“I told you, I’ll take the first job I find. If it’s in sales, then I’ll do that. I’ll look at construction, too.”
“Don’t do that,” she said softly. “I want you to do something that makes you happy.”
“I know you do, but that’s a luxury I won’t have, at least not when I first get here. Maybe down the line I can concentrate on finding something more fulfilling.”
She turned her head to lie on the opposite cheek. “I’ll find a new job that pays better.”
“I don’t want you to worry about that,” I said.
“I’m not. Waitressing jobs are a dime a dozen here.”
I couldn’t talk her out of it, so I went at it from another angle. “Then you’ll have no trouble avoiding the graveyard shift.”
“I’ll avoid the twenty-four-hour job listings,” she said, shifting under me, “if you promise not to worry.”
“Sure,” I said, as if it were a remote possibility, and squeezed the tops of her thighs. Her skin was unnaturally soft all the way down. I ran my knuckle over the backside of her knee. “You have the finest blonde hairs here.”
“Sometimes I forget to shave that part.”
“At the tops of your thighs, too,” I continued. “I saw them when you wore those short shorts at camp.”
“I can shave higher.”
I shook my head to myself. It wasn’t what I meant. “When I was in solitary, I used to think about that, how I’d seen a part of your leg you hadn’t meant anyone to, and how it was so close to heaven, and I would get lost . . .”
“Lost how?” she asked, her back expanding with an inhale.
“Turn over again.”
She didn’t. “Are we going to have sex?”
“Eventually. I want to look at you first.”
“Manning?”
“Yeah, Birdy . . .”
“Why do you want to look at me so much? It makes me self-conscious. I don’t want to turn over and lie here while you look at me.”
She had no idea how touching her, seeing her, was a delicacy I never thought I’d ever be allowed to taste, much less gorge on. I was leaving tomorrow. I needed this to sustain me while I was gone. “Don’t be self-conscious. I just like the way you look. Turn over.”
With a sigh, she moved onto her back but kept her hands over her breasts. She was uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to push her. I was eager to get to the point where she could relax around me, though. “My cell in solitary was about half the size of this room,” I said to put her at ease. “Imagine having to stay locked in here for a few months . . . or, in some cases, years.”
“Did the guards talk to you?”
“No. They just pushed food through a hole most days. Then, they’d take me to the rec area, which was a slightly bigger room without windows where I could shoot hoops alone for an hour. And they’d watch me shower.”
She widened her eyes. “Really?”
I nodded slowly, bringing her ankle to my mouth. “So I wouldn’t try to pull anything.”
“I thought about you so much while you were gone. Did you think about me?”
“Every day.” I inhaled a breath by her calf, watching her face as I ran my stubble along her skin.
She shuddered. “How did you think about me?”
I could tell what she was looking for. It was my own fault. I’d kept her in the dark about these things, because of her age and innocence. She probably felt insecure about that, wondered if I’d thought of her at all. But of course I had, in all manners of ways. With her leg in my hand, shame tightened my chest. It should’ve turned me off to remember fantasizing about her while she was underage—I’d been unable to stop, even after I’d learned my dad was a pedophile. Instead, my erection raged on. Back then, I hadn’t been able to have Lake in any other way but in my mind. Now she was lying in front of me, still young and sweet and wide-eyed at heart, but with the body and mind of a woman.
I found a condom in the nightstand, put it on, and got horizontal on the mattress, lying between her legs so my lower half hung off the bed. I parted the blonde curls over her mound and kissed her once.
Her hands went into my hair, grasping me as I licked her like a peach-flavored ice cream cone that held the sweetest nectar at its core. When she got so worked up that she was trying to push my head out of her legs, I crawled over her and entered her quickly. She covered her mouth to muffle her moans, but I removed her hand and kissed her, swallowing them for her. Having to be quiet irritated me. I cradled the top of her head so she wouldn’t hit the wall and spent my frustration by fucking her fast and hard. When she was close, I put my other hand over her mouth so she could scream into it, but we weren’t fooling anyone. I looked into her eyes and she didn’t turn away, maybe because my hands held her head in place. As she accepted the length of me with each contraction, I came before I was ready.
