by Amelia Wilde
“Good. On your hands and knees.”
She rolls over right away, her head thrown back, her back arched in a curve so perfect I can’t stand it. Her hair is coming loose from the twist she had it tied in at dinner, and I tug it free, wrapping my hand through it, pulling her head back a fraction of an inch more and pressing my lips along the side of her neck.
“Spread.”
Her knees go apart another few inches, and I take a few more moments to stroke the wetness, mixed with my own from the car. She’s trembling, shaking, trying to stay on her hands and knees, and I can tell that if she spoke now, it would be through gritted teeth.
“You’re my bad girl, aren’t you?”
I put my hands on her hips, holding her in place, firm and strong, and I’m rewarded with another burst of wetness. My cock twitches.
“Yes,” she says. It would be a cry, but that would be against the rules.
“Don’t ever forget it.”
Then I plunge into her with one quick, powerful thrust, burying myself inside her channel with one motion, and just in time, I reach around to catch her cry in the palm of my hand.
Chapter 31
Zelda
Sawyer lays on his back, his breathing settling down, and I curl up against his body, relishing the heat, tracing my fingers along the hard muscles of his abs.
My entire body feels like a fireworks show at its peak, warm and sizzling and with all the release I could ever have asked for.
He kept his word, all right. He fucked me until I thought that if I had even one more orgasm, I would die.
There were several times when I came close to breaking the rules, which I know that he brought along just to put me at ease. He might be some kind of criminal, but he took one look at my parents’ house and knew. He understood the weird contradiction I’m living in, an adult still living at home, and he turned it into something so hot I don’t know that I’ll ever recover.
“Wow.”
My hair is a mess, and I reach up and push some errant flyaway strands away from my face.
Sawyer leans down and kisses me on the forehead. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
I twist my hips another few inches toward him so that I can weave my leg around his, and let out another satisfied breath. He’s pulled up the sheets on top of us, and they’re cool and smooth against my skin. My heart slowly settles into a regular rhythm again, but every so often it speeds up. Having Sawyer this close is intoxicating.
He takes a deep breath, and his chest rises and falls under my cheek.
“Is something on your mind?”
There’s a little silence before he speaks, and my heart plummets into my gut. Whatever he’s about to say…
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” I push myself up on one elbow and look down into his eyes. “Yes! Did I somehow give you the impression that this isn’t what I wanted? I don’t know how I could have done that, but—”
“No, not this.” His interruption saves me from an unknown amount of nervous babbling. “What happened earlier.”
It bubbles up again, that cold fear in the pit of my stomach, and Sawyer’s face changes along with mine. This is it. This is the thing that’s going to take the shine off what happened between us. And it probably should, because—
Because Sawyer, as much as I love being in bed with him, is probably a criminal.
“That was…” I lay my head back down. If this is the last time we’re going to be together, and it probably should be, then I’m going to try and enjoy what I can. “That was a really bad situation, Sawyer.”
“I know.”
“Does that—is that what happens every day in your job?”
“Not most days.”
“I don’t mean the guy with the rock. I mean…going to people’s houses like that.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much my job. Sometimes I might go with my boss to a party or a club, but mostly I’m…paying house calls.”
I don’t want to know, but I have to ask. “It’s not just talking, is it?”
He shakes his head, and I feel the movement all the way down in his perfect torso. “Sometimes the person isn’t…cooperative.”
“And then you have to beat them up?”
“Yes.” The word is a sigh, and underneath me his muscles relax a little more. This is the thing he hasn’t wanted to tell me, and now he has. Even if it’s the end for us, he’s still telling me. Which has to count for something. Only—
“You do that for a job?” There’s a funny ache in my chest when I think about it.
“I’m not worth much else, Zelda.” His voice has a strange tightness, and it makes me sit up again.
“Why would you say something like that?”
He looks to the side, away from me. “I’m—” His jaw juts out, and then he pulls it back, works to rearrange his expression. “Look, it felt—it felt good to get into that. After living with my dad all those years and being on the receiving end of a lot of brutal hits, it felt good to turn around and give it to somebody else. At least these people—” He squeezes his eyes shut, then forces them open again. “I was going to say that these people deserve it, but I don’t know how—” He swallows hard. “I don’t know how you’re going to look at me the same way now that you know what a piece of shit I am.”
“I don’t think you’re a piece of shit. How could I?”
“Well, you should.” He’s tensing up, drawing away from me, and I don’t want it to happen. I’m still trying to find a way out of this, a way forward, because something in my soul is reaching for Sawyer all the time. My heart doesn’t want to let him out of my sight.
“It wasn’t your fault, though.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Your…your dad, what he did to you. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Maybe not.” His jaw works. “Maybe it wasn’t, or maybe I’ve always been a worthless asshole who deserved a few knocks.”
