“I’m so sorry for putting all that on you, Meekai . . .”
“Who was he?” His smile had retreated, replaced with a jaw that ticked and jerked as I pondered over the answer.
Grit vibrated up his vocal cords, his thumb tapping incessantly on his thigh, waiting for me to give him the answer he thought he needed. I could see him struggling to find calm, not wanting the question to sound as dangerous as he meant it. Yet he held no apology, just a need to hold my trust and solve all my problems. Giving him a name wouldn’t solve a thing.
“I can’t tell you that, Meekai. I’m not there yet. You’re the only one who knows, and I can’t believe I handed it over so easily. I didn’t mean to I . . .”
“Your family don’t know? Becca? The fucking police, Radley?” He looked at me, brows twisted inwards as he subconsciously turned his body into mine. “Have you reported it?” he asked, in a low, infuriated tone.
“Just you.” The words caught in my throat. “You’re the only one who knows, and the police wouldn’t believe me if I tried, and I refuse to sit there and make them. Please, let that be enough. I can’t give you names, I can’t give you anything else. He took everything from me, Meekai. There’s only one thing I have left to give . . . I . . . this feels so fucking humiliating.”
“Tell me, Violet. I’m in this with you. Nothing could change the way I feel for you. I wish you could see yourself the way I see you, feel the way I feel about you, feel how deep it goes.”
“Why do you say such . . . big fucking things, Meekai?”
“Because you make me feel such big fucking things, Radley.”
His eyes drifted to my hand that rested on the bed closest to him. His right hand twitched as he lifted his eyes to meet mine, directing me back down to his hand as it reached out for mine. The sparrow lifted in a slow delicate dance as it hovered and inched closer, landing gently on top of my hand. I turned my hand over, my palm turned in submission, permission given as he laced our fingers together. He stroked the sensitive skin on my inner wrist, igniting every feeling I’d tried to repress, in fear of remembering everything I wanted to forget.
I turned my head away as I reached for the words he was asking to trust him with. Basic words really, yet they felt like another language.
“A kiss . . .” Why did those two words feel so heavy and thick? I felt naked.
The warmth of Meekai’s hand left my own, the bed jostled as I felt the presence and warmth of his body inch closer, his shoulder a breath away from mine. They felt like magnets desperate to touch, the pull tangible, like a thick rope that tugged and jolted back and forth. I wanted to bottle it; to always have a souvenir of how it felt to fall so easily for him. The earth felt like it stopped to listen the closer he got, the silence deafening, awareness making itself known. My eyes fluttered closed as I prepared to hand everything over to him. Was it really that easy? To give yourself away?
His fingers grazed along my jawline, heat trailed behind as goosebumps arrived right on time, waving the white flag and leaning into his touch. It was so easy. His fingers settled under my chin and tenderly directed my head to face him.
“You’re safe with me,” he promised. “I will never take anything from you that you don’t want to give me. I want the hurt, the pain,” he exhaled, “I want nothing less than every part you’re willing to give. You’ve already got me. Plot twist, it was that easy, baby. I’m yours.”
He gave me a shrug. Not a shrug of defeat, but a shrug that signaled he’d given himself over to me, easily, completely. He wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed. There was no second guessing. His surety floored me; he’d always been so sure. Maybe one day he’d tell me why, but for now I had to give him a part of myself. I wanted to feel free; borderless, completely open to searching out what it felt like to fall the whole way. I supposed if I wanted to land on my feet I had to hide in his surety and trust him. Trust someone until you can’t.
“A kiss is the only first I have left. It’s all I have to give that’s mine alone. And the thing is . . . I want you to have it, I do. I want you to change everything by erasing the rest. I want you to erase the memory of him.”
His jaw clenched and his fingers fell from where they held attention on my chin, reaching out for me, interlacing our fingers again. Bottled fury changed the deep brown of his eyes to a reddish hue that was uniquely him. It expressed the most honest part of him. His eyes gave him away, and I loved that I could incite the part of him that needed to protect me.
