by Robin Lovett
He was six years old when that would have happened. Six. When his own father tried to kill him.
He doesn’t answer. Seeming to have reached his limit for speech, he lets go of my hand, runs out into the surf and dives into an oncoming wave.
I let him go, my heart pounding against my ribs. He’s right. I didn’t want to know a father could do something like that to his little boy.
But I’m glad he told me, because I want to know what he’s survived.
* * *
My head breaks out of the surf, and I gasp for air.
I shove down the memories like they’re a threat against my life. I dive back into the waves, wishing I could leave the past at the bottom, let the waves take it with them back out to sea, so I never have to think these things again.
I can’t believe I told her that. I’ve never told anyone that.
No one knows that story except me and a dead man.
I swim it off, swim it away, the confusion, the grief, the anger and the pain. I dive into wave after wave until all those things disappear, and I’m left with nothing but tiredness in my limbs and breathlessness in my lungs.
I get out of the water, not knowing how long I was out there. An hour. More.
I return to the spot on the beach where everyone else is, and Aunt Maggie calls to me. “There you are. We’re all ready to go home soon. It’s almost dinner.”
I glance at my sister, Logan, and . . . “Where’s Daisy?”
Penny shades her eyes from the sun. “She was with you.”
“She hasn’t come back?”
“No.”
I turn around, looking down the beach, into the water. And don’t see her or that bright yellow bikini she was wearing.
“She probably just went for a walk down the beach,” Aunt Maggie calls to me, but I’m already gone, running across the sand.
I run and run, seeing her nowhere. I scan the water, the shoreline. There aren’t many people on this section of the beach. It would be impossible to miss someone.
The longer I go without seeing her, the more nervous I get. What if something happened to her? What if she went in the water alone, and . . . there are no life guards here, and I don’t know how well she can swim, and . . . I don’t . . . What do I . . .
I’m hyperventilating. Blood storming through my veins, ramming through my head. I can’t find her. What if I can’t find her? Where could she have gone?
I dash out into the surf, looking as far out into the water as I can see, not seeing her.
I run back down the beach. I see Penny and Aunt Maggie but still no Daisy.
Fuck.
“Blake!” I turn around and see her yellow bikini and her stunning smile, walking toward me.
I don’t know what happens, but something in me snaps—and I’m running to her, catching her, hugging her, kissing her and wishing I could consume her everything.
“You scared me,” I snap, my anxiety too great to hide. I hold her against me, feeling her breathe, feeling her be alive. “What happened to you?” I pat all her limbs, look her up and down. “Are you okay?”
She’s damp like she’s been swimming, warm like she’s been running. “Blake, I’m all right. It’s okay.” She cradles my face in her hands and with tenderness says, “Breathe. Slow down. Nothing’s wrong. I’m totally fine.”
“I thought—I didn’t know—You were—”
“Shh.” She hugs me and lets me bury my face in her neck. I inhale her smell. Beneath the scent of salty ocean, there’s her. The smell that’s been growing as familiar and comfortable to me as home.
Fear shoots through me. I don’t know what’s happening. Why I’m becoming so dependent on her?
But rather than letting go, I hold her tighter. I don’t know how to feel this. But I definitely can’t do it without her.
She strokes my head. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw you back there, but you were too far away to hear me yell.”
I lean my forehead against hers and nod, unable to form words.
Her eyes are bursting with gentleness and surprise. “You were worried about me?”
“Yeah. I—I—” I try to control my breathing, try to keep the desperate relief from my voice and the growing anxiety from tightening my hands around her. “It’s fine. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
She kisses me. “It’s going to be all right, Blake.”
I shake my head. She’s wrong. Horribly, totally wrong. The things that are happening between us, there’s no way they can turn out all right. But I don’t know how to stop them.
I hug her to me again, feeling her small warm body against me, calming me. The need to not let go is so overwhelming, I give into it. I try not to be surprised by it.
I try not to be surprised when she holds me back just as tightly.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He doesn’t speak to me much the rest of the day. But he doesn’t have to—because he pretty much won’t let go of my hand.
When he came running for me on the beach, as though scared for his life he’d lost me, it almost made me glad I scared him. It wasn’t on purpose. I really wasn’t trying to, though now that I see what happened, how it’s made him see my value to him, how it’s made him admit on some level that he needs me, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it myself.
But I don’t really have time to think in victory terms or in how my plan has worked on turning his feelings toward me—no. I’m too scared myself by how good it feels to have him not let go of me. To have an evening where he’s not fighting me, and I’m not fighting him.
We’re not defensive or baiting each other. We’re just sitting next to each other, holding hands. His family buzzes around us. They’ve only been with us a day. They don’t know what a change this is for us, they don’t know we’re not like this all the time. That the quietness that has settled between us speaks more than any of our combative exchanges ever have.
He asks me what I want multiple times, letting me choose, caring about what I’d like. I answer him a little breathless each time about how he’s finally learned to ask.
