He turned, facing the nylon backdrop behind the stage, and struck an Fm7 chord on his Les Paul electric. The amplification pealed into the dark wall of night, and the crowd rallied with such thunder and force he couldn’t hear himself think. Didn’t matter. For this last song, he only needed to feel.
When they calmed down, Laz switched on his mic. “You fucking rock, Lubbock, Texas.”
The screams waxed with ear-stabbing intensity.
“One more song.” Laz waited for the hush. “This is the first time we’ve played this one live. And since Jay locked himself in his room for ten hours writing it, I think he should sing it front and center. What you guys think?”
Shrills and roars echoed hollowly in Jay’s chest. He scrunched his neck farther into the shelter of his shoulders. He respected what Laz was trying to do. The relentless nudging was backed with nothing more than good intentions. But Jay’s reason for performing from the isolation of the dark corner was beyond a sane person’s understanding. Triggers and traumas and murdered dreams. He was a walking manual on mental disorders.
“Welp.” Laz laughed. “Jay must be getting a blowjob back there. Guess we’ll hear how he sings while he’s cumming.”
More screaming. “Jay. Jay. Jay.” His name rolled into a chanting staccato.
Jay blew out a ragged breath. Laz teased him about blowjobs, knowing he’d committed to abstinence from alcohol, smoke, drugs, and sex. Laz also knew he had been teetering precariously on that straight edge ever since he learned about Charlee.
The burn in his throat spread behind his eyes. She was gone, but she could never die. She was alive in him, guiding his thoughts and holding together what was left of his heart.
He strummed the beginning chords. He didn’t hear them. He felt them. In the stretch of his chest. In the heat of his blood pushing through his veins. In the burning around his eyes. He felt her.
He cleared his throat and turned on his mic. “This is called You Weren’t Just a Girl.”
The drugging tones of Laz’s guitar joined his own through a slow-building chord progression. Then the instruments fell silent for his vocal solo.
“When I walked into your eyes, I saw tomorrow.” He swallowed. “I saw you sleeping next to me. I saw you holding me.” He licked cracked lips. “I saw you loving me.”
He pushed heavy breaths through the mic. “You weren’t just a girl.” His heart ached, bending with the refrain. “You were a vision. And without that vision, I would perish.”
Laz eased back in with a crawling tempo, accompanied by Rio’s tap-tap-tap drum beat in 4/4 time. Wil’s pulsating bass guitar brought the measures together with a deeper modulation.
As Rio opened up the hats and played quicker, Jay moved the chords up the fret in a fast, even legato and raised his voice. “I know something about pain. I have enough to liberate. I don’t know how to let it go.” His vocals cracked. “I don’t know how to let you go.”
His throat was on fire. Not from the strain of his vocal chords, but from the mass of grief simmering to escape. He sang the refrain hushed and pained. “You weren’t just a girl.” He choked, and Rio threw a concerned expression over his shoulder.
“You were a vision. And without that vision, I would perish.”
The harmony of instruments began the complex climb of the song. Jay grasped at the next verse, couldn’t feel it. So he altered it. “In my vision you hear me. You hear me say. There’s no metal. No rivets. No man of steel.”
The guitar pick in his hand shook and screeched the chords. His heart pounded painfully. “Take me to your grave. You weren’t just a girl.”
Sudden vertigo quaked his knees. He sang an improvised verse. “It’s getting dark. So dark. I can’t see you.” His fingers locked up. “I’m losing you.”
The pick dropped to the stage. His guitar followed, and the music crashed to a deafening silence.
He walked away. Down the metal stairs. Across the field. Away from the lights. Away from the crowd.
He walked until the burr of cicadas drowned out the distant roar of people. Then he dropped to his knees and pressed his fist on his sternum as if it could hold in his sob. It couldn’t.
Footsteps crunched the dried grass behind him. A moment later, a slender shadow fell over him. He looked up into blue eyes. They weren’t exquisite or unforgettable. Just…blue.
