This Is a Dark Ride

by Melissa Harlow

  Her heart quickened a little at how close his face was to hers. His gaze was on her lips now, like he was thinking about kissing her. That would be nice. That would be really nice.

  “Brody kissed you?” he said in a whisper. Sam’s face moved closer to hers. “Or did you kiss him?”

  “I…I don’t know. Both, I guess.”

  “Is that what you wanted?” She nodded, and stupidly honest words came spilling out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m sorry. I’ve never kissed anyone I liked. I thought it would be…I don’t know…kind of nice. I never kissed a single fucking person in my entire life because I really wanted to.” Her cheeks flushed, and she pulled back and looked down at her bare feet.

  She’s said so much, confessed things she never had before. It was too easy to tell Sam the truth.

  Angel forced herself to look back at his face. “I…I kind of want to kiss you.”

  He smiled a little. “Kind of?”

  “Just to see what it’s like,” she whispered.

  His mouth immediately sought hers in a soft, wet kiss. Clumsy and timid, he didn’t kiss her like anyone else ever had. Angel closed her eyes as his tongue swept over her bottom lip. The tip touched her tongue, licking at her, until she stilled it by suckling lightly. He moaned in his throat as she pulled it into her mouth. Her heart ached with strange and unwanted emotions.

  Sam had a delicious mouth, a mouth that teased and promised and took its time, gently and patiently—melting her.

  So, this was what it was like…the reason girls in school would go to the movies and then not bother to watch the show because they were too busy kissing some boy.

  She gripped the sides of his face, urging him to kiss her deeper. He obliged, his tongue pressing into her mouth, until she could scarcely breathe. As he kissed her, she felt his sadness and loneliness, a wave of anguish and need like she’d never felt in her life. She wanted nothing more than to hold on to him and make everything better for him. But she couldn’t. She could only make things worse.

  Angel pulled back and looked up at him. Why did he hurt so bad? He had Brody. Were things between them really that bad? Brody might have problems, but she believed wholeheartedly that Brody loved this man. It was easy to see why. If she stared into those eyes too long, she was in danger of doing it herself.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” Angel said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “I don’t want to come between you…you and Brody. Brody loves you. You love him.” She rested her hand against his cheek. How fucking unfair is this? “The first man I ever really wanted, and he’s taken…taken by someone else I want.” She whispered the last several words, but she knew he heard.

  “I didn’t—” His voice trembled. “I didn’t just stop because you didn’t have a coat on. I stopped because I had to.” He shook his head. “I had to. I keep thinking about you…dreaming about you. I can’t make it stop.”

  He grabbed her hand tightly and pressed his lips to it. She heard him swallow.

  “I don’t know how to make this stop,” he said, and then his voice broke. “I need it to stop. I don’t want to lose Brody. The dreams about you, the things I keep thinking about, I’m so fucking confused. Tell me how to make it stop!”

  Fuck. What was she supposed to say to that? She didn’t want it to stop. There was an ache in her belly and a knot in her chest that had never been there before.

  “Brody loves you,” she whispered hoarsely, reminding him…reminding herself.

  “And I love him,” Sam said, honesty evident in his voice. “I don’t know what this is.” He let go of her hand. “I don’t know what this is, and I don’t know how to make it go away.”

  “I’ll leave.” Angel turned back toward Sam and Brody’s bedroom. “I just need something to put on and I’ll go.”

  Sam grabbed her shoulder and turned her to face him once more. “Don’t. Please?” A quiver in the voice of a man so large seemed strange. He swallowed hard again, and she saw him struggling to regain his composure.

  “I mean, where are you going to go? Back out there?”

  Angel shrugged. “Where else would I go?”

  “Your family? Don’t you have family? They are probably worried about you.”

  She laughed in an attempt to cover the anguish she really felt. “My stepfather’s a dick. I only have my mother, and she probably doesn’t know I’m gone. She lives in her own world.”

  “I’m sure she misses you.”

