by Tara Sivec
The room at the end of the hallway is roughly 1,000 square feet in size, with shiny hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors all along one wall, and no windows. The pristine condition of the room that is nothing like any of the other dusty, shit-smelling rooms in the stables isn’t what keeps my feet glued to the floor in the doorway and my eyes bugging out of my head. It’s also not the reason my dick is stirring to life in my pants and my palms are starting to sweat.
Right smack in the middle of the room, with her back to me and bent at the waist with her perfect ass in the air, is Shelby. Her body flies back upright and she twirls around the room, her hips moving erotically to the beat of the music while she spins, leaps, and dances like a goddamn angel. A hot, sexy angel in a pair of the smallest black shorts I’ve ever seen, a white sports bra, and bare feet, her body glistening with a thin sheen of sweat and pieces of her long, wavy hair sticking to her cheeks and her chest as she whips her head around to the music. She combines moves that would make a stripper proud with steps that would make a ballerina bow at her feet, her left leg extending above her head as smooth and easily as one would throw their arm up to wave at someone.
She’s beautiful.
She’s breathtaking.
And she sure as shit isn’t a little girl anymore.
The music comes to a stop and so does Shelby, poised with her arms draped over the top of her head, breathing heavily. Her chin comes up and her eyes meet mine in the mirror before I can back out of the room and pretend like I was never here.
“What the hell are you doing in here?”
Her green eyes are filled with fire as she whirls her body around and presses her hands to her hips.
“How did you get in here? That door was locked.”
Forcefully moving my eyes up from her tits straining against the thin cotton material of her top, I give her a smirk and lean casually against the doorjamb, pretending like I see shit like her standing in front of me half-dressed every day and it has no effect on me at all. She doesn’t need to know that I’m suddenly feeling the four-year absence of her from my life like a punch to the gut, because I feel like I missed out on so much. She also doesn’t need to know the memory of that kiss she gave me the night of her high school graduation is suddenly flashing through my mind, wreaking all sorts of havoc in my head. Soft lips, bold tongue, the smell of peaches filling my nose as I fought the war raging inside me to push her away when all I wanted to do was strip her naked and fuck some sense into her.
“Shelby Eubanks, all grown up, a fancy college graduate and a dancer to boot. How ’bout that?”
She rolls her eyes at me, her bare feet moving her across the room toward me. Right when I think she’s going to hug me in greeting, she turns and grabs a towel from the small wooden table right inside the door.
“You’re not supposed to be in here. No one is allowed in here,” she tells me irritably, dabbing the fluffy white towel against her cheeks.
“Nice to see you, too, Legs.”
She presses the towel to her chest and raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow.
“Really?”
“I’m sure all those college boys you hung around for four years showered you with plenty of compliments on those long legs of yours,” I tell her with another sarcastic smirk, ignoring the jealousy coursing through my body at the idea that any guy got close enough to those gorgeous fucking legs and the hot body attached to them. “How come I never knew this room existed? Or that you could dance like that?”
Shelby tosses the towel onto the table and mirrors my casual pose, crossing her arms in front of her.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Eli James. I’m not a stupid little girl anymore and I’m not going to fall at your feet, so you can go ahead and wipe that smirk off your face.”
Four years in New York City didn’t diminish the Southern twang in her voice, and if anything, her annoyance with me brings it out even more. At least one thing is still the same in this fucked-up scenario where the tables have turned and she seems to want nothing to do with me.
I open my mouth to ask about the room again, when suddenly, I feel something drip down the side of my face. Bringing my hand up, I swipe my fingers against my cheek, holding them in front of me to find them covered in blood. Pain explodes through my head and I cry out, my hands clutching on to handfuls of hair.
