by BB Easton
He draped an arm over my shoulders as we both doubled over in laughter. Just like the good old days—before everything in my life had gone to shit. God, it felt good to laugh again. As our giggles died down, we heard the metallic clicking sound of the front door being locked.
Craig looked at me with wide eyes. “It’s nine o’clock, bitch! You know what that means!”
I groaned and rolled my eyes as Craig grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the cash stand. He threw open one of the cabinets, swapped out the corporate-approved CD in the store sound system for one of his own, then treated all of us to his favorite closing- time ritual. A storewide performance of the “Thong Song.”
I sighed and twerked in amused defeat as Craig danced circles around me. Throughout the song he gyrated around my ass like it was something special, which was absolutely ridiculous. The girl in the song had “dumps like a truck.” All I had were dumplings.
When I walked out to my car ten minutes later I was still smiling from ear to ear and singing about a girl with “thighs like what.” When I sat inside my little Mustang and cranked the engine, I felt a newfound confidence behind the wheel, thanks to Harley. And when I looked in the rearview mirror before backing out of my parking spot I screamed and slammed on the brakes.
Zombie eyes held my wide-eyed stare in the mirror.
Musky, cinnamony cologne seized my lungs.
Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream.
Pins and needles stabbed my every hair follicle.
My heart slammed against my rib cage.
My brain sent panicked signals out to every extremity—Door handle! Open! Run!—but they went unreceived. I was paralyzed. Frozen to the spot by his icy stare.
The shadow man in my backseat spoke, “I got your letter.” His clear, deep voice sounded like controlled chaos. Syllables sliding through clenched teeth with restrained rage. Heavy, hot breaths being pulled and pushed through flared nostrils.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t breathe at all. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t tear my gaze away from the rearview mirror. I was caught in the eye of an F5 tornado. One wrong move, and I’d be annihilated.
“I wanted you to look me in the fucking face and tell me you believe him. That you think I’m a fucking cocksucker.”
I couldn’t see anything but his cold, calculating eyes, but I could hear his breaths and feel the heat he was radiating. It filled the already-sweltering car, causing droplets of sweat to roll down my sides.
“What do you think I saw when I got here, Punk?” Knight’s voice dropped an octave as his hand shot out from the darkness and wrapped around my mouth, pulling my face to the right. Toward him. Forcing me to confront my own personal nightmare.
“Harley James. Harley fucking James!” Knight squeezed my cheeks so hard, my mouth folded into a reluctant kiss against his rough palm. He leaned forward so that our eyes were mere inches apart—his angular lips curled into a snarl—just before the word no tore from his chest in a burst of anger.
I flinched and tried to pull away, but his hold on me only tightened. Clenching my eyes shut, I willed myself not to cry, but my breaths came out as whimpers.
When Knight spoke again, he’d resumed his controlled snarl. “What did I say when I left, Punk? Huh? What the fuck did I say?” He jerked my face in his hand, pulling a high-pitched shriek from my lungs. “I told you I loved you. I told you I was doing this for you. I told you to find somebody fucking better! And this is what you do? A month later, you’re fucking Harley James and telling me that I’m the piece of shit? That I’m the liar? That I’m the cheater? That I’m some fucking faggot who never let you all the way in?” Knight let out a menacing laugh that made my adrenal glands shudder and constrict. “Oh, you’re alllll the fucking way in, Punk. You’re in my goddamn guts. You’ve seen my shit-stained soul. You’re the only fucking person who knows what I am inside, but it seems like you need a little reminder.”
Knight wrapped his hands around my rib cage and dragged me into the backseat while I was still struggling to process his seething words. My ass landed on his thighs, the back of my head landed against the passenger window, and my heavy boots got stuck between the driver’s seat and the center console, immobilizing my legs. Knight gripped my face again, pressing my head harder into the glass.