  “She has her husband. And her booze…her pills. That’s all she cares about.” Angel’s eyes burned, and she blinked away tears. “She’d do anything to keep that piece of shit she married.”

  Sam’s fingertips gently skimmed over the bruises on her neck, his eyes full of compassion and understanding. She should tell him. She could finally say it out loud to someone. Finally tell someone about what her stepfather had done.

  “Sometimes people do stupid things because of drugs. It doesn’t mean you weren’t loved,” Sam said. “Maybe you should consider going back home.”

  Don’t you tell him, bitch. Don’t you dare tell him.

  Angel ignored the voice that screamed inside of her. She finally had a chance to say it out loud, to admit what had happened.

  “My mother knew what he was doing to me. She even walked in once. Then she turned around and walked right back out. I talked to her about it. She told me I was a liar. She said she didn’t see anything! For years, she fucking knew and she did nothing!”

  The image of bloodstained sheets and the silhouette of her stepfather sliced through her mind. Ugly memories that she’d buried deep inside all came flooding back. The sound of her bedroom door opening and his shadow there in the hall. Night after night, the smell of whiskey on his breath and his sweaty skin pressed against her. The night she’d tried to hide from him in her closet. He’d beaten her with a hanger before he raped her. Angel shook her head violently, trying to make the thoughts and the pain all stop.

  “I’ll never go back there! It wasn’t my fault, Sam. Not my fault!”

  “Shh, I know it isn’t your fault, Angel.” His voice was soothing. “You don’t have to go back there. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Sam’s arms wrapped tightly around her. He should be pushing her away. He knew now. This almost total stranger knew what she’d never told anyone. The one thing she was sure would make everyone hate her. No one was ever supposed to know she’d always been dirty, always been nothing.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “No. No no no! I don’t want you to be sorry. Sorry doesn’t fix it. It won’t change it. I’m the one who is sorry. I don’t want to be what I am. I never wanted to. I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t want you to be sorry; you can’t ask me to stay here because you’re sorry. You, Brody—you have enough problems. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me.”

  “Shh,” he said, stroking her hair. “I won’t be sorry then. Don’t you be sorry either, because none of this is your fault.” His eyes locked with hers. “I really don’t want you to go. Don’t you want to stay?”

  It took a tremendous effort to say yes, and the word came out sounding very quiet.

  “Good. Because I wasn’t going to just let you walk out that door.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know,” he said. “I can’t spend my whole life feeling like I missed out on knowing.”

  “You want to know what?”

  “What this is.” He ran his thumb gently over her lower lip and then traced his fingers up her jaw.

  It was curiosity. What else would it be? Sam had never been with a woman. She couldn’t tell him she knew that, but she needed to make him understand that she couldn’t stay here and start feeling things for him just to be thrown back out in the snow when he was done finding out what it was like.

  “Look,” Angel said. “I’m not some kind of case study or science project. I’m not going to stick around here wh
ile you two try and figure things out. I’ve got a life. My life. You and Brody might not like what I do, but it is what it is. I don’t much like it either, but I can take care of myself.”

  “Like you did last night?”

  “That was…” Mean. “That never happened before. It won’t ever happen again. I let my guard down.” It could happen again, and she knew it.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Not very long.”

  “And it’s already happened one too many times. The only way it won’t happen again is if you don’t put yourself out there. No more. You’re staying here, end of discussion.”

  “Really?” Angel cocked an eyebrow at this new version of Sam.

  “Yes. Really. Brody wants you to stay.” He paused for a moment. “And so do I.”

  Her whole fucking life not being wanted and she suddenly had two men demanding that she stay. And Sam…he was different. Everything about him. In a different life, in a much different life, he could have been the one.

  Hahaha! The one. You dumb-ass. Quit fucking daydreaming. He doesn’t want you. Neither of them do.

  She looked at Sam’s concerned face, wishing he wanted her to stay for something besides the fact that he pitied her. That was what Sam didn’t know how to make stop: pitying her. The fact that if he let her walk out the door, she was going back to her old life. He didn’t want to feel like it was his fault if something happened to her again. Neither did Brody.