Shelby calls to me, but her soft Southern voice speaks in a foreign language. One that churns my stomach with nausea and fear and hate. I cry out again when my stomach explodes with pain, like someone just punched me right in the gut. Bending at the waist, I drop my body forward and feel my mouth filling with the salty, bitter taste of blood. I spit it out onto the floor, noticing I’m no longer standing on shiny hardwood, but roughly packed dirt. My head whips up when a burst of searing pain explodes through my ribs, catching my reflection in the mirror across the room. My face is filled with bruises and cuts, the blood dripping down from my head making bright red rivers trickle through the mud and dirt caked on my face.
I open my mouth and scream at the man in the mirror. The broken, dirty, ruined man staring back at me with so much pain on his face that it hurts to look at him.
“Eli, wake up!”
I close my eyes, refusing to look at the ugliness in the mirror and scream louder.
“ELI! WAKE UP!”
My eyes fly open and I jerk myself upright, my arms and my fists swinging as I go.
“ELI! IT’S ME! IT’S ME, IT’S OKAY!”
My fist pauses in midair when I realize where I am, and that it’s been three months since I was rescued. I’m holding my hand an inch away from the woman sitting on the edge of the bed next to me, her eyes the same chocolate brown as mine, her tangled mess of hair from being woken up in the middle of the night, once the same shade of dark brown as mine, but now filled with fancy blond streaks, her face as white as the sheet tangled around my sweaty body, and probably the same hue as my own face after that fucking dream.
I pull my knees up under the sheet and rest my elbows on them, dropping my head in my hands.
“Jesus, Kat, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whisper softly, trying to get my heart rate back to normal and slow my breathing as the pain in my heart and the guilt swarming through my head amplify, hating myself for what I’m putting my family through.
My younger sister scoots closer to me on the edge of the bed, wrapping one arm around my shoulder. I immediately flinch when she touches me, looking up from my hands to see tears pooling in her eyes when she nervously jerks her arm away and clenches her hands together in her lap. My baby sister. The one I used to take care of and provide for after our parents died when we were teenagers and the responsibility fell on my shoulders, is all grown up. She’s a wife and a mother and now she has to take care of me. She has to listen to my screams in the middle of the night, deal with my shitty attitude and my refusal to talk about what happened. I want to scream and rage at the unfairness of it all, but that would make things worse. It would just make Kat sadder and want to do even more than she already is trying to help me.
Three months since I was pulled out of that hellhole. Three months of interviews and debriefing and countless sessions with enough military headshrinkers that if I wasn’t crazy already, they sure as shit would have pushed me right over the edge with their endless questions and need to know everything I went through for five years. I used to love going to sleep at night. It was the only time Shelby and I were ever left alone and I could dream about her without the memories being tarnished. The dream I just had was one of my favorites. The day she came back into my life with an attitude and a backbone that made me finally wake up and see her for who she really was. She burrowed her way under my skin and never left. And now that’s ruined, too. I can’t even dream about her anymore without the hell I lived through coming back to haunt me and taint the only good thing I still have inside me.
“I thought the dreams were getting better,” Kat says softly.
“They have. They are,” I lie, giving her a tight-lipped smile. “I’m fine now, Kitty Kat, go on back to bed.”
Kat smiles when I use the nickname I gave her when we were kids. She leans forward, probably to kiss me on the cheek, but quickly thinks better of it and pulls herself away from me and slides off the bed.
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
I nod, even though we both know that talk will never happen. I’ve been back in Charleston for two weeks, staying with my sister and her family until I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with my life. I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t keep putting her through this night after night. I only came back here for one thing. The only thing I know that will help me heal and keep the nightmares away. I know she’s probably long gone, living her dream far away from this town, and I know it’s shitty of me to burst back into her life after what I did to her, but I have to try. All my shrinks have told me I need to find a hobby. Something to focus on other than the torture and the pain, something to keep me grounded to the here and now and not stuck in the past, reliving every moment of hell. It’s probably not healthy that I’ve decided finding Shelby and convincing her to love me again is the perfect hobby for me, but that’s too damn bad.