It’s early after dinner, the sun has barely set, and he whispers in my ear, “Shall we say goodnight?”
“To each other?” I whisper back.
“To them.” He smiles and strokes my cheek. The look on his face is stunning. A real unguarded expression, different from the one he gives his sister and his aunt. This one is just for me, a communication of not just a bodily desire, but of his heart too. He wants me—but not in the taking, obsessive kind of way.
He wants me for me.
I kiss him. I can’t help it. He’s opening himself to me—he’s letting go of his revenge in favor of what he’s feeling for me. His lips ease over mine with promises of heartwarming things, things that open up a deeper level of need in me than even he has touched before.
This man—this remarkable man who has been through so much, who is making horrible mistakes, yes, but who has the capability to feel and express things to a soul-deep level. It’s a good thing he’s keeping me, because I don’t want to leave him.
“Get a room,” Layla interrupts us.
Blake chuckles and looks up. “I think we will. Goodnight everyone.”
They say goodnight to us, and we ignore their knowing smiles. I don’t care that they’ve all guessed that we’re leaving them to go have sex, that him holding my hand all day has had me daydreaming about his hands all over me all through dinner.
He leads me up the stairs and closes the bedroom door, and now there aren’t words between us but touches. He doesn’t turn the light on, I can’t see his face, but I can feel him.
It’s strange and soothing, igniting and satiating. The slowness of his touch, the lingering of his mouth, the contrast to last night is . . .
I can’t fully think it, because the change can’t mean what I think it means.
His lips all soft and caressing rather than biting and frantic—I’ve come to mean something to him and I�
��m relieved because he’s come to mean something to me too. His fingers are gentle and massaging where before they were gripping and desperate, like he’s begun to think of making love to me.
The change is too strong to miss but too moving to consider. My response is not just accepting it, but reveling in it, basking in it like I’ve craved it all my life. And maybe I have. Like I crave not just him inside me, moving in me, but that I need him, feeling things for me, awakening feelings in me—loving me.
That it could happen, that he could soften his heart to me so completely, leaves me able do nothing but receive what he gives me, and give it back to him myself.
It’s no longer just his body that is irresistible to me. His heart and mind have become just as invaluable. And if I’m honest, perhaps always have been.
He bathes kisses over me like I’m something precious to him, and when he settles his face between my thighs, the way he likes to, he laps at me not like he means to devour, but like he means to savor. And it is my undoing.
I kick the bed, desperate for faster, harder. I plead and he won’t listen, he just continues his slow languid torture, giving me an orgasm that sails through my body like a breeze off the water. It doesn’t ease the fire, it stokes it hotter.
When he slips inside me, it’s like a filling of places I didn’t know he could touch. I wish he would drive into me, in that hardened way he usually does. It would be easier to bear.
But he doesn’t.
He moves in me with evocative strokes, not hurrying, not leading anywhere, just the pleasure, the enjoyment, the feeling of being in me. And he murmurs in my ear. “Easy, baby. Just feel, that’s all you have to do.”
Just feel. He doesn’t know how hard that is, or how it just makes it worse.
I claw at his back, arch beneath him, begging him to move faster, to quell the ache he’s building in me. But despite the sweat I feel on his skin, he doesn’t hurry, as though he wants to make it last and never wants it to end.
But in the end it overcomes him the way it overcomes me. His pace lurches forward, speeding until he’s driving into me with crushing force, me crying with the intensity of not just feeling sexed but being loved.
He makes me come, and it threads up my spine with a fierceness that I fear will tear through my skin. He is all there is and he is all I need, and in the moment I really believe it. In the dark, beneath him, him inside me, I cannot fathom ever needing more.
* * *
She wakes beside me the next morning and the urge to do something for her is bursting in my chest. I want inside of her now, not only physically, but into the recesses of her mind and desire. I want to satisfy her not just sexually, but every part of her life, every part of her day, every part of her.
“I was wrong about the charity,” I say, kissing her hair. “You should definitely do that with my sister. That would be a great thing.”
She looks up at me with sleeping eyes and a gentle smile. “I knew you’d let me.”
She kisses me and her lips have a drugging effect. Not just an arousing effect on my body, but a warming effect on my heart. My chest feels bigger, and for some reason today I don’t feel a need to control her or tell her what to do or make her see it my way. No. I want her to decide.
“What do you want to do today?” I ask.
Her brows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re asking me? Did a storm come in the night? Did hell freeze over?”
“Maybe.” I grasp her hand and kiss her fingertips. “Do you want me to bring you breakfast?”
Her mouth curves in the smile I wanted to see. “Yes, please.”
I bounce out of bed. “Lay there. And don’t move.” I throw on pants. “And when I come back I want your detailed itinerary of our day.”
She smiles, and I swear it burns away my cynicism. I wonder if I looked at her often enough if it would burn away my anger and my bitterness. If being around her could help heal my pain and keep away my past.
