by London Casey
Maddox took all that from me as he kissed me.
His hands then moved down to my shoulders and my arms. Next thing I knew, he was gripping my wrists tight. He thrust himself forward, making damn sure he was between my legs, his body tight to mine. I could feel him through his jeans. A thickness so hard, showing me what the kiss was doing for him.
I shuddered and groaned, putting my head back.
Maddox pulled away for a split second, then he kissed my neck. Letting out a small growl, his teeth grazed my skin right before he kissed my neck again. I felt the tip of tongue cut a perfectly straight line toward my ear. His grip on my wrists became tighter, and that’s where all my focus went.
His hands. My wrists. Holding me. Restraining me.
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t breathe. The room started to spin a little. My heart raced even faster, and not in a good way. I willed myself to just move my hands, but my mind convinced itself that my wrists were incapable of moving. That I was trapped. That I was in trouble.
I swung my feet to bring them together in front of Maddox’s body, nudging him back. I twisted my neck like a bee had been flirting with my hair. I let out a yell that was far too dramatic for what was actually happening.
“Hey,” Maddox whispered as he backed away.
He released his grip on my wrists, and I clutched my hands to my chest. I saw a small opening and I brought my right foot up and kicked at his stomach. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself.
There I was, leaning back on my own dining room table, my right foot extended, pushing at Maddox.
He showed me his hands, surrendering out of pity, a look of confusion on his face.
“Go,” I said.
It was all I could say.
I wasn’t going to have that conversation with him. Not a chance. Nope.
“Hazel…”
“Just go,” I said. “Don’t come back here, Maddox. Don’t look for me. Don’t listen to my neighbors.”
“Whoa. What is this? Why are you so scared of me?”
“I’m not scared of you. I’m telling you to go. Now listen to me.”
“What happened, sugar? I sat outside your door for an hour…”
“You did what?”
“Yeah. If someone was here trying to hurt you…”
“Get out, Maddox. Get out and stay away.”
He backed up a little more after I gave a push with the heel of my foot. Truthfully, I couldn’t have moved him if I really wanted to. My foot felt the hardness of muscle under his shirt. It sent a radiating pulse of heat up my leg and nestled right between my inner thighs. I was torn up in more ways than one.
“Get out and stay away,” he whispered. “That’s what you want?”
“You heard me.”
Maddox grabbed my ankle and threw it out of the way. Then he came charging at the table. The panic tried to kick up, but my heart refused. For the first time in my life, my heart took control and refused to end up scared.
Maddox put a hand to the small of my back. He grabbed my hand with his other hand and stared down at me.
“I get it, sugar,” he whispered. “I get it.”
“I don’t think you do,” I said.
“Anything I don’t get, you can tell me.”
I shook my head. “Maddox, no. Don’t come here. Don’t look for trouble here. Let me do my job, and I’ll be gone soon enough. Then nothing will matter between us.”
Maddox nodded. “Right. Nothing between us. Except all the times you took a picture of me. Each time you pressed that button, sugar, you were poking at me. Tempting me. Messing with me. You have no idea what the camera means to me.”
“Because of the girl in the picture. Right?”
My interest rejuvenated itself. I felt a surge of excitement.
Maddox squeezed my hand. Then he pulled me to the edge of the table. He lifted my hand and touched his chest with it.
“We all bleed, sugar,” he whispered. “And for some reason, our hearts are still kicking and ticking.”
Maddox backed away.
“Maddox, wait. Please.”
“You asked me to leave,” he said. “I’m going to respect that wish. I don’t want to bother you, Hazel. I don’t want to put you in a corner. I don’t want to scare you. But I want you to know that you are not alone. Whatever that means to you. You know how to get in touch with me.”
He kept walking away. I was frozen on the table, my body reacting to too many things at once.
“Maddox, I want to know about her,” I said. “Please.”
“I think you can appreciate that some stories aren’t meant for exposure.” He opened the door and stood there for a moment. “Don’t ask me why I give a damn about this, Hazel, but I do.”
“I know why,” I called out. “The girl in the picture. You think she’s me, and you want to save her.”
Maddox didn’t respond.
He reached into his pocket, and I tensed up. My instinct told me something bad was going to happen.
Maddox took out his phone. He touched the screen and then held it up.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
I heard the sound of a picture being taken.
I tilted my head and sighed. “Maddox…”
“Now I have a piece of you. Think about how that feels. I can stare at it for hours and try to pick you apart. Guess things. Assume things. Wonder about anything. Okay?”
He then shut the door.
I was alone again.
In an apartment that didn’t feel quite like home anymore.
I wanted Maddox. I wanted him in a way that scared me. Yet I was the one who stopped the kiss and demanded he leave. Because as much as I wanted him, I didn’t want him to get hurt.
He had no idea how dangerous my situation really was.
