by Natasha Boyd
Our feet slid in the mud, and we were falling, hanging onto each other, our mouths fused. My legs came out from under me, his knees hit first, and our mouths were wrenched apart.
“I’m not allowed you. I’m not allowed this. Please,” he rasped. “Please stop.” And I didn’t know if he spoke to me or himself, but his battle was clearly lost as his mouth found me again and slid down my neck, blazing over my icy wet skin.
Hands fumbled and grasped at my dress straps, pulling them down, and then I was bare to the rain as it sluiced over my breasts. Tom’s eyes feasted greedily for a nanosecond before his hands were full, his mouth and his teeth closing over my nipple.
I cried out and grabbed his head. God.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing was going to be enough.
Dress sodden and heavy, I climbed over his knees.
His warm hands slid over the cold bare flesh where my skirt had ridden up. Needing to get closer, I arched against him, gasping as my body found his straining erection under his coarse jeans.
He groaned. “God, Liv.” He pushed against me again, making me whimper at the friction. The pressure. The ache that desperately needed to be eased. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he hissed through kisses that ate me alive, sucked my tongue, bruised my flesh and stoked my desperation. His hands roamed up my skirt until he was clutching and kneading me.
“Ah.” The moan escaped through my breathy gasps. “I need you, please,” I panted, completely embarrassed by my plea.
His fingers moved behind me and stole between my legs, slid into the slick heat between my thighs that had soaked through my underwear.
I desperately looked to him for help.
“Christ,” he gasped, his eyes open and glassy, deep dark pools of diluted pupils. Then they closed, and his mouth grew hungrier, sliding over my flesh.
I arched against his hand, pressing down as his fingers slid beneath the scrap of material. “Please,” I sobbed, grinding against it. Something in my body coiled painfully tight.
The storm blew around us, thrashing the earth. It was relentless. And dangerous to be out here. It was right on top of us. We were right in the center of it and I didn’t care. We didn’t care.
Then his finger speared me, sinking deep. Frantic and fumbling I leaned away to grasp at his jeans, terrified that this would be over, that he would come out of this haze he was in. My hands shook as I freed his erection.
“God, Liv,” he barked out as my hand closed around his perfect thickness.
My mouth went dry, despite the rain sliding down my face and over my lips.
And then he was helping me, lifting me, positioning me. My underwear was a torn scrap on the rainy ground next to us.
He tensed, paused, his hands on either side of my face. Eyes sweeping inside mine, he raked my soul bare as his long fingers slid into the hair at my nape, his thumbs grazing reverently over my cheek.
And I held his eyes in mine as I lowered down onto him, my unpracticed body resisting his blunt thickness for just a moment before the exquisite ecstasy of it, and the way his face flushed and his lips parted, made me sink down and take all of him in one long, slow, deep roll of my hips.
We both released strangled sounds of relief and further agony. Before I could move, his arms swiftly wrapped around my frame, his face dropping into my neck, and pressed me down hard, not letting me move, like he could somehow get deeper inside me. Or like he never wanted to leave. And I felt him all the way up to my heart.
His body quaked beneath my hands. The air charged up around us, my skin sang and prickled. And I felt his head shaking side to side in my neck. “No,” he muttered, brokenly. “No.”
Panic danced around the edges of my all-consuming need for him, almost like my body could feel him emotionally withdrawing from me, even as our bodies were locked together.
I pulsed and throbbed around him, brought to the very edge but held at bay. His arms loosened a fraction, and I rocked, needing him. Still desperately needing him. “Tom, please,” I whispered.
He groaned, and grabbing my hips painfully, pulled out and thrust deeply inside me.
I cried out at the force.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped and went dead still.
I tried to rock against him again, grabbed his face to look into his eyes. To understand what was going on. He held my hips firmly. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his eyes shuttering, a look of dawning realization stealing over his face, like he was waking from a dream.