I scanned her face. Her cheeks were flushed where my fingers pressed into them. I removed my hand, and her labored breaths came hot against my chin. “Damn,” I panted. “I wanted to look at you more before we did that. Couldn’t help myself.”
She spread a hand on my back. “You can try again later.”
As my heart rate slowed from hammering to pounding, I released the tension from my muscles, giving her my weight. She was sweating, sweet-smelling but briny. Me? I was far from sated. I’d had her body, now I wanted more. I wanted her to know, every day of her life, that she could tell me all her thoughts and desires and secrets, and I’d never tire of hearing them. And for that kind of intimacy, I had to reciprocate.
“It turns me on thinking about that time I couldn’t have you,” I admitted.
She nodded lightly. “It’s the same for me.”
“No it’s not. You were underage. Innocent. It was wrong.”
She sighed, fluttering her fingers over the back of my head. “But you didn’t do anything, Manning, so it’s okay.”
“I wanted to. Very badly.” I lifted my head to see her reaction. “When I was in solitary, I’d jerk myself off thinking about fucking you—and you were seventeen, Lake.”
She bit her bottom lip. When she moved, I became more aware of my cock softening between her legs. “I’d be upset if you hadn’t thought of me that way. You have to forgive yourself.”
Should I be forgiven for all the things I planned to do to Lake in order to ensure she was always mine? I wanted to make her feel so good, she could never leave me. “It’s more than that,” I said. “There’s something you should know.”
Uncertainty crossed her face. “About?”
“My dad.”
The tension in her arms eased, but the wrinkles in her forehead didn’t. “What is it?”
I ran a thumb between her eyebrows, smoothing her skin. “He was . . . he is . . .” I worried once it was out there, Lake would see everything differently. I wouldn’t blame her. I was inside her right now. She might shove me off, disgusted with me. I was at my most vulnerable, and that was the reason I both wanted and didn’t want to tell her. “He molested Maddy before she died.”
Lake’s eyes instantly filled with tears. “But she was nine.”
I gripped both sides of Lake’s face as it screwed up, lowering mine right above hers. “Can you understand why I feel this way? Why being with you made me feel like I was no better than him? I can compartmentalize it better now, but back then, I couldn’t. I would think of you and feel like a monster.”
She covered her face and began to cry. “No.”
“Lake.”
She shook her head. “Stop.”
My heart pounded. This was exactly what I’d been afraid of. I thought of all the despair and rage I’d felt since learning this about my dad, and now I was passing that onto the one person I wanted to protect. “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.
“Leave?” she asked. “You’re so . . . why? Why do you do this?”
“Do what?”
“I’m so angry with you.”
I pulled her hands aw
ay, confused. “Angry?”
“How can you think you’re anything like that, Manning? How could you spend all those years living with this? I know you’re not a monster. You know you aren’t. Please, Manning, stop doing this to us.”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t put yourself, or us, in that box. It’s not you. You loved me, didn’t you? You understood me. You wanted to care for me.”
“Yes.”
“And you never, not once, touched me.” Redness rimmed her eyes. “There’s no way you can equate what we had with his actions. How could you? It makes me want to physically hurt you to get you to open your eyes, and your dad, he . . . he—” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
“I know. I know. Don’t cry.” I kissed the tip of her nose, still holding her wrists even though she struggled to cover her face again. “Stop.”
“How long have you known this?”
“I got the letter while I was in prison.”
“When?”
I looked her full in the face, trying to think of how to explain. She came to the conclusion on her own, though.
“I knew there had to be a reason you went to solitary,” she said. “Something that sent you over the edge. I knew it.”
