Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three)

by Dunning, Rachel

  Her small fingers move onto my abs, slide around my waist. “You’ve become quite the bad boy, haven’t you, Deck? All those newspapers. All those gossip sites. Every girl’s dream, isn’t it?”

  “Blaze, I’ve missed you for four years, thought about you every day in those four years, buried my sorrows and drowned them in drugs and booze the first part of those years.” Her fingers grip my shirt. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this with you, because I’m fully in control with those other girls, but fully out of control when I’m with you.”

  “So am I.”

  I clutch the bottom of her wet tee, start to lift it. She wraps her hands around my wrists, whispers, “Wait. I need to know something.” She’s looking down. “And it won’t change anything, I just...need to know it. When I came here, I told myself I’d only give myself to you if I knew you loved me, but now I don’t care. Because I know I love you. And that’s all that matters to me. I know that makes me sound weak and vulnerable, but I’ve always been those things around you anyway. So, even if you don’t, I just want to know. So, tell me, honestly. You’ll have me either way, I promise you that, but just let me know.”

  She peers at me. Fear and dread and pain howl inside her eyes. They glint with sorrow and need and want and...passion.

  I’ve loved her so much, love her so much now, that it’s too much to express in words. I can’t tell her. Because that would cheapen it, make it seem crude and meaningless.

  And how do you express what I’ve felt for her in only three words? And is it right to share those three words when we might be each other’s kryptonite?

  I move down to kiss her, and she lets me. Soft smacking sounds, wet and sweet, echo gently up into the room, cymbals struck by soft metal brushes to a backdrop of an electric blues guitar which is the rain.

  I straighten. Her hands are tight fists around my shirt. My fingers dig into her shoulders. Need. Such primal, animalistic need. “You’re gonna fucking kill me, you know that, Blaze? I’m not gonna answer you. You need to decide for yourself how I feel about you. And not only how I felt the day I got that ink on my back, but also now.”

  Her eyes search me, furious and storming. Then she says, “You don’t need to answer me. I know the answer.” She gets up on her toes, and buries her tongue in me.

  And I go hard. So very hard.

  -3-

  Blaze Ryleigh

  It’s him, really him, here, in my arms, as if nothing has changed.

  Only it has, it has so very much.

  I feel him holding back as he kisses me, feel his hesitation above, but also his desire below.

  But below isn’t what counts, it never counts with men, it’s what’s above. And he’s holding back. He’s holding back a lot.

  Why?

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him. “I thought you were gonna take me completely if I came here.”

  He grabs me by the shoulders. Thunder claps at the precise moment he does it and my heart stops for a brief moment. He keeps kissing me, but I know the way Deck kisses, and this isn’t it. When Deck kissed me it used to be out of control, wild, crazy, no-holds-barred...

  He stops, puts his arms around me, holds me. And I feel him shivering. This big man, shivering and trembling and holding on for sweet life. I hold him against me, feel his muscles and his largeness and his power shatter in my arms. Into his chest I say, “We really fucked things up, didn’t we?”

  He croaks, “Yeah,” and I wonder if he’s crying, but I’m too squashed up against him to tell. His scent—fresh soap—mellows me, kills all my defenses. I squeeze him tighter, dig my nails into the topography of his back. He puts his hands on either side of my head, kisses me on the top of it—a friend kiss. Then he holds me again.

  “I do have a shirt for you,” he says. “In my room. If you still want it.”

  My heart sinks, and I wonder why he’s suddenly pushing me away. “Uhm, OK, yeah, sure. Cool.”

  I start to move away from him but he still holds me tight. Then he stretches me to arm’s length, holds me to the spot by the shoulders. His eyes quiver and tremble. “Blaze...I’m...going to say something here that I think I’m gonna regret.” My heart sinks even deeper. “I—I can’t even believe I’m putting myself on the line like this again—”

  “What?”

  He swallows, his eyes full of doubt. He runs a hand through his messy hair, then runs it down the front of his face. “Fuck. I can’t believe I’m doing this...”

