by Mia Storm
She smiles up at me and something wicked flashes in her eyes. “I think we should send Detective Diaz a sex tape. She seemed to enjoy the one Craig made.”
“Craig?”
“He told me tonight that he followed us. He wanted to go out after the slam tonight and said I wouldn’t regret it. Said he could make me come like you did.”
My blood pressure rises twenty points, and I literally see red as it pumps hard through my head. But I’m not going to let him ruin what we’ve got going right this second. I kiss her then start pumping inside her. “You’re killing the mood, love.”
She grins up at me. “Did you just call me ‘love.’”
“I did.”
She pulls my mouth to hers and kisses me to my soul. “I like that,” she says when she finally releases me.
I love her slowly, living in her body. And when she never asks to go home, I never take her.
Epilogue
Blaire
The Complete Works of William Blake is open on the arm of the sofa in front of me. I’m on my stomach, propped on my elbows, reading. Caiden’s leaning back against the other armrest. His knees are bent and his feet press against my outer thighs. The tops of my feet rest in the creases of his hips. His laptop lays on the back of my calves as he works.
“You weren’t joking about Blake being warped,” I say, then clear my throat and start reading A Poison Tree aloud.
“I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
“And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
“And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
“And into my garden stole.
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”
I look over my shoulder at Caiden. “I thought the last stanza would be some big message about how holding a grudge will destroy you, not about how sweet revenge is.”
“Blake wasn’t all that into ethical grandstanding. He would have hated all those after-school specials and Hallmark movies with the big moral messages.”
“Yeah, but…” I look back at the book. “That’s a little over the top, isn’t it. I mean, I get that this guy did something to piss him off, but he’s saying he basically obsessed over his wrath until he finally killed the guy.”
“What makes it even more interesting is that there’s a consensus in some literary circles that Blake’s apple symbolizes one of his own creative works that one of his contemporaries stole and passed off as their own.” He sets his laptop aside and starts massaging my feet. “The fact, as you so deftly pointed out, that there’s no final stanza that suggests any remorse for the vengeance would suggest Blake was hoping for an unhappy end to his plagiarist.”
I drop my forehead onto the book. “God, that feels good.”
He massages deeper. “Chris and Taryn are coming to graduation tomorrow. Chris has some big gift for you that he’s keeping secret even from me.”
“Seriously?”
We’ve spent some time with Caiden’s brother and his fiancée. I really like them both. But I don’t feel like I know them well enough for them to be giving me a gift.
“Are your parents coming?” he asks.
I nod against the book. “And Marcus.”
His fingers stall on my feet for a second before he goes back to working his magic. And I know why.
He’s never met Marcus.
Caiden moved to Berkeley with me when I came back to school sophomore year. We found our tiny studio apartment over a bar in a not-too-scary neighborhood in Oakland. He had some editing jobs and got a paid internship at a small non-profit in San Francisco, which turned into a full-time archivist position in their Knowledge Services department last year. I sold the Mini and busted my ass to keep my scholarships. I started getting invitations to poetry slams with prize money attached last year, and the more of those I’ve won, the more invitations I’ve gotten. We’re getting by. Just barely.
But Marcus has never come to see us in Oakland, and the few times we’ve gone home to visit, he makes a point not to be around, even though he moved home last year after he graduated UCLA. He’s coaching the girls’ water polo team at Oak Crest High while he’s trying to figure out what to do with his Exercise Science degree. In his heart, I think Marcus understands I’ve always loved Caiden, but he’s never gotten past what happened between us when I was only seventeen.
They say time heals all wounds. I hope they’re right.
I feel all the tension in my body leech out as Caiden massages. He has that power over me. Just his touch can bring me down from the edge of crazy. His presence, his love, is the only reason I’ve made it through the last three years at Berkeley with my sanity intact.
He rubs and I melt into the cushions, forgetting all about William Blake. But when his tongue finds my feet and makes totally unrelated parts of me wet, I turn over and watch him suck my toes.
Something on my foot catches the light and flashes. When I look closer, I realize he’s slipped a ring onto my toe.
A emerald ring. My birthstone. The emerald is a small and rectangular with tiny diamonds set around the edges.
I wiggle my toes and it shimmers in the sunlight. “My birthday was yesterday. Don’t you remember? You took me out for my first legal drink, then brought me home and took advantage of my drunken ass.”
He grins. “Oh I remember. All except the part about taking advantage of you. I’m pretty sure I was the one being ravaged all night.”
I slip the ring off my toe and crawl up Caiden’s body, laying across his chest and holding the ring up. “You already gave me a birthday present.”
“Then it’s a damn good thing this isn’t a birthday present.” He takes the ring from my hand. “Do you remember what I told you in the street the night I took you home with me and never brought you back?”
“You told me a lot of things,” I say, confused.