I fell into the honesty that was Meekai, inching toward him, needing him. His breath hitched as mine fell like scattered secrets, reaching for him, not knowing how to kiss him but realizing it didn’t matter. My free hand reached for his face, tracing along his jawline in languid temptation. My fingers came to rest on his chin, my thumb feathered along his full bottom lip.
His eyes closed in lazy need, his hand flexed, pulsing pressure that was losing the fight as he moaned, “Fuck . . . Violet . . . Baby, you’re not making this easy.”
Baby. That was the second time he’d let it slip. I gave into it, the needy ownership I never thought I’d be open to. I leaned in, my thumb stroking his lip as I grazed the tip of my nose against his, the touch igniting the ache between my thighs and freeing the part of me that would’ve called this impossible two weeks ago.
He’d brought me my deepest shame; my body had caved to his manipulation. He’d drawn out my orgasm while he tore me apart. That was what I’d struggled with the most.
As I breathed Meekai in, the nevers and impossibilities floated like bubbles that popped one by one, setting them free, giving me a part of my freedom back. My choices felt like they were becoming my own again, and I wanted to feel it all.
I tilted my head, angling, searching. My lips barely grazed his before I felt him pull away. That one action sent humiliation into free fall. How quickly things could change. I ripped my hand from his and scampered to the edge of the bed.
“Why would you do that? What, too damaged for you, Meekai?”
“Hey, no!” he growled. His weight shifted off the bed as he got up, swiftly moving his way around to the front of the bed, coming to kneel in front of me like an offering. A complete fucking lie.
“For someone who was struggling a minute ago you did a pretty good job of delivering a complete one-eighty in the next breath. Forgive me for assuming it was anything less than disgust,” I threw back at him.
One hand grabbed onto my knee, the other reached toward my face. I pushed it away, like I pushed back the tears.
“Feelings aren’t facts, Radley.”
I scoffed at him as I tried to move from the edge of the bed to the center, away from him. “Save your condescension for someone who cares to hear it, Meekai.” I needed space, but space wasn’t what he was offering. He pushed down on my knees and asked me to look at him.
“Please, just look at me, Violet.”
“Right now, looking at you is the last thing I wanna do.”
“Please, please, just hold onto me. Don’t let go, Radley, please.”
Pain. Genuine pain thrashed within the confines of his plea.
. . . don’t let go Radley, please . . .
I looked down at him, some of the fire shifting. Once he knew I was listening, he spoke.
“I don’t want you to remember this day as the day you gave away your first kiss. I can’t, Radley. I know I told you the choice was yours, but I won’t fucking share you with him.” He shook his head in defiance. “No way! Not a chance in hell I’ll share you with that motherfucker!”
The anger melted away with understanding, but he still had to know I couldn’t give him the name he wanted.
“I’ll never tell you who he is. If you want to move forward with me, you need to respect my limits, and that’s a hard limit. I feel like he just took my chance away. I was so ready, Meekai. That in itself is fucking huge and you pulling away right now, justified or not, it hurts.”
He pushed himself up from where he kneele
d before me and moved to sit next to me on the bed. He grabbed both my hands pulling them onto his lap. “Your chance hasn’t been taken, I just refuse to let you give away the only part of you that you have left. It’s sacred, Radley, and you deserve nothing less than sharing this memory with me alone.” He smiled at me and chuckled. “Not gonna lie, I’m hurting right now, but soon enough we’ll be lost together, Violet.”
He pulled me in closer and cupped my face in both hands. I could see the struggle, could feel it in the firm grip that held me still as he leaned in, and left a warm imprint of his lips on my forehead. He breathed me in, pushing back and looking at me with an intensity that held tight to the internal chambers of my heart. The emotion that emanated from his stare burned a trail so deep, a lone tear fell in complete reverence.
“Every experience you have with me will be a first. When you’re naked in my bed, when I finally get the chance to taste you, to feel you from the inside out, I promise, it will be like he never fucking took what was mine. I will erase him and what we build together will change everything. And baby, I promise you this . . . we will never be the same.”
