“We’re going to play Collin’s game,” she says, brandishing the paper he’d given us.
“And what’s in it for the winner?”
“One of us gets to stay in the country. The other doesn’t go to jail.”
“Boring.”
“Really?” she laughs. “Is that why you’re always doing those boring things that have a high probability of landing you behind bars.”
She has a point. Still, it’s not the point I want. I hook my thumb under the blanket and steal a peek at her breasts. “Those look like a pretty decent prize.”
Beth swats my hand away, but there’s no missing the blush reddening her cheeks. “Seriously, Maverick!”
“More than you could ever imagine.”
With one hand gripping the blanket for dear life and the other holding the paper in front of her, Beth tries to move as far away from my tangent as possible.
I hold my hands up in a surrender. “Fine.”
“Fine,” she agrees.
“But if I win this, I’m claiming my prize.” I whisper the words, not quietly enough for them to miss her and wink before snatching the paper from her hand and scanning the list of questions Collin prepared for us. “Let’s start with the simple stuff. What’s my favorite food?”
“Beer.”
“Wrong.”
“Favorite sport.”
“Do I need to answer that?”
“Wrong.”
She crosses her arms over her chest and pouts up at me. “That wasn’t an answer. I want my point back.”
“Fine. Answer the question.”
“Hockey.”
I shake my head at her, and she rolls her eyes. “Hockey is your favorite sport,” she insists. “You’re cheating.”
“Hockey was my favorite sport…until I fucked you. So yeah…wrong.”
She blushes crimson red and my cock jumps, loving the embarrassed look on her. Silently, I tell it to stand down. One way or the other, I’m gonna win this game, anyways.
“What’s my favorite color.”
“Uhm, pink?” she giggles. It’s like she really wants me to pin her to the headboard right here and now.
“That’s another point for me. You’re not taking this serious.” I poke her side and she wiggles.
“Okay. Okay. Your favorite color’s olive green.”
I didn’t see that one coming and try as I might, I can’t keep the shock out of my face. “What makes you say that?”
She points to my wristband, then the cushions on the sofa and the accent wall behind the T.V.
“Just a hunch.”
“Okay. Fine. That one was a giveaway. Where was I born?”
“You sir, were born in Haslemere, U.K.”
“How the hell do you know that?” I ask, completely baffled by her accuracy. When she doesn’t respond I feel my stomach tighten.
I know exactly how she knows.
“Well...it appears you lied to Collin. You do know quite a bit about me.”
“I didn’t lie. There are things I know about you, but I didn’t know at the time that they were about you.” She pauses as though weighing her words and I brace myself for whatever comes next. “Your mom…she talked about you a lot,” she whispers, and I close my eyes.
Beth’s hand finds mine and it takes me way too long to bring steel back to my expressions. “I’m sorry,” Beth says. “I’ve upset you. I shouldn’t have-”
I shake my head at her. There’s no reason in the world she should feel guilty about remembering my mother.
“No,” I assure her, “I’m not upset. It’s just that…you have all these memories of her and I’ve got pieces of nothingness that I struggle to put back together.”
Beth swallows and despite her trying to hide it, I still spot the sadness in her eyes.
“But now I have you,” I say. “And you’ve got some of the missing pieces. To think I spent all of that time pushing you away -”
“And to think I spent all of that time thinking we were friends.”
I raise a brow at her. “Friends?”
“Your mom was always telling me about you - her little firecracker with a big mouth and a heart of gold. To me, you were already my friend; I just hadn’t met you yet.”
I smile at her words, but even then, I can’t dodge the feeling of salt being poured into a freshly opened wound.
“And now that you’ve met me?”
“I admit, we got off to a very rocky start.”
“One that I’ll need to apologize for a thousand times over.”
She fans away my apology as though it means nothing.
“Yeah. You were a very convincing moron and a diabolical asshole.”
“Jesus, Beth.”
“I’m just being honest here,” she nods at me.
I tackle her and she yelps beneath me. “I’m still a diabolical asshole.”
“True...but now you’re my diabolical asshole.”
Her hand cups my face and she smiles up at me, her eyes softening. Seconds later, she’s pulling me down to her and my head rests against her chest as I listen to the quickening beats of her heart.
“You’re not really an asshole,” she says.
“I wear the title proudly. Take it away and I’m nothing.”
“You’ve already done the honors yourself,” she says. “A true asshole would have filed a restraining order against Jessica. He would have left me in the pool that first day I came here, and he wouldn’t care as much as you do about the fact that he can’t remember his mom.”
Her arm tightens around me and I know she’s stopping me from running.
“Fine.” I sulk.
“Maverick?”
“Yeah.”
Her heartbeat increases and mine mirrors hers. “There are pieces of my puzzle that are missing too,” she says. “Could you tell me what happened to her? Do you remember that?”
The lump that develops in my throat isn’t fist sized. It’s the size of the entire universe. I’m not unhappy about it. If I try to swallow my shock, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to choke to death.
