Mad Love (Guns & Ink Book 1)

by Shana Vanterpool

  She disobeyed immediately.

  She was on the kitchen counter the moment I turned around, her foot touching some part of me. It was the strangest thing I’d ever been a part of. Her desire to touch me, see me—I knew it wasn’t about me. It couldn’t be.

  When I cracked eggs over the sink, her hand skimmed my side and ribcage, making goosebumps break out across my skin like I was a twelve-year-old shrimp dick. I moved out of her touch and resumed cracking eggs, only for her foot to touch my hip. The frightening part was that she wasn’t even looking at me. She looked at the floor, but some part of her touched me the entire time.

  I didn’t fight her. How could I? I wrapped my feet around hers under the table as she picked and pushed at her food. I didn’t have much of an appetite either. But I ate it so she would.

  “Can you try and eat it all?” Her eggs and toast looked dismantled. “Please, Mad?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re upsetting me.” It was a dick move, but it got her attention. Her eyes shot to mine. “If you eat, I won’t be upset. I might even let you maul me again.” I gave her a small smile to show her I was kidding.

  She didn’t smile back. But she did eat.

  When she finished, I dumped our dishes in the sink, noticing how they were piling up. The living room was still dirty from their slumber party and me crashing on the couch. The Chinese takeout had been discarded—thanks to Cat—but my usually clean house looked neglected. I didn’t mind as much as I normally did.

  On the way back to our bedroom, I grabbed my laptop off the kitchen counter. When we got to my room, I set it on the end of the bed and then joined her when she laid down, wrapping my arms and legs around her. She felt cold. She held my hand near her stomach, playing with my nails, tracing the bed and then the top crescent mindlessly until she passed out again.

  When I was sure she was sleeping soundly, I removed myself from around her and grabbed my laptop. I checked my email first. After answering a few, and ignoring the hundreds of others, I shot Cat an email asking her to go through mine. Then I opened my browser and typed three words into the search bar. Madison Missing Person. My heart crammed into my throat at what came up. Articles bombarded me. I read bits and pieces until my horror pounded in my veins.

  Madison Hart, twenty, disappeared, April 1st, from her college campus. Security videos on campus show her walking toward her hall at eight-fifteen, but the subsequent cameras never catch her turning the corner or entering the building. There were no witnesses, but her backpack and books were found a block away from the University of Denver discarded in the street. Her boyfriend, twenty-one-year-old Leigh Statham, alerted her parents to her disappearance early Saturday morning, who reported the twenty-year-old college student missing. Her boyfriend is not a suspect at this time, and the cops have no other leads.

  I stared at the article until the words blurred. It was nearing late May. She’d been with me for a few weeks, closer to a month. If she went missing April 1st, there wasn’t much time between when she fled, and Cat found her. Which meant she was held captive for at least a month. A month of non-stop hell.

  I kept going, finding it impossible to stop. She had a boyfriend and a family. I searched for her boyfriend, locating a Facebook.

  I immediately regretted it.

  His profile picture was of Madison and him. She looked so entirely different it turned my stomach. She was stunning. Blond hair golden and straight, gray/blue eyes shining at the camera as he kissed her cheek. She looked young, carefree, lips glossy and smile easy. This picture made her a real person with a real past, instead of the broken bird huddled in my bed. I scrolled down to the comments, and stilled. There were five hundred and forty comments, most of which came from Leigh Statham himself.

  Where are you?

  I miss you. Your laugh, your lips, your voice.

  Please come home, babe.

  I can’t stop thinking about you. All day, all night.

  His comments ranged from clearly heartbroken to empty. There were other comments from her friends as well. Well wishes, prayers, and then one comment that struck me hard by someone named Austin Hart. Where’s my baby?

  I swallowed hard and clicked his picture. It was her father. A middle-aged man who rarely went on Facebook, judging by the lack of activity. I took a second to breathe before I clicked on his photo albums. Too late, I wished I hadn’t. Madison on vacation, Madison grinning, Madison holding a child that looked no more than seven. Madison happy, perfect, so damn beautiful I felt lost in her haze. She was tanned and brilliant, radiating happiness and youth. Her profile was tagged in one of the pictures, and I clicked on it, adding fuel to my nausea and heartache.

