by Selena Kitt
And why had she done that, exactly?
“Forty minutes,” Beast said into the phone. “Thirty if I push it… yeah I know, but I had… a thing… I had to take care of…”
Tilly narrowed her eyes at him. Was she that “thing?” And just what in the hell was he up to?
“No, I told you not to call the port authority until I give the word, understand?” Beast insisted, his voice gruff. Then he was listening again. “Right. Okay. Bye.”
He pocketed his phone, turning toward her in the light of the setting sun. It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be soon.
“What in the ever-loving-hell is going on?” Tilly demanded. “And what does it have to do with Frankie?”
Because of course, it had to have something to do with her, Tilly reasoned. Beast hadn’t insisted he had somewhere to go until Tilly had let him listen to her strange phone call. And although she’d checked her phone several times since then, there’d been no other messages, not even a text. She was worried about Frankie, to say the least.
“Tilly, listen.” He pressed his mouth into a thin line for a moment, and then sighed. “There aren’t things you don’t know. About me. About...”
“No kidding.” Tilly snorted, rolling her eyes. “You don’t tell anyone anything.”
“Oh but I’m not the only one keeping secrets, am I?” Beast leveled his cold gaze at her and Tilly shrank back. It was the first time he’d acknowledged it since he’d directly asked her, is he ours?
“Beast…” She tried to follow that up with something, but she didn’t have any idea what.
“Later.” His phone rang again. He reached into his pocket to silence it and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he was talking about their discussion or his phone call. “I promise you that I’ll tell you everything. We can both… tell each other everything.”
She hated the way his voice caught when he said that.
“Right now I don’t have time.” He nodded at her purse and the gun hidden inside it. “Keep that with you. Stay here. No matter what happens, even if you hear from Frankie again, I want you to go into the house, set the alarm, and don’t answer the door to anyone but me.”
“This is crazy,” she whispered.
“Trust me.” He leaned in and lifted her chin so she had to look into his dark eyes.
“Are you…” She swallowed. “Is it dangerous?”
He didn’t answer that, and she knew.
“Is Frankie in danger?” she pressed, seeing something flicker in his eyes, and knew the answer to that, too. “Oh God. What’s happening? I’m so scared…”
“I know.” He put his arms around her and held her close. In that moment, everything she’d been trying to hold back flooded in—everything—and Tilly began to shake. Beast’s arms tightened around her and she gasped, clutching at him, never wanting to let him go.
“Stay with me,” she pleaded, her lips moving against his throat. “I can’t be alone. Please don’t leave me.”
“Baby, I have to,” he croaked, and the memory came back so hard it hurt.
She had barely caught him going out the door—leaving a week earlier than he said. Something had woken her, early, before dawn, a sense or feeling. Something’s wrong. But when she’d padded down the hall to his room, expecting to find him sleeping, there was nothing. His room was empty, the bed made, none of his things arranged on the bureau or night stand.
Tilly remembered racing down the stairs, finding him putting his duffel bag in the trunk of his car. She’d thrown herself into his arms. She’d begged him to stay with her, like she was now. She’d pleaded with him not to leave her. And he’d held her, like this, and said those exact same words. Baby, I have to.
“You’ll come home,” she whispered, her memory and this moment melding into one. “You’ll come home to me. Promise. Promise me.”
“I love you, Tilly.” His voice was choked, just like it had been then, when he finally spoke those words. “God fucking help me, I love you, baby. So much.”
Her heart soared and shattered into a thousand pieces at those words. She tilted her head back and he kissed her like she wanted to be kissed. Kissed her like it was the last time he might ever kiss her.
“I love you,” she said when they finally parted, because she had to tell him, too. Because she was desperately afraid he would go and never come home.
Again.
Except this time, it could be forever.
“Go,” he urged softly when they parted. “Be a good girl.”
That horrible sense of deja-vu overcame her. They were playing out the same scene once again, as if Tilly couldn’t ever escape the pain of it.
She climbed slowly out of the car, dazed, but she managed to make it to the door. Beast waited for her to go inside, and she managed that too, but just barely. Once the door was open, after much fumbling with her key, she set the alarm just as he asked her to, and then she sank to her knees in the foyer and sobbed.
The Mustang roared down the driveway, just like it had the day they’d said goodbye, taking him away from her. Tilly leaned back against the door, looking around in the fading light of the foyer, so eerily similar to how it had been that morning. Except this time it was sunset instead of sunrise. Endings and beginnings.
Which one was this? She wondered.
She listened for the sound of his car taking the final turn out of the driveway, but he was already gone.
The first thing she did was call Frankie. The phone rang and rang. It didn’t even go to voicemail. She texted her three more times on the way up the stairs. Help me. That’s what she’d said in the message. And she’d said “he,” hadn’t she, before the call had cut off? Was Frankie in danger? And what did Beast have to do with it?
