by Unknown
Nick can’t begin to figure out how to answer that, so he just keeps on kissing her, jaw and neck and shoulder until she’s grinding her ass back against him, impatient. He’s been hard since she peeled her jeans off, that dumb animal need he’s got for her like he’s seventeen all over again. He breathes out a slow, careful breath. He can’t keep himself from pulling her even closer, wrapping his arms around her front and mapping the flat plane of her stomach. Taryn whimpers. When he gets his fingers between her legs, she’s the kind of proper wet that isn’t from bathwater.
“Easy,” Nick murmurs again, her bucking hips and two more waves cresting over the edge of the tub. He opens her up carefully, just the tip of his pointer finger on her clit, trying not to let the water wash away her natural slickness. But already Taryn’s angling for more of it, grinding her pubic bone against his palm.
For a second Nick gives her what she’s after, full pressure and speed, but then the water does its job and his fingers are catching on her squeaky-clean skin. Taryn makes a frustrated noise, sitting up.
“I want—” She’s on her knees facing away from him now, pink toes brushing against either side of his hips. It’s a tight fit. Still, when she sinks down again and pushes her ass back, there’s no room for misinterpretation. Nick bites at her shoulder, soft-toothed.
“Let the water out some,” he tells her, leaning his forehead against the wet pleat of her spine. He wants to talk about this, why she’s at him like it’s the end of the world, if she’s staying or going or what any of it means, but she’s turned so he can’t see her face. “I’m not mad, okay?” he says instead, petting her hips while she pulls up the old-fashioned drain stopper. The curve of her back is as tight and elegant as a dancer’s. “Hey, Falvey. Listen, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want.”
Taryn doesn’t turn around, but she does sigh. “You always let me get away with it,” she says, her voice strangely thick. Nick doesn’t have time to respond before she’s sitting down on his cock. She has to force it, how close together her knees are and the way the water keeps cleaning her out, but then he’s inside and both of them are gasping.
Taryn’s noise though—it’s not such a good noise.
“Okay,” Nick pants, forcing every muscle in his body to freeze. “Just—” She’s so tight like this, Jesus Christ, he can barely think. If he had to guess, he’d say she’s trying to prove something, although he’d be hard pressed to imagine what. Whatever it is, he’s not letting her do it this way. “Hold on,” he tells her, reaching around for the handheld showerhead. It’s the newest fixture in the entire bathroom, an afterthought reno from whoever owned the place in the eighties. Taryn startles when he switches the water back on.
“Nick,” she says, shifting her weight. Sweat is beading along her hairline, the heat or the discomfort or both.
“Shh,” he tells her. “Gotta take care of you too.”
He drags the spray across her stomach first, then lower, hooking his chin over her bony shoulder to watch. Taryn mewls, sloshing the tub again. The water level’s low enough by now that none goes over the edge.
“Tell me if it’s too much,” Nick instructs, reaching around with his free hand to open her up more. Taryn’s only reply is a greedy noise, pushing both knees hard against the sides of the tub as if she can somehow get them wider that way. Under a minute and her body is slippery again, slick enough inside that Nick can feel the change. “That’s it,” he tells her, directing the spray back and forth a bit and trying to cover how utterly relieved he feels. “Good?”
Taryn nods. “Um.” She lifts up, an inch at most, then sinks back down with a sharp, surprised keen. “Oh God,” she gasps, hand over his to bring the showerhead closer to her body as she starts into a rhythm. Her nails are digging into the backs of his fingers. “Fuck. That’s really—”
“Yeah.” Nick can feel it too, how tight and good the drag is with her pretzeled like this. He sinks his teeth into her nape for a second before drawing back. “Taryn, hey.” He nudges at the baby curls behind her ear, trying to get an angle on her face. “Look at me.” He doesn’t even know how much he wants it until it’s out of his mouth. “Look at me, Falvey.”
“Mmm.” It takes her a minute to do it, long enough that he thinks about getting his hand in her hair and pulling, but then she turns her sharp chin to face him, the perfume-sweat smell of her skin amplified by the sticky heat. Her swollen mouth bumps against his. Nick can just see her face in the halo of the night-light, these wide, surprised eyes like a cat’s in the dark. He is…pretty sure it’s not the expression of somebody who’s getting ready to bolt.