I’m broken and scarred and half the man I used to be, but if she’ll let me explain, I hope to God she can put me back together again.
Chapter 3
Shelby
I jerk awake with a scream dying on my throat and my body covered in sweat. Taking a few deep, calming breaths, I stare up at the slowly turning ceiling fan above my bed, wondering if I’ll ever get a good night’s sleep again. I haven’t been sleeping well since the night I fainted, making up a lie about low blood sugar so Landry wouldn’t know my mind and my heart had shattered into a thousand pieces as soon as I heard that name. In the three months since the story broke, I can count on one hand how many hours I’ve been able to close my eyes and not see him, feel him, or hear his voice.
Knowing I’ll never be able to get back to sleep, I slide out of bed, wrapping a short, silk robe around my body as I open the door to the guest house where I live, and head out for a walk across the grounds.
Sitting down on a bench under a particularly large oak tree on the front lawn, I stare up at my family home with the moon shining bright above it and a chorus of cicadas chirping all around me. Located on sixty acres in South Charleston, it was once a cotton plantation before the Civil War. The 10,500-square-foot historical home is your typical updated Southern plantation home. It’s a two-story white wood-framed house with black shutters, a sprawling front porch, and an expansive terrace on the second floor that extends the length of the house. With a pecan grove, saltwater marshes, two ponds, orchards, a 35,000-square-foot horse stable, and numerous live oaks draped with Spanish moss around the property, it really is one of the most beautiful places to live.
If only the beauty on the outside could make up for the ugliness on the inside.
Checking the face of my silver watch, which I haven’t taken off since Meredith gave it to me for my birthday a few months ago, the perfect gift to hide the markings on the inside of my left wrist from prying eyes, I realize I’ve been sitting out here for two hours. Ever since I woke up from a dream and couldn’t fall back to sleep. In the daylight hours, I can put on a brave face, don a happy smile, and push away the thoughts that have been plaguing me since that night in my room a few months ago when I listened to the news report and collapsed to the floor in front of a completely shocked Landry. At night, when the sun goes down and darkness fills my room…that’s when I forget how to shut everything off. That’s when my mind and my memories take over and refuse to let me forget, and it’s only gotten worse in the last few weeks. My best friend, Meredith, has been checking on me nonstop ever since the news broke. She’s the only person in my life who knows everything about Eli. Well, everything that happened before, at least. No one knows about after, especially not Meredith. I’d never be able to handle her disappointment and anger about what I’ve done and the choices I’ve made.
For three months I reassured Meredith I was fine, happy with Landry, and couldn’t care less about what was happening on the news, but Meredith knew me better than that. It was easy to pretend my life hadn’t changed when I didn’t know where he was. When I’d only caught one grainy glimpse of him on the news and didn’t even recognize the man they claimed was him. He was too skinny, had too much hair, and didn’t smile. It wasn’t the Eli I remembered. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe they misidentified him and it was all one big joke. They screwed up once before, claiming he’d been killed in action, what’s to say they couldn’t do it again?
When I found out he’d come home, when I heard he was living with his sister, a few miles away, breathing the same Southern air as me, walking the same streets I frequented, I couldn’t pretend anymore. In the midst of a panic attack the other night, curled up into a ball on my bedroom floor, I called Meredith and begged her to come for a visit. I needed my friend. I needed my rock to get me through this.
He’s alive and he’s home.
Every time I go into town, I’m afraid I’ll run into him. Every time I turn around, I’m afraid I’ll see his face, once a face I knew like the back of my own hand. A face I used to love to touch and kiss and hold in the palms of my hands, now a face that I’ll never be able to look at without being reminded of all the things I’ve done. It won’t matter that those things were all for him. It won’t matter how much I’ve died a thousand times over the years, all for him. Nothing will matter to him but the fact that I’m still here, still where he left me, following in my mother’s footsteps, unable to move forward. While unspeakable things were being done to him, every day for five years, I had good things, wonderful things right at my fingertips, and I let them slip away. It won’t matter how or why; it will only matter that I let them go.