“If you had stopped and used your fucking brain for one second,” Knight growled, his chest heaving, “you would have realized that you and I weren’t even together when Lance said he sucked my cock. We didn’t start dating until after he got expelled, did we?” Knight forced my head to move from side to side against the glass, silently answering his own question. “But you didn’t want to use your brain, did you? You wanted a reason to hate me. You wanted an excuse to fuck that piece of shit guilt-free.”
Tears pooled behind my closed lids as I realized that Knight was right. About everything. We hadn’t been together when Lance said Knight cheated on me. And I did want a reason to hate him. I’d needed one. Because if I didn’t hate him, that meant that I still loved him. And if I still loved him, then I was fucking doomed to spend eternity in the darkness I’d been living in before Harley showed up. Doomed to sit idly by while a piece of my heart used himself as target practice overseas. Doomed to miss him forever.
“Well that doesn’t fucking work for me,” Knight said, removing his hand and replacing it with his lips. He kissed me hard, unleashing every ounce of anger he’d been holding back. He kissed me like he wanted to hit me. Like he wanted me to hit him back.
My hands instinctively found their way back into his velvety-soft white-blond buzz cut as I accepted his rage. His madness. His love. My body cried out for his, longing for the pleasure-pain he’d taught it to crave.
“You are mine,” Knight growled against my mouth, gripping the back of my neck. “Do you fucking understand? You’re mine until I say you’re not.”
His words terrified and elated me at the same time. After the way he’d cast me aside, I’d felt like a crazy person—like I’d imagined this great love, made it all up in my own head. I’d felt insignificant and insane. But here he was, with my lip between his teeth, telling me what my heart had known all along—that not only had he let me in, he’d locked the door behind me and thrown away the key.
I pulled my feet free from the center console and shifted so that I was straddling him. Knight must have pushed the passenger seat all the way forward when he climbed into the back because there was more room than I’d expected. His huge arms wrapped around my body, pulling me even closer, as he dropped his face to my neck. For a split second, I saw the sweet boy underneath all the muscles, the tattoos, the hate. I saw Ronald, and he was clutching me to his chest as if I were a teddy bear during a lightning storm. Then he was gone along with my T-shirt as Knight tore it off over my head. Followed by his own.
I unclasped my bra as he unbuttoned my jeans, longing to be skin-to-skin with him again. Memories of sleeping with him late into the afternoon on an itchy brown couch surfaced. The way our breathing lungs and beating hearts would synchronize automatically. How hard and heavy his body felt on top of mine, yet soft. Touchable. How much younger he looked when the monster in him was asleep and his zombie eyes were hidden by lids lined with long blond lashes.
As Knight looked down, concentrating on relieving me of my boots and jeans, those same long lashes glinted in the light from the adjacent parking lot. He was really there. Every one of my senses confirmed it. Knight had come back.
Once I was in nothing but my socks, Knight freed himself from his camouflage pants and pulled me to him. The sparks that flew when our flesh collided were blinding. Scorching. Fire licked between my legs where his cock throbbed against me and spread up my torso where our chests heaved in unison. Knight’s fingers dug into my bony hips and slid my waifish body up and down against his. I gripped his fuzzy head again—my favorite thing to touch in the world—and panted into his mouth.
Knight broke our kiss and bit down on my earlobe as his thrusts became harder
. “Am I gonna get that piece of shit’s cum on my dick?” he hissed through his clamped teeth.
“Fuck you,” I spat before my brain had time to catch up to my mouth.
“Fuck me?” A laugh rumbled like thunder from his chest. “Fuck me? Do you have any fucking idea what it does to me, thinking somebody else has touched you?”
“Yeah, I do!” I yelled. “Because that’s exactly how I fucking felt every time I saw you and Angel Alvarez together before you left!” I began to shake just thinking about it. “She answered the door when I came looking for you. She followed me around school, talking shit and telling me you never loved me. She and her little hood-rat friends even said she might be pregnant with your baby! And you stood by and let her do it because you thought it would help me ‘move on.’” I made air quotes around the words with my fingers for emphasis. “So you don’t get to fucking judge me for trying to move on when all you’ve done for the last three months is push me away!”