  Horses run over my chest, blood settles at my knees.

  “Blaze, look, just...here...let me show you where the shirts are. And...I even have some sweatpants that might fit you.” He walks off. I’m bolted to the spot. He turns. “You coming?”

  I guess I am. I follow him into his luxurious bedroom (it wasn’t upstairs.) The room alone is the size of his entire old apartment, with fresh carpeting and a huge round bed. Red sheets which look like silk. I fight the urge to see if there’s a mirror on the ceiling...but finally give in. (There isn’t. Thank God.) He ruffles around in a cupboard and throws me a large white tee, then a cashmere sweater which looks uncannily female. “Old girlfriend’s?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” He reaches out for it.

  I tug it back. “No, it’s fine. I’ll wear it. Your own might be too big for me.” It strikes me suddenly that it might belong to...her...but I swallow my pride and don’t ask about that.

  Deck, however, reads my mind again because, midway through looking in a drawer, he turns to me and says, “It’s not...hers...in case you were wondering.”

  “Oh, uhm, I see.” I don’t tell him I was indeed wondering...

  “And...FYI...I never brought her...here. I got the apartment afterwards. Much afterwards. And the sweater must have been left somewhere else, maybe in my car. I...never brought...anyone...here. If you know what I mean.”

  I know what he means. “Oh, OK. Cool.” I play it cool, but in my mind I’m doing a cheerleading dance and blowing fireworks.

  He grabs some sweatpants and gives them to me, then he hesitates as if wanting to say something. He looks at me with a pile of clothes in my hands as if I’m getting ready for an all-girl slumber party.

  He shuffles his feet, looks me over, licks his lips. Then says, “I, uhm, I’ll wait outside.” He trudges out, closes the door.

  My hormones settle while I get changed, and it dawns on me that it’s probably a freaking good thing we didn’t just have sex. As if I wasn’t already so damned fucked up on the subject of Declan Cox! This is good. Hanging out, chilling out, it’s good. Yeah, cool. I can do this.

  The sweatpants are way too big. I pull the drawstring seriously tight but even then I have to hold them up with both hands to stop them from falling. Right, maybe I could seduce him by letting my pants fall to the ground so he sees my lace panties. Ha ha. Funny funny, Blaze.

  I roll them up thrice by my ankles and officially look like Santa Clause now, in gray sweatpants. M-hmm.

  I notice I’m feeling more lighthearted, feeling easier about all the muck that has passed under the bridge between Deck and me. Most of that muck was our own personal shit. Maybe this is just what we need: Sitting on his couch, feet curled up under my butt, talking, watching a movie, catching up...

  That’s what he was looking for with Gina after all, wasn’t it? It’s the one thing I never gave to him. Normalcy. It’s a good place to start, I decide.

  I could live with that. I really could. And suddenly I want that more than That Other Thing. The thing we almost did just inside the door and which nearly complicated the crap out of my and his life.

  Sheesh!

  The mind plays tricks. And it seems to have one sick sense of humor. What trick it’s playing on me now I really don’t know. But I’m glad Deck caught it. I’m glad Deck stopped us before we jabbed the needle of Sex into our addicted veins and screwed up what little ground we’ve gained with each other since Sunday. We’ve officially moved from Avoiding Each Other Com
pletely to Wearing Old Girlfriend’s Sweater.

  Good progress. Good progress.

  I step out into the main penthouse area (what do you call that—the living area? All I know is it’s huge huge huge!) Deck’s turned the lights down, and a fire burns from a fireplace I never noticed before, just under the TVs in the sunken living room. Actually, I have the distinct memory that there wasn’t anything there at all before except a wall...

  Deck, sitting on the couch, now stands. He catches me eyeing the fireplace. “It’s electronic,” he says, “hidden behind a false wall. Press one button and the cover comes off, and the fire lights itself up.”

  Of course...

  I tug my pants up. He smiles. “They’re a little big,” I say.

