by Natasha Boyd
My blood pounded so hard, it roared in my ears. I was surprised there was enough of it left in my upper body since most of it had coalesced between my legs. Throbbing.
“Tom,” she whispered.
I jerked out of my fantasy and clumsily put the pins into a cup holder built into the wood veneer. “I’ll just, uh, wait outside,” I said and burst out of the cabin into the night air, breathing hard.
This was not what tonight was about. What any time with her would ever be about. She’d just been attacked and almost died, for Christ’s sake. She still had to hate me for lying to her and taking advantage of her feelings for me.
I stood on the deck, hands stuffed into the pockets of my black dress pants, the breeze bringing much needed cool air to my bare chest. The water was dark and peaceful, although the strains of a fiddle could still be heard as the reveling continued. I needed to start thinking about where I would go after I left here. After Pete. I’d stay as long as he needed me, of course. I couldn’t think about Liv. I needed to move on. Let her live her life without me and the memories I brought back to her, weighing her down. She thought she loved me, but it was based on shit.
“Tom?”
I turned.
Her small blonde head poked out of the cabin door and her eyes traveled over me. “Are you coming back?”
God, did she think I’d leave her here by herself? But that’s what I was busy planning, wasn’t it? Not tonight, but soon. “I’m not going anywhere. Go ahead and sleep. I’ll be there in a while.” But she didn’t go back down, she just watched me. I was confused and conflicted, and it was doing my fucking head in. And I still wanted her. I wanted to run my hands all over her delicate body and show her how incredible every single part of her was. How her body was an instrument of love, not shame. Joy and not pain. Love. I loved her.
I loved her in a way that swelled so hard in my chest, it felt like my ribs might crack. How long had I felt this way and shoved it aside?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she whispered.
I squeezed my eyes closed and swallowed the emotion down.
“Because…” My eyes opened and found her. “Because I’m at war with myself. Over you.”
Her brows creased together.
My hands fisted inside my pockets. “I represent too many painful memories for you. It’s not fair of me to remind you of them just by existing. I wish I could take them all away. But I can only take myself away.”
She seemed to ponder my words. “You asked me to come back to you,” she said.
She’d heard that?
“And I did. Now come inside.”
LIV WAS LYING curled up on her side under the bedsheet when I stepped down into the cabin. The boat rocked gently. Her blinks were slow, and I knew she was moments away from sleep. But she watched me from under lowered lashes.
I toed off my shoes and socks and pulled my pants down over my boxers, knowing that it meant she’d see how aroused I still was. Wishing I could turn it off was useless. It just was. I didn’t look back at her to check if she’d seen. Turning off the lamp, I climbed under the covers and lay on my back, hands resting under my head.
After a few moments, she shifted, her head nestling into my shoulder, her body down my side and her arm snuck over my waist. Another wave of lust rolled through me, and I focused on keeping my breathing steady. Could you die from over-arousal?
“Is this okay?” she asked.
I nodded and brought an arm down to wrap around her shoulders. “Yeah.” I breathed into her hair. It smelled different, but she was still there underneath it. Cinnamon? Was that what she smelled like? I could never pin down the undercurrent.
Her hand came up to my face, running gently over my shaved skin, over the planes and the bones. Her finger traced my lips. Her leg snuck across mine, and I tensed.
“This?” she whispered.
Forcing myself to relax and not feel that she was now fully pressed against me, I tried to think of something else. Pete? Yeah, that was sad. Devastating. But I was still hard as a rock. I couldn’t get a handle on this. Was she trying to drive me insane? It was working; I was going fucking insane. I thought I’d been turned on before, but with my head and my heart in on the game, it was… I was… I couldn’t…
“Can I touch you here?” she whispered and her hand traveled south.
My arm tightened around her.
… I was fucked.
Her small, soft hand drifted over my boxers and closed around my hard length.
