by Meg Collett
His voice quaked with nerves.
“Yes. Once. When I was seventeen.”
She hadn’t thought about that boy in years. Her first boyfriend. In secret, of course, because her grandmother never would have approved. Violet used to sneak out to see him. He’d been older, a senior in high school, and she hadn’t looked so weird back then. Just odd enough to be mysterious and very different from the other girls in her class. But he’d left Canaan after graduation and never looked back.
“Don’t worry,” she said when Arie still hadn’t spoken. “He wasn’t very good, and I assume you have more experience than he did. Surely, you’ll be better.”
He coughed out a bark of laughter, and she smiled at him this time. He returned it, and she didn’t feel as though she’d messed up so badly anymore.
He stepped farther into the room and their smiles disappeared with his first step toward her. The wood in the furnace crackled and broke in a burst of flames. She’d left her curtains open, allowing the moonlight in, but her room was mostly in shadows. Arie stopped half a step in front of her, close enough she could lean into him and touch his chest, his face steeped in shadows and his eyes black pools of fresh ink.
He still hesitated.
“I don’t break so easily,” she whispered.
His hand rose toward her face, his eyes painstakingly cautious as he watched her for any sign she didn’t want this or that every single nerve in her body wasn’t screaming for him, even though they were. She wanted to take his hand and move it faster, but she didn’t. Maybe he needed this hesitation too. Maybe, when his eyes asked if she was okay with him touching her, he was really asking himself if he was okay too.
And though she already knew her answer, he might not. So in the time it took his fingers to touch her face and skim along her cheek and tuck a loose piece of hair behind her ear, he needed to answer his own question.
His hand trailed down the back of her neck and cupped it. He stood over her, chest heaving with each heavy, dragging inhale, and she stared up at him, eyes wide and unblinking. His thumb stroked the skin along the underside of her jaw. The simple touch became her entire world.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
She’d never been more okay in her life. “Are you?”
His eyes shuttered, a flash of pain registering in them at her words, and his jaw flexed as he gritted his teeth. He was desperately holding something in, holding back.
“I think so,” he whispered. “It’s hard to tell. Can you tell?”
“I can’t feel anything except how much I want you.”
His brows drew down over his eyes. “I know that feeling.”
He drew closer to her until the space between them disappeared and his heartbeat thudded against her sternum. She settled her hand right above his heart, and she thought she felt it surge as she touched him. Fingers splayed, she took him in. A low-key trembling settled in her body, in her bones, in her soul. They were barely touching. They’d never kissed, had never done anything. And she’d never felt so close to another human being in her entire life.
If a lifetime’s worth of loneliness was the price she had to pay for this moment, she would pay it over and over again, just to be here, with him.
“Arie.”
He leaned over her, pouring himself around her, his hold on her neck bringing her up onto her tiptoes to meet him halfway. When their lips came together, an ache flared somewhere deep in Violet’s belly.
Arie’s tentativeness broke her heart, tore it right out of her chest, because this entire time, she’d thought of herself as one way when it came to the people around her.
She’d always viewed herself as the broken one, the incomplete one. But as Arie kissed her, his lips trembling against hers, and he leaned into her, needing the support as if he was falling apart, she realized something earthshaking.
She wasn’t the broken one. She wasn’t the one who needed healing.
Arie was.
Her hand swept up from his chest to the side of his face. She pulled away from him, just fractionally, and studied his face. “Can I ask you something?”
He closed his eyes and nodded, already knowing her question.
“Have you been with anyone since you lost your leg?”
He withered up, a leaf in autumn, a shell of a big, strong man. He crumpled against her, in every single way but physically, and clung to her.
“No,” he said. The answer sounded like the worst thing he’d ever said in his life—a piece of himself he had to lose without anything to support him.
She threaded her fingers through his hair, at the roots so she could hold on tight, and pulled his face back down to her lips and kissed him.
She took control, coaxing his lips, slow and steady, a slight brush against his lower lip and a tiny pull against his upper. She traced her tongue along the seam of his mouth, and he unraveled in her hands.
In a crowd of people, she never would have pointed him out as the one with a shard of himself missing, a ship at sea, looking for a lighthouse to guide him to safety. But he was. He’d been standing in front of her for weeks, but she’d been so lost behind her own brokenness, thinking herself worse for it, that she hadn’t seen him hurting this entire time.
And those tasks. Her list. Every day, he’d shown up to work to pay off a debt he’d built up in his head, and she’d waited for him, thinking she needed to see him to feel whole, to heal herself, to stave off the loneliness at her heels. But maybe he’d needed that too. Maybe her list and her silly tasks and this island and her house were a sanctuary for him too.
She could be wrong, but she thought she felt the answer in his touch, in the way he kissed her as though he needed to taste her desire to feel his own and know that a part of him hadn’t been lost forever.
If there was any space left between them, any walls left to separate them, she pulled them down. She pressed herself against him, and he opened his mouth to her. She never would have thought she could be the one to kiss this way, to claim and explore and take and show, but she was. She pulled herself into him as though she could meld their skins together, and when she kissed him, when she eased her tongue into his mouth, she kissed him on intuition, not through experience, because Lord knew she didn’t have enough of that. But it was as though she’d been designed to kiss him and know what he needed, so she kissed him as though she deserved to.