  She had fifteen-hundred friends. Her wall was overrun by comments and prayers. I clicked on her pictures only to find even more that annihilated me. She had a lot with her boyfriend. Some of them were cutesy, and some of them weren’t. Like the one where she wore a baby pink bikini, and he had his arms around her as she squirmed away from him at the beach. I didn’t like that one. Or the one where she sat in his lap with a skirt on and his hand was on her thigh as he gazed lovingly up at her.

  Like a fiend, I kept clicking, binging on her bright, perfect selfies. The girl loved selfies. I smiled a few times when I’d get to a Snapchat filter or a goofy one, but mostly I felt like I’d lost her already. There was no way this girl would let a man like me hold her if she knew. Not when her boyfriend was a perfect, jock douche who seemed to be even more perfect beside her.

  Are you jealous? I demanded, closing her profile in disgust. But his profile was still up in the first tab. So I proved myself right, clicking and clicking. Madison and Leigh were obviously in love. It looked like they had been together for at least a year. I’d never been with anyone that long. I’d never looked at anyone the way he looked at her. Or worse, no woman had looked at me the way she looked at him. There was even an album for their Valentine’s Day together. He bought her a Tiffany bracelet, a chocolate heart, and a Starbucks gift card for a hundred dollars. She seemed to love the gift card more than anything.

  I chuckled at her holding it up, giving the camera a wink.

  She did like coffee. And clothes. And dinner. And laughing. And apparently, she loved grilled cheese sandwiches. There was one picture of her with an older woman with the same gray/blue eyes, and she was caught stealing a piece of her sandwich. It was staged, of course, but she made me laugh again with her embellished expressions.

  I knew why Leigh had fallen in love with her.

  She was making it hard for me not to. Her pictures alone were addicting. Her sarcastic humor and easy grin were endearing. Not to mention her body was out of this world. Short legs, wide hips and a tiny waist leading to her petite breasts. She was small and adorable at the same time she was sexy and funny.

  When I could take it no longer, and I’d saved all the information I needed, I closed out of my search and then got some work done. I checked the bank, paid the rent for the property, and then approved a few marketing plans from my online promotional company. All the while my eyes were full of tears and my guts were sick with the truth.

  Madison had to go back to that life.

  She deserved that life.

  She deserved to smile that wide and light up the world.

  I didn’t deserve anything, definitely not her.

  Chapter Ten

  Madison

  Time went back to the way it used to be.

  Large chunks of it faded around me. I was both exhausted and confused. The only thing that let me know I was no longer trapped in that room, in those sheets, was Klayton. He was proof I was safe. His touch no longer frightened me because the look in his eyes had been horrified and heartbroken. Monsters don’t feel bad for their prey. They rejoice.

  But Klayton had broken with me.

  Sensing the absence of his touch, my eyes snapped open, and I reached for him. I found him sitting up staring at his laptop, his eyes faraway and lips parted.
Why did he insist on working? I had nothing in me but the desire for sleep. I wanted time to fade.

  “We need to talk.”

  I didn’t want to talk. I barely had it in me to think. Instead, I snuggled close to him and hid my face in my pillow, blocking out the bit of light seeping in through his curtain.

  “Madison. We need to talk,” he repeated.

  I sat up, holding myself together, trying to block out the memories of not being able to scream. To help, I looked at Klayton. The memories stopped. Klayton was all the proof I needed to remind myself that I never had to go back there.

  “About what?” I stretched my toe out to touch his leg.

  He sighed heavily. He ran a hand through his messy hair and then put his face in his hands. These were all signs, but all I cared about was how close I felt to puking again. I couldn’t puke again. Klayton shouldn’t have to keep cleaning up my messes. I’d punched him. He’d washed me. He didn’t deserve to suffer anymore. I breathed slowly; it felt like I was swaying, but my body was still.