I shoved his chest with shaking hands, but it did nothing to satisfy my rage. I smacked his hard torso and upper arms with my open palms, but the slapping sounds couldn’t quell my hurt. Knight just took it, staring at me like a laser scope as I pounded away at his flesh.
“Fuck you!” I cried, lifting a hand to slap him across the face.
Knight caught my skeletal wrist mid swing and held it in the air next to my face, never blinking. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. His voice was eerily calm.
“Yes, I did! I do fucking know how it feels!”
“Not that question,” Knight said, cocking his head to one side.
I huffed, trying in vain to pull my restrained hand away from him. “No, you’re not gonna get his cum on your dick, if that’s what you’re asking. Fucking asshole.”
Knight raised an eyebrow. “No?” he asked, continuing to study me.
“No, goddamn it!” I shouted, finally yanking my wrist free.
It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t the whole truth either, but if Knight had wanted the whole truth, he would have asked a different question. He heard what he wanted to hear, and before I could suck in my next breath, we were joined.
Electricity coursed through my veins at the contact, as if Knight were the plug and I were the socket. He lit me up from the inside out, turning feelings back on that I’d thought would be forever dark. Igniting the pleasure-pain sensation that I thought I’d never experience again.
I rode his body, as familiar as my own, as he nipped and sucked his way down my neck. The last time I’d seen him we were fucking good-bye in his truck in the exact same parking lot. Now we were fucking good-bye again as well as I’m sorry, I missed you, I love you, and, Don’t leave me. Knight used sex as a way to inject me with all the words and thoughts and emotions that he didn’t know how to express any other way. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun. It hurt and it healed, all at the same time.
With my hands cupping the sides of his fuzzy head and his gripping the back of my neck and one bony hip, we breathed the same air and beat to the same rhythm and prayed to the same universe to make it last forever. But the gods didn’t listen, or maybe our bodies were the rebels. Either way, the moment didn’t last. It exploded in an electrical fire of teeth and nails, bleeding skin and broken capillaries.
We stayed pressed together for a long time. Long enough for our breathing to even out and our heartbeats to synchronize, the way they always did. Long enough for my brain to start working again. Long enough for me to realize that, twenty-four hours ago, I was fucking a different man in the front seat.
My empty stomach roiled.
Knight still had a grip on the back of my neck, but he was using his rough touch to massage it, rubbing slow circles with his firm fingers.
Eventually, Knight broke the silence. Placing a kiss on the top of my head, he asked, “What time do you need to be home?”
That simple question made my eyes sting and my chest constrict. Knight might have been a psychopath with a rage disorder, but I couldn’t deny the fact that he cared. That he thought about me before he thought about himself. That even when he was hurting me, he was really trying to love me.
“Eleven o’clock,” I whispered, forcing my words out around the lump in my throat.
Knight released my hip and looked at his wrist. He was wearing a simple watch with a dark green canvas band. I’d never known him to wear a watch before.
“It’s ten fifteen,” he said, dropping his chin to the top of my head and pulling me closer. “We’ve got thirty more minutes.”
“Knight?” I asked, hardly able to hear my own thoughts over the sound of his heart thumping beneath my cheek. “How did you get here? Aren’t you supposed to be at boot camp for two more months?” Sitting up, I looked at him with a bowling ball in my gut. “You didn’t, like, go AWOL just to come see me…did you?”
Knight’s face gave nothing away. His clothes didn’t either. He was wearing a pair of camo pants, but those might have been ones that he already owned. I hadn’t really gotten to see his T-shirt before he tossed it on the floorboard, but it was pretty generic too—a solid color, maybe black or dark green. It definitely wasn’t the skinhead band T-shirt with tight Levi’s rolled up at the bottom and skinny suspenders—braces—that I was used to. That’s for sure. Had he come straight from boot camp, or was he just dressing differently now?
“There are ways to get leave,” Knight said, his tone sending chills up my spine. “Family emergencies come up. Shit happens.”