Pushing myself up from the bench, I walk with determined steps through the wet grass, to the one place I can still escape and forget the world around me until Meredith gets here tomorrow and talks some sense into me. It cuts me like a knife each time I walk in there and see the floor and the mirrors covered in dust, unused and forgotten, but it’s still my place, my sanctuary and the one thing that is still one hundred percent all mine, that no one, not even my mother, can take from me.
She’s taken it all, and still, it’s not enough. She’ll continue to take and demand and I’ll continue to fold, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Over the years, we developed a quiet understanding that has served us well. I did as she said without complaint, and she continued to make sure Eli’s sister and the rest of the world would always remember him as a hero. Now that he’s alive, now that old rumors resurfaced, that quiet understanding has been destroyed. I’ve had to beg and plead with her every day, I’ve had to show weakness and bite back my anger because, once again, I needed her popularity with all the heavy hitters in the town and government that carried over from my father, and the power that reputation brings to fix things. And once again, she named her price and I paid in full to make sure Eli and his sister were protected.
I rub the tips of my fingers against the band of the watch on the inside of my wrist, as I make the two-acre walk across our land to the stables. I can see a few lights streaming from the windows in the distance, guiding me through the dark cover of night. My mother and the household staff are fast asleep in the main house, and the stable workers went home to their families hours ago. Just like I’ve done every night for the last three and half months, I quietly walk through the open archway into the stables, letting the soft whinny of one of the horses and the stomping of hooves against the dirt calm my racing heart.
I head past the stalls and turn down the hallway that leads to the very back of the stable, pausing in front of the locked door
. Closing my eyes, I try and stop the memories, but it’s pointless. I continue coming to this room, night after night, because I need the pain. I need the sharp stab of agony in my heart and the overwhelming ache of sadness, because even though it hurts, underneath all that pain is a reminder that I used to be happy. I used to be a different person, a stronger person, a confident person.
Slowly opening my eyes, I unlock the door, and walk down another dark hallway, my hands shaking with nervous energy as I flip the switch on the inside of the room. My room. The place I love and hate equally. Leaning my back against the wall right inside, I slide to the ground and let the memories consume me, slicing my heart open to leave me bleeding on the floor.
Chapter 4
Eli
You’re sure you’ll be okay home alone?” Kat asks for the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes since her husband, Daniel, left to drop my niece off with a sitter.
God forbid they leave a two-year-old home alone with her crazy uncle. It’s not like I know the first thing about kids, or would even want to be home alone with one, but it would have been nice to be asked. To be considered. To feel normal.
Fuck, I have a niece. A beautiful, chatty, spitting image of my sister, niece.
“Kat, I’m not a child, I’ll be fine. Plus, I have Rylan to keep me company.”
The man in question lifts his arm next to me on the couch and gives my sister a wave. She ignores him, like always. Aside from having to put up with my bullshit, she’s also had to contend with my best friend also living under her roof until he can get acclimated to not being chained to a wall and not having to ask permission every time he takes a piss. Although his problems lean farther away from screaming nightmares in the middle of the night to being a slob of a houseguest with no respect for anything around him. Rylan grew up in the system, bouncing around from one foster home to the next until we graduated high school and he convinced me to join the Marines with him. He spent more time in our tiny apartment at the edge of town when we were kids than he did at any of his numerous foster homes, finding more comfort with us even though we had two drunks for parents who never cared about our well-being, than he did in the homes he moved around between during that time. Kat had the unfortunate experience of having not one, but two, older brothers to stick up for her and kick anyone’s ass who dared mess with her. I probably should have asked if it was okay that Rylan shack up in her house instead of just bringing him home with me when we were rescued, but it’s not like my sister would have ever said no anyway. Rylan was part of the family, and he always would be, end of story.