He rolls the ring in between his finger and thumb. “I said life isn’t pointless if you don’t lose sight of the things that really matter.”
My heart begins to pound when I start to follow what’s happening here. “You also said I owned you.”
He smiles, slow and sexy. “You do. Every fucking inch of me.” He lifts me gently by the hips and slides out from under me, then lowers himself to a knee on the carpet.
I sit up and just stare, unable to form a coherent thought.
“I always believed when I met The One, something about her would to me in a way no one else ever had. Ever since that first night in the library at Sierra four and a half years ago, when you were standing there asking about Byron in that baggy sweater and jeans, somewhere in my DNA, I knew it was you. Your spirit speaks to mine. Your soul feeds mine. You unlock all the best parts of me and I’m more when I’m with you. You are the thing that gives my life meaning. You keep me from being pointless. If I do any of those things for you”—he holds up the ring—“then marry me, Blaire.”
I crack up.
Laughter comes so hard that I double over and can’t even speak for several minutes. When I finally pull my shit together, I wipe the moisture from my eyes and I look at Caiden. He lifts his eyebrows in a question.
I hold out my hand and he slides the ring onto my ring finger. “You had me a little worried. I wasn’t sure that was a yes.”
“It’s just, I can’t think of a bigger ‘fuck you’ to the world, you know? They yank us apart and send you to jail for loving me, and now...” I hold up the ring and like how it looks on my hand. “I think we should invite Professor Duncan and his high horse to the wedding.”
Caiden’s brow creases. “He did the right thing, Blaire. I was a faculty member and you were underage.”
I shake my head, hating that I even brought this up to ruin our moment. But I can’t help it. I’ve carried all this resentment and anger for so long. “Firing you was the right thing. Maybe even withholding your degree, though I think that part was really just him having a hissy fit. But he never once asked how I felt. He never asked me if I wanted to report you to the police. He just assumed I was a naïve little girl who’d been played by a person in a position of authority. He projected all his shit all over me.”
Tears begin to stream down my face as the real root of all my anger burns to the surface. Suddenly his face is all I can see, and it’s not Professor Duncan.
Caiden tries to hold me and I shove him back. “He decided what you were doing to me was rape, but where the fuck was he three weeks later? No one fucking saved me from Nate! He raped me and I…” I drop my head when a sob hitches up my throat, choking off my words. “I kept going back,” I say weakly. “Every time he touched me, it killed another piece of my soul. And I let him. Over and over and over.”
I see the animal in Nate’s face as he pins me down. I see the possessive look in his eye and I know he hears me when I say no. I feel him, grasping tighter, pounding harder when I try to push him back.
I feel the toxic swamp mud oozing through my veins again. I feel poison, like Blake’s apple.
This time, when Caiden pulls me off the sofa and into his arms, I let him.
“I’m so sorry.” He crushes me to his chest. “Christ, Blaire, I knew something had happened to you. You weren’t the same after…” He presses his face harder into my hair as he shakes his head. “But I just assumed it was me…what happened with us. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
I manage to gradually pull myself together and wrestle out of Caiden’s arms, feeling suddenly stupid. “It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.”
He lets me go, but his eyes stay on mine. “It does matter. Blaire, you need to get help…talk to someone who knows about this shit…someone who can help you figure out ways of dealing with it.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He slides onto the sofa next to me and lifts my face so I’m looking into those storming blue eyes. “I think you need to. Jesus, Blaire. You’ve been carrying this around for so long. It’s eating you alive.”
I bolt off the sofa when my stomach suddenly turns into a volcano. I make it as far as the tile floor of the bathroom before its acid contents erupt out of me. I collapse onto my hands and knees and wait the waves of nausea out. It’s several minutes later that my puking turns to dry heaves, then finally trails off.
It feels like my body’s trying to puke out my entire year with Nate. Every touch was poison and I feel it burning my insides on its way out.
When I become aware of my surroundings again, I realize Caiden’s on the floor with me, holding my hair back. I sink into his lap and he pulls me close, not even caring that I’m covered with puke. “I love you, Blaire. We’re going to get through this. Let me help you.”
My whole body seizes and I curl into a ball.
Let me help you.
That shouldn’t sound terrifying. But it does.
I’ve never let myself need anyone. I learned to take care of myself when I was young, and then I took care of Marcus too. But maybe Caiden is right. Maybe the point of life is not to get so lost in the bullshit that you lose sight of what matters.
Caiden matters. We matter.
I don’t have to be alone anymore. I can tear down my walls and let someone help me. I can let Caiden help me, because there’s no one I trust more.
I sink deeper into him, right there on the steaming, puke-covered floor, and tell him everything. I open up my mouth and my greasy black soul spills all over him.
“I let myself believe he didn’t hear me say no. I let him…” I cringe and trail off. “Every time we were together I felt him rape me all over again, so I just shut down and stopped feeling anything. I turned it all off and just pretended not to exist.”