18
MADDOX
YEARS AGO
I didn’t hear the click of the camera and I didn’t see the flash of the bulb, but it was there. As though it were fucking midnight in the middle of nowhere. The camera like a quick flash and thud of lightning and thunder. I grabbed the strap of my bag on my shoulder and told myself to just ignore. Just fucking ignore it. It’ll all go away. That’s what they all kept telling me. That it’ll all go away soon. That there’s nothing I could have done then, now, and nothing I could do except live.
Living was the option.
Living?
Was that the magic answer?
I didn’t hear the crunch of the gravel as someone followed me, but I knew it was there. The fucking trail that the town fought hard to pay for. To knock down a chunk of the woods and create this path. For people to walk their dogs. Walk with their kids. Lovers to hold hands on a cool summer evening. Fitness people to be able to run one end to the other, spanning ten miles with the intention of making it much longer in years to come. In the winter, the town would set up Christmas lights, a full array, from elves that were smiling to the big guy himself, waving from a giant sleigh, capturing the innocence and excitement of the holiday.
But we were far from Christmas as I walked the trail with a bag full of clothes, notebooks, basically everything I owned at that exact point in my life. I managed to hold down a one bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building that felt like it swayed when it was windy. I had no clue how the building wasn’t condemned, and I figured one day I’d wake up ground-level and buried under the damn thing. But the rent was cheap. I had a box fan in the window for the warm days and cool nights. If it got cold enough, I had my own thermostat. The pipes groaned in protest for a little while, but the heat worked. It was a shit hole, but it was my shit hole. My landing pad until the next step in my life.
I stopped walking.
I told myself to not stop walking.
They told me to not stop walking.
That no matter what, I had rights in this mess. I could lower my head. I could act casual. In fact, it was better to just be normal. Don’t give a story that isn’t there. Except ther
e was a story there. A really fucking big story. I was the only one who knew that story, though. The truth. To everyone else, it was whatever they made up in their mind.
How sad. Drunk. Falling to her death like that. See, that’s why alcohol and teenagers don’t mix. Even if she was an adult, there’s a reason the drinking age is twenty-one.
How sad. Fooling around up on that ridge like that. See, the town should have closed that off a long time ago. Done something about it. But no, they left it there. It was only a matter of time before someone fell to their death.
How sad. What exactly was she doing up there? Huh? I bet there’s more to the story. They should have questioned more into it. Did she fall? Did she trip? Did she…jump? Was she…pushed? Oh my, think about that for a second…
I swallowed hard.
In a hidden pouch in my bag was the letter she left. The truth. In her words. But I knew even more of the truth because of what I had seen.
I felt someone approaching me.
My hand shook as I held the strap on my bag tighter.
Someone then moved right by me.
A woman in really short shorts. A tight, neon-pink top. Blonde hair pulled back tight. A water bottle in her left hand. Earbuds in her ears. Her arms pumping hard back and forth.
Power walking.
I sighed.
Fuck.
I turned, expecting to find myself alone on the trail.
I wasn’t alone.
A camera was a foot away from me. Another stolen picture of me.
I dropped my bag and charged the man holding the camera.
He was short with a thick waist, scruffy clothes, messy hair, wearing a belt that was filled with bags and lenses.
He stepped back, snapping a couple more pictures.
I stopped.
He stopped.
He lowered the camera.
“Maddox,” he said. He showed me his hands. “I’m not looking to print anything you don’t want printed.”
“Then get the fuck out of here,” I said.
“Look, I just want what everyone else wants: the truth.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“This is a big story, Maddox. It’s spreading. I mean, ‘beautiful woman suddenly plunges to her death.’ The whole world in front of her. You know? And there’s pieces that don’t add up.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Why she was up there. What she was doing. Who she was with. You were the only one up there with her, right? So what happened?”
I felt the anger rising in my throat like razor blades slicing away.
I shook my head.
The man reached for a little notebook. “See, here’s where I’m confused. There’s a report that there were injuries that occurred prior to her fall.”
“What?”
“I’m just going by what I was told. Injuries that seem a little suspicious, Maddox. What exactly happened up there?”
I stepped toward the man. I swung my hand once and knocked his notebook away.
“Fuck off.”
He nodded. “Is that the kind of anger you showed up on the ridge that night?”
That was the line for me. Before I knew it, I punched the guy. Right across the jaw. He went down to the ground in a heap. But I wasn’t done yet. He grabbed for his camera and I kicked at it, knocking it away.
“You murdered her, didn’t you?” he snapped.
I blasted a knee to his gut as I dropped down.
He let out a yell, and I punched him again.
We were just a few hundred feet from the main street in town, which meant there were plenty of witnesses.
I punched again and again.
