by Amelia Wilde
She has the grace to look a little sheepish. “I might have—caught a glimpse.”
“I don’t really think you were spying.”
“I’m just curious.”
“He’s a guy I met when I was out with Carly.”
“A guy from the bar?” The corners of her mouth turn down before she can keep a neutral face.
“Not…really?” I take a sip of the mocha, which is delicious, and put the mug back on the table. “He was at the club we went to, but he’s not a regular there.”
“Where’s he from, then?”
I take a breath. “The neighborhood, actually.”
“Our neighborhood?”
“Yeah. His aunt is a woman named Linda, from a few houses down.”
My mom’s face lights up. “Oh, Linda! She’s so pleasant.”
“You know her?”
“I’ve run into her a few times when we’re both out walking. I didn’t know she had a nephew. What does he do?”
This is it—this is the question that’s either going to be answered with a lie or bring the entire conversation to a grinding halt. I’m not a big fan of lying to my mom, but I think of that guy standing outside Sawyer’s car window, and there’s no way—no way—I can tell her what Sawyer does. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“He has a job in the city.” It’s true. Sort of.
She nods, and I wrack my brain trying to remember if Sawyer was wearing a jacket. No—a dress shirt, and he didn’t have the sleeves pulled up. There’s no way she saw his tattoos.
My mom takes a sip of her tea and leans across the table, eyes shining in a way that surprises me. “Is he in town for long?”
“I’m not really sure. I guess his dad is very ill.”
She frowns then, and it’s genuine. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I guess they have—a complicated relationship.”
My mom shakes her head. “Some people do.”
Like us.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, sipping our drinks.
“So…do you think it’s going to get serious?” She asks the question in a light tone, but I can tell by the look on her face that she’s dying to know.
My stomach turns over. I open my mouth to tell her that it seems like it’s getting serious, like there’s nobody else I’ve ever wanted to talk to so much in my life, that he would put himself between me and any danger…
But I can’t, because being with him is a danger.
Instead, I buy some time by taking another drink of the mocha, and then I give a little shrug.
“It could be. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
Chapter 34
Sawyer
This time I don’t fuck around with walking around the block in the opposite direction. I just walk straight to my dad’s house, two left turns, and it doesn’t take nearly long enough until I’m taking the porch stairs two at a time and pounding my fist against the door. Too late, I wonder if I should have pulled it back, if he’s really, you know, dying, but what’s done is done.
The door swings open almost immediately to reveal Jem. Her dark hair is piled on top of her head, a little messy, like she’s been leaning up against the couch.
“Hi.”
“Hey, Jem. Is he home?”
She shoots me a look. “Where else would he be, if he wasn’t here?”
I lift one shoulder, then drop it back into place. “You’re here, so I’m assuming he is, too.”
A weak voice filters toward the door from the den, which is in the back corner of the house. “Who is it, Jem-bug?”
Jem looks up at me, her jaw squared like she’s debating whether or not to let me across the threshold, but then something shifts in her dark eyes and she steps back.
“It’s Sawyer.”
“Sawyer?” Even from here, he sounds nothing like the man I used to know, the thundering, red-faced behemoth who would shake the foundations of the house with his rage.
I follow his voice back to the den, but it’s not the den—not like I remember it, anyway. It’s been turned into a hospital room.
“I’m going to grab some food,” Jem calls from the front entryway. “Anything you want, Dad?”
“A shake,” says the skeletal being propped up in an actual hospital bed that’s been moved into the room. “Chocolate.”
I take him in. There is no way a man in his state can drink a chocolate milkshake. Even getting it through the straw would be hard. A sharp ache zings through my chest. I’ve hated this fucker for longer than I worshipped him, but the sight in front of me…
He’s just wasting away.
There’s not much left of him at all, yet here he is, tucked into the hospital bed, the back on an incline so he can watch TV. The ratty blue couch from my teen years has been replaced with something Jem must have picked out on sale—floral, inoffensive—and I can see where she usually sits, curled up on one end, because the other side is completely untouched.
My dad doesn’t have hair anymore, and he turns his skinny neck to look at me during the next commercial break. “Sawyer.”
“Hey.”
There’s a pause as we look at each other.
“You can come in, you know. I’m not going to—” The smile on his face is a cruel parody. “I can’t come after you anymore.”
“I can see that.” I try to crack a grin—God knows why—but it’s impossible to keep one on my face. My gut is a churning mix of disgust and despair and hate.
And something else.
Zelda’s face flashes up in my mind, her eyes wide, her expression hopeful. You could still go to school. I bet, if we got into another conversation about my dad, she’d say something like, you could still forgive him.
I can practically hear her saying it, and something cracks open, the first fissure in the thick wall I built around myself years ago. I don’t want her to have to tell me. I want to be…
It sounds stupid as hell, but I want to be the kind of guy who proves her right without her having to ask.