  Charity starts at home. They needed to be worried about fixing themselves, not her. She was just fine without either one of them in her life for this long—she didn’t need to change things now.

  Except Sam kissed her again, and it wasn’t quite like before. He still tasted sad, and he still tasted of that deep pain that she wanted to soothe, but there was something else.

  Sam’s hand moved slowly down her back and then slipped lower. He cupped the swell of her bare ass and pulled her closer. Angel’s knees felt weak and rubbery.

  His other hand rested against her collarbone. His thumb stroked gently at her throat. He kissed her even more deeply, taking ownership of her mouth and leaving her absolutely breathless.

  He pulled his head up and gazed into her eyes. “You’re so beautiful, Angel.”

  She stared at him, unable to say anything. It was like he had spoken a foreign language. Those were words she’d never heard, and he said them with such sincerity. Her chest felt funny; her whole body felt like she was floating. Not floating, no; it was more like flying. She was flying again. Soaring through clouds.

  “Morning.” Brody’s smug voice from the bedroom doorway broke the spell. “Looks like I’m missing the party.”

  Sam let go of her like he was holding a grenade with the pin pulled. His arms went down by his sides, hanging there limply.

  “Morning, Brody,” Sam mumbled, looking down at the floor.

  “You making breakfast?” Brody asked.

  “I will if you’re hungry.”

  Brody shrugged and grinned. “How ’bout you? You hungry?”

  Sam just kept looking at the floor. Angel worried, uncertain if he was embarrassed that he’d kissed her or just embarrassed that Brody had seen him. Maybe both? She wasn’t flying anymore; instead she’d crashed, and she sat down on the rumpled sofa, truly grounded once again. She hugged herself, remembering she was naked.

  Her stomach felt sick all of a sudden.

  Maybe Sam had realized what he’d done, kissing a whore like that. Well, she’d certainly proven herself for what she was. She’d kissed both of them. Offered to fuck either one of them. Now she was here between them like an extra sock.

  Brody smiled at her. “You hungry, Angel?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly without looking at him. She didn’t want Brody to see how disappointed she was right now. She pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged on the sofa, pulling Sam’s T-shirt over her body, feeling her own icy feet touching her bare legs.

  She focused on a window near the table. The sunlight reflecting off the snowy roofs of the buildings around them made the day appear bright and warm, but she knew it wasn’t.

  She didn’t want to go back. Not back outside, back on the street, back out in the cold, back where she had to fuck strangers.

  She looked up finally, choosing to look at Brody and not Sam.

  “Were you serious about that offer? Me staying here, I mean?”

  “’Course I was.”

  She studied his slender body. Shirtless Brody was both strange and impressive. Muscle and bone, like some stone carving come to life. It was hard not to try and imagine him and Sam together. They would be beautiful to see.

  “I don’t want to get in the way. I don’t want to keep you two apart. I don’t want Sam to sleep on the couch. I’m in the way.”

  “You’re not in the way,” Sam said quickly. Brody laughed a little, masking it as if he were coughing.

  “Where do you want Sam to sleep?” There was a suggestive tone in Brody’s voice that was hard to ignore.

  “Wherever he wants.”

  Brody rolled his eyes. “Well, there’s your problem then, because Samson here don’t know what he wants.”

  “I’ll tell you what I want. I want her to stay,” Sam said, his voice doing a sexy tremble.

  Angel chewed her bottom lip. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  Brody shook his head. “It’s a fucking California king. There’s enough room.”

  “Enough room?” What the hell was he thinking?

  “Sure,” Brody said, his back turned toward them both as he took a frying pan out of a cabinet. “We can all sleep together in a nice warm pile.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed and he frowned. “We’re not all sleeping together, Brody.”

  “You want her to sleep on the couch? Or me? Whatever you want, Sam. This is your place, right?”

  “Don’t do this, Brody. I’ll sleep on the sofa. I’m fine with it.”