  “Do you want some wine? I, unfortunately, have to stick with the grape juice tonight. I’m back at practice. And coach has a twenty-four hour No Drinking rule. Yesterday I was just within the limit...”

  “Uhm, no, I’ll do the grape juice thing as well.”

  He gestures to the couch and I lift the sweatpants and trudge over to it. He pulls out a bottle that looks like a wine bottle but which is in fact its non-alcoholic counterpart, pours us two glasses. Two wineglasses of grape juice.

  Sweet.

  He holds his glass up to me. I hold mine up as well. He says, “To...trying again.”

  We touch glasses, and I down mine in one huge gulp. So does he. Then we sit there.

  In silence. In awkward silence.

  For a while...

  NINE

  SWEAT

  -1-

  Blaze Ryleigh

  You can’t put Deck and me in a room alone and not expect there to be fire. And this time there was.

  It’s dark and quiet when I feel myself waking up, hours later, neck stiff, eyes bleary. The storm outside has ceased. Poetic. Something’s pushing up against my shoulder—something thick and hard, a leg. I hear myself groan, move my hand and get that sticky feeling of hot leather on it.

  Memories of what he and I did earlier, after that awkward silence, pummel me and make me smile, the sweat, the rush—

  “You’re awake.” It’s Declan’s voice, hard and rumbling, above me. I open my eyes and see I’m on his couch, lying on his leg. His face is serious, lit up by the moonglow coming in from his windows.

  What a beautiful face. I kissed that face earlier...

  I lift myself up, feel a twinge on my neck like a spear being dug into it. “When did I fall asleep?”

  He looks at his watch, suppressing a yawn. “Five or six hours ago.”

  “Wh—five or six hours? What time is it?”

  “Three A.M.”

  My eyes go wide in surprise. “Five or six hours? Why—why didn’t you wake me?”

  “Do you need to be somewhere?”

  “Well, uhm, no. I just...aren’t you tired?”

  “Exhausted.”

  And yet he didn’t go to bed, he sat here, letting me sleep on his leg because I was tired after he and I made out. At one stage I remember him stroking my hair, moving some of it from my eyes, and that’s what finally pushed me over the edge, what finally put me to sleep.

  We’d been talking about the old days.

  The initial silence, that awkward silence, hadn’t lasted for more than a few minutes. It was broken after Deck had said, “Blaze, we’ve slept with each other, been in love with each other, bared our souls to each other, so why don’t we just cut the bullshit and say what we want to each other?”

  And then we did. I told him I still loved him. Why not? He was right—we’d been closer to each other than to anyone else. And I knew as well as he did that that love had not disappeared, that it sat right with us in this room like static electricity on a finger after rubbing your feet on the carpet, waiting to snap. I said, “Well, if I’m gonna be honest about it, if I’m gonna just go out and admit it, then I have to say that I love you, and that I’ve always loved you, and that I screwed things up. There. I said it.” My mouth had felt dry after that. My glass was empty.

  Declan exhaled forcefully, a man with a burden so deep that it pressed down against his shoulders like a ten ton anvil. He grabbed the grape juice bottle, filled my cup.

  Then ominous silence hit again. I’d told him I loved him, and even though I hadn’t expected an answer in return and certainly didn’t expect anything to come from it, his lack of response was on me like a dirty finger to an open wound.

  I sipped my drink loudly. He scratched his head, sighed deeply again. “What, Deck? Why can’t you just answer me or talk to me? Ever since I’ve come back here you...seem distant, unable to speak to me, like you want to say something but can’t.”

  His expression froze. His cold blue eyes hunted me. I caught them looking down at my breasts, saw him licking his lips but quickly catching himself. Then he looked away. “Christ, what a fuck up,” he said. I couldn’t see his lips but it sounded like his teeth had been clenched.

  “Why, Deck? Just tell me why. What is it? What is it you want to tell me so much but can’t? You’ve already told me you slept with my arch-nemesis a gazillion times. What could be worse than that?”