Maybe.
I go downstairs. It’s early so I don’t expect anyone to be awake, but when I get to the kitchen, Layla is sitting at the table with her feet propped up on a chair.
“Good morning,” Layla says cheerily, in that way that means she’s about to cause trouble. And not the innocent prank-pulling kind like Daisy. Meddlesome, mess with your life, trouble.
“Morning,” I say, and head straight for the coffee maker.
“I already made some. You’re welcome to it.”
There’s not enough in the pot for me and Daisy, though, so I dump it. “I’ll make a fresh one.”
“I wondered when I might catch you alone. I suppose now is as good a time as any.”
“For what?” I get the coffee brewing and open the fridge.
“To tell you what I learned about Daisy’s father.”
I cringe and close my eyes. No. I did not need this today. I force myself to continue looking through the fridge, like I’m not nervous about what she’ll say next. “Oh? And what’s that?”
“It changes everything.”
I slam the fridge closed. “What could possibly—”
“It wasn’t him.”
My hear skips. “Excuse me?”
“You’re going to want to sit down for this.”
“Like hell. What wasn’t him?” She can’t mean what I think she means.
“The payments your father made to Emmett Nowell were for a very different reason than you think.”
Blood rushes in my ears and I move backward. “What reason?”
“I found a police report.” She pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through something.
“What was it?” It can’t be. She’s wrong. She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying.
“A source of mine came through last night. Emmett Nowell spoke with an investigating detective two days after your mother died.”
I roll my eyes. “As my father’s lawyer, defending him from any investigation.”
She shakes her head. “The report logged his concerns. Apparently, he spoke to your mother the night before she died. He made a visit when your father wasn’t home.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he suspected something. She confessed things to him, detailing your father’s abusive behavior to her.”
“He filed this with a detective?”
“Yes.”
“But they didn’t do anything?”
“There’s no further paper trail. I can’t find any forward movement on the case, any evidence that anything ever came of it.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No. You’re wrong. I tried to tell you to wait, so did Penny, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Emmett tried to report my father?”
She hesitates but says, “He said in the report that he spoke to you. The day after she died.”
I shake my head. “There were a lot of adults talking to me. None of them helped me.” There’s only two memories I have from that week: the one of my aunt visiting, and the one, the day after she went home, of my father trying to drown me.
“Well, according to the report, he spoke to you at the house.”
“I don’t remember that.”
She stands and walks closer. “It doesn’t matter if you remember. The point is that there’s a report proving that Emmett Nowell suspected your father of killing your mother, and shared those suspicions with the police.” She holds her phone in front of my face, and I’m forced to see it.
It’s there, a facsimile of a handwritten police report. I read it, all four pages, my stomach twisting in dread with each word. “He visited my mother at the house? Alone?” There’s a detailed conversation between the two of them from the night before she died. “How could he have? My father never would’ve allowed that.” He was a controlling possessive asshole.
She takes her phone back from me. “He must have snuck in to see her.”
He tried to help.
<
br /> The air won’t stay in my lungs. My veins fill with ice and my brain slows to a halt.
He tried to help.
“Then what was that email exchange I found?” I ask the floor.
“I don’t know, Blake.” Layla pats my shoulder. “I wish I knew.”
Daisy.
I manipulated her and her father over nothing. He tried to tell me there was more to his story and I wouldn’t listen. I shut him down before he could tell me any of this. I convinced him so thoroughly I was like my father, that he thought the truth would make no difference. I threatened him with prison time when he was the one person who tried to help me.
I’m a fraud. Nothing but a revenge-thirsty bastard accusing innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit, trying and failing to take the law into my own hands to punish them for it.
“I—I—uh—” I have to get to Daisy. I have to talk to her. To explain myself. To try to make her understand . . . what? What do I want her to understand?
Something. Nothing. Everything. Me. What a fucked up loser I am and how fast she needs to get away from me.
I push from the room and a ringing starts in my ears. I have to get to her. I don’t know what I’ll say, how this is going to work, but I have to see her. Everything I thought I knew is crashing down.
I have to make sure what I knew of her is still there.
I’m going to lose her. She’s going to leave.
I could lie to her. I could just . . . not tell her. I could keep her, keep on with the pretense. Keep on pretending that the revenge I was basing my life on is still possible.
My vision gets hazy and I stop with my hand on the stair railing.
What am I going to do now?
“Blake, are you okay?” Layla asks from the kitchen.
“No.” I blink my eyes open and closed, trying to see past my failure. My failure to see past everything.
My entire life was about protecting my sister from the man who would hurt us.
He’s gone.
I thought I could get some revenge for my mother’s death.
That’s gone.
I had Daisy for a little while. A woman who made being a better me—someone who could face and handle my past demons without running from them all the time—seem possible. I didn’t know what she was doing. I’m not sure she knew either, or maybe she did.