I kissed her again. I was crushing her, so I let her arms go to lift myself off her, but she immediately hugged me closer. So much for her threats of physical harm. “I went to SHU a few nights after I read the letter,” I said. “One of the guards had seen you trying to get in to visit me—”
“He saw me?” she asked.
“Yes. He was a piece of shit, always trying to get under my skin. He’d talked shit about Tiffany before, but when he started in on you, and how young you were, and the things he wanted to do to you—”
“Oh, no. Oh, Manning.” She dug her fingernails into my back. “Is that why . . .?”
I nodded slowly, my eyes moving between her lips, ears, forehead, eyes. All of her. “I couldn’t take it. Not after the letter I’d read from my dad. Suddenly, that guard was a molester who could get to you while I was stuck in there. That guard became my dad. He became me.”
Lake’s hands shook as she touched my face. Her tears made straight lines down her temples. “I’m sorry. I should’ve listened. I never should’ve gone there.”
“I’m grateful that you did. At the time, I would’ve spent more time in SHU if it meant keeping you away from there, but now that so much time has passed . . . I can admit I would’ve done the same if I were you. And it gives me some peace knowing you never forgot about me.”
“I tried. Did you ever read any of my letters?”
“No.”
“Where are they?”
“At the house.”
“Do you think Tiffany knows about them?”
“They’re hidden in the attic, but with her, anything’s possible.” I thumbed away some of the wetness on Lake’s face. She was the first person I’d ever told, and with that information out of my brain, I realized Lake was right. What she and I had wasn’t bad or immoral or wrong. She was a part of it, and her goodness always prevailed, and I was not that monster. “You know what?”
She barely even whispered. “What?”
“Instead of continuing to blame myself for something I never had control over, I’m going to make it right, Lake. I’m going to be everything my father wasn’t. You and I will have a family one day, and—”
She cried more, and I had to nuzzle her to make sure she heard every word. “And I’ll spend a lifetime making up for his mistakes. I will be the best father to our children.”
“You can’t say that,” she said, sobbing into my neck. “It’s too early. We’re not even official.”
“We are official,” I said, smiling about how juvenile it sounded, and also at the idea of raising a family with her. “If anything, it’s late, not early.”
I thought I felt her smile against my neck, too. For all I’d dreaded telling Lake the truth about my family, a weight lifted. We’d turned a hard conversation about something ugly into a glimpse of a happy future. Being with Lake had taught me there was such a thing as second chances. I wasn’t my past or my father’s mistakes. I was just a man becoming the best version of himself for the girl he loved—for his Birdy.
* * *
I held Lake until she eventually calmed and I could no longer ignore the voices coming from the next room. “What’s going on in there?” I asked.
“Val invited some people over,” Lake said. “Every time she and Julian break up, she has a party claiming to celebrate. Really, she wants an excuse to get drunk or high.”
With a heavy sigh, I dropped my forehead on Lake’s chest. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“We won’t be able to hide in here. They’re my friends, too. They’ll find us.”
“Lake.” I implored her. “I want time alone with you. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
There was a crash in the next room followed by laughter. Lake shrugged it off. “One of the kitchen chairs has a loose leg. People fall in it all the time.”
With a knock on the door came Val’s high-pitched voice. “Roger’s early,” she said. “Come say hi or we’re breaking in.”
“Roger?” I asked, covering us with the top sheet. “Does your door lock?”
“No.” She craned her neck out from under me to call, “Don’t come in here. Give us five minutes.”
“You have four!” a man yelled from the other side of the door.
Lake tried to get out from under me.
“I’m not done with you,” I said. She laughed, but I hadn’t meant it to be funny. I was dead serious.
“They’ll come in here, Manning. Believe me.”
I let her push me off. “Who’s Roger?”
She picked a shirt off the ground. “A friend from class.”
“What kind of friend?”
“A gay one.”