My breath stuttered out of my chest in a mangled groan. “Liv,” I rasped, and my other hand grabbed the sheets tearing them loose from my side of the berth.
“Please let me.” Her voice was soft. “You’re aroused by me.”
I nodded. I think.
“Yet you don’t use it, or make me do anything.”
Her hand stroked up and then down.
I heard my own breaths and grimaced that she could hear how little control I had right now.
“Don’t you want to be aroused by me?”
How the hell did I answer that? My hand joined hers and squeezed, to still her but also pressing down to relieve part of the ache. “Liv,” I managed. “I want you to touch me. I want to touch you. I just… I just…” I want so much more.
“Then let me.”
I let her go.
Her hand slid under my shorts, closing around my cock. My chest imploded as the air left.
Her strokes were tentative at first, but it was so incredible to have her hand on me that all I could do was squeeze her shoulder where I hugged her, my hand kneading her arm.
Her strokes became more sure. And I tried not to lose my mind.
My free hand came to rest on her head, brushing through her hair. I needed to kiss her. I tilted her face up even as my lower body moved to urge her, thrusting up into her hand. I wasn’t sure I was breathing until I heard my own gasps. My lips found hers. God, this was so fucked up. I hadn’t even ever simply kissed her. Just kissed. For the sake of kissing. Tasting her. I would remedy that some time. But right now, I wanted to thrust my tongue between her lips, to have some part of me inside her.
As if she could sense what I needed, she opened, and sucked my tongue into her sweet hot mouth. Holy hell. My hips bucked. Her fist got tight. “Liv,” I gasped into her mouth. But I couldn’t hold the tide back, it roared in, filling my whole body. My spine stiffened. “Oh, God,” I moaned helplessly, and sensation exploded through me, erupting into her hand. I rode it out, not able to stop, her hand milking me dry until I was shuddering and completely destroyed.
Remorse oozed into the emptiness that remained.
“Thank you,” Liv whispered.
“What? How can you possibly be thanking me?” I sounded as disgusted as I felt. With myself. I sat up, shrugging her off me so I could reach the light, and fumbled it on. There was a hand towel near the small sink. I reached over and grabbed it, cleaning myself up. I turned to offer it to her and stopped dead at her eyes spilling over with tears.
“Thank you for letting me do that. Because I’ve never done that simply out of love for someone.” She turned, to curl up onto her side again, away from me.
Shame slammed into me. I dropped the towel I was holding. My mouth opened and closed. Oh my fucking God.
“Liv.” I went toward her, drawing her small frame into my arms and curling myself around her back. “Livvy.”
Her body shook with sobs. I rocked her, hating myself all over again. Was there any right way for us? For me? Or were we completely damned?
“Livvy,” I whispered in her ear. “You’ve done nothing but give or have it taken from you. I don’t know where I fit into that. I don’t know how to be with you. Please,” I said brokenly, “I’m trying to never hurt you again, but I don’t know what I’m doing.”
After a while her arms found mine and held me in place around her.
I wanted to touch her. To give her pleasure. To show her that no matter what had ha
ppened to her, no matter what she’d done in the past, I wanted to erase it. Replace it. But I was paralyzed with fear of hurting her. Or reminding her. So I simply held her.
“I’LL GO BY myself, if you don’t mind.” We’d pulled to a stop under a massive live oak, swagging Spanish moss out of our way with the roof of the cart. I acquiesced with a silent nod.
Liv climbed out of the cart, and I could already feel the swarm of no-see-ums and a few mosquitos from our post April shower heat descend and start biting.
She hurried over to JJ’s door, all pale bare skin apart from the small piece of fuchsia that passed for a dress. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
She knocked, and when he opened up, there were a few moments of nothing before Liv launched herself at JJ, wrapping her arms around him. I had an odd moment where I was stunned and uncomfortable. Jealous? It was no secret that JJ had somehow been there that day, when I wasn’t. But no one knew, and JJ couldn’t say, how he’d gotten Liv out of the water. Or even known she was there. I pursed my lips and got out of the cart.