A hot frustration wells up in my chest. “You’re not a worthless asshole.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I—” The truth is, I haven’t known him long enough. I just haven’t known him long enough for my opinion to carry any weight. But in our conversations, he’s sweet and respectful, and he put himself in harm’s way rather than let anything happen to me. “I’m not into worthless assholes,” I finish, forcing confidence into my voice.
“I wasn’t nice to your friend.”
“You could make that up to her.”
“You think I should stay around that long?”
“I think you should stay around forever.”
There it is. There’s the truth that’s been ringing like a bell in my mind since the first time I saw Sawyer. He’s not perfect. He’s got a long way to go in his life to reach that. But when I think about doing anything without him, living without him, it’s like picturing an endless series of rainy days.
I’ve fallen for him—hard.
And there’s nothing I can do about it, except try, in any way that I can, to make this work.
At least my words make a grin come to Sawyer’s face. “What the hell would I do in a place like Greenville?”
“I didn’t mean Greenville.” As I’m saying it, something else comes to me. “I don’t want to be here either. We could—” This is a pipe dream, and it’s probably a result of too much excellent sex. “We could go somewhere else. We could start over. It would be a risk, but we could do it.”
Sawyer wraps his arms around me, squeezing me tight. “You have nice dreams, Zelda.”
“They don’t have to be dreams. They could be real.”
His sigh tells a different story.
Chapter 32
Sawyer
Zelda has long shifts at the library and work to catch up on for her grad classes, so it’s back to texting for the rest of the weekend.
It turns out to be a good thing, because I need to get
my head straightened out.
On Sunday morning, over a tray of breakfast casserole, Aunt Linda looks me in the eyes when my phone buzzes another time—another message from Zelda.
“You’re very popular.”
She didn’t say a word about the fact that I came home in the early hours of Friday morning, though I’m sure she wanted to.
I give her a smile. “I have my moments.”
“Have you been to see your dad?”
I can see why she wants to know, why she’s pressing, even though we both know I don’t want to talk about this. This is what I came here to do. I can’t stay at Linda’s endlessly just because there’s a girl down the street who’s in the process of blowing my world into a zillion pieces.
“I really don’t know if I’m going to, Aunt Linda.”
She puts down her fork, and I put down mine.
“Is there—?” She looks out the window. It’s a sunny morning, and the yard is looking better than ever, the grass green and even, the flower beds finally tended to her satisfaction. “Is there some reason you’re putting it off, Sawyer? You’ve been here over a week.”
Something wells up in my chest, and I can’t press it back down. I just can’t. “You don’t remember how things were. Is that it?”
“How things were with your dad?” Her eyes are pools of concern, but I’m having trouble stifling my irritation.
“Yeah. How things were with him, before I moved out.”
Linda shakes her head, pressing her hair back behind her ear. “You know, I never wanted to press you too hard. Sometimes teenagers just need a place to get away, and I was happy to do that for you so that you didn’t feel—” Her eyes scan over my tattoos. What she’s not saying is that she didn’t want me to feel like I had to get in with a bad crowd.
A pang of guilt flashes through my gut. Of course, that’s exactly what I did, the very moment I moved out of my dad’s house.
“I didn’t want you to feel like you had nowhere to go, when you needed to get out, and I was happy to give that to you.”
“And I’m—I’m grateful for that. But I wasn’t—” I stare into her eyes, and she looks right back. “It wasn’t just teenage angst.”
Linda shrugs one shoulder. “It probably didn’t seem like it then, but it’s a phase that everybody goes through when—”
“He beat the shit out of me.”
Her face goes blank with shock, and then her forehead wrinkles. “What?”
“My dad. He beat the shit out of me, more than one time. Especially when he was drunk.”
Linda’s mouth drops open. “Are you serious?”
“Why the hell would I make that up?” My hands ball into fists and I force them to relax. I force myself to put them in my lap. The last thing I want right now is for Linda to think I’m some out of control criminal who might take out his past on her. I’ve never been totally clear about what I do for a living, but we both know that if I had a regular nine to five, I’d have told her about it a long time ago.
She presses her lips together, and tears gather in the corner of her eyes. “I never knew,” she says in a small voice.
“Well, it’s not like I was going to complain about it.”
“That must have been—”
“It was fucking terrible.”
Linda puts her face in her hands and takes a deep breath. The silence that descends on the kitchen is thick with the deep breaths she’s taking to try to steady herself. When she takes her hands away from her face, her eyes are red. “I don’t know what to say, Sawyer.”
“You don’t have to—”
“It was my responsibility, as your aunt, to prevent that kind of—”
“No, it wasn’t.” I cut her off in a firm voice. “It was not. It was his job not to be a fucking abusive asshole. It was his job to do that, not yours. You gave way more than your share.”
“But you have to blame me for—”
“For not noticing? I had a lie ready for you for every black eye. I know you thought I was fighting at school, and that was fine with me.”