“You have a beautiful voice.” She knelt before him. “In fact, you are an incredibly beautiful man. And I think you could use a little lift. Allow me.”
His cloud of grief labored his breath, squeezed his chest, and fogged his mind. He wasn’t alone in the fog. There was a spark. His beacon in the dark. “Charlee.”
She smiled. “You can call me Charlee.” She pulled on the chain around her neck and a small vial appeared from between her breasts with a tiny spoon attached. She dipped it in the vial and held up a scoop of powder.
Her plain features blurred, fading in and out and morphing into the visage of his dreams. His fantasy raised her little spoon to his nose and blinked huge inimitable blue eyes. “Sniff, baby.”
Charlee wouldn’t tell him to sniff. She would never be able to tell him anything. Looking into the face before him, she was all he could see. Christ, he needed to let her go. He needed to forget.
He sniffed. A zing pulsed through him. His senses opened. The sky deepened. The soil smelled richer. And the powder-coated finger sliding over his gums and the roof of his mouth trailed ice.
His mind fractured in memory. Don’t be so cold, little boy. The shed loomed against the night sky, waiting.
A tongue replaced the finger. It stabbed in his mouth and his own lay limp and numb. “Charlee?”
“Mmm.” She purred and rubbed her tits against him.
The numbness trickled down his throat and enveloped the chasm in his chest. The ache at the center melted away.
He fell upon his back, arms stretched out above him, and gave into the high. Gave into the hands in his pants. Gave into the mouth around his cock.
The loneliness lost its grip. Charlee was all around him. Her smile, her body, her mouth, her hands.
Hands. Petting his thigh. Squeezing his dick. Dragging him to the shed. Shoving him into the belly of hell. Oh God. He pushed her off him and jumped to his feet, swaying through a wave of dizziness. “Hands flat on the ground.”
Blue eyes stared up at him. Then she smiled and turned on her knees, bending at the waist and offering her ass.
Nausea turned his stomach. He pushed it away. “Move your hands from where they are and we’re done. Clear?”
She nodded.
The girl he’d spent one eternal hour with was gone. Yet she wasn’t just a girl, and she could never die. Submerged in the haze of hallucination, he visualized her skin beneath his palms, her pussy wrapped around his dick, and her strong-willed voice filling his ears. She was alive in him and always would be.
He dropped his head on his shoulders and shouted his release. “Charrrrleee.”
Chapter Fourteen
‡
In the two weeks that followed, the penthouse had taken on a kind of tense stillness. Maybe because Charlee’s perception was limited to the confines of the stockroom, bedroom, and office, with Roy and Salvador as her only visitors.
She perched on the floor beneath Roy’s desk, her back pulled against his leg where he sat in the chair above her. She tried to tune out his conversation and focus on the drawing in her lap. If she could recall Jay’s scars better, she could perfect how the sketched flames should lick and curl around them.
What she did remember, however, had bound her to Jay those long painful months. Her mind remained whole, strengthening even, amidst the flames and steel of a man she hoped had gone on to fulfill his dreams. She clung to the vision of someday finishing his tattoo and seeing it displayed on stage for thousands of worshipping eyes. He deserved no less for saving her.
“I don’t care how long the company has been in your family.” Roy’s hand settled on her head and stroked h
er hair.
She leaned into the touch, craving the affection, despite the source.
“Sentimental shit is why you are drowning in debt.” Roy coiled a finger in her short strands and yanked, making her eyes water. “Take my offer, sell me the business, or I’ll make sure your competitors push you into bankruptcy.”
“I didn’t want to resort to this, Mr. Oxford.” The voice on the speaker shook, coughed. “Does the name Craig Grosky ring any bells? How about his daughter Charlee?”
The hand paused, stroked again. “I don’t hear any bells, Henry.”
“I hired an investigator. I know what that girl looks like, and I know what you did to her. I have proof.”
She stared at her sketchbook, hid behind her calmest expression, and tucked all her nerves deep inside.
“Are you attempting to blackmail me, Henry?”
“Yes.”