By the time I joined them, Liv was holding her kitten, with her nose pressed into his fur and her eyes leaking those Goddamned tears again.
JJ looked over my right shoulder.
“Thank you, JJ,” I said.
For saving her kitten, for helping me with Tyler, for saving Liv. Period. “I’ve decided JJ sounds like a superhero name. What do you think, Liv?” I glanced at her.
JJ tilted his head toward her. A tiny movement, but for him, he may as well have looked right at her.
“Yes. JJ is a superhero,” Liv agreed.
I raised my eyebrows and looked at JJ. “Guess it’s true, then.” I shrugged.
He gave a small smile and shook his head.
“No big deal,” I said. “I know.”
He gave a nod, shuffled back into the dim recesses of his home, and closed the door.
“Some people may say he’s autistic,” I said.
“Others may say he’s an angel,” Liv said.
I nodded. “That too.”
THE SUN WAS bright as we pulled up in front of the cottage. It was strange to be so familiar with a place and have it be so alien all at once. Livvy, Prince Eric (What. The fuck. Ever), and I sat in the cart for a few minutes just staring.
I took her hand. “Come on,” I said and climbed out. She slid out behind me, not letting go of my hand, the cat sitting like a baby on her hip under her other arm. We walked across the front yard, already thick with spring weeds in just the few days since I’d come out here to get stuff fixed.
“It looks good,” she said when she saw the shutters.
“No more boo hags for you.” I smiled.
She let go of my hand and tucked her short hair behind her ear like she’d forgotten she cut it.
I’d had the whole place cleaned too. Seeing the aftermath of their brief struggle had made me physically sick.
We stepped inside and Livvy paused, her eyes resting on certain parts of the main living space. Eric, I refused to use Prince, meowed and jumped from her arms, searching out his familiar spots.
“Well, the living room window with the broken lock was replaced,” I said, nervously trying to fill the silence. Because a kitten was thrown through it. The fact the cat hadn’t died on impact was a miracle. There were a lot of miracles that day.
She nodded, reminding me I’d shared that information already. “We have a lot of memories here,” she said quietly. “In such a short space of time.”
I hoped she was remembering all the good ones.
“It’s yours too, isn’t it? Because you were married. That’s why you’re here.”
“The cottage? Yeah. When Abby died, her half went to me. To be honest, I would have come here anyway. I had nowhere else to go.”
“Why did you marry her?”
“Liv, I would have done anything for your sister. But more than that, I just needed to give her something real. Something good. So she’d know I accepted her no matter what. And to be honest, I thought it would give me a way to protect her from her family.”
Liv went to the couch and sat down. “Were you drunk the night Abby died?” she asked.
My heart thudded to a painful halt. “Wow. How is it you always totally curve-ball me?”
Her eyes dropped. “Sorry.”
I almost went and sat in the chair, but the echo of the night I left, the night before she was attacked, was too loud. “No.” I slid my hands into my pants pocket, in a display of calmness I would never feel over this topic. “No. I wasn’t drunk. Nor had I had anything that would put my results over the legal limit in a toxicology report. But since you were told I was, why the hell are you asking the question?”
“Because, now I know you, I don’t believe that to be the truth. And your reasons for marrying Abby don’t sound like the act of an immature wastrel, which is what everyone claimed you were.”
I laughed without the joy that should accompany it. “Well, Liv, I hate to disappoint you, but for most of the year prior to that event, you’d have been wrong. I drank, smoked, swallowed, or snorted anything I could possibly lay my hands on. So in the grand scheme of things, I was bound to be involved in a fatal event sooner or later.”
“There was a toxicology report from that night.”
“Yes, there was,” I agreed.