That was the point where someone should have been there to pull me off him before it went too far. That was the point where Night should have pulled me off him. Screamed in my ear to calm the hell down. Then he’d give me that shit-eating grin, knowing he was proud of me for doing that. Then we’d have to run and hide until the smoke cleared.
But Night was gone. Just like she was gone.
So I laid into the guy over and over.
The person who stopped the attacked was the woman who had been power walking. She was brave enough to get involved, slamming her water bottle off the side of my head. Later, she said she had been screaming for me to stop but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t remember hearing her.
The guy survived, but not without wounds and what would heal into scars.
I then got myself a new place to live. Somewhere that didn’t sway in the wind. Somewhere that was tiny, smelly, but it came with some food.
Tossed into jail, my only concern was my bag. And the letter inside. I could never lose that letter. I could never stop seeing her as she stepped back and opened her arms. I could never put the pieces together the way I wanted them to make sense.
I sat alone in a jail cell, looking at my hands. My knuckles were swollen, crusted with blood. I started to shake. I was no better than Night in that pathetic moment.
I put my head into my hands.
I was so numb inside, I couldn’t even fucking cry.
19
HAZEL
PRESENT DAY
Tate reviewed more pictures and started to give me more direction. He wanted to organize them into collections. He would label the pictures where he wanted them, then he’d give me suggestions on some other ones. It was by far the most expansive project I’d ever been part of. But it was worth it. The checks Tate wrote cleared, and it was really going to help me out.
My couple days off and away from St. Skin turned into a long days at home. Organizing pictures, running them through software to make the changes Tate wanted, not to mention working on the picture I wanted to get blown up, framed, and give to Tate as a thank-you for the work. I always did that for customers. I’d find that one picture they truly loved and I would do something special with it and give it to them as a thanks. My mother always told me that one picture could change the world. Maybe not the whole world collectively, but the world inside our own hearts and heads. That was during those rare times when hell wasn’t running through the house I grew up in.
And finally, there was the folder of Maddox.
The man who didn’t want his picture taken, yet made the camera melt with the smoldering look from his wild eyes. His jaw was simply made for a camera. The size of his body and the color of the ink on his arms. There wasn’t a single bad picture of Maddox, which didn’t seem fair. He didn’t have a good side…he had a good everything.
I even caught a few rare pictures of him smiling.
He had a big smile, too. A gorgeous smile. A contradiction to the aura and attitude he gave off, which only made the smile sexier.
Sitting there, I had to close the folder and step away for a minute. I was at the point where looking at pictures of Maddox were starting to turn me on. The more I looked at him, the more I felt him inside me. That warmth running wild, making me a little nervous, waking up butterflies in my belly.
I thought about the picture he took of me. I didn’t like that. I was the one getting paid to take pictures of him.
I shut my eyes for a second to catch my breath. What I needed was more coffee. I had plenty to make, but I decided to go for a walk.
Clear my head. Breathe the air. Get a coffee. Then get back to work.
Tomorrow, I’d have to go to St. Skin. There wasn’t much left to do there. Maybe another few days, a week at the most. Unless Tate wanted more from me. Even then, I was really starting to think it was for the best to get out of the situation. Put distance between myself and Maddox. It was a kind gesture for him to show up at my apartment and want to help, but this wasn’t the damsel in distress fairy tale stuff.
This was serious.
I left the apartment and took a long walk. I got my coffee and walked slow the whole way back home. I enjoyed myself so much that I finished the coffee by the time I got back to the apartment. I couldn’t remember the last time I actually did that. Just t
urn everything off and appreciate the small things. The noise of the traffic on one block, the noise of nature on another. The calmness of the day. Bright blue sky. White wisps of clouds scattered throughout the sky as though a painter had just flung their brush wherever.
I tossed the empty coffee cup into the trashcan outside the apartment building and had an extra kick in my step as I hurried up the steps. I was full of energy and caffeine. I was going to get all the pictures together and send everything to Tate. Then I wanted to set up a final date for St. Skin and move on. I had a couple calls to return for clients needing pictures. And I wanted to maybe poke at Tate to see if he could give me some referrals. Then again, if I stayed close with Tate, that kept me a little closer to Maddox.
I opened the apartment, humming some random notes, trying to focus my mind from Maddox to work.
One step into the apartment and that was all taken care of.
“Hazel…”
Mitch stood there, holding my camera in his hand.
It was like ice running through my veins. I blinked, harder, faster, figuring he would disappear. Mitch didn’t come back so quick, ever. All he usually wanted was to torture me a little, get some pleasure out of it, and then disappear. But obviously he had other intentions in mind.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in here?”
Mitch laughed. “Front office let me in.”
“How?”
“Just had to show the pictures of us,” he said. “Said I forgot my key. Had flowers for you. Was going to surprise you with flowers and some food. I’m a very good talker, Hazel.”
I swallowed hard.
That I knew.
Mitch really knew how to talk.