by Cole McCade
“Is there?” she asked. “I feel as if I’ve been running from that one moment my entire life. Trying to atone for it, by being a better person. But I’m still trying to escape that girl I was in those seconds, when everything was red and it was the only color I ever wanted to see again. Doesn’t that make me terrible? Doesn’t it make me the kind of person you kill?”
“No, Willow.” He cupped her cheek briefly, before his hand fell away and returned to the steering wheel. “It simply makes you interesting.”
There was nothing to say to that. Nothing to say at all, and so Willow only curled up in the seat with her good leg tucked under her, and let the silence keep.
Before long, the familiar backdrop of the Nests turned into more: the sense of knowing that came with being near home, the street corners where she turned to go one place or another, the houses where she knew the neighbors’ names and what grade their kids were in and who she could call if there was an emergency and an ambulance wasn’t fast enough. Her stomach didn’t know if it wanted to rise or sink—and so it simply floated, riding a wave of excitement and nausea, this buoyant thing that rocked and rolled to the rhythm of her life’s blood.
But that rhythm nearly stopped, as Priest eased the car to a halt in a secluded alley several blocks from her house. The shadows between buildings fell over them in a cloak of darkness, until she couldn’t even see the moon and the only light came from the dash, and a thin razor’s slice of a streetlamp’s glow cutting across one slab of gritty gray brick. Willow curled her fingers in the seatbelt.
“Why are we stopping?”
Priest unbuckled himself and opened the driver’s side door. “If we drive right to the house, they will see us.”
“Of course. You couldn’t let it be that easy for me.”
A penetrating look snapped to her. “Do you really want to add your family, your loved ones, to the list of witnesses?”
She closed her eyes. Why did he have to be so logical, so practical? Why, every time her heart screamed for something, did he have to counter it with such cold, implacable sense?
“…no,” she mumbled.
He slipped lithely from the car, shut the door, then rounded the hood to her side. She unbuckled her seatbelt, then waited as he pulled the door open. Pulled the door open, and offered his hand.
“Then come,” he said—and as she slipped her fingers into his, he lifted her into his arms.
He carried her from the car and into darkness. She imagined herself among the dead, with the way he found shadows where there were none, the way he created night around him to move unseen, until she was a ghost peering out at dim-lit streets from across a veil no mortal could ever cross before the last moments of their fragile lives. Maybe that was what she was: a ghost. Already dead, but not quite ready to let go of living.
She curled her fingers in his shirt and clung tight. Priest skirted streets, skirted yards, skirted houses that slept on unawares, circling in on the rickety little shack she’d always known as home. But he stopped, in the overhanging shadow of the eaves of Mrs. Jepsen’s house across the street. Home was so close—so close that if she wiggled free and ran, if she managed half a second on her bad leg and the voice to scream, she could find her way to shelter and safety. Yet for her the house was a strange land across an endless ocean, an alien shore on the other side of the road’s dark asphalt sea, the colors all wrong and the golden lights shining through the windows, part of a warmth that was no longer her place.
Dirty thing, dirty thing.
So dirty with the touch of those hands that held her close, that she wondered if she could ever go home again.
Priest’s hold tightened on her. He looked down at her, fox-gold eyes glowing in the dark. “Are you certain you want this?”
“Yes.” She knotted her fingers in his shirt. “Please. Let me see him. Just let me see that he’s all right. That’s all I want, if I choose to stay. I need to know that much before…” Before I die. She couldn’t make herself say it, and finished, “…before whatever happens to me.”
He studied her, then bowed his head. “Come desidera.”
Her brows knit. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“It means, firefly,” he murmured as he stepped forward, “as you wish.”
He slipped out from behind the shed. His path of shadows took them past the tree planted in Mrs. Jepsen’s yard, over her fence, to the abandoned house next door to Willow’s. The tattered, ripped screen door on the enclosed porch barely squeaked as Priest carried her inside; he moved soundlessly over crumbling porch boards and across the floor until he concealed them behind the tilting walls of an old shelf someone had abandoned on the porch, along with the other detritus that had once been a life.
From here, she had a clear vantage of the kitchen window. But she buried her face in Priest’s chest; she almost couldn’t stand to look, couldn’t stand to see, when she’d only be torturing herself with what she couldn’t have. She was Persephone and Priest was Hades, and through that window were the wonders of Elysium and the splendor of Olympus, forever out of her reach.
But she couldn’t not know. And so she lifted her head, made herself lean forward, made herself look.