I think about lying to Beth. It would be the easier route to take. We’d be done with this and I wouldn’t need to take a trip down nightmare lane. But even as I try to form the words, my mouth seals shut on itself and I can’t seem to do it.
“Only if you want to,” she adds and a part of me hates how easy it is for her to speak right now. That feeling only dies when the sound of her heartbeat comes back into focus. If it thumps any harder, it’ll drill a hole right through her chest.
She cared about my mother. Loved her even. And now, here she is, very close to loving me. I feel like a monster. A traitor. The biggest sin. So much of me wants to take off for the hills. Run away and never look back.
But there’s a different part of me that is stronger, stupider, less of a coward. That part of me is willing and ready to see the look of love in Beth’s eyes turn to the vilest form of hate. That part of me is searching for just another reason to hate myself.
I swallow hard, working my throat to speak the truest words I’ve ever spoken. Words I’ve been reminded of a thousand times over, by my dreams. My nightmares. My father.
“I killed my mother,” I say and watch as all the blood drains from Beth’s face.
37
I feel like my skin is not my own. Strangely enough, it’s not a feeling that is foreign to me, but somehow, when Beth looks at me and I see the monster that I am glistening in her eyes, it makes it just that much harder to breathe. I saw this coming. An admission like that doesn’t get greeted with roses and sunshine. I put that look on her face and I did it because I needed a reason to break. Instead of staying like I should have, I push down on the bed and find my footing, shaky as it might be.
I’d like to say that I’m calm and collected when I leave the room, but I am not anything close to that. Like a madman, I rush into my pants, throw a shirt over my body and hightail it out of the condo.
Bet
h finds her voice just as I’ve made it through the door. But she doesn’t stop me from leaving. That’s all I can think about as the elevator doors close behind me – the fact that my admission has rendered her speechless... immobile. The fact that even though she didn’t look like she was judging me, she very clearly was.
Some men want a woman who believes in them. A woman who doesn’t question their truths. Right now, I’m not that man. Right now, all I need is for her to challenge me, to tell me that I’m a liar, that I could never do such a thing. To hold me, to comfort me, to not believe my truths.
The air feels like ice-blades against my skin as I step out into the open. I don’t know where I’m going, but as I shove my hands into my pockets and brush against the metal of my keys, I know that I have the means to get very far away from here and so I do just that. I drive without purpose. I drive without direction. I drive until the tears have dried in streaks down my face and my breaths are no longer heaved in chaos.
There’s a part of me that blames Beth for what’s happening here. She didn’t push too far. It wouldn’t be fair of me to say that. But the fact of the matter is, she pushed and the house of straw I’d been hiding under came tumbling down. What I also know is that no matter how much I care to blame her for forcing these feelings out of me, she’s also the only person who has made me feel human in a very long time.
Not right now, though.
Right now, I feel like a monster.
And so I do exactly what it is that monsters do.
I challenge God.
38
There’s a dining room in this massive condo, complete with cushiony chairs and an oversized lamp that almost brushes the surface of a perfectly polished wooden table. It’s one of those rooms that look too perfect to use while being too much of a waste if not taken advantage of. There’s no reason why I’m standing in here, other than the fact that I’ve been pacing around this condo for about three hours, waiting for Maverick to come home while, at the same time, dreading the moment he walks through the door.
What will I do?
What will I say?
How will I act?
So many questions and no answers that feel concrete enough to enforce confidence.
I take a seat in one of the chairs and allow my head to loll back while I think.
The thing is, I know enough about Maverick to know that I should panic, and I should worry and I should pick up the phone and call every single one of his friends. I should make sure that he’s okay. Call the cops if that’s what it takes to keep track of him. But I hesitate. I tell myself that this is different from all those other times where I’ve seen Maverick try to find himself at the bottom of a bottle. Back then, he was lost. Back then, he was lonely. Back then, he had friends who would egg him on. Cheer as he attempted to drink himself into the underworld. Right now, he’s just a boy missing his mother. A boy who wants to miss her in private, mourn her in private.
The truth of the matter is, however, I doubt Maverick is alone.
He’s likely with those very friends. Doing those very things he shouldn’t be
doing.
“As long as he’s not alone,” I think out loud, reflecting on the time Maverick called to ask me to pick him up. Even as highly intoxicated as he was, he still had his wits about him. He could have gotten behind the wheel and left the rest up to fate, but he called. The problem here is that he doesn’t have his phone with him. It’s sitting pretty on the nightstand in the bedroom, asking for a code to be punched in before it so much as budges. It’s the reason I haven’t phoned his friends. That and the fact that I might be overreacting. But seriously, it’s been three hours and the way he left...
I suck in a deep breath, but my nerves don’t get any steadier. If Maverick attempts to drink his sins away tonight, he won’t be able to reach me.
All the chances in the world say that he doesn’t have my number written on his palm or sitting in the back of his head. And even if he did, this non-relationship that we’re having would mean that he wouldn’t dare ask one of his friends to punch in my number even if he had it.