“You could have told me.”
“I didn’t want to do that to you. Put you in the middle like that.”
She’s shaking her head again, her mouth turning down into a frown. “What you have to understand is that—” She has to stop to find the words. “Your dad and I had a close relationship growing up, but that didn’t mean—” She throws her hands up. “None of that means I wouldn’t have done anything in my power to—”
“I know.” I reach across the island and take her hand in mine, giving it a squeeze. “I know, Linda. And we don’t have to—” I really don’t want to drag this out into the next decade. “I know you would have done everything you could, okay? I know it. But I was a teenager, and I thought I was doing the right thing.”
I thought I was doing the right thing.
My own words echo in my head. What the hell do I think I’m doing right now?
They’re followed closely by Zelda’s.
You’re not a worthless asshole.
She could be right. She could be right, and it might just be that I haven’t seen it all these years. Asshole, maybe. Worthless?
I guess there’s still time.
I let go of Linda’s hand. “I just wanted to tell you why I haven’t been over there.”
A worthless asshole would stay away from his dying father. A worthless asshole wouldn’t give him the chance to apologize, if that is what he has on his mind. A worthless asshole wouldn’t put things off until it was too late.
“He’s worse, Sawyer.” Linda’s lip quivers. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be until—” A tear spills out of her eye and down her cheek. “But my head is spinning. If that’s how things were between you, you shouldn’t feel any obligation to—to go see him, if you don’t want to. I’m sorry for pressing you.”
“You know what?”
She picks up a napkin and dabs at her eyes. “What?”
“I’m going to go over there right now.”
Chapter 33
Zelda
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m up to my eyeballs in grad school work that I’ve been putting off all week. My small group isn’t thrilled with me, either, for canceling on Thursday’s study and planning session, and they’re getting a little snippy in the online chat. Finally, I type out my final response. I’m going to go work on developing my content, I say. Call if you need anything.
None of them ever call because nobody wants to have to use the phone to actually talk to someone unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I settle in with my studies, determined to ignore my phone for another hour or two until I’m caught up.
I’ve been texting Sawyer all morning.
I want to be texting him now, but I’ve got work to do, and I still feel off from the dream I had early this morning.
It was about the guy from that neighborhood, the chunk of concrete still in his hands, only he had already used it to break through the windows of my little basement apartment, and he was brandishing it from where he stood next to my bed. I woke up with my heart pounding, and my first instinct was to text Sawyer.
Only I couldn’t bring myself to tell him exactly what had happened.
What was the dream about?
It was the first question he asked. Every college man I ever flirted with the entire time I was away would have teased me about it first.
I don’t remember exactly, it was just really unsettling
Every day that goes by, I’m getting more and more comfortable with him…but today, there’s a creeping unease in full force.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I tell myself out loud, and I jump when my mom’s voice filters through the basement entrance, almost like she’s replying.
“Zelda?”
“Yeah?” I get up from the computer, minimizing what I’ve been working on along the way, and go to the door. A burst of warm air comes in when I pull it open, and I’ve been working with t
he lights off, so the sun is mildly blinding.
“Hey, honey.” She’s wearing her typical weekend uniform of jeans and a crew neck sweatshirt that somehow manages to look expensive, even though I know she doesn’t spend a lot of money on clothes. Her hair, the same shade as mine but going gently gray, is pulled back into a low bun.
“What’s up?” My mom and I were close when I was a teenager, but something about the accident at the quarry changed that. She became more possessive, more worried. She’s tried to work on it, I know, but old habits die hard. Now I feel like a teenager standing here, even though I’m standing on the threshold of an apartment I rent from them and not the doorway to my childhood bedroom.
She gives me a smile. “I just wanted to…come down and see how you are. You haven’t been around much lately.”
I crack a smile, too. “I’ve been busy.”
“Work?”
“Work, school—you know, all the usual stuff.”
“A guy?”
I can’t stop my eyes from narrowing, and I open my mouth, then close it again. I can’t accuse her of being nosy if she saw Sawyer come in with me the other night. It is her house. But that old feeling of being fifteen years old and caught in some little lie wells up in my chest.
My mom’s eyes linger on my face, but she doesn’t let me dangle for long. “Did you want to go get a coffee?”
I take in a deep breath and let it out. I want a break from the screen, a break from the work, but if I know my mom—and I still do—this is a set-up, a way for her to get someplace neutral so she can ask more questions.
It doesn’t take her three minutes once we’ve settled in at a table by the front window of the Sweet Shop, a coffee joint and tiny bakery not far from Bernie’s.
“You know, you don’t have to feel…you don’t have to feel strange about bringing people home.” Her hands are wrapped around a mug of cinnamon tea.
“Mom,” I say, keeping my voice even, light, a little joking, wrapping my own hands around a mocha served in a similar mug. “Are you asking me this because you were spying on us from the window?”