It’s something though—not fear, but close enough that Nick ducks his face down and smudges his lips across her cheekbone. “Not mad,” he says again, the words almost getting lost under the sound of her gasp. Every time she moves it’s better than the last, the vise-tight clutch of her body from this angle and the push of her warm, wet ass. She’s arching into the hard pulse of the water with each upstroke. “You’re perfect, okay? Want you just like this.”
Taryn nods—perfect’s the magic word with her, he’s figured out, the one she waits for every single time. “Feels really good,” she says, shaky voice pitched like she’s confessing to something. She’s going faster now, maybe fifteen seconds from an orgasm. The hand that’s not on his is curled at the back of his neck to keep him close. “Nick. Feels really, really—”
“Good,” he finishes for her, nipping at her mouth and soothing his tongue over the bitten places. Their faces are so close together he thinks he might go cross-eyed looking at her. He can feel her starting to clench around his cock. “Don’t stop.”
Taryn doesn’t, coming with a startled cry and her nails deep enough into his skin to leave marks, skinny knees banging off the porcelain. Nick talks to her the whole entire time. It’s mostly nonsense, shit he’d be embarrassed of normally, but she’s looking at him like it means something. He swallows back the worst of it, follows her over even as she’s still working her way through. It’s a motherfucker of an orgasm, almost painful in its intensity. It feels like something’s getting ripped out of him by force.
He reaches around her and shuts the faucet off as they settle down, neither one of them saying anything. She’s shaking against his chest just the slightest bit. Eventually the water drains out, and Nick helps her out of the tub on two boiled-pasta legs, wraps her in a clean towel out of the closet. He can feel her teeth starting to chatter against his jaw. They’re still damp but he pulls her into bed with him anyway, wet patches soaking into the sheets everywhere they touch. Taryn pulls the quilt almost over their heads.
“That was a really terrible date,” she tells him, breaking the endless silence. He’s about to agree when she goes on. “We’ll have to make sure the next one sucks less.”
Nick feels his eyebrows shoot up, though it’s dark enough in the bedroom that’s he’s not sure it’ll translate. He can see the moon outside the picture window, white and not entirely full. “The next one, huh?” he can’t help but ask.
“I mean.” Taryn shrugs into the mattress. “If you’re not breaking up with me.”
Nick’s breath escapes him in a sharp whoof, nearer to a laugh than anything else. “I’m not,” he confirms, reaching out blindly under the covers and coming up with her elbow. An hour ago, maybe, but in truth he changed his mind the second he thought she might to do it herself. “I swear.”
Taryn doesn’t say anything in reply, her face blurred in the dark so it’s just a specter with eyes and a mouth. After a second, Nick feels her cold feet insinuating themselves between his calves.
And God, it’s so high school—not even, really, seeing as he can’t imagine having this conversation with Maddie back then, how serious they were from the get-go—but, “Are you?” he asks quietly, thumbing at the dip in Taryn’s elbow. “Breaking up with me?”
“What? No,” Taryn scoffs, as if the answer should be self-evident. When she scoots her head
closer on the pillow, Nick can read her eye roll clear as day. “Don’t be dumb.”
Don’t be dumb. Christ. Not for the first time, Nick wonders how Pete went about getting this girl to agree to move in with him. “Good to know,” he says. It comes out sarcastic, him mimicking her brattiness like a reflex—fuck, both of them are going to get hurt so badly when the shit finally hits the fan. Nick finds himself resigned about the whole thing. “Get some sleep.”
“’Kay,” Taryn says. And then, a few minutes later, “You know me enough, okay? I just don’t want to fuck this up.”
“Shh,” Nick murmurs against her skin. The sheets are almost dry now, a pocket of warmth everywhere around them. “S’fine, Falvey. Nothing’s fucked up.” He’s dozing off, so it doesn’t occur to him to wonder about the implication behind her words until later. To question why, in Falvey’s mind, “fucking it up” seems to follow naturally from learning more about her.
