he also found the guys that hurt us. It wasn’t for me directly. He did it for himself, because he just found out about Valerie, and he was on a crusade to make himself feel better.”
“Natasha, I’m over caring about what shady shit that asshole is involved wi—" Reaching to silence Erik with a thumb on his lips, his goat scruff tickled my palm, and he automatically turned into my touch. The strangest sensation shot up my arm, his clean-shaven face rough but somehow still smooth, like he put lotion on. His goatee was starting to grow unevenly since the last time he’d trimmed it, and I inhaled sharply through flared nostrils as I traced the line down his chin.
“I want you to understand, though . . . Carlyle found them, and I don’t know what happened, but no one ever asked me if I wanted to confront them. I didn’t get the chance, and I know for a fact that I never will. What happened to Valerie, it was awful. Yeah. But . . . but what about me? Why did Carlyle get the hog all the self-righteousness and anger? He never has to answer to anyone, but this had nothing to do with him and he still made it all about him. Even Valerie doesn’t know that he had them, so it wasn’t even about her, either. So, I guess . . . you’re right. Things aren’t cut and dry, and there’s a lot of stuff that happens that we don’t like, but we have no control over it.” Licking my dry lips as my whisper morphed into a hoarse rasp, I exhaled a shaky breath as I stroked the longer hairs curving around Erik’s chin. “I don’t know if it’s because, you know, it hasn’t been a long time, but I really feel okay when I’m around you, Erik. To be honest, I don’t know if it’s real, or if it’s even what it’s supposed to be.”
Trailing off as my words got jumbled up as my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, I sniffed hard, but Erik seemed to understand. His eyes narrowed on mine, his fingers flexing as he brought mine to his lips to very gently kiss the tips, and I tensed at the almost numbing tingles that rippled down to my palm. Not daring to close my eyes, my heart raced suddenly, and my eyelids fluttered dangerously while he pressed the flat backs of my fingers to his cheek.
“I don’t expect it to be easy, Natasha, but if we get there, we get there, and if we don’t . . . then we don’t. I’m not going to go screw around with someone else. It’d just be easier to jerk off.” Rolling my lips between my teeth, the blood drained from my cheeks at the mere mention of that awful fucking idea, and Erik smiled encouragingly. “So, do you want to make some breakfast? Surprise— I went to the store last night and got bacon and eggs and stuff. I know you can do something with it.”
“Is today the day we’re leaving?” Anxiety thrummed faintly in my gut, and Erik nodded as he straightened to arch sharply in the chair. He’d been slumped over this whole time, and the muted pop of his joints peppered my ears as I watched his muscles roil under his skin. He raised his arms to pop his shoulders, shaking his arms when they swung down with a heavy sigh, and I sat up to swipe my hair from my face.
“I assumed the smaller piles of clothes we—"
“No.” Narrowed eyes met mine as I wrapped my arms around myself, bunching up his t-shirt under my breasts, and I shook my head a little harder than necessary. “I like this shirt.”
“Ah, okay. You should put some underwear on, at least.” The awkwardness in his voice infected the atmosphere, and Erik rubbed the back of his neck before pointing a thumb at the door. “I’ll make some coffee. It’s almost six a.m., so if we want to leave by eight, we should get movin’.”
“Okay.” Shuffling out to shut the door behind him, Erik left in his bed, and I fisted his shirt to bring it to me nose and inhale. My eyelids fluttered closed, his smell wafting up into my brain to calm all my terrible thoughts, and I held my breath for a long moment.
Erik really was a hero— not just an American hero, but when I needed him, he came. He beat back all the monsters, not only the ones who beat against the outside of my head but the inner ones, too. Sitting back on my heels, I slumped a little as worry slowly infected my abdomen.
There were so many things I had to say, still. So many revelations. So many reasons the voluntarily expose that would make any man run away with reasonable disgust.
My eyes stung, and I laid back down to cover myself with the comforter before that first, brave tear trekked the wasteland that was my face. My chest tightened at how overwhelmingly huge my mountain of problems was now that I wasn’t ignoring it.
And I was gonna lose Erik when he climbed too close to the top.
27
Natasha
“Is something wrong?” Glancing up from pushing around eggs on my plate, I nodded firmly, and Erik’s brows furrowed as questions blossomed in his gaze. “Do you want to tell me?”
“I’m not nervous. I thought it’d be more . . . daunting. Um, I don’t like sitting in the front seat, so . . . ” Trailing off, I shimmied a piece of bacon to the center of the plate, and he pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I’m sorry. I know you’re not them, but it’s not you, Erik, not really.”
“Righting wrongs is something I do a lot.” Erik smiled warmly, and my heart sputtered when he touched the back of my free hand. “It’s not such a mystery. You sit in the front when Illya drives. You sit in the back and still hold the door handle.”
My lips twitched in a sad, ugly, tiny smile, and I set down my fork as my appetite fled completely. A black blotch spread across my chest, and Erik sat back a little as his full attention laid firmly on me. Propping my elbow on the table, I held my chin on my palm as I thought on that observation.