My jaw tightens. I’m just not sure I can do it.
I take one step into the den. It smells like hospital and death in the room, and every cell in my body screams at me to go back outside, where it’s sunny and fresh, not stifling.
But this is what I came here to do.
And I see why Aunt Linda has been so damn insistent.
“What are you watching?”
It seems like the least loaded question I can ask, but my dad’s hand lifts from the blanket, picking at a remote control. The TV goes off with a click that echoes in the thick silence of the room.
“Come over here.” He motions toward the end of the bed. When I was a kid, he would have taken up the whole thing. Now his legs are only twigs underneath the blanket.
Well, there’s no point in dragging this out. I cross the room in four steps and sit down gingerly at the foot of the bed. Then, because I’m a fucking grown man and not a scared little kid anymore, I look him in the eye.
His eyes are just like mine and still, despite the rest of his body revolting against him, bright. Not with joy, though. With pain.
We stare at each other for a long moment.
“You’ve filled out.”
“I worked at it.”
“I can see that.” He smiles then. He’s echoing me, but I’m an echo of him, even if I don’t want to be. The truth of it comes like a sucker punch. “You doing okay?”
“I make a living.”
“Doing what?”
“I work for a guy in the city.”
“Doing what?”
What’s the point in lying? Is there any time left for that kind of shit? “I’m a heavy for a drug dealer in the city. He’s a dangerous piece of shit, but he’d rather not do his own dirty work.”
My dad nods slowly. “That what you want?”
I look down at the blanket, pulled up carefully to his waist, then back at his face. “Do you care?”
“Yeah.” He folds his han
ds together in his lap. “I was a monster, Sawyer. There’s no getting around it.”
My instinct is to shrug it off, tell him that he really wasn’t, but I can’t. I can’t do that. “You were.”
“But you don’t have to be.”
“I’m not a monster.”
“You really think that?”
Anger bursts like a rocket in my chest, but I force my voice to stay level. “You’re really going to call me a monster after what you—”
He raises his hands. It looks like it takes an effort. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what the fuck did you mean?”
“Look, son, you can be pissed at me until I’m in my grave. Afterward, if you want. But I was just saying—” He takes in a hard breath. “You think you’re doing the right thing? For yourself?”
I open my mouth to tell him that of fucking course I do, but Zelda crashes into my mind again, and when her face slides away I feel a wash of relief like I’m back in that college kid’s room, glad he’s getting the money so I don’t have to hit him. No. I haven’t thought for a while that this is a good fucking thing, but there might not be any way out now.
“No.”
He considers me again. “You should do something else.”
“Why?”
“You’re too good for it, Sawyer. You’re just too good. You’ve always been too good. It used to make me mad as hell when I was drunk.”
“Maybe.”
“Can I tell you something?”
I shift on the bed. “Sure.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t want him to tell me he’s sorry. I don’t want to hear it. I want to keep hating him, for as long as I live, so it’s never a fucking problem if he dies or does something else that’s fucked up, and hearing it takes the breath out of my lungs, squeezes tight on my throat.
“I—” I can’t find any words. I’m just trying to get a damn breath. I have to get out, I have to go. “I’ll come around soon, okay?”
Then I’m walking out, shutting the door behind me, walking fast, walking right to her, hoping against hope that she’s home.
Chapter 35
Zelda
I’ve just settled into my chair in front of the computer again, my mind taking the hard fall back into concentration, when there’s a knock at my door.
“Didn’t we just—?” I’m smiling when I open the door, expecting to see my mom standing there even though she just told me that she was running across town to the craft store, but it’s not her.
It’s Sawyer.
My breath hitches at the sight of him, the space between my legs heating up, but a beat later I register the look on his face. It’s somewhere between anguish and anger, his jaw clenched tight.
“Are you okay?”
“Can I come in?” He shifts his weight from foot to foot and takes a deep breath.
“Are you sure you want to?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you have some—” I stop myself from saying “extra energy,” because Sawyer is definitely not one of the kids at the library who frequents the tween section and wreaks havoc. “I could come with you, if you wanted to go for a walk or something.”
“No. All I want—” He looks into my eyes and something in his face shifts, gives way, and the next thing I know he’s stepping forward in one motion, wrapping his hands around my face, covering my mouth with his and taking all of me in.
The momentum pushes us back through the door and into my apartment. Sawyer kicks the door shut behind us, not bothering to lock it, and I don’t care. I don’t care, because his hands are everywhere, sliding down to my waist, stripping off my pants, coming back upward and tearing my shirt over my head.
We’re making our way to the bedroom in a hurricane of flying clothes. Sawyer’s deft fingers unhook my bra and my breasts spring out into his waiting hands, and I’m soaking wet, the dampness beading on the skin between my legs.
Where did his clothes go, and when did he have time to take them off? All I know is that he’s on full display, his tattoos dark against his skin, every muscle working together to bring us to the bed.