Confused and getting angrier by the minute at Beast’s incessant need for secrecy, Tilly went up to her room and fed Scrabble. The house was quiet. The overnight staff were probably in their quarters at the back of the house, because they knew Liv was at the hospital. No one even knew Tilly was in the house.
She sat on the edge of her bed and checked her calls one more time. There was nothing more from Frankie, but that’s when she noticed the number Frankie had called in from wasn’t Frankie’s. The number just registered as “private.” What the hell? If she hadn’t called Tilly from her own phone, whose phone was it?
Tilly didn’t know what to do with herself. She thought about going back up to the hospital to sit with her mother, and that prompted her to call the hospital. The ICU nurse—Alexis, she said, when Tilly asked—told Tilly that Liv was still sleeping comfortably and her vitals were stabilizing. Visiting hours were over, but she could come up anyway, Alexis told her, and Tilly knew why they’d make an exception. Liv was well-known at the hospital, and donated a lot of money there, as had her father before her. In fact, every time Tilly went to the cafeteria, she saw her grandfather’s picture hanging on the wall, staring at her from a plaque, along with a line of other rich donors.
Tilly told Alexis, if Liv was stable now, she would just see her in the morning—but to be sure to call if there was any change in the middle of the night. She considered just getting undressed and going to sleep, but even though she felt exhausted, she knew she’d just toss and turn. Her mind wouldn’t shut off.
Glancing at her phone, she saw the battery was low, and she reached for her purse to retriever her charger, noting that her purse felt heavier than usual. It wasn’t until she unzipped it that she remembered why.
The gun.
She looked at it, considering. Ridiculous, to think she needed a gun in a house like this. Like Frankie said, they had state of the art security. She would keep it, because he told her to, but she wasn’t going to sleep with it under her pillow or anything. Glancing around her room, she made a decision, going over to her bureau and pulling open her top drawer. The staff would go around cleaning in the morning, and she didn’t want anyone to discover a handgun in her room—she could just imagine the reports Liv would get when she go
t home—and so she slipped it under her panties and bras. Safe enough there, she decided.
Then she plugged in her phone and went downstairs to the kitchen.
Had it really just been that afternoon when Beast had pinned her against this refrigerator and kissed her until she was dizzy with wanting him?
Things had unraveled after that at a dizzying pace. She still hadn’t managed to catch her breath. She opened the fridge and peered inside. She hadn’t eaten anything since her bagel and cream cheese—and she’d only had a few bites of that—but she wasn’t in the least bit hungry. Her stomach revolted at the thought of food and she closed the fridge again, going to the stove and picking up the kettle.
She decided to make herself some tea, not because she really wanted any, but because she had absolutely no idea what else to do. The house was empty. She was alone with that emptiness and it seemed to stretch out endlessly before her. She made her tea and took it into the sun room. She could see the pool from here, just a glimmer of orange on its surface as the sun finally set, and shuddered at not so distant memory of Miles nearly drowning. But she couldn’t let herself think about him, not now. Not yet.
That one hurt too much.
Tilly sat at the table, remembering the night she’d come home from her date with Mark and found Beast sitting there with a bottle of tequila. It had become her safe word. Had he decided, then, that he was going to train her? When had he broken down and finally let her in? In so many ways, it mirrored that summer they’d spent together, the summer after she’d graduated high school.
He’d come home that summer, so angry, distant, full of secrets. She’d heard him calling out in his sleep, and she’d gone to him. He’d let her comfort him and that’s all it had been, at first. They’d seen so little of each other since Beast enlisted—just holidays, a few weeks here and there—that Tilly had grown up without him realizing. He looked at her differently that summer, like he was surprised by how much she’d changed.
Liv had been the one who insisted he spend the summer at home, Tilly remembered, as she sipped her tea. Tilly’s mother had manipulated and finagled until Beast had finally given in. She still didn’t know what Liv had said to get him to sublet his apartment and come sleep in his old room at home that summer, but whatever the pretense, Tilly was pretty sure it was Liv’s sense that Beast was in trouble that motivated it.
And he had been in trouble. The kind of trouble that had ended his father’s life, Tilly thought with a sad little shiver. Beast had gone to a dark place when he’d been deployed to Afghanistan and he’d come back in an even darker one. His nightmares, his anger, the secrets he kept close, were all shadows that loomed, threatening to black out everything else.
Tilly had been his light. That’s even what he’d called her that summer—sunshine.
Morning, Sunshine.
Hey, Sunshine, wanna go for a swim?
There’s my sunshine…
She had only wanted to help him, and if there had been other, less altruistic thoughts that flitted through her mind when she slid into his bed at night and wrapped her arms around him when he cried out in his sleep, well, she hadn’t been aware of them.