“Ah.” Relieved, I watched her dress. “You forgot your bra.”
“It’s fine.”
I sat up, grabbing my own clothes and searching the bed for her undergarments. When I didn’t find them, I lifted the frame a little. There was no bra, but I did pull out something familiar, something I hadn’t seen in probably six years. “Who do we have here?” I asked.
When she turned and saw the stuffed bird in my hand, she lunged at me. “Oh my God.”
I held it over my head, out of her grasp. “It’s Birdy,” I exclaimed.
“I tried to hide her,” Lake said, her cheeks pink.
Unable to contain my grin, I looked up at the blue and white toy I’d won for Lake at the Balboa Fun Zone since I couldn’t take her on the Ferris wheel. “Why would you hide her?”
“It’s embarrassing.” She bit her bottom lip, obviously anxious about the bird. “Did you know Birdy was a blue-footed booby, not a pelican?”
“’Course I did,” I said, setting it on her head to resume looking for her bra. “I don’t want to go out there and make nice, Lake. I want to be alone with you, talk to you, make love to you, and then sleep with you. Birdy can stay, but they’ve got to go.”
“We should at least say hi. Then we can, I don’t know, go for a walk.”
“Are you going to tell them who I am?”
She pretended not to hear me, busying herself by fixing her hair in the mirror above her dresser.
“Lake.”
She turned to me, still hugging the stuffed animal under one arm. “What am I supposed to say?” The hurt was evident in her voice. “Should I lie like you did to that woman at the ice skating rink? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”
“No.”
“These are my friends,” she said. “I can’t hide you from them forever.”
“I’m not asking you to. Tell them the truth.”
“But some of them know Corbin, and also . . . he’s been calling.”
“Calling where?” I sat on the edge of her bed. “For what?”
“Nothing. Everything. He’s my friend, Manni
ng. We talk all the time. He left messages on the machine, and I’ve been ignoring him.”
I took a deep breath, dropping my eyes to the floor. Val could be annoying, but because she didn’t take shit, she was good for Lake. What about Corbin? I hated the idea that once I left, he’d still be here, but I had to face the facts—in four years, she hadn’t given in to him. For six years, he’d been trying, and evidence would show he’d been respectful about it. And with that realization, I kinda felt bad for the fucker. “Have you considered that ending the friendship would be doing him a favor?”
“Him?” she asked. “Or you?”
“Him. I know what it’s like to love you from afar. It isn’t easy.”
Looking lost in thought, she caressed Birdy’s head, then put the toy on her dresser next to something else I recognized—the wooden box I’d made her for the earrings she’d worn as Maid of Honor.
“Do you regret it?” Lake asked.
I tore my eyes from the jewelry holder. “Regret what?”
“Loving me.”
“Obviously not, Lake.”
“Then maybe he doesn’t, either.”
“He does, he will, because he won’t win you. He’ll never have you, and that’s why it isn’t fair to him.” I waited until her eyes returned to mine, and the sadness in them made my gut smart. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know he’s your friend, and if you want things to stay that way, I can’t stop you. But a part of me can’t help but feel bad for him.”
She shook her head. “It’s not like that. Corbin knows nothing will ever happen between us, and it’s still not enough for him to end our friendship. Trust me.”
I didn’t believe that for a second, but I said, “Okay. And for the record, I didn’t lie to that woman to keep our secret. She doesn’t know us. I don’t want anyone to. You and me, we’re you and me. Nobody’s earned the right to know our story.”
“Our story.” She let out a breath then came over and straddled my lap. “I thought you were ashamed of us, and that was why you lied.”
“It’s going to take me some time to get used to touching you without looking over my shoulder,” I admitted. “But rest assured, the decisions I make are with you at the front of my mind.” I picked her up, carrying her over to her closet. “Where’s your overnight bag?” I asked. “We’re leaving.”
Something in the Way: A Forbidden Love Saga: The Complete Collection Page 70