Tears welled. “Please,” I pleaded.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Liv. I’m so sorry.” He pushed me up, unlocking his body from mine. “Oh, God,” he said again, squeezing his eyes shut a moment, then shifting away so I was sitting on his thighs.
I stared at him, confusion and shock rendering me mute and frozen as I struggled to understand what was happening here. My mind and body still scrambling to catch up.
Protection. That’s why he was stopping. That’s all it was.
But I knew it wasn’t.
He raked his hands down his sopping face, exhaling harshly. The rain had eased somewhat; it wasn’t so loud. Yet it fell, steadily. Spattering all around us, seeping into our skin, diluting our haze of lust. Washing Tom with reality, while leaving me swimming in an ocean of unrealized want.
And all I could hear was his breathing, sawing in and out of his chest. And my own.
“Tom,” I whispered.
He snapped his head up. His eyes swimming in despair and regret and a thousand other things I couldn’t pin down that weren’t supposed to be there. Emotions that had no business being in this moment.
He shook his head, his hands went between us, putting us back to order, pulling my straps up, tugging on my dress like he hadn’t just been buried inside me.
“Tom,” I pleaded. “Speak to me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop saying that. What the hell just happened?”
He shook his head. “I can’t… you can’t… I can’t believe I did that to you…”
“You didn’t do it! We did it. We were doing it. And I want it, Tom. I want you.” My voice broke.
“You don’t want me. You don’t know what you’re doing.” He kept shaking his head. Like he couldn’t believe what had just happened.
“But I do know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t. I don’t.” His voice was harsh.
The wind had died down, but the rain was incessant. I pulled strength from the steady thrum of it, the certainty I felt in my bones. “I know what I’m doing,” I said calmly. “I’m loving you.”
His face went blank. With shock? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
It was all so clear to me, now. I grabbed his face and looked into his eyes. “Every look, every touch, every time I conceive of ways to get you to react, to talk to me, to think about me, every damn breath I take to keep living, is me loving you. You saved me, Tom. You gave me strength when I didn’t even know I needed it. You gave me an anchor. You gave me a deep blue eternity to look forward to, rather than run from, which was all I’d done until you. I love you. I’m loving you. I’m in love with you.”
“You can’t,” he whispered brokenly.
“Don’t tell me what I’m feeling, and if I’m allowed to love you.” I ran my hand down his arm, and he shuddered under my touch.
“You can’t,” he said again. His voice sounded strangely hollow, like a man on the track, staring down a train he knew he couldn’t avoid. “You can’t, Livvy… because you’ve been actively hating me since you were twelve years old.”
His words hung, his tone, like a deep dark abyss, a terrible gaping horror, dragging me forward.
“What?” I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean, Liv. You know who I am. You’ve met me before. You’ve blocked it out, that’s all. I kept waiting for you to remember. But then it went on, and you thought I was the caretaker or some stupid shit.”
; I swallowed.
“And then it became harder and harder to tell you because I felt like if you knew, really knew, you would run.”
I shook my head faster, my skin getting tight and cold. This was not real.
“And you would’ve run. But I… I needed you to stay. I needed to right the wrong. To make sure you were okay. To…” his throat bobbed heavily, his voice mangled. “To make up for not saving you.”
What?
“Saving me? From what?” But the knowledge crept in around the dark recesses of my mind. Crowding me. Pressing in on me from all sides.
“From—”
“No,” I whispered.
The world stilled. Everything around me slowed and quieted and disappeared except the light brown eyes in front of me.
Air expelled forcefully out of my chest like I’d been punched. “No,” I gasped.
And I saw the truth in all of its ugliness forming in the tears that were welling in Tom’s eyes. His hateful, fake, deceiving eyes. The truth spilled out, raw and brutal, carving its way over his cheeks, running rivulets that dripped off his chin to the ground. And now that the rain had ceased, there was nothing to hide it. Nothing to wash it all away.
“Say it,” I said.