The stillness in the room convulsed. “Show me the evidence. This pointless conversation is nothing more than a poor attempt to weasel out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. Until you have something useful to say or prove, we’re done here.” His fist hit the phone, and it flew off the desk.
She held herself immobile, invisible.
“How the fuck does he know anything about the Grosky’s? Charlee doesn’t even look the same.”
The air crackled with his bellow, and she wasn’t sure who he was addressing.
He rose from the chair and sent it wheeling into the bookcase. “Unless he used my facial recognition software, my fucking design when she was out fucking around for four years.”
She curled into herself. His fury would seek her out, eventually.
He paced the room. “No, that’s not it. The evidence he’s insinuating would’ve come from inside the penthouse. A witness.” He stopped, whirled. “We have a mole, Salvador. It’s the only explanation. No one has access to the video storage, so it must be one of the men monitoring the cameras.”
I’m working on an undercover case…My client gave me a photo of a girl.
Dammit, Nathan. Was he leaking information to this Henry guy? How would she get a message to him when she hadn’t seen him since the night in the dining room? Could she signal something to the cameras? But how would she know who was watching? Roy didn’t miss anything.
The Craig shifted his weight. “Yes, sir.”
“I won’t cancel our trip to Newark tomorrow.” Roy approached her, hands in his pockets, eyes boring into her. “That worthless Russian running the Dinmore shipment cannot be trusted with this job. There’s too much on the line with this one. I have to be there.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Charlee will go with us.” He patted her head. “How’s that sound, beautiful girl. A trip to New Jersey?”
Like she had a choice. Leaving Nathan’s vigilance rammed her heart to her stomach. She suspected he’d watched her on the cameras over the previous two weeks and that knowledge alone had made her feel protected and less lonely, despite the depraved situations he must’ve witnessed. “Yes, Sir.”
“Very good. Salvador, make the preparations and find that fucking mole.”
Chapter Fifteen
‡
That night, Roy caned Charlee harder than ever before. Perhaps because he anticipated little opportunity to beat her on the trip or maybe it was punishment for Henry and the mole. She limped to bed on heavy feet, nursing even heavier thoughts. The reason for his brutality didn’t matter. Nathan was in danger, and she didn’t intend on leaving him.
As Roy showered, she gathered the chain beneath her pillow, one link at a time and hoped the movement wasn’t caught by the cameras.
He joined her in bed and wrapped his body around hers. She lay still. Please don’t stretch an arm beneath the pillow.
He settled, and she stared into the dark, listening as his breath slowed into the rhythmic pulse of sleep.
Thirty minutes passed. If she waited any longer, she’d wimp out. She could do this. Do it now.
At least one of the cameras would be infrared. They would see her but wouldn’t reach the room in time.
She clutched a length of chain, her hands concealed under the pillow, her movements slow and precise. He was on his back, his chest rising and falling with even respiration.
The garrote was ready, taut between her fists. Breathe, Charlee. Three…two…one…
She slipped it from the pillow, shoved it beneath his chin, and crossed her fists behind his head.
Sirens blared and the overhead lights flickered on. Damn it to high heaven. She hadn’t thought of that.
His eyes popped open, and his hands shot to hers. “Charleeeeee.” His roar was a bad sign. Very bad. It meant she hadn’t yanked hard enough. He could still breathe…and scream.
He wrestled her for the noose, and the stomping of footfalls exploded through the door.
Pull tighter, dammit. He was gasping, hacking. His eyes rolled back in his head. It was beautiful.
A fist shot through her periphery, slammed into her eye. Then another. And another.
She couldn’t breathe. She clawed at her throat. The chain. Oh God, the chain was wrapped around her neck and a heavy weight crushed her chest. Roy stared down at her, his face a manifestation of hell itself. Even if she survived, she wouldn’t recover from this.
“Your eyes,” he whispered. “That’s the first thing I noticed about you the night Craig Grosky brought you to my doorstep. Big open windows.”
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t take a breath. Her lungs burned. The dark crept in from the edges.