Chapter Thirteen
Nick does, in fact, take her out on another date. Taryn was terrified that he wouldn’t, that things would just go back to the way they were—stupid, seeing as she’s the one who wanted them the way they were. But sure enough, less than a week later they’re at the movies, making fun of Bradley Cooper. Nick pays for her popcorn but makes her buy her own candy, on the grounds that, “Red Vines are disgusting, Falvey, Jesus.” Afterward they share a slice of pie at a coffee place around the corner, Taryn kicking off her wet boots and squishing her socks into his lap. The first day of spring just passed and Western Mass is working hard on its thaw, snowmelt everywhere.
“We can count this as the first one,” Nick tells her in the truck. “First date, I mean. If you want.” Taryn climbs into his lap, saying yes.
So. They’re dating then, or close enough for government work. Casually—Nick doesn’t ask about her family again, and there’s no talk of Taryn going back to the diner for lunch—but officially, with a capital O and full exclusivity. Taryn tries to check in on that last one surreptitiously, stretched out underneath him on a lazy Sunday. “You’d let me know, right?” she asks, just before he sinks in. “If we needed a condom?”
Nick is the master of the gist though. “I’m not seeing anyone else, Falvey,” he promises. “You know that.” And Taryn does, of course she does, she just, like—wants to be reassured or something. She doesn’t know.
“Just you,” Nick tells her later, right before she’s about to lose it. “Only you.” Taryn comes with a gasp.
She knows she’ll have to share something about her family situation eventually—either that or break it off—but she’s hoping to do it in controlled stages. She and Jesse are thinking about talking to a housing counselor, someone specializing in mortgage delinquency and default resolution. They’ve paid down over half of what’s due thanks to Taryn’s paycheck and another surprise fistful of cash from Jesse, but their thirty days are almost up now and they need a miracle. Maybe she could ask Nick for banking advice, ease him into the Falvey shit show nice and slow.
As it turns out, that’s not how it happens at all.
It’s the Tuesday of the kids’ March break, almost warm out. Taryn took the boys to run around at the park this morning, let them get the worst of their wiggles out with an epic game of freeze tag while Caitlin read a vampire book on the swings. Jesse’s pulled another disappearing act, which Taryn guesses she should have expected, although the two shifty-ass, pillhead-looking kids that knocked on the door asking for him last night freaked her out more than she might have liked to admit. A while after they left, Landon came around too, and Taryn made sure to flip both dead bolts once he was gone.
“I can make mac and cheese,” she offers now, pulling her hair into a work-friendly ponytail, but Rosemary waves her off, crowing something about lasagna. The kids are watching TV on the couch. “Be good, you guys,” Taryn says before she goes.
Nick brings her an iced coffee and a chocolate chip cookie, but it’s a bear of an afternoon from the very beginning, a screaming kid with her hand stuck in a kitchen drain and a guy in his thirties with end-stage cancer and trouble breathing. After dinner they wind up at a triple-decker not far from Taryn’s house, a woman with a broken cheekbone and a bloody mouth whose piece of garbage husband tossed her down the stairs and who wants him to ride in the ambulance with her regardless. “No can do, honey,” Taryn says, slamming the door to the ambo and leaving the asshole to the cops.
The woman calms down once they get on the road, and Taryn hopes the worst of it is over. Nick looks just as beat as Taryn feels. “Want to call in?” she asks once they’re done with the transport, sliding her hand up his inseam as they idle at a red light near the hospital. It’s ten fifteen; they’ve got a pile of paperwork ahead of them, but Taryn’s thinking more along the lines of parking for a while. They haven’t done it in the bus yet, but she’s pretty sure she could convince him.
Nick laughs, head lolling against the passenger seat. Taryn likes that, that he’ll let her see how wrecked he is now. “Call in and do what?” he asks obnoxiously.
Taryn moves her hand up an inch and grabs.
Nick oofs in surprise, and probably not a little discomfort. “Be easy, Falvey, Christ,” he pants, but he’s completely opening up his legs to give her more access. Taryn grins.