“My name is Thomas Whitfield Cavanaugh.” His voice was strung out like barbed wire. “My family, and yours, knew me as Whit.”
“BUT YOU’RE DEAD. You’re supposed to be dead. You and Abby are supposed to be dead.” My teeth tried to slam shut, even as my mouth hung open in shock. I scrambled backward in the mud.
He dropped his head and gripped it with his hands, now free of me, his knuckles white.
“Speak to me!” I roared, not even recognizing my own voice. My body was shaking. In anger? Shock? Cold? I didn’t know.
“Yes,” he rasped. “I was driving the car she died in. And I wish I’d died that day too. But I didn’t. Not in the way I wish I had.”
“But you did!”
“Maybe you were told I did,” he responded tonelessly. “I think you’ll find there’s no actual record of me dying.”
“I don’t understand. Why would anyone lie about that?”
Tom’s hollow laugh was his only answer. It would have sent chills through me if I wasn’t already numb.
“I hated you,” I said. “Hated you for taking her away. Letting her run away with you. Hated you for not letting her come back to get me, to tell someone, say anything that would have saved me. And I couldn’t tell you that because you were dead too.”
I was so confused, reactions and questions popping through me so fast, I could only ramble. “You took her. She could have told them about Mike. She could have taken me away.”
I looked around helplessly, as if I could find a way out of the nightmare. The cottage stood, quiet and warm, beckoning me back inside, within her safety. Inside, where I’d been living the worst lie I could imagine. I thought back to the day I’d found the box on my bed. Oh my God, he knew what Uncle Mike did to Abby. “God, you could have told someone. You knew she had a sister. You knew about me. You knew of me.” I heaved in air, trying to catch my breath, shock making it hard to even blink. “You said Abby told you about Mike and what he did, and I thought you maybe must not have known back then that she had a sister. God, I just thought the best of you. You would never abdicate responsibility on something like that.”
I paused, trying to gather my thoughts while Tom sat still like a statue. “You were admitting it,” I said incredulously. “And I was so blinded by you that I didn’t hear it.” My empty and unamused laugh pinged the earth between us. “There I go again making those fucking bad choices about men, right?” I got to my feet. My legs felt like rubber. “I hate you,” I rasped, my voice falling into a sob as my face crumpled, my hands coming up to hide it. “I hate you.”
The rain continued its patter around us, and thunder rumbled. Another round was gearing up.
“I know,” Tom whispered. “I know you do. And you should. That’s the only thing you should feel for me. I fucked up the only chance I had to make it right.”
“Make it right? How can you undo something so horrible? If I’d known from the beginning, Whit,” I dragged out his name with disgust, “there would never have been this chance you think you had.” I tried to gather my thoughts. “A liar once told me he wasn’t a liar, and I believed him. But you believed your own lie too, didn’t you?” My voice grew louder. “You thought you could be nice to me and make up for it, erase everything. Make up for a little girl being ‘petted,’ being made to touch someone in return, being made to feel like she was special because of it, even though she knew it was wrong.
“But she was so fucking lonely from being made to keep the secret from her parents, even though all she wanted was for them to get closer and help her, not go further and further away.”
I sucked in more air to keep going even though I wasn’t sure I was making any sense. My voice grew and grew until I felt like I was raging along with the wind, and drawing my strength from the ocean and the trees and the rain and the air and the thousands of miles of earth beneath my feet. “And you can’t ever,” I spat, “make up for that girl trying to change herself to become invisible so he wouldn’t want her anymore, so he’d leave her alone, and instead, he was so angry that he, that he, she was…”
My voice collapsed to a whisper, picking the only acceptable word, a word that had become an easy one to say, when the reality was so much worse. “Raped. Raped as punishment for not looking like he needed me to look.”