At least, that’s what she told herself, until she couldn’t pretend anymore and one night, she’d given herself to him like an offering. She’d straddled him in the moonlight and pulled her nightie off and kissed away his half-hearted protests.
Because by then, they had both fallen, hard and deep and unexpectedly.
Tilly sat and drank her tea as darkness fell and thought about how everything had changed. And yet, they were the same. Whatever had called out to her, in him, was still there. The man who had entered her tenderly for the first time, taking her innocence and giving her his love in return, was the same one who had recently bound and spanked and whipped her.
Were they really one in the same?
She had come to know the man who had returned from the desert the summer after she graduated high school—the man who had nightmares about minefields and tank blasts and never-ending landscapes filled with grit and blood and pain. He was also a man whose smile could light up a room if he deigned to give you one, and whose dark, solemn eyes followed her everywhere, as if she was his best-kept secret.
She had grown up loving that boy, had loved him even more somehow after the tragedy that had befallen them when his father killed himself and Beast had run as far and as fast as he could to escape that fate. And she had fallen deeply and utterly in love with him after he’d come home again that summer. His darkness had allowed her light to shine brighter than it ever had before, and she had become his sunshine.
But who was the man who had returned home this time? Was he the same?
Was she?
No. So much had happened to her since he’d been gone, so much he hadn’t been there for. She wasn’t the same girl he’d left. There were dark, hollowed out places in her now, scars he’d never seen. Some he might never see. And so, too, with Beast. Clearly, he was keeping secrets.
There are things about me you don’t know.
All the secrets. All the lies. She couldn’t imagine what he was hiding.
Her head was starting to hurt.
Tilly sighed and got up, took her empty tea cup to the sink and washed it out. Then she wandered into the living room, which had been all noise and confusion not too long ago.
She slumped onto the couch, and turned on the television—ancient reruns of 1960s sitcoms. I Dream of Genie—Barbara Eden, the genie, was trying to please her “master,” Major Nelson, and only getting him into more trouble. Nope. Too close to home.
Tilly changed channels and somehow got another 60s sitcom—Bewitched. Samantha Stevens was trying to help her husband, and... no. She was sure Downton Abbey was still in the Blu-Ray player, but that wasn’t right either.
Tilly turned the television off. She heard the grandfather clock tick away on the opposite wall. Maybe she would try to go to sleep.
Upstairs, she checked her phone—fully charged now—but no word from Frankie or Beast, or the hospital. Was no news, good news? She decided to give Frankie one last call.
Just as she was about to hang up, Erich answered. Tilly sat bolt upright.
“Tilly, is that you?” He sounded frantic. “I’m at Frankie’s place. Her phone and purse are here, but she’s not. Do you know what’s going on?”
“Uhhh… no.” That was the truth. She had no freaking idea. What was he doing in Frankie’s apartment? Tilly frowned, remembering Frankie telling her something about giving him a key, an act Tilly had chastised her about. They’d gotten awfully close, very fast. But Frankie had rolled her eyes and had edged toward anger, so Tilly hadn’t mentioned it again.
“Erich, did something happen?”
“We got into an argument,” he confessed, sounding rueful. Tilly relaxed at that, leaning back against her pillows. If they’d argued, well, then the frantic phone call from Frankie made sense. When Frankie was pissed, Frankie often did stupid things. “I’m afraid she took off because she was mad at me. But… why would she leave her purse and her phone?”
“I don’t know.” That was the part that bothered Tilly, too. She could see Frankie storming off, but… leaving her purse with all her money and her phone? No way. Then she remembered—the number Frankie had called from hadn’t been her own.
“Maybe she went to her parents’ place.” Tilly perked up at this thought. That could explain the “private” number she’d called in on. “Do you want me to call them?”
“I already did,” Erich informed her, sounding morose. That surprised Tilly—had Frankie brought Erich home to meet her parents? “No answer. I think she mentioned they were on vacation somewhere?”
“Oh yeah.” Tilly remembered Frankie saying something about her parents and the south of France. “But that means they’re not home and Frankie has a key. It’s the perfect place for her to go.”
“But she’s not picking up the phone…”
“She
wouldn’t,” Tilly insisted. She knew Frankie well enough to know her first line of defense would be the silent treatment. Frankie thought depriving anyone of her company and constant chatter had to be the worst possible punishment. “She’d ignore your calls. I’m going over there.”
“Wait!” Erich cried. “Tilly, I need to see her. We… we have to work this out. But she’s so mad at me…”
“What did you fight about?”
Erich didn’t answer her.
“Okay, you don’t have to tell me now.” Tilly sighed. “But you know Frankie’s going to tell me all about it.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound mad, just resigned. “Hey… wait… Tilly, what if we go over there together?”
“Together?”