Liv’s mouth twisted to the side, and she bit her lip. “But it wasn’t public knowledge. I dug that out. So why would there be a secret report saying you were drunk if you weren’t. If something was faked, wouldn’t there be a report saying you weren’t when you actually were? Especially because of who your father was?”
“You’d think,” I agreed. Her face told me she wasn’t going to let this go. “Remember, I told you we went to the bar to try and meet Mike Williams?”
“Yeah. I just don’t understand why, if he could have faked your toxicology report to make sure it just seemed like a random drunk driving teen accident, which happens all the damn time, why did you then have to…” She turned her toes in and sat on her hands. “Why did you have to fake your death?”
“Mike Williams had manufactured proof that I was drunk, so it would, and should, have been an open and shut case. And really, it should have been a routine DUI. Jail, probation, whatever. Not a fatal accident. Mike Williams discredits me, and all goes back to normal, right?”
“But your father was a senator?”
“Yes. The choice was go public and have Mike Williams, and his colleagues who all saw us in a bar, discredit the case with his false report and bring my father’s entire campaign down at the same time… or leave. Disappear.
“It seems so stupid, so trivial now, but when you’re young and nineteen and sequestered in a hospital room with campaign staff and crisis management people and they warn you that making claims against Mike Williams will expose your own father and his involvement with the Atlanta PD and open the door to a corruption scandal involving not only the police, but the highest levels of office, and your mother is crying and begging you to just pretend you don’t know anything…” I paused, drawing in a shuddering breath. “You do the only thing you can do. They gave me an out. I took it. They gave me the option to not have the toxicology report revealed and ‘go away’ or stay and be the drunk senator’s son who killed your sister. But the ‘go away’ option was permanent. It didn’t matter how many times I told them Mike Williams had faked the report, credible witnesses had seen us in the bar. I wasn’t in a fit emotional state to make the decision, but I did it. And it wasn’t even a decision. Not really. My parents basically told me, it was easier for me to be ‘dead’ than deal with my mess. I did the only thing I could think of when I’d already lost everything that ever meant anything to me. I agreed.”
Liv’s eyes were filled with tears. “They disowned you. They abandoned you. God, it just seems so extreme.”
“Yes.”
“What exactly happened that night, Tom?”
I closed my eyes.
Before
“SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT, Whit.” In the dark interior of the car, Abby was shaking. We were back in the car after walking into that freaking bar to try and confront Mike Williams.
“I know.” I dragged my hands forward over my short-cropped hair and then slammed a palm on the steering wheel. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
“We need to go. Right now. Let’s start driving back to the cottage right now. We can take the money your parents offered. He won’t find us there, he doesn’t know I even know about it. Please. We can go back and figure out a better plan than this.”
“I’m not taking their fucking money,” I yelled, raw with rage at what had happened earlier. They’d utterly turned their back on me, their own son.
“I shouldn’t have seen him,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I shouldn’t have seen him.”
“Well, we did.”
“I shouldn’t have seen him.”
“Stop it, Abby.” I started the car. She continued to whisper over and over. “Please, Abby,” I snapped, as I pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the ramp to the highway. Without a better option, we may as well head back south. It wasn’t like I had anywhere to go now either. The shock and anger of my parents’ betrayal was nothing compared to the pain and hurt now setting in. My mother’s face looking at me with disappointment, and her hands clenching and unclenching her pearls over and over. Don’t you know how hard your father has worked for this? We don’t even know if Abigail Baines is telling the truth. We just can’t risk that kind of scandal touching us right now.
“I shouldn’t have seen him.”
“Please stop fucking saying that,” I yelled. I was losing my mind. I checked the rearview mirror. The highway was fairly empty, but a car’s headlights in the distance gave me a weird feeling. I checked the next sign, Northside Drive. Perhaps we should just go back to my parents’ house, sleep in the pool house or whatever, and figure it all out in the morning. At least we’d have security. A literal security team. Taking the exit at the last minute, I saw the car behind us speed up and do the same. Oh, shit.