  “This is all up to you. All of it. Okay?” He groaned. “Damn it, Mad. I don’t want to do this, but it’s what you need. You have two options. Option number one is you get some help. You talk to someone, anyone, about what you’re feeling, what you went through, what you’re afraid of. If it’s inside of you, you’ll talk about it. Option number two is I drive you to twenty-two twelve, Ten Street in Boulder. You go home to your family. To people who can help you. You need help. To heal.”

  My toe stopped rubbing his leg. Sudden, hot terror settled over me. That was my address. The house my family lived in. Nausea moved over me. I ran to his bathroom in time for my breakfast to come back up, and all I could think about was coming home to my family like this.

  I sobbed into the toilet bowl. “I don’t want to go home. Please don’t make me go home.”

  His arms came around me. I scrambled to him, and he tucked me into his arms on the bathroom floor on his lap.

  “You need help, baby.”

  I could hear the tears in his voice. See, I told Old Madi. Klayton’s safe. I yearned for him so completely, I straddled his lap and squeezed him to me.

  “All you have to do is talk to someone. You can’t keep living your life this way. You’re fading into nothing. You don’t eat, you barely sleep, and you can’t think of the past without throwing up your insides. You—” He shoved his face in my neck and sobbed. “Have to heal. You can’t do that here.”

  Where would I do it? At home with my family? With my perfect family? They wouldn’t know who I was. They wouldn’t want me anymore. “I want option one.”

  Even as he tried to convince me to go with option two, his entire body sagged in relief when I picked him. Still, he continued. He went on and on, trying to show me how he was the worst option for me. I didn’t listen because it wasn’t true.

  Instead, I traced the tattoos on his left arm. They were entirely dissimilar to the ones on his right. These tattoos told a different story. All that I want was never mine, was in script on his bicep. It led down to a pair of hands reaching for each other. The bottom hand was too short, and it became a couple. A man with a Mohawk and a woman with large breasts. She was on her knees in front of him, clearly begging, but he’s looking down at his shoes as they become a galaxy. There are stars and a sun. Klayton wouldn’t stop trying to paint himself in a bad light as I watched the sun’s rays become another line. All that is mine was never wanted, was written on the thumb and inner wrist of his left hand.

  This piece looked to be more about what he should want and instead his ignorance of what he had. It could have been twisted, but I thought deep down that maybe Klayton wanted that girl to turn around, for that hand to reach for his, and for that sun to shine even if he never looked up.

  Finally, he gave up. “Go brush your teeth.”

  I did so, watching him in the mirror as I washed the sickness from my mouth. I wiped my mouth off on my shirt. It was then that I took in the mess that was the bathroom. It stunk of puke, and it wasn’t all from today. Klayton wore nothing but his jeans, his hair and countenance in disarray. I wasn’t sure about anything, but the look in Klayton’s eyes told me that it hadn’t been pretty. He looked like he’d been in a bar fight with his blackened eye and crumpled expression, the scent of puke swirling around us.

  “Don’t,” he said, but it was empty and lackluster when I reached for the towel on the floor to clean. He remained slumped and empty, staring up at me with red eyes and pain.

  It ruffled me. He was usually so strong and knowing. Now he looked like he didn’t know anything. I started cleaning, not knowing how else to say I was sorry. I bundled all our clothes up—at a distance—and started the washer. I used a dampened towel to wipe the dried puke off the floor, tossed that in the wash, and then I cleaned the shower, leaving it as shining as it was before I broke.

  “I’m not going home, Klay.” I wiped off the counter. “My family can’t know me like this.”

  “They won’t care.”

  He didn’t know them. The reason my family could wield their perfection was because they were. They tolerated nothing that took it from them. Even when we had colds, we had to smile through them. The pressure was unreal, which was why I went away for college. Dad wouldn’t have let me go farther than Denver, but I’d had to get out. “They’ll care.”

