Silver Lining

by Skye Warren

  There’s more he wants to say. The twist at the corner of his mouth makes it obvious. But I don’t care. I can’t care right now. He’s at my limit and I work down against it anyway. He’s at my limit and I still want more.

  “All you have to do is beg me, Elijah, and I’ll make you stop.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Yes.” I am a liar. I never want him to stop, even if it hurts. Maybe I don’t want him to stop because it hurts. My body was made in some strange way that wants pain.

  I know I’m alive when it hurts.

  “Damn it, Holly.” He says my name through clenched teeth and it’s almost like begging, though I know a man like Elijah North would never really beg. It would be beneath him. He would cajole and command and threaten but he won’t beg.

  Or will he?

  I see his lips start to form the word, start to say please.

  It’s too late.

  The winding, punishing orgasm that’s been building and building shears off and explodes. And if I was trying to fight with him, if I was trying to take control—god, I don’t know what I was doing. All of that is gone now. Destroyed. Elijah’s body stills but mine doesn’t. I’m aching and shuddering and clenching all over him.

  His fingers tighten in my hair. They keep my face turned to his.

  “Look at me.”

  The rough edge of his voice makes me peak again. It’s nothing like you need to rest. It’s nothing like the infinitely patient way he’s been speaking to me, speaking around me, for the last thousand years. It’s a voice that can’t be disobeyed.

  So I do look at him while I ride out the rest of this orgasm and its aftershocks. I trace the lightning in his eyes, the sunflower bursts of gold around his irises, and the dark shadow of guilt and pain and love behind all that new-leaf green.

  He must sense the moment I come down because his fingers untangle themselves from my hair.

  Elijah returns his big palms to my hips and holds.

  I can’t catch my breath and for a dizzying instant I think maybe he was right. Maybe I should have been resting instead of trying to fuck him like a crazy person.

  But he’s here, too. He’s rocking his hips up to meet mine again. He’s pushing himself up on one elbow so he can kiss me while he also braces me with his body.

  I didn’t know I could feel the wound until he does this, and then it’s too late to feel anything but his release.

  It takes him over. His thighs bunch underneath mine and he tips his head back, looking up toward salvation or just the ceiling. I graze my teeth over the line of his jaw and he turns into the touch. I’m still so hot for him, so wet I can hear it. Hear the low, soft grunts he makes as he comes. Hear the relief in his voice that he’s worked so hard to hide from me.

  When it’s over he puts a hand to the back of my head and folds me into his shoulder, easing us both down to the cot. My skin hums. I could be in a field of bees, only I’m not, I’m in the basement of an abandoned church with one Elijah North taking up all the room on this narrow bed. Fine with me. Fine. His hard body feels like it’s keeping the blood inside my skin. The bullet wound hurts, but it’s a faraway pain, like it can’t quite touch me.

  Elijah reaches for the table next to the bed and something drops onto the floor with a plastic clatter. He doesn’t move away from me to pick it up, only reaches for another bottle.

  Those damned painkillers.

  I’m too high from the sex to argue with him when he puts one on my tongue. I’m too high to do anything but sip water from the bottle he offers.

  It kicks in fast. I have just enough time to sling an arm over his chest.

  Stay, I mean to tell him. There are other things I want to tell him, too, so much I have to say.

  Too late.

  Sleep closes in.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Adam

  London’s apartment raises more questions than it answers.

  Questions are easy to come by, here on the couch, listening to the unsteady rumble of traffic out on the street.

  Most people’s apartments—or houses or dungeons—give away lots of information about them. People tell their whole life story in what they keep and what they throw away. But I find I have a particular interest in my surroundings. This is because of my particular interest in London Frank. Particular interest is an understatement of the kind that makes me laugh out loud, even when I’m alone in a silent apartment.

  And I am alone in a silent apartment. Her silent apartment.

  It’s been days. Long enough for London to go running to her authority of choice and tell them that I, Adam Bisset, have taken up residence on the hand-me-down couch in her one-bedroom apartment. It’s an option that’s open to her. Then again, it would implicate her, too.

  And London Frank can’t afford to be implicated.

  If I were a good man, I would disappear right now, before she returns from her shopping. I would disappear and I would lose myself on the opposite side of the planet.

  Naturally, disappearing comes with its own set of risks. If I disappear, there will be no one here when they come for her. Someone will always come for London Frank.

  How could they not?

  I couldn’t help myself. I knew damn well that I shouldn’t come here, and yet I did.

  And there is the thing I can hardly admit even in the privacy of my own thoughts.

  I don’t want to disappear.

  I’ve spent a lifetime in the shadowy spaces between where real people eat and fuck and get married. London lives in the light. If it were possible to be there with her…

  London has been gone fifteen minutes when I tire of lying on the couch, staring up at the old plastered ceiling. The bullet that tried for my life didn’t hit anything too important, and I took it out before any major infection set in. It would have been more dramatic to die. Ah, well. Now I have the opportunity to go through her things.

  The main room is a kitchen and living room in one. It’s not terrible, for New York City real estate—close but not cramped. The appliances are old but scrubbed clean.