One tug of his wrist and I’m straddling him, my wetness planted against his hard hipbone, and I lean down and put my lips against the skin of his chest, licking hard. His hands are at my waist again, pulling me up, and it’s the dance of a hot fuck that’s happening now, my pussy coming down on his cock in one motion, taking all of him in, riding him with an abandon I’ve never felt.
His hands guide me up and down, up and down, harder and harder, faster and faster, and he lets out a low growl. I bite my lip, trying to keep any noises to a minimum, but it lasts for only a few moments before I forget myself.
I think he’s on the verge of a powerful orgasm when he lifts me off his cock, putting me down next to him on the bed, on my knees, upright, and then he’s behind me, his hands on my wrists, moving us toward the headboard.
“Hands on the wall.”
That’s all he has to say, and I brace myself against the wall, his head moving behind me. He lowers his head and kisses the curve of my shoulder, sending shivers all through my body, and his hands are spreading me wider, tugging my hips back from the wall so that I’m open for him, completely open for him. My muscles tense, holding myself in place, and then he’s pressing in, filling me, stretching me, taking me with a kind of possessiveness I’ve never wanted from another man.
Then, because I’m at a dizzying level of pleasure already, the corners of my vision going blurry, I’m almost there and he seems to sense it, he dips one hand down and strokes my throbbing clit.
One stroke.
That’s all it takes, and I’m coming so hard I can’t see or breathe, my muscles clenching around him as he pounds into me again and again, his other hand tight on my hips for balance as he goes over the edge of his own release, inside me to the hilt, his heat meeting mine.
His muscles tense, freezing in place, and we’re both breathing hard, the only sound in the room, my hands trembling against the wall. My skin is covered in a sheen of sweat from our efforts.
After a minute, Sawyer’s hand releases from my hip. He stands up next to the bed and guides me gently down after him.
“Do you have your own shower down here?” He runs a hand through his hair, trying to put a smile on his face and failing.
“Yeah, of course I do.” I reach for his hand and my fingers curl easily into it. “This way.”
It’s big enough for two, a nice perk of the recent renovation, and I turn on the water to the perfect temperature and step inside. Sawyer steps in after me and takes a big breath that ends in a shudder.
I’ve never seen him like this before. I have no idea what happened, no idea what to do, but I start by switching places with him so that the water can run warm down his hair, down the back of my neck.
I reach up instinctively to help the water through his hair, and he bows his head, lips pressed tight together, and his chest gives a funny jerk. Is he crying? I can’t tell, not with the water droplets running down over his face, but he keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t pull my hands away.
“What happened?”
I keep my voice soft and low, no pressure. It takes him a long time to answer. In the meantime, I work some shampoo through his dark hair, coaxing him to tip his head back so I can rinse it out.
“I went to visit my dad.”
“How—how did it go?”
He has to lean down a little bit so I can reach up high enough to rinse all the suds away. “He finally apologized.”
I don’t know what it was like for Sawyer growing up, and I can’t pretend to understand it. My father never raised a hand to me, or to anyone else, as far as I know. His turmoil is written all over his face. I can’t find the words.
“I—” He takes another breath, blowing it out through his lips. “As long as he was a piece of shit,
I could hate him. But seeing him like that—”
There’s something I’m missing here, some crucial piece of information that Sawyer has kept locked inside.
“Is he…doing okay?”
“No!” Sawyer cries, his hands coming up to cover his face, the water streaming own over him. “He’s dying. And I can’t hate him anymore.”
Chapter 36
Sawyer
I don’t know how long it takes me to get my fucking self together, but Zelda doesn’t speak, doesn’t coax me, doesn’t do anything but run a clean washcloth over me, then gently turns me away from the water so she can shampoo her hair and wash up.
When she turns the water off and steps out of the shower, I finally snap the fuck out of it, and she’s back an instant later, a fluffy, clean towel in her hands.
“Here.”
She wraps her own towel around her body, working the fabric over her skin, and I draw it roughly over my hair, around the back of my neck, drying myself with sharp movements. “I’m sorry.”
Zelda looks up at me with her huge green eyes, and there’s no pity there, only a sincerity that takes my breath away. “You don’t ever have to be sorry.”
I laugh, and the sound is bitter and short. “I have a lot to be sorry for.”
“Well.” She wraps the towel around her body, tucking an edge in just above her breasts to keep it in place. “Being upset about your dad isn’t one of them.”
Then she turns on her heel and steps over to the counter and bends, sliding some of the drawers open and taking out a circular brush and a hair dryer. She sets them both on the counter and starts what looks like a familiar routine—lotion over most of her body, the same in a thin layer over the skin of her face, and I stop her when she starts to lift the brush and hair dryer to her hair. I lift her hair from the back of her neck, thick and damp in my hand, and kiss her there in that hidden spot.
“I’m not a fragile man.”