He cinched the noose tighter, his face raging above her like a wall of nightmares closing in. She swiped a hand at him. He grabbed her flailing arm, bent it backward. Something cracked, and pain jolted through her shoulder and chest. Another blow landed in her side, and her lung burned as if stabbed.
She couldn’t scream, couldn’t moan, couldn’t inhale. Her eyes throbbed. She blinked through the wet darkness, tried to open them as wide as possible and fill them with her words. Would you survive my death?
He stared at her. His brows slanted in a V, the angle of his clenched jaw severe. She wasn’t getting through to him. He was going to kill her. It was there in his glare.
The part of her brain capable of processing her own end grasped onto a thread of optimism. He wouldn’t survive her death. She was certain of it, and the thought made her smile, as much as her contorted face would allow. Do it. Kill me. She was so fucking ready.
His eyes widened, but he wasn’t looking through them. They were glazed and far away. Had he come to the same realization?
He flung himself off her, and the sound of his footsteps marked his clumsy retreat.
She gasped for air, her throat on fire, her lungs straining. No punctured lung? Broken rib, maybe. She could no longer see through her swollen eyes.
“Everyone out. Salvador, ready my plane. I’m leaving now.”
She pulled the noose from her neck and gathered her useless arm close to her body. She cried out, miserable with pain.
“Now, Mr. Oxford? It’s two in the morning.”
A body thumped against the wall, followed by a gasp.
“I don’t give a fuck what time it is.” Roy’s voice bellowed from down the hall. “Get me the fuck out of here. She stays. No one goes in that room while I’m gone.”
The door slammed shut, and the quiet crept in. The prior minutes settled over her in a heavy fog of pain.
She made a mental perusal of her injuries. Swollen eyes. Broken arm. Possible broken ribs. She still had her teeth. She might’ve laughed at that if her throat wasn’t so damaged. Her body throbbed and burned as if on fire, and the sad thing was, the pain was beginning to feel just a little bit normal.
Maybe she should worry about her injuries being left untreated in Roy’s absence, but the buzz in her head weighted her eyelids. So fucking tired.
Chapter Sixteen
‡
Charlee awoke to the bed jostling, lurchin
g. How long had she slept? Darkness shrouded her vision and nausea rolled through her gut. Why couldn’t she see? She was so damned tired, drifting in a furry sort of haze. Or was it fuzz? Yeah, fuzzy.
Something pulled on her ankle and her leg felt lighter…free.
“Shhh. This might hurt.”
That voice. She knew that voice. She’d made it to heaven.
Steady hands tucked her arm next to her body. Stabs of pain skated through her shoulder, and she moaned.
Bedding wrapped around her, chin to feet. The mattress fell away and her body was lifted, cradled against a hard chest. Was she going somewhere?
“I…” She swallowed past the hurt in her throat. “Can’t…see. Book.” She jerked her chin in the vicinity of the table.
The forward motion stopped. “Got it.” He walked through the room. “We’re heading into the hall now. Don’t make a sound, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. “Noah.” She melted into the arms holding her so gently and pressed her face into his neck. “You came.”
He tightened his grip and shifted into a sprint. Just like her dream, he’d come to save her. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to bawl like a baby.
Footsteps emerged behind them. He jerked right, stopped, and pressed her mouth harder against his neck. A warning to keep quiet?
Where were they hiding? She pictured the penthouse’s layout. A closet, maybe?
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the monitoring room?” The unfamiliar voice was far enough away she was sure whoever it was couldn’t see them.
“Matthew let me step out for a smoke.” Another voice she couldn’t mark.
Her exhales were coming out so loud. She couldn’t help it. The damn injury in her chest was igniting with her panic. Could they hear her? She couldn’t stop shaking.
“Where’s Matthew now?”
“He’s still in there. It’s fine, man. Mr. Oxford put him in charge.”
The pain in her shoulder hammered. The trembling grew more violent, reaching deep in her bones. Please, leave. Shut the fuck up and leave.
Make Me: Twelve Tales of Dark Desire Page 118