His other hand went to her waist, his fingers pressing into her back, along the side of her spine where her dress zipper led up to the back of her neck. She held his face in her hands. Holding him together or piecing him back whole, she didn’t know.
Her tongue swept against his, and he began to meet her, bit for bit, pulse for pulse. His arm around her practically lifted her off the floor in his effort to sink inside her, and she felt as if she could fly in that moment, with him holding her as if she was the one solid anchor for him in a world lost to gravity.
He eased back. “Violet.”
She looked up at him, her silence her only answer.
“I haven’t . . .” He swallowed heavily, struggling. His body tensed against hers, straining as if he were pulling something deep from within himself. “I haven’t wanted anyone the way I want you. Not since . . . I can’t. I mean, I wish I was better for this.” A piece of his hair fell across his forehead, tickling her skin. “I want to be more for you, but I don’t know how to do this now. I don’t know if I can do this the way you deserve to have it done.”
Her thumb skimmed across his lips as he spoke the last few words of his plea to her. His truth wrapped up in a cracked shell. A hurt, fractured soul.
There were no words, and even if there had been, she probably wouldn’t have spoken them anyway, or she would have missed the right time to say them. She took his hand and backed toward her bed, pulling him with her.
When the backs of her knees pressed against the end of her bed, his hands found her waist and his eyes locked on her. A million and one words passed between them a
s she lowered her head and reached for the frail pearl button at the back of her neck. She carefully undid it and tugged at the zipper, pulling it as far down as she could. She turned to offer him her back and swept her hair over her shoulder.
Feeling nothing but the fire’s heat against what little skin she’d exposed, she tipped her chin down and looked back over her shoulder. He reached for the zipper, his eyes on the tiny metal tab as he pulled it down, unveiling her skin to the moonlight and the flickering warm notes of light in the room.
It shouldn’t have felt so right, coming undone in front of him, but she wrapped herself up tight in the moment of sharing herself with him.
Inch by inch, he exposed her flesh to him, the zipper of her dress leading all the way down to the small of her back, stained with yellow-hued bruises. She felt the barest hint of his hands against her back as he pushed the lacy material off one shoulder then the other. She wiggled the dress past her hips and let it pool at her feet.
She turned around, wearing only simple cotton panties.
He eased her hair back over her shoulder and drank her in, his eyes consuming her bit by bit, traveling across every pale inch of skin, his fingers following in the wake of his eyes.
He nodded, mostly to himself, and started on his own buttons. She didn’t help because it seemed like something he needed to do, this exposing of himself to her. He peeled off his shirt and revealed the swath of muscles, thick and swelling. His abs were riveted and convex, and her hands ached to touch their sweeping ridges.
While her skin looked milky and translucent in the light, his looked rich and fathomless, a deep caramel that almost matched his eyes. It seeped with warmth, looking almost liquid to the touch. She imagined her flesh against his, the contrast of it, and her body flared with heat that emanated from her core.
His hands reached for his pants. The metal button came loose between his fingers, and the material glided over his hips with a smooth hiss. He took his boxers down with them, baring himself completely to her. His hardened length was impressive to be sure, but her eyes were on his leg, on the metal glint right below his knee. His truth. The missing part of him, or so he thought.
She stepped up to him, her bare chest against his, and kissed him.
When she pulled back, his lips were glistening. He pivoted her around and sat on the edge of the bed to release his leg’s pin from the socket at the base of his stump, his movements concise and controlled. The fiber glass shell slipped free. He pulled the leg loose and laid it out on the ground at their feet, then he removed the liner along the outside of his leg. He looked up at her, waiting for an answer to a question he’d posed.
His leg was bare, and for the impact of the moment, it was as if he’d laid his soul at the ground by her feet. She ran a finger down the middle of his thigh. At his knee, the joint was red, the scars roping and white. She leaned down and kissed his mouth, her hand circling down and to the back of his thigh. He groaned into her kiss and she smiled against his lips. She straightened back, and when she looked at his face, he met her eyes and waited for her next move.
She eased her panties down. Shimmying her hips, she rocked the fabric down past her thighs, letting it fall around her ankles. She stepped out of them and took a step toward him. He reached for her, his fingers running along her ribs to her back, pulling her to him, and she settled herself on his lap.
His hands explored her skin, and they kissed again. As her tongue worked against his in a slow, stroking pull, his fingers ran across the tender skin beneath her breasts and continued along her ribs, up her spine, beneath her collarbone, and around her back. She rocked her hips again just to feel the friction of him against her. His answering groan slid down the back of her throat.
His hands roamed, cupping her backside and her breasts, feeling her out, memorizing her in that way she’d known he would. Every touch felt as though he’d already been there, already traced the swell right beneath her nipples a thousand times before, and tonight was just one night among many.
She rocked herself forward, above his hips, and he positioned himself beneath her, his dark gaze locked on her.