He doesn’t flinch or pull away when I give him the details—of the rape and everything after. By the time I’m done, the apartment’s dark, but Caiden is still here, holding me. His grip on me is as tight as it started, as if he understands that my greatest fear is him letting go.
“I’ve got you, love,” he whispers in my ear, rocking me slowly in his arms.
Love. He calls me love, like that’s what I am to him. Maybe that’s all I need to be.
All you need is love.
Fuck. What if The Beatles were right this whole time? Maybe love isn’t as transient and ethereal as I thought. Maybe it’s the most real thing there is.
He thumbs the ring on my finger. “We’ve still got some things to figure out, Blaire. I get that. But that’s the journey I want to take with you all the way to the ‘the grow old and die’ scene at the end of Act Five.”
I blink at his reference to my graduation speech. He wasn’t there. He was in jail.
He smiles at my confusion. “I found your speech when I searched for your poetry on Youtube after I got out of jail.”
“You cyberstalked me?” I ask with a lift of my eyebrows. But I can’t contain the smile, knowing even when we were apart, he was thinking of me.
He trails a fingertip down my nose. “I was in purgatory the year we were apart. Seeing your face, listening to what came out of that beautiful mind of yours, it was the only thing that saved me.”
“Parts of my mind aren’t that beautiful.” I cringe. “There are dark parts and scary parts and more than a few crazy parts.”
“I think it’s your dark, scary, and crazy parts that speak to mine.” He pulls me close. “Nothing in there could ever scare me away.”
I mold myself to his body. “Remember you said that.”
I’ve never believed in “two halves of a whole,” or destiny or any of that. I’ve surrounded myself with people who made it easy for me to be an island. I’ve chosen to be alone in this life. Until Caiden. Now I know that no one is ever truly alone. That knowledge prickles my skin into goose bumps and steals my breath as the truth sinks into my bones. The connections are there, some stronger than others. The strongest are capable of breaking through any wall we put up.
Caiden was through my walls before I even knew I had them. I don’t know if that’s destiny, but it’s big. And it’s real.
Scarily real.
I pull myself out of Caiden’s arms and move to the window. The stars are hard to see through the city lights, but they’re there. “Does this scare you?”
He comes up behind me and lays his hands gently on my hips. “What scares the living shit out of me is the thought of a life without you in it.”
In the black velvet sky above, the moon smiles on me the same way she did the night exactly three years ago when I freed my soul from my self-imposed prison. I smile back knowing that, because of Caiden, I’ll never need walls again. And I’ll never be alone.
How to Heal
A poem by Blaire Leon
I can hardly remember when
His touch felt like love on my skin.
Before he forced his way in.
Now every touch feels like a sin.
Distrust has become my law.
Fear rakes my insides raw.
The only chance of survival: Die.
Wave the part of my soul that sang goodbye.
Iron bolt the doors to my heart,
And never again let it start
To remember the part
Where my friend became the monster in the dark.
How many secrets can you keep?
Can you lock away deep?
What will it take to unlock the pain?
Things I can’t even begin to explain
Or to understand.
Will it be another hand?
One who loves without command?
A man who knows my heart firsthand?
A voice of unconditional love
That will finally help me rise above
The landmines in my soul;
The scars in my heart that control
The way I cry and love and hate.
The reason for my self-abate
Dies when I dare to open a new slate.
For the way I live and die and create
A place in my spirit that can love again
And trust that he’ll not revive the pain.
This is how my soul begins to heal;
By believing in him and keeping it real.
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks go first to every single one of you who picked this book up and gave it a try. I truly appreciate you spending your valuable time with Blaire and Caiden. That includes the many bloggers and authors who helped spread the word. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
This book would not have happened without the encouragement of my dear friend Katy Evans, cheerleader extraordinaire. Thank you, my lovely. And thanks also to the ladies at New Leaf Literary who brought this story to life: Suzie Townsend for all her tireless work on my behalf, and Danielle Barthel for fixing all my many booboos. Thanks to Danielle Sanchez and K.P. Simmon at Inkslinger for all your encouragement and endless hours of support. And, always, thank you to my family for…everything. I love you.
Music is my muse, and I try to give credit to the artists who inspire my work. The influence of a single song caused all the passion that is Caiden and Blaire’s story to pour out of me in a matter of days. You’ll find that song referenced in the text, but I have to thank Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys for writing “Do I Wanna Know.”
About the Author
Mia Storm is a hopeless romantic who is always searching for her happy ending. Sometimes she’s forced to make one up. When that happens, she’s thrilled to be able to share those stories with her readers. She lives in California and spends much of her time in the sun with a book in one hand and a mug of black coffee in the other, or hiking the trails in Yosemite. Connect with her online at MiaStormAuthor.blogspot.com, on Twitter at @MiaStormAuthor, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MiaStormAuthor.