  “A gazillion times two.”

  Punch. Yip, that was worse...

  -2-

  Declan Cox

  I’ll tell you what could be worse, I thought. What could be worse is that I not only love you, but I don’t want to lose you again. And yet...somehow I think we’re not meant to be together, like Romeo and Juliet. We’ll just implode, Blaze. Implode.

  Blaze had once told me that the beginning and middle of a romance is always good, but that the best romances end tragically. We met our end already, four years ago. And it was tragic. It’s exactly as she’d said.

  Or could the ending be even worse?

  “Remember when we first started dating and we had that conversation about Middles and Ends?” I told her.

  “In your car, outside the gym. Yeah. I remember it like yesterday.”

  “Was it in the car? I thought it was on your rooftop.”

  She suddenly blushed, the pink of her cheeks bringing out the green in her eyes. “No, uhm, that was something...else...on the rooftop.”

  My bad-boy twitched when I remembered what she was talking about: January, up on her roof, undoing her pants and sliding my hand inside her, looking down at Bogart Street, then letting her pants drop, pushing against her...

  She was right. The roof was something else...

  I felt sweat break out suddenly on my skin as I thought back to it. I cleared my throat, looked over at her equally aroused face.

  We have history, Blaze and I. We have history... That’s all that can be said about us. We have history.

  “Right,” I said. “That was something else. But that conversation, where I told you or you told me that the middle and the beginning is always good, but that all great romances end badly...”

  “Yeah?” She was looking down now, picking absently at the fabric of my gargantuan sweatpants.

  “Well...” I swallowed, tried to force the words out, because the reason I haven’t been talking to Blaze is because I just can’t. I’ve buried this stuff down deep for over four years. To say it all at once to her is like trying to swim up from the bottom of the ocean: too much weight above me, too much to lift. “Well, I just”—I willed the damn words out now!—“am afraid...that”—I inhaled deeply—“we haven’t reached our very end yet, Blaze. I’m afraid that we’re still in the middle, that you here in my apartment is just the high-point before the crash, when Romeo finally marries Juliet and you think everything’s going to be OK but it’s not. It’s so not.” I stopped. I had said too much as it was. Surely she could read between the lines.

  A glint flashed across her eyes, eyes which I’ve dreamed of so many times that I lost count. Her lips twitched up slightly on the right of her mouth. “Declan Cox...” Oh God, Blaze, when you say my name like that you undo me. “...is that your roundabout way of telling me you love me too?”
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  She read between the lines. If I’d had a less heavy heart I’d have smiled. But I didn’t. I have a heavy heart, a heavy mind. A heavy conscience. And an even heavier fear. I looked up at her, feeling like her eyes were the sight of a rifle and I was in its crosshairs. Vulnerable, completely vulnerable. Gimme a dude charging at me with a ball under his arm and I’ll take him down, even without my gear on.

  But put Blaze in front of me, show me those lily-green eyes and have her smile awkwardly at me like she’s doing now. And I’m toast.

  “Do you really want me to spell it out for you, Blaze? I mean, have I ever been great with words to you, or have I shown you how much I loved you, shown you what you meant to me?” Just like I want to show you now.

  She gave a half nod. She got it.

  She sat back on the long couch, facing me. She leaned against the far armrest, put her feet up on the seat. My eyes were drawn to her striped gray and green socks, just another flashback moment that made me feel like everything that’s happened is water under the bridge.

  I want to undress you, Blaze. I want to curl my fingers into the seam of your pants and pull them off you. I want to slide your panties down, hear you groan as you wait for me to enter you. I want us to forget the past, ignore how we destroyed each other, how the love and heat was too powerful for both of us. I want to lay you on the ground, widen your legs and slide between you. Most of all, I want you to forgive me. Because you are my life, Blaze. You always have been. You always will be. And if I wasn’t afraid of what we might do to each other, I’d take you right now, right on this couch, gray-green stripey socks and all.

  “Deck, you’re...staring at me...intensely.”