There might have been something to say in the moment, but she didn’t say anything, nor did he. She eased onto him, filling herself with him, the stretch and pull, the quick intake of breath. His hands ran down her back as he clenched his jaw over a moan. He leaned back onto his elbow, his other hand on her hip, coaxing and guiding her, and she moved above him, her silver hair flowing over her shoulder and her eyes on his for every gliding stroke.
There wasn’t a piece of him she didn’t find that night.
If her kiss and touch could restore, she did her best, taking in every part of him.
If a man could be patched back together in one night, she wouldn’t leave an inch of him in a broken state.
15
The next morning, Violet woke up wrapped in Arie.
His arm was a solid beam of muscle around her waist, keeping her tucked against his side, with his face turned toward her. His breathing was slow and deep, every exhale rustling his scent from his pillow.
She wiggled out from under his arm, careful not to wake him, and scooted to the edge of the bed. She stood, discovering a tightness deep inside her body, but her skin smelled of him, turning the ache into the special sort she wanted to savor.
On her tiptoes, she stole into her bathroom, right next to her bedroom. In there, she brushed her teeth and rinsed her face, her eyes catching on her reflection in the mirror multiple times. She paused and examined herself, tracing the curve of her slightly swollen lips and the suggestion of a beard rash along her neck. Her eyes were the only things that appeared completely normal in their complete oddity. But she looked at her reflection and saw herself staring back.
Still odd Violet Relend. Nothing had changed. She was okay with that.
She dressed in a turtleneck, wool skirt, and penny loafers and treaded downstairs to start a pot of coffee. As it gurgled and spat dark liquid into the carafe, she slipped out the side door and closed it quietly behind her.
In the daylight, she could see her yard still needed more work to recover from last night’s party. Forgotten cobwebs hung in the branches and a few napkins were still fluttering around. She picked them up before they could blow into the ocean. As for the decorative cobwebs and the strings of lights, they would have to wait until she had a ladder to deal with them.
She turned toward the bluff and angled her face into the chilly morning breeze. The air was damp with moisture, the salt thick in the air. The waves were louder at low tide as they hit the rocks and sprayed upward, not quite able to reach the cliff edge. She didn’t dare venture close enough to see the rocky sliver of beach down below. That far out, the edge of the bluff couldn’t be trusted not to fall away.
The breeze bit at her bare ankles and her skirt billowed around her legs. Her hair whipped around her face until she had to hold it back with her hands.
Since Teller Morgan Group had come after her house, and especially in the face of the assault charge and her looming court date, she’d thought the fight was over, but with nearly three hundred signatures on the petition, she might stand a chance. There was a slim possibility she could keep her home.
It looked less spectacular this morning without the flashing lights and dance music and people milling around in droves, laughing and dancing. It was a little less vital, a little less alive beneath the rising sun.
She could dress it up in the dark of night and disguise it as something more, but in the light of day, it was still just a crumbling, old house. Nothing had changed for it, at least. Last night, she’d dressed up as the Ghost of Canaan, as a version of herself, but when she woke this morning and stepped out into the crisp air, she was a completely new person.
Thinking of irrevocable change, she returned to her finished pot of coffee in the kitchen.
A handful of minutes later, with a chipped mug full of coffee in her hand, she heard feet scuffling down the st
airs. Hair tussled, Arie came into the room a beat later, his nostrils flaring at the scent of caffeine. He was dressed in his costume’s suit bottoms and the white button-up, left completely undone, his chest bare. He set his shoes down and laid his jacket on the back of a chair.
“Morning,” he said, slightly squinting at her as he rubbed a hand across his abs.
“Mugs are in the cupboard next to the fridge. Do you want some eggs?”
His jaw cracked as he yawned. “Cade texted. They’re gonna grab some breakfast in town. Want to go?”
She only paused for a beat. “Sure. Thank you for inviting me.”
A tuft of hair stuck straight up over his eye as he studied her. “It’s seriously so hard to tell sometimes.”
“Tell what?”
“If you’re joking. Of course you’re invited. They’re your friends too. Can we get that entire pot to go?”
As she got him a thermos ready and he struggled back into his clothes, she couldn’t help but smile. She was having Sunday morning breakfast with her friends, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. A month ago, she would have gone days without talking to a single person if she wasn’t working at the bakery that week.
“Ready?” Arie asked, fully clothed.
She handed him the thermos. “Ready.”
On the way out the door, she grabbed a jacket and her purse from the peg in the hall. She locked the front door and turned to follow Arie down the steps, but he froze and she nearly collided into his back.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, stepping around him to check his face.
His gaze landed on hers. “Will you be fine riding with me?”
“Oh.” Her eyes landed on his hulking truck. He’d pulled up into her driveway last night after he, Hale, and Cade had cleaned up. It was loaded down with smoke machines and a few of the extra streetlamps they’d rented.
He was watching her face, waiting for an answer. The furrow between his eyebrows said he didn’t think she would go with him and he was busy thinking of an argument to keep her from going back inside to hide.