I shake all those thoughts away and push the chair back.
Something...I need to find something to do with my hands and something else to fill my mind. I turn to the kitchen and start to spin it out of order, thankful that I wasn’t shy on restocking it where I could.
There’s chicken breast and shrimp, ground beef and steak. For a short moment, I consider cooking up a storm like no one has ever seen before. And then I put that thought into action. I’ll drive myself mad if I’m not doing something.
My mind flashes to Eloise. In moments like these, my violin would act as a respite from all the bullshit life throws at me. Except there’s no turning to her. She’s shattered into even more pieces than Maverick. That thought causes my heart to throb twice as hard, forcing me to focus on the cooking and to try to forget everything else.
I pop open the oven and set a sheet on the lower rack before filling two pots with water and setting them on the stove. My mind falls into my motions as I whizz through the kitchen, cutting and chopping. Seasoning this. Seasoning that.
In no time at all, the oven’s heated and the pots are starting to boil. The aroma of lemon and spices fill the air, but they don’t help me to forget that this night just turned on its ass in a heartbeat.
I stick a spoon into the mixture I have on the stove, blowing softly and sucking it clean of all flavor. Unfortunately, no matter what I do and no matter the distractions I try to cook up, one thing remains true, I’m still just as lost as I was before all this.
It’s obvious that Maverick and I will need to talk. But, if and when he gets back home, I’m not sure how to approach him. This isn’t some squabble. This is him, admitting to something that is so far from the truth that it makes my head spin. This is him thinking that I, even for a moment, considered that what he said might have been true. I know it’s not. I know it’s not because I know, without a doubt, that he loved her. And I should have said it sooner. I should have said it immediately. I should have held on to him. Ran after him. Pinned him down with all my strength and kept him stable with my words, but instead, I panicked.
Because what 18 year old boy says something like that? And why? Why would he say something like that? And Jesus, I couldn’t breathe realizing the weight he had been carrying around his entire life.
So maybe I fucked up. But how the hell was I supposed to act with what he’d thrown at me? Again, I shake my head, this time a little harder, like I’m trying to bang my brain against the inside of my skull.
Focus on cooking.
Focus on cooking.
You’re here when Maverick needs you.
And that I am. Being here so that he can have me when he wants to need me.
I pop the oven open and check on the broccoli, giving it a little stir before sprinkling a good helping of cheese over the top. Everything is almost ready now, sizzling and steaming and wishing to be devoured. I’ve already got the kitchen counter lined with Tupperware because heaven knows, I don’t have an appetite.
I start to dish things up, cringing a little as I realize that I could have fed a small village with the food I cooked. When I’m all out of Tupperware space, my mind drifts back to the dining room. Just for kickers, but mostly out of boredom and a need to not have that boredom draw me into the darkness, I start piling silverware into my hands. I place them on the table before rushing back into the kitchen to pick up plates. The pots and pans still have half the food that was cooked in them, having not been able to fit in the Tupperware. I find cute little heat protectors still in the packaging, rip those open and balance them along with the pots and pans that I carry over to the dining table. And then, I set the table like I’m trying to win a Pinterest award. I shove away all but the two chairs at the opposite ends of the table.
In here, it’s just us. Hiding away from the world like we don’t deserve to be a part of it, when in truth, we’re proof that
something beautiful can be born of something ugly. Maverick and I, we are what hope looks like.
I sit in front of an empty plate, watching as the food on the table grows as cold as the blood in my veins. Time ticks into the next hour and Maverick is still nowhere to be seen.
Still, I sit.
Still, I wait.
There’s a part of me that is angry with him because after what we’d shared, after how vulnerably I was to him, why the hell did he feel the need to run? Why couldn’t he just turn to me? Why couldn’t he have waited a beat longer for my words.
Standing, I push back my chair and am in the middle of storming out of the dining room when I hear the front door creak open. There are four square holes in the wall facing the door, each filled with decorative cram. They’re not large enough to completely skew Maverick’s face from my line of sight. I’m not sure whether or not I’m grateful for that.
Nervous as all hell, I continue out of the room and walk right up to him. About to demand an explanation or to give him one? I’m not sure. But what I see when I come face to face with him stops me right in my tracks.
There’s not just blood on his shirt.
There’s blood everywhere.
39
I didn’t just come back to my condo. I came home. The scent of lemon in the air. The steam still oozing from the oven, filling the rest of the room in a mix of aromas that my life had never been privy to until Bethany walked into it.
Instead of talking or thinking or allowing a word to leave her chewed on lips, I pull her toward me and I kiss her. I kiss her like a man starved. Like someone who doesn’t just want her, but someone who needs her.
I kiss her for what feels like it might be the very last time as well as the
beginning. A part of me is deathly afraid that it might be true. Whether or not she makes the decision, or I do, I know that sooner or later it might very well come to the point where we’re staring down the barrel at the end of us.
Vile Intentions: A Dark Sports Bully Romance Page 19