I tried to draw another breath in, but pain was trying to get out at the same time, and they wheezed and clashed in midair. “As if,” I squeaked, “as if the years before hadn’t been punishment enough. Oh no, he’d saved that for later. Until everyone thought I was certifiably crazy and delusional anyway. I kept thinking, maybe he wouldn’t have done it if I’d just stayed the way I was, if I just looked like her for longer. He wouldn’t have done that to her.”
Tom looked like he was going to be sick. He got to his feet and started toward me. “No, Liv. He did.”
Stumbling back, I held out a hand to ward him off.
“Please, no,” I managed. The thought of anyone touching me right now was like asking me to exfoliate a third-degree burn. I’d never told anyone the things that had just come out of my mouth. Even though my voice didn’t sound like mine, I still knew it was me. And to think I’d just spewed all that at Tom…
No, not Tom, Whit.
This was Whit.
Whitfield Cavanaugh—a player who lost his college football scholarship because he kept getting in trouble. Not even his influential father and his academics could save him. I racked my brain for the rest of the rap sheet everyone seemed to talk about in hushed tones back then. But all I could come up with was the way Abby talked about him. Like he was going to save her.
This wasn’t my Tom, this was Abby’s Whit. Thomas Whitfield Cavanaugh IV. Deceased.
I WAS MUTE, staring at the fire. Tom had finally convinced me to go inside out of the rain, so I parked myself on the couch soaking through all the cushions. I didn’t want to do anything he told me. In fact I wanted him to just… disappear. For the last hour not to have happened. For me to have never come here. For my heart to not have known him. God, and I’d had him inside my body. Abby’s Whit. I winced.
“Did you and Abby have sex?” I asked suddenly.
Tom was sitting in the chair closest to the fire, legs apart, his body propped up by his elbows and his hands and head hanging listlessly. He lifted his head wearily. His eyes were a shock. Their caramel color was drained to dry mud. Flat nothingness. “That’s what you want to know?”
I shrugged. “The only guy I willingly chose to have sex with turns out to be my sister’s boyfriend. It seems like a legitimate question.”
His face was expressionless.
Perhaps he didn’t hear the part where I admitted I wasn’t as sexually experienced as he thought, despite my bravado and my attitu
de. That none of the things I’d experienced were things I wanted. That he was the only person I’d ever really… chosen.
“Husband.”
“What?” The word burst out of me.
“Husband.” He swallowed, loudly. “Abby and I got married in Beaufort before coming to the cottage. I was trying to… trying to do it right. I guess I thought I could protect her better. I don’t know.”
And the kicks just kept coming. I pressed my lips together. “You’re, you’re my brother-in-law. Wow. At what point from the moment I arrived here did you think I didn’t need to know that? I mean did you look at me and think she looks dumb enough to buy this caretaker bullshit?”
“I never called myself that, you did. I just didn’t know how to correct you.”
“Obviously, it would have been hard to tell me. But don’t you think it would have been better than this? Better than allowing me to, I don’t know, to start to feel…” My voice gave out. I tried again. “To feel happy, to live again, to, to,… want things, only to pour gasoline on everything and strike a match. I get that you didn’t care enough about some little girl you hardly knew—”
“Of course I cared, but I couldn’t do anything back then.”
I ignored him and continued, “…enough to save her from a monster, but then to start pretending you care about me and let me, let me…” I couldn’t finish. We both remembered the words I’d said to him outside.
I’d fallen in love with him. I’d fallen in love with an honorable, strong, caring, funny guy, who lay with me when I was sick, who scared my monsters away, and whom I never believed could be capable of hurting me. But he wasn’t that guy anymore. He’d never been that guy.
“I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how. I was so shocked when I saw you. When I realized who you were. And it got harder and harder. Especially when every day you were here I saw the person you are inside finally coming out, and I didn’t want to hurt you again.” He blew out a rough breath and raked his hand over his head, gazing up to the wood-beamed ceiling as if it held answers. “Can you understand that?” he asked, looking back at me. “I know I should have told you, but I didn’t want to inflict any more pain on you. It was wrong. But I didn’t know we would get this far.”