I didn’t want to know what kind of family emergency he was talking about because, whatever it was, I had a feeling he had something to do with it. The last time I’d been in the same room as him and his “family,” Knight had smashed out the glass doors on every built-in cabinet in the living room with a fireplace poker, beaten his stepfather’s face to a pulp, and had a gun pulled on him by his own mother. Knight could instigate a “family emergency,” no problem.
“Knight…what did you do?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Knight ran his thick hands up my bare thighs and stared directly into my eyes in warning. “I did what I had to do. It’ll take a hell of a lot more than a few miles and a few Marines to keep me from you, Punk.”
His indirect answers made me nervous, but I swallowed and asked the question gnawing away at me anyway, “Did you hurt someone?”
“No,” Knight snapped. Then his tone softened. “One of my clients does medical billing for Emory Hospital. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get forged admission paperwork when free tattoos are on the line.”
“But you don’t have a car on base. How did you—”
“I took the bus.”
“Jesus, Knight. You did all of that just because of my letter? You could have just written me back, you know.”
Knight smiled. Really smiled. Smiled the smile that I had bent over backward to elicit from him every day since the first time I saw it. The smile that had tricked me into thinking he was sane. That I was safe.
“Maybe I’ll try that next time,” he said, all sparkly white teeth and sparkly white eyes.
I touched his beautiful grin with two fingers just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. Then, I kissed his smiling mouth with everything that I had. We had twenty minutes left, and we spent them doing what we did best. What Knight had taught me how to do. What I wished I’d never done with anybody but him. We made love—violent, passionate, miserable love.
Then we did what we did worst and said good-bye.
I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the entire night with my T-shirt pressed to my face, trying to extract a hint of Knight’s scent from the overpowering odors that my shift at Pier One had left behind. It was there, beneath the blaring notes of patchouli and eucalyptus and lavender and vanilla. If I shut my eyes and concentrated hard enough, I could smell it—just a whisper of cinnamony musk. The scent strangled me with longing and made my heart race.
The fact that Knight’s feelings for me were every bit as real as
I’d once imagined—that he hadn’t cheated on me with Lance, hadn’t lied about who he was—made things both better and worse. The sting of unrequited love was gone, but it had been replaced by the ache of loss. Somewhere, out there in the night, a broken, dangerous man moved through the shadows, carrying pieces of me in his pocket—a chunk of my heart, a sliver of my soul, the blood he’d drawn, the flesh ejected when he’d pierced me, a lock of hair from my shaved head, a jar of my tears, my hymen, my innocence.
But there was one thing that he didn’t have despite the number of times I’d thrust it into his murderous hands. Knight refused to take my future. He left it shiny and new, still in the wrapper. So what would I do with it? Put it on a shelf and waste it pining over him, or give it to someone else to open and play with?
And would anyone even want it once they realized how many pieces were missing?
“You. Little. Slut,” Juliet said, tucking her boob away and handing Romeo to me.
With his curly black hair and almond-shaped eyes, he looked just like his half-Japanese, half-African-American mama. Thank God. His piece-of-shit daddy, Tony, who was doing hard time for selling drugs, was far from a looker. Or a thinker. Or a father for that matter.
I draped a burp cloth over my shoulder and accepted the sleepy-eyed, milk-drunk newborn. I’d made the mistake of criticizing Juliet’s heavy-handed burping style once, so now it had become my job.
“Shut up and tell me what to do,” I pleaded. “I’m freaking out.”
“I can’t shut up and tell you what to do, dumbass,” Juliet said, rolling her eyes.
“Ugh! You know what I mean,” I huffed.
Standing up with a burp cloth and a baby draped over my shoulder, I paced back and forth across Juliet’s new basement bedroom, rubbing Romeo’s back instead of smacking it. Juliet’s mom had moved her and the baby down there so that they’d “have more room,” which I suspected was code for, so that I can get some fucking sleep.
“Listen,” Juliet said, raising a nonexistent eyebrow, “you know how I feel about…Skeletor.”