  “Mad—”

  “They’re not like you,” I interrupted. “They would never hold me as I vomited. They’d never look me in the eye after all that I’ve went through. They won’t want me anymore.” I blinked my tears away. “You and Cat are all I have.”

  The hard lines in his face had gone. He looked like a twenty-seven-year-old man who couldn’t remember what he had to be angry at. He looked closer to my age, and Mad pointed out how dark his midnight eyes were, how his messy hair and stubble made him look worn and … sexy. The thought struck me, having not felt anything close to it in … a long time. Time wasn’t real to me anymore. I saw him this way because he wasn’t a threat anymore. Like the dark. I used to be so afraid of the dark as a child. Then one night the power went out. I had no choice but to face the darkness. Once I had, it was no longer scary. It was just shadows and the same things that existed in the light.

  “Trust me, Mad,” he said, gazing at me openly. “All they want is for you to be safe and for you to come home. How could they not want you?”

  I looked down at my toes. I was in a pair of Klay’s sweats. Big baggy and comfortable. I vaguely remembered him helping me into them. A blush snaked up my spine. I hadn’t thought anything of him seeing me naked at the time. He was safe. He’d seen me in a situation far worse, and I felt close to him. He’d never hurt me for trusting him. He may scare me, but he’d never hurt me. But now, I felt winded at being bare in front of him. Of him being bare in front of me.

  When I peeked at him, he was still watching me, waiting for an answer I didn’t have. “You didn’t even want me when we met.”

  His eyes closed immediately. Something thinned his lips, and his hand slid down his body loosely, fumbling to the floor. “I want you now.” His eyes opened. Fire burned in them; they were glossy, like a starry night. “I want you, Madison. If you left me today, I’d spend the rest of my life thinking about you. Do you have any idea how selfish I wanted to be? To keep you here with me, so you didn’t go back home to your perfect family and perfect boyfriend? With people who deserve you? I want you. Don’t ever say that to me again.”

  He’d obviously looked me up—he knew about Leigh, my address. Uneasiness settled inside of me. The fire in his eyes was difficult to ignore. It burned, daring me to deny him. Trusting him didn’t mean he wanted me. Trust and want weren’t the same thing.

  He pushed to his feet with a grunt, flashing me a wounded look. Before he left, he must’ve thought better of it, and turned around, looking me right in the eye. “So now I don’t care about you? I don’t care about you, Madison? After falling apart right along with you, I don’
t care? Are you kidding me?”

  He looked like he cared. No one had ever looked at me like that before. Like I was the cause of their pain, their torture. I didn’t know what to do with it.

  When I didn’t say anything, he came for me. He held my face in his grasp and brought his forehead down on mine, midnight eyes crashing into me. His breath met mine, mixing until I wasn’t sure who was breathing in whom.

  “I care about you. Tell me you know that.”

  Mad shoved me forward onto his lips. She gave me no time to answer. And then she kissed him so hard, Klayton’s tongue ring felt more like mine. His tongue was searing and strong, and silky. It made me groan, it was so hot and soft. His hands held my face tightly as he matched the intensity of my attack. For a few seconds, everything else around me faded. There was nothing but his kiss, his lips, the heat of his touch. It made me feel like a version of me I had never been. Madi would never have let him kiss her. Not because she didn’t want him too, but because her father would have disowned her for wanting a man with so many tattoos. Mad wanted to kiss him because of those things.

  “Madi,” he whispered against me, tilting my head to the side. His lips deepened their kiss, curling my toes on the bathroom rug. There was so much intensity in his lips. So much want, so much care. But soon, he seemed to lose himself. His tongue and lips became more erotic, lost in a wet searing haze. His hands let my face go, and he slid them down my body to my ass. He gripped handfuls of my flesh and lifted me on the counter, putting my lips closer to his.

  He took full advantage of the new position and kissed me until I forgot everything but him. He slid between my legs, forcing me to drop my hands from his arms. I brought them to his lower back. The feel of his hot flesh sent shivers over me. He was so hard and smooth, so … tempting.