  Either she cares a lot about kitchen maintenance or she barely eats here.

  The refrigerator speaks to the latter. London has three bottles of strawberry-infused water, half a bag of baby carrots, and a takeout container of unknown origin.

  She came home the other night smelling like a coffee shop, so she must eat there—or somewhere else. I can picture her a hundred places in the city, feet wrapped around the rungs of a barstool, neon lights in her hair.

  I can’t picture her standing over the stove, stirring a pot of noodles. She does have noodles, two boxes in a slim cupboard above the fridge.

  Oh—traveling. She would have been traveling before for her work as an influencer.

  But she’s not traveling now. How could she, really? Posting her face all over a public profile would bring the NSA running faster than she could count to ten.

  So could my presence here.

  It’s a toss-up.

  The living room doesn’t offer much in the way of new things to look at. There’s the couch and the crocheted blanket I’ve been sleeping under. A television on an IKEA stand, with a fake potted plant perched nearby. I’ve been in here for days. I know every leaf on that plant.

  I pass by the bathroom in the narrow hall separating Holly’s bedroom from the rest of the space. Her medicine cabinet is practically bare. A bottle of Tylenol—that’s it. No prescriptions. I searched the medicine cabinet the last time she went shopping, hoping for something stronger.

  Nothing.

  The one place I haven’t been is London’s bedroom.

  The door’s open when I get there. Open wide. It’s almost flat against the inner wall, so I can lean against the doorframe and look in. I’ve assessed hundreds of rooms over the course of my career. None of them have made my hair stand on end. Not like this.

  At first glance there’s nothing out of the ordinary. A full-size mattress with a rumpled white comf
orter sits close to one wall, with just enough room on the side for a person of London’s size to squeeze past. A slim end table holds up a nondescript lamp. The closet space isn’t anything to write home about—a long closet set into one wall. Shallow. So shallow it can’t hold all of London’s clothes, which are stacked on the floor, bursting at the seams. This is the first hint of her former influencer life.

  She has a wardrobe.

  But it doesn’t look like it’s recently been in use. The hamper wedged into a corner of the closet only has a few items at the bottom. She hasn’t been changing in and out of various looks for photoshoots. I would be shocked to discover she’s been sneaking out to take photos. It wouldn’t be much of a travel shoot for London.

  So there are the clothes.

  And then there is the shelf.

  It’s one shelf, also IKEA-chic, snugged up in a space below the narrow window at the front of the room. The window looks down over a New York City street as nondescript as anywhere else. That doesn’t mean it’s safe. That doesn’t mean they won’t find us. But that’s old information. What interests me is the contents of the shelf.

  The top two squares are filled with records.

  Records leaning against each other in a tilted slope toward the left side. On top of the shelf, in a place of prominence, is a blush pink record player. This, at least, looks perfect for an Instagram shoot. Something sent to her by a company that wanted her influence, no doubt. Women like London get this kind of thing all the time. That’s why they go into careers on social media, or at least side jobs there.

  I would expect London’s apartment to be full of these kinds of gifts, or bribes, or payments.

  It’s not.

  Aside from her clothes, the record player is the only obvious sign of her career. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she bought this for herself to go with her record collection.

  I didn’t intend to come into the room when I stood up. Only to look. To canvas. The records change my plans. My fingers itch to separate them from each other and read the titles. It’s the same aching itch I have to touch London whenever she’s in the same room, which is nearly always.

  A deep breath to steady myself turns into an exercise in restraint. I can smell her. The light floral soapy scent of her shampoo is all over the blanket, and she’s left it tumbled and open, like she just climbed out of it. The bed is a trap. It’s the records that hook me at the center of my chest and tug me across the threshold.

  The fact that I hesitated has made all of this more illicit and more irresistible. If I’d just walked in like I own both the bedroom and London Frank, I wouldn’t get to feel this blend of shame and exhilaration.

  My feet meet the rug and it gives. The rug, like everything else, is shockingly secondhand. It’s endearing as hell to know that a person like London, beautiful, well-traveled London, furnishes her apartment with comfortable castoffs. I fight off the urge to sink down to my knees and run my palms over the fabric ridges.

  The rug ends where the shelf begins.

  This is more intimate than rifling through her underwear drawer. Make no mistake—I want to do that, too. So much that if she ever knew, she’d call me a sick bastard and change the locks. I want to look at the records more. Is it an obsession if it makes you want to go through a person’s records more than you want to see their lingerie?

  Perhaps.

  I test the paperboard sleeves of the records and my heart races like I’ve hooked a finger into the waistband of her panties. It hurts to stand, as cavalier as I’m being about it.

  What hurts more is the absence of her in this apartment. I’m six inches from the side of her bed and it’s a joke. A furniture taunt. I could have her in that bed. What I wouldn’t give to have her in that bed, to have my fingertips on her skin instead of on these records—

  I pull one out at random, take off the sleeve, and drop it onto the record player. My grandpa had one of these when he was alive. An Army man. He would have been ashamed of what his son had become. He would have been ashamed of me, too. I suppose it’s just as well he died of a heart attack decades ago.