“This guy used to take me to the grocery store. We got real food. I would buy produce, not fried shit in bags or cans of overly processed dye. It was awesome. It wasn’t like my mom ever ate, so I knew it’d just be me and Valerie. It was never more than two hundred dollars, and in Dallas, that’s how much the hookers cost. So, we got a couple weeks of food, and for, what, twenty minutes of my time in the front seat of a car parked behind the store. At the time, it was worth it.”
“Is that how you learned to cook? You had to do it all?” I nodded, humming softly, and Erik’s jaw ticked as his eyes brightened. “Valerie didn’t cook?”
“No. I mean, she made mac-n-cheese and hotdogs and stuff, but she . . . she hated doing chores. She always said she was too tired, too busy, too whatever. She was going to her friend’s and didn’t want to get her shirt wet. There were always reasons, so I stopped asking and did it myself. She was such a brat until . . . ” The confessions seemed never-ending, and I frowned under furrowed brows. “Our mom did something. She must’ve pissed someone off, because they grabbed us and held us hostage for six days. We were there in separate room
s, and everything I did, everything I endured, it was all for nothing. I’d ask her to do something, and she did it, pouting and dragging her feet.”
“Is that when you started lecturing her about safety?” Nodding again, I gulped down the dense lump in my throat, and the crease between Erik’s brow deepened. “You didn’t leave until you were sixteen, though.”
“Sixteen is when Valerie and I both had jobs— she worked part-time and I worked full-time second and third shift. We made enough money and I convinced my sister she needed to get above low A’s in school to get a scholarship to an art school for computerized imagery. Job opportunity, right.” Hallowing my cheeks to puff out my lips, I scrunched up my nose before shaking my head a little. My wrist started to ache from the angle, but I ignored it as Erik frowned deeper, darker. “Anyway, I kept going to those guys. We needed money because Mom was useless. I didn’t trust her not to spend it on drugs, so I had to do it all myself.”
“It’s always you, isn’t it, Natasha?”
“The qualities of a leader.” Tilting my head at him, I inhaled a deep, stabilizing breath as Erik’s eyebrow twitched. “And you’re a follower.”
“Protector sounds a lot better. A queen always needs one.” Scoffing lightly even as fire licked up my neck, I tore my eyes off him to stare at my plate. “Ah, come on, Natasha. That was a good one. Anyway, you know, Natasha, you’ve never lied to me. Is it because I’m too dense to see an ulterior motive?”
“You’re a bleeding heart, Erik. You don’t think a good enough lie is capable of being a lie. If it’s believable, it should be believed. Even the outrageous with plausible explanations, you don’t second guess genuineness if it’s mimicked well enough.”
Smiling faintly, I picked up my fork again to stab a piece of egg as Erik’s eyes narrowed on me. He didn’t looked particularly put out by my words, and I licked my lips heavily. “I like that about you. It’s . . . it’s pure. It’s bright, and I want it. Everything I’ve said to you could be a lie, but it’s a sob story and plausible and because of what you’ve seen, you’re inclined to believe it because you love when people start bad and get better.”
“You can’t fake the breaks, though, and that’s what started this, isn’t it? At CVS, you were breaking, and I fucked up with the jacket, but the rest . . . I don’t lie, and you, you cover up, you don’t lie.” Stroking my hand with his thumb, Erik sighed softly as he scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “You’re avoiding the question, Natasha.”
“I don’t think you’re dense, Erik. Everyone chooses what facts to accept and what to ignore based on personal experience. You—" Pointing at him with my fork, I inhaled deeply as I slumped a little in my seat. “You don’t acknowledge the fact that, to avoid trouble or punishment, the automatic reaction is to lie. You don’t acknowledge that I had sex for money, because I did it for my sister. Just like you, I put myself through unspeakable horrors for someone else, someone innocent. I murdered my own mother, but it’s palatable because of the negligence— because when it all comes down to it, it’s her fault.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, Natasha. You turned it around on me to avoid it. You gave me a tiny bit of what really worried you and steered the conversation somewhere else. I took interrogation classes, you know.” Sucking my bottom lip between my teeth, I ducked my head even as Erik smiled encouragingly and squeezed my hand gently. “Like I said, you cover up. You’re really good at it, too. The thing is, I care about everything you say. So every time you cover up, it uncovers something else more.”
“Yeah, I’m not . . . I mean, the back seat is . . . maybe it can be fixed. Maybe it can’t. There’s gonna be hours, days in the car. So, why am I not nervous? I . . . I’m gonna meet your parents and your siblings, and I’m not nervous. I’m going to leave everything behind, and I’m not anxious. I . . . ” Trailing off as my tongue dried, I rubbed my knees under the table as heat slithered up my neck. “I’m wearing your clothes, and I like it. It took me, I don’t know, I was twenty-four when I realized that I didn’t feel disgusting putting on my own clothes . . . before work, after work, after a shower . . . and that was when I realized it, not when it started happening.”