And with that, I was his.
15
Radley
“This is a bad idea,” I said in the pathetic tone that chicks always seemed to be reduced to when their hormones gave way to stupidity.
“Bad ideas make for great stories, Violet,” he whispered into my ear before kissing my neck and lingering there as he breathed me in. He’d been breathing me in a lot over the last hour. He stood nestled behind me, hands lightly rested on my hips, invading my space like it was his to take.
He’d told me that kissing my neck, my hands, my forehead, behind my ear, my nose and the top of my head, were all reasonable places to allow him to kiss until I worked up the balls-direct quote-to ravishing his lips and body. I’d rolled my eyes at him. My punishment? The collarbone got thrown in as disciplinary action.
“Roll your eyes again and I’ll include my hands not just my mouth.”
I had to remind him that his hands were already gripping the sides of my waist. He’d broken his own rules as fast as they’d left his mouth.
Going from zero to one-hundred with Meekai summed up our relationship perfectly. Confusion summed it up just as fairly. But in all honesty, I gave in because I needed-wanted-to get used to the physical contact. Even though I wanted him, it didn’t make it any less difficult to accept the physical part that I knew was coming; that was beginning.
It seemed like a fair trade. The chaste kisses that felt anything but, the kisses I didn’t let him know I wasn’t opposed to. The lingering of his lips on my skin was becoming easier and easier to dissolve into and crave. I’d told him that I refused to let him treat me like glass; a fragile thing to tiptoe around. He was taking complete liberty of that discussion, his lips on a journey that had no particular destination, but knew exactly what they were doing.
“We’ve been over this. I won’t kiss you . . . on your lips,” he said as his warm breath vibrated up my neck and along my sensitive skin. My body rushed with adrenaline; the threat of the thought alone was enough to make want everything I’d been afraid of. “It’s all up to you, baby, but just remember, if you feel it now, the things I wanna do to you . . . focus on the fact that these are only words. Words are nothing like the feeling. When you let me, I’ll make good on the words and make you feel everything.”
I groaned. He got his first groan as my body openly fucked me over. Sonofabitch!
“Fuck . . .” Fingers ground into my waist but left just as quickly, imprinted on my skin. “You can’t do that, Violet.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Moan. You can’t moan around me. I’m too vulnerable.”
I laughed at his dramatics. “Too bad,” I said as I told him to focus.
We were screen-printing black tees with white bold letters. Mine said “Taken.” His said “Tolerated.”
“I don’t know why we have to go all public declaration, Meekai. I think it’s a little soon, don’t you?”
He moved from behind me and came to rest against the desk I was using to screen-print the shirts on. Meekai referred to our public declaration as “The claiming.” I’d rolled my eyes and he kissed my collarbone, repeatedly.
I used the squeegee to run the thick white ink over the word tolerated. My shirt had already been printed and sat draped over the stairs bannister to dry, waiting for Monday.
“I know you think this is an act of defiance, like burning your bra, but it’s not. It says commitment. I want the stares. I want the chatter. I want people to know you’re mine.”
“Can you calm down? Like, at all? Going along with this is a big step and you’re making me really nervous. I’ve never done this couple thing before, and a public service announcement wasn’t something I thought I’d be doing a couple weeks into senior year.”
“Let me clarify something, Violet. We’re a couple. It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship, and you’re taken. It’s the t-shirts or a school announcement on Monday morning. Mrs. Dyke is partial to my charms, and it won’t take much to get behind the mic of the P.A system.”
I laughed at his audacity and gently lifted the silk screen off the shirt I was working on. “You’re so dumb.” I smiled at him. “At least tolerated is a clear assessment when it comes to you.”
“Dumb? No, I just know what I want, and I want everyone else to know. And taken is a clear assessment when it comes to you and me. I’m not gonna apologize for it either. I want the shit talk in the locker room to stop, and I want you to get used to this thing that is happening between us.”
I placed the silk screen on the table and my heart skipped a beat, but not the good skip. It was the put-your-guard-up kind.