  “Whatever,” Brody said.

  Chapter Six

  Sam avoided him like the plague for the next week or so, and that was probably a good thing. Brody knew he was increasingly bad company. He was surly and grew enraged over little things. A lot of the time he felt like there was nothing to look forward to anymore. No drinking. No pills. He tried his best to keep his temper in check around Sam and Angel, but he wasn’t always successful.

  She’d been through enough shit—that was plain. It wasn’t her fault that he’d gotten himself addicted to pretty much anything that came along, so it shouldn’t be her problem that he needed to get off everything either.

  His patience dwindled the sicker that he felt. Today was by far the worst day yet. He’d spent an hour in the bathroom, his stomach unwilling to accept the glass of milk he’d drunk when he woke up sometime during the night.

  He gave Angel a lot of credit. She was a tolerant woman, but she also could hold her own in an argument and she wasn’t budging on the “no booze, no drugs” thing. Brody knew Sam felt the same way, but Sam had to go to work. Angel was always around to stay on Brody’s back and keep him from doing anything. Like a fucking watchdog.

  He thought of how he’d kissed her once—only to see, only to make sure of what he already knew. She kissed like Sam did. She was like Sam in so many ways. Tortured inside, needing and lacking…probably submissive as well. Perhaps not by choice, but life hands out cards that must be played.

  That first night, Brody had felt a little sexual charge thinking about her and Sam, but the last thing on his mind now was sex. He’d kill for some wine, a couple of pain pills, anything…

  The room was cold, yet sweat beaded on his forehead. His stomach burned, and his hands shook so bad it was hard to complete even the minutest of tasks.

  He was supposed to be helping Angel fold clothes. Brody watched her making it look easy, folding about five of Sam’s shirts and stacking them in a nice tidy pile, while he still fought with the same pair of jeans he’d been fooling wi
th for the last ten minutes.

  It felt like things had gone nonstop since the moment she arrived. They’d gone to the apartment she’d been staying in, an empty apartment, no better or worse than this one. It felt like a terribly long walk, and the sun glinting off the snow had given him the most horrible headache imaginable.

  She’d worn Sam’s clothes—a T-shirt, sweatpants—and looked silly in Brody’s sneakers, which were huge on her. At least they fit better than Sam’s shoes. His feet were gigantic. But she did have her own coat.

  That coat, the one Sam had bought for her was hideous. A down-filled, nylon monstrosity. There was something about it though, the first thing Brody had noticed before he saw how ugly the coat really was. It was purple. Her favorite color—like somehow Sam just knew that.

  Now the laundry, oh, the fucking laundry! It seemed like years that they’d sat in the laundry room of the building, doing nothing but watching clothes tumble in the dryer. He toted baskets of clean clothes back up to the apartment, and the little table was piled high with things that needed to be folded.

  The walls were closing in. He’d heard that expression before, but now he understood. A block from the liquor store with nothing to drink, stuck in this apartment.

  He glanced over at the plastic chocolate milk mix container on top of the refrigerator. Angel had money in there. Brody wasn’t sure how much, but he’d seen her put it in there after she’d insisted on giving Sam a little cash to help pay the rent.

  He could borrow some, maybe just enough to get a bottle of cheap wine. She’d never let him, but maybe if she didn’t see him take it he could go and—

  “Brody?”

  “Huh?”

  “Want me to help you with those? You’re really having a hard time.”

  He looked down at the jeans he’d twisted into a ball and then back to her worried face.

  “No. I’ll get them.”

  So much care in her eyes. Concern… Just like Sam. Fuck, it had been bad enough that he’d always let Sam down. Now he had to worry about letting her down too.

  Her bruises were changing color; eventually they’d be gone.

  Gone. Something he wished she wouldn’t ever be. His pain-in-the-ass watchdog, the bitch making him work and stay clean—he tried to squash the way he felt for her, tried to instead think of all the things she was preventing him from doing. He didn’t want to love her. No! He did not love her.