“Who’s easy?” she murmurs, backing off her grip to a light tease. Nick raises his eyebrows. Still, his face does not look like the face of someone about to say no to sex in the workplace.
Which, of course, is when the radio squawks.
“1C priority, 81 Orchard Street, asphyxiation. Female, early forties, VSA.”
Two things occur to Taryn right away: the first is they’re too far away to take the call, because 1C is code for medical/trauma, HOT response, requiring the closest resources possible, and she and Nick are all the way out at Fairview.
The second is that they have to take the call, because that’s Taryn’s address.
Nick figures it out a beat after her, sitting up straight and still. The silence after the radio squeals off is awful. “Tare, that’s your—”
“I know.” He has never, ever called her Tare before. Probably now is not the time for Taryn to be noticing that. “I’m—yeah. I know.” The stoplight rolls over to green a split second before she floors it through the intersection, flicking on the lights and sirens and pulling into the empty oncoming lane. There isn’t a lot of traffic this late in the evening, but what’s left flows over to the sides of the road. The ambulance slices elegantly through the middle, Moses and the red sea of economical Japanese imports.
VSA? Stands for vital signs absent.
“Call my brother,” Taryn tells Nick through clenched teeth, hands slipping on the wheel. They’re five minutes away. “Phone’s in my pocket.”
Nick does what she says, scrolling through her contact list and bringing the phone to his ear. “Voicemail,” he reports.
Taryn swears, veering around a sedan that doesn’t pull over quickly enough. “Leave a message,” she says. “Or don’t. He probably won’t even—” She breaks off, choked.
Nick leaves one. Taryn listens while he identifies himself as her coworker and tells Jesse that their mother is having a serious medical emergency, repeating the time of the call twice and promising a follow-up once they know more. His voice is very calm and very professional. Taryn lets it flow over her as they turn down the street toward the house, lit up like a psychotic Christmas tree with all its windows blazing. There’s another ambo just arriving, whoever officially caught the call. She and Nick never bothered to phone in.
Taryn’s up the front steps and through the door at a sprint, almost running right over Connor, who’s standing guard in the foyer like a gap-toothed sentry. “Are you okay?” she demands; then, when he nods, “Where?” Connor points up the stairs.
They’re in the bathroom, Rosemary and Caitlin, Rosemary a crumpled heap on the dingy tile and vomit all over the fucking place. Caitlin is completely hysterical. “I’m sorry,”
she’s saying over and over, tears streaming down her cheeks. There’s dried blood at the corner of her mouth. If Rosemary’s last act on this planet was to whale on the goddamn kids, Taryn is not going to be responsible for her actions. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”
Taryn pushes her out of the way. “Go downstairs,” she orders, feeling for her mother’s pulse and not finding one, flipping Rosemary onto her side and realizing too late she stormed in here empty-handed, no equipment at all. Rosemary’s lips are blue-gray. “Send the other medics up here, then take the boys and sit on the couch until I say. Ma,” she says then, getting two fingers into Rosemary’s mouth and clearing the airway as best she can. “I swear to God, Ma, you better not.”
She’s already started CPR when she finally registers the sound of three sets of boots on the creaking staircase, Nick’s voice plus Lynette’s and Doc’s over the sound of her own thudding heart. He’ll have told them, Taryn thinks dully, feeling a strange, sick kind of relief even through the ice-cold terror. This was always going to happen, and now it has.
“What’s her name?” Lynette’s the first one into the bathroom, down on her knees in the worst of the mess with the intubation kit clutched in one hand. Doc’s in the hallway with the stretcher. Taryn can sense Nick behind her, the tall, solid bulk of him. She is very, very careful not to look.
“Rosemary,” she answers instead, pressing hard and rhythmic on her mom’s narrow chest. Rosemary’s wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and nothing else. “Airway’s clear, but no breath sounds.”
“Okay.” Lynette nods, tilting Rosemary’s head back to slide the tube down her throat. “Nick’s going to take over for you, all right? We’ve got it. Emily, take Taryn downstairs and check on the kids.”
“I’m fine,” Taryn says, still doing chest compressions. Nick’s crouched down beside her, nudging her out of the way.