“What do you mean shit talk? Are they talking about what I look like?” I began to fidget on the spot, pulling my shirt down, trying to cover myself and my insecurities as I thought about how all of this felt like a fairy tale for a reason. It was. Made up dribble that never had the possibility of playing out in real life. Too good to be true.
Piqued curiosity took place of Meekai’s smile. His hand reached out for my face, jaw set firm as he moved closer. “Radley, why do you keep mentioning the way you look like it’s actually
something that’s worth a damn?” He shook his head in disgust. “They really fucked you up back in Adalita, didn’t they?”
I tried to move his hand away with my ink-stained fingers, but as usual, he held tight and refused to let me look anywhere else but into his eyes as I spoke. The thing I was learning about Meekai, he had to have complete eye contact. I found his need to read me like a book completely overwhelming and he knew it, yet he demanded it.
“Violet, you’re so fucking beautiful it hurts. You gotta know that. How could you not know that?”
“Because I know nothing else. Hardy, the whole school, they told me I should wear baggy clothing to cover up the shit they didn’t wanna see. Probably should use more makeup, too. If more than one person says it, it must be true, right?”
“No.” He fumed. “It doesn’t even come fucking close to being the truth. It’s a lot closer to being intimidation. If I gotta go there, I will. If you’re forcing me to address it, here it is. Radley, your body is built for sin. Sorry to be crass considering everything that’s happened here today, but you’re a man's wet dream, pure and simple.” Frustration had both of his hands reaching for my face, an absolute need to get through to me. “Let me ask you this. How many times did Hardy Breeland ask you out or come onto you in the years you’ve known him?”
Heat prickled from my fingertips and made a fast ascent up to my face. “I have no idea,” I said with complete honesty. “It was a lot. But from about the age of fifteen, it became less public. In public, he’d humiliate me, but afterwards he’d find a way to drag me into the school bathrooms, unoccupied hallways or library stacks, wherever he could. He’d beg me to the point where he’d leave marks on my arms.”
/> “Excuse me?” Meekai looked sick. “Did . . . was he . . .” He couldn’t say it, but I knew what he wanted to know. I would never say his name. He could guess all he wanted.
“Quit it, Meekai. I told you it’s not up for discussion.” I pulled away, quickly cleaned the ink off my hands with a damp rag and grabbed the shirt as I moved to place it next to mine on the bannister. He followed behind. I could feel the questions circling like snow flurries.
“No,” I said with finality. I could feel him at my back, his hands came to rest on my shoulders as I looked down towards the living room where I could hear Gamma watching some game show that was taking a beating.
“Unbelievable!” she yelled at the television. “You should turn being a loser into a profitable industry, Karen. Lord knows you’d be one rich ass moron!”
I grabbed onto the bannister, nerves on high alert, her voice a reminder. She’d come home and seen that I was okay, but told me there was a discussion that would be taking place as soon as Meekai left. My time was up.
Meekai turned me around, staring the way he liked to do, burning his need into my soul. No words, just desperation and hurt. “Okay, Violet, but I can’t forget what I know. You have to see from my point of view, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said with wobbly emotion.
“When I see you, do you know what I think? Like within the first moment my eyes land on you?” he asked. I shook my head in reply. “I think I can’t believe she’s gonna be mine.” He winked, trying to release the tension. “I think, I can’t believe someone as beautiful as you exists in real life. Your body is perfect, Radley. I don’t know how many more times I gotta say it, and I don’t mean to sound like a pig, but since it comes down to image, I have to tell you that what you’ve been led to believe was a lie. A lie based on control. “They, he, told you that because you were unattainable. When someone like Hardy and those dumb fucks want to control a situation, a person, they try to break them. When a girl like you says no to Hardy, his ego kicks into high gear. He has to save face. Everything you were put through was born from his own insecurities. Believe it or not, but your torment was his high. He got off on it, because he couldn’t get off with you. Retribution.”
Thirteen Hours To You Page 18