“Maybe, all that psychology you just tried to use on me is exactly the answer you didn’t want to admit to yourself, and it just so happened to apply to me.” Maybe Erik’s not as dense about some things. “Natasha, you don’t have to validate anything by being nervous, or excited, or anxious, or uncomfortable. If you want to wear my shirts, you should.” My cheek twitched as guilt clogged my throat, and I ducked my head as Erik continued to stroke the back of my hand. A tightness gripped my chest, and he stood up to round the table and kneel by my chair. “Hey.”
Cupping my chin very slowly, very obviously, Erik lifted my gaze to his, and my vision blurred as the last few minutes caught up with me. My nose heated, and I rolled my lips between my teeth to stop them from trembling. Gingerly, his fingers curled against my cheek, and apprehension skittered up and down my spine as determination knit his brows.
“I know it’s only been a few weeks, and so much has happened, but I’m not with you to fix you. I’m with you to support you. You’re messed up, you know it, and you’re trying to help yourself in your own way. Not everyone can go to the hospital for help. Sometimes, that’s not the kind of help they need— not sitting in a room, naked, waiting for a doctor to swing around when you know he doesn’t care about you or anything you have to say. There’s other ways to get help. We can go to anonymous survivor’s meetings, or we can just have a good time, because God only knows, you don’t have many good days.” Tears welled in my eyes, and Erik brushed his thumb along my eyelashes with a tenderness that stole my breath. He was such a good man, and I had done such terrible things. Gulping harshly, I jerked my head in a nod, and his lips quirked beneath his goatee when I reached a trembling hand to tug on it. The bristly, coarse hairs sent goosebumps surging up my arm, and my heart beat furiously.
“O-okay, yeah.” A bare sigh deflated my fiery lungs, and I pursed my lips thinly, as Erik retreated and stood up. Sitting in the chair, he seemed so tall and broad, larger than life, almost monstrous. Before I could stop myself, I grabbed his waist, and his tense, toned muscles flexed against my cheek. His six-pack rippled with power when he put a hand on my head, and my throbbing lids fluttered closed as I leaned heavily against him.
28
Erik
“Yeah, Dad, I’m on the highway right now. We’re about to pass into Pennsylvania.” The line crackled loudly against the seats of my car, and I glanced into the back seat while Natasha stared out the window. She really knew how to ignore what she thought didn’t involve her, which was as nice as it was infuriating. Not to mention the whole conversation this morning.
“I just wanted to call and make sure. Cathy’s here. She wants to talk to you.” Biting back a groan, I frowned as I flexed my fingers around the wheel, and my dad chuckled knowingly. “She’s not so bad.”
“I don’t know whether or not to dispute that.” My sister’s voice started a far-away muffle but grew in clarity, and I clenched my jaw shut when she obviously took the phone from my dad. “Hey, Erik! Long time no talk. You didn’t send me any letters during my deployment. I had to find out through Dad on the way home from the airport that you flunked being a cop.”
“Believe it or not, Cathy, but my life doesn’t revolve around your deployments. How long are you here for?” So I can plan a party when you fucking leave. My sister, man, she was a piece of work, and not a good one. She was average at everything, but she succeeded at most things and thought she was awesome. Christ.
“Six weeks. I’ve been meaning to talk to you, actually. You know, while I was overseas, I met this girl, Maya, and she lives in the same town as you in New York. I invited her to this thing this weekend so you could meet her.” My brows shot up, a disgusted, sharp bark of laughter bursting from my throat, and my sister’s frown rippled in her voice. “What? I thought you’d like her
, and she liked you, or the idea of you, anyway.”
“You’re a terrible judge of character, Cathy. Just because Jason and Mary met in Afghanistan when she was a war reporter doesn’t mean that’s the only place to meet women.” Rubbing my jaw roughly, I shook my head, and I could practically see Cathy pouting when I blinked. Flicking on my blinker to merge into the cruise lane, I inhaled deeply before Natasha’s eyes bristled the hairs on the back of my neck. “Anyway, are you staying with Mom and Dad, or at your boyfriend’s place? He’s not back yet, right?”
“Nope. He comes back in two weeks, though. Ben’s only staying for two weeks before getting reassigned. Speaking of Jason, he’s not happy that Uncle Mike is gonna be at the party tomorrow. It’s gonna be awkward again.” Snorting roughly at that, I exhaled a gruff breath as I gripped the wheel tightly. “He’s a creep. I know he gets invited to be polite, but it’s not like his kids would know why he didn’t go one time. Mom says he has to come because she doesn’t want to listen to it.”
“Yeah, fuck him, though. Seriously. I gotta go, though. We’re about to hit the exchange on I-95.” Even if my sister was average, she stuck to her guns— literally— and I smirked when she scoffed loudly. “I’ll see you when we get there.”
I hung up before she could even take a breath to protest, and I settled into my seat to clear my throat roughly. The music we’d been listening to filtered through the speakers, and I flexed my fingers to get rid of the stiffness. We were going to be on the highway almost the entire way down, and my brows furrowed sharply as I tried— and failed— to calculate how far my three-quarter tank of gas would get me.