  The needle drops into the groove and the soulful voice of Etta James fills the space.

  Maybe she’s listened to this, too, standing in this very spot. Maybe she was only dressed in panties and a bra. Maybe she was wearing nothing. Her body would have been relaxed. It wouldn’t be like it is with me. London pretends to be at ease but I know she’s not. She knows what I’m capable of.

  “What are you doing?”

  London’s voice is a spear through At Last. My hand goes to the bullet wound before I can stop myself, skin tightening. I’ve been swaying a little with the music. Mistake.

  She’s planted her feet in the doorway, eyes dark with suspicion. London has both arms around a paper grocery bag and her lips in a thin line.

  I can’t stand it. Can’t stand the frown, can’t stand the tense set to her shoulders, can’t stand any of it. It’s only a few steps across the room.

  When I reach for the bag she turns slightly away, eyes narrowing. “What are you—”

  “Don’t fight with me. Don’t argue.” London releases her death grip on the groceries and lets me put them on the bed. And then I reach for her hand. “Dance with me.”

  She has already taken my hand by the time the words are past my lips. Already stepped toward me, still in her winter jacket. Oh, London. You can’t resist me, either.

  It could be the music, but I suspect it’s something else that makes her move in closer. Long eyelashes flutter closed over eyes like the forest at night. She sighs. It sounds like surrender. “What are you doing?” This time, it’s more of a plea than an accusation.

  “Dancing with you.”

  I lift my arm and London twirls underneath it. The breath goes out of my lungs. A man who has been shot should keep his arms below his shoulders to avoid worsening the wound. I’ve worsened it. And I’ve had a vision of her in a white dress, with flowers in her hair.

  She finishes the turn and searches my face. “You look like shit.”

  “You only keep Tylenol in your apartment.”

  “You looking for something harder?”

  “Why? You got a stash of pot in here somewhere? It’s not even illegal here.”

  “Sorry. Only Tylenol. I might be able to spring for Advil, if you play your cards right, but no promises. I might give you essential oils instead.”

  I search her beautiful hazel eyes. Sometimes people are careful about what drugs they keep around because they dealt with addiction. “Did you use?”

  “Cocaine,” she says, her voice flat and matter of fact.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m cleaned up. It doesn’t control me anymore.”

  My voice comes out soft. “I’m glad.”

  “Should you even be dancing right now? You just got shot.”

  So it hurts. So does everything. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

  “That’s a slick line. I don’t fall for guys with slick lines. Not anymore.”

  “But you used to?”

  “Used to do a lot of things. Used to be an influencer. A couple million people like to watch me splash around on the beach at Bali or walk barefoot in the desert in Egypt.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  She gives a delicate snort laugh. “Yeah, what they didn’t see was the hours it took to do my hair so it would have those beachy waves before my toes even touched the water. Or the sunburn I got from posing for two hours to get the perfect shot.”

  “And you met a lot of slick guys this way, huh?”

  “It’s the party scene. I started off wanting to travel the world. Wanderlust. My parents had it, too. I never wanted to stay in one place. The Instagram, the photos. It was all for fun at first. Then I started getting contracts as an influencer. All you have to do is say you drank this coconut water or wear those clothes. I thought, what’s the harm? I started getting invited to all these parties
. Meeting models and celebrities. Doing drugs.”

  “And you’re done with that now.”

  “Definitely done with the drugs. Maybe done with the whole scene. Instagram. TikTok. Selfies. Makeup. Traveling the world. It’s a lot scarier when you’ve been on the run across the Italian countryside. You realize just how dangerous that world can be.”

  I sweep her in a circle around her old embroidered armchair. It makes my side ache, but I don’t really fucking care, not when her hair’s flowing around her shoulders. “You don’t have to swear off traveling. Or selfies. It could happen without the drugs.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not like it was important work, anyway. Convincing people they should drink coconut water or making them feel envious of my life.”

  “Not important?”

  “Not like Holly. She’s a bestselling author. Millions of people read her words.”

  “And millions of people see your photos.”

  She scrunches her nose, looking adorable. “It’s not the same.”

  “No,” I say slowly. “Not the same, but still important. You give people a sense of adventure, even when they’re afraid to take that step for themselves.”

  “Don’t make me sound all noble and interesting. I don’t even like coconut water.”

  That makes me laugh, which hurts more than the dancing. I press my lips to the top of her head. God, she smells good. Not like coconut, though. Sweeter than that. “Maybe not noble, but you’re definitely interesting, London Frank. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elijah

  Holly sleeps like we’re in a five-star hotel, all pink and flushed beneath the sheet on the cot.

  I stayed until my leg fell asleep from hanging off the side. If there’s one thing I can’t afford, it’s to be caught with pins and needles in one of my feet. The city breathes around us. With every inhale our enemies get closer. This is a hunting expedition, and we’re the prey.

  I find a blanket and tuck Holly in, then take the chair by her side to keep watch.