Her father sat at the kitchen table. Even in the softening glow of the kitchen lights—and thank God, Dev or Wally or someone had gotten the lights back on—he looked tired. Old. But he was sitting upright without help, dressed neatly, his crutches propped against the chair. There was something different about the crutches. They’d been modified, the hard metal arm cuffs covered in pale blue hand-stitched sleeving that screamed of Uncle Wally’s particular style. Wally himself sat catty-corner to him, dapper and trim as always, and as she watched, Wally gently laid his hand on her father’s arm. Her father looked up, fixing Wally with a long, silent look full of painful, terrible understanding, need, and when Wally smiled and squeezed Joseph Armitage’s arm, he didn’t pull away.
A smaller, rounder body blocked the light, moving across the window, and then Maxi sank down at the table, setting out plates of food. Her voice was a distant thing, unintelligible, but it still carried—and whatever she said prompted a watery smile from Willow’s father, a brief chuckle from Wally. Maxi reached down to pat something, and Willow realized it was that damned baseball bat: long, bristling with nails, engraved with Coraline in flowing, feminine script, leaning against Maxi’s chair like a fourth person in the room.
They looked, Willow thought, exactly how a family should look.
She couldn’t breathe, yet she was so caught in watching them that she didn’t realize why until everything spilled over in a hoarse and aching sob filled with love and longing and something she didn’t even understand, something like resentment, something that demanded to know what right they had to laugh and love and be there for each other like she’d never been there at all and they didn’t care that she wasn’t coming back. She knew they cared—it was there in the haunted look in her father’s eyes, in the quiet understanding that had brought him and Wally back together, in the spreading wings of Maxi’s protective warmth and stabilizing presence, but it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that they had each other, and no matter what happened to her they would find a way to pick up and move on.
“He’s okay,” she gasped out. “He’s okay.”
“Did you think he would not be?”
“No, I…” She shook her head and turned her face into Priest’s chest, mumbling against him. “Maybe…maybe I thought he needed me more than he did.”
Silence. Then Priest shifted his hold on her, turning her so he could support her with one arm, propping her on his hip—and freeing his other hand to stroke through her hair. To guide her head to his shoulder, and fuck her if she didn’t need this. Didn’t need the comfort of a warm touch, even if it was his. Even if it was his scent wrapped around her, his body strong and steady and firm against hers as she wrapped his arms around his neck and just sobbed.
“This hurts you?” he asked so
ftly, a strange note in his voice, as if he wasn’t capable of understanding.
“I…I don’t know how to feel.” She could barely talk around each heaving, gasping breath, each cry, but she forced the words out as if she could push the emotions out with them so they’d stop eating her up inside. “They…it…it feels like they already moved on without me…and why wouldn’t they? I’m nothing. I’m nothing. My only friend is an old woman who runs a pawn shop and I’ve never even had a boyfriend. I’ve never gotten drunk and gone out partying, never hooked up, never had a real job, never…I didn’t even finish college. It doesn’t matter to them if I die because I…I never even really lived, because I thought…I thought…” Her whole body shook on a racking, horrible sound that turned her lungs inside out, and God, how could they not hear that? If they loved her, wouldn’t one of them sense it, this pain, and look up to see her right here? “…he…he didn’t even need me…”
“Perhaps he needed your love and companionship more than he needed your sacrifice.”
Priest sank down the wall, then—settling with his back against the wall and his spread legs bent, her body cradled between his chest and thighs in a safe cocoon. She curled up there, and when he rested his chin to the top of her head, she closed her eyes and clung to the thought that she hated him. She had to hate him.
Or she would hate herself, and everyone she’d ever loved.
As if he knew her thoughts—as if he always knew her thoughts, this intimate and horrid creature who knew her better than she knew herself—Priest asked, “Do you hate your father now?”
It took longer than she was proud of to answer. And shame was a sick swelling in the soft spots behind her ears and pooling sour under her tongue, when she said “…no,” but wasn’t quite sure she meant it. She burrowed deeper into Priest, curling her arms against her chest. “I…I hate me. I hate me for needing to be needed so much that I practically…that I…” That she what? Martyred herself? But her father was sick, and… “I don’t know, maybe I’ve been infantilizing him, or…” She made a frustrated sound. “I don’t know. Was all of it for nothing?”
“Only you can answer that, firefly.” He stroked his hands down her back; his voice wrapped around her in low sighs of thunder. “This was the life you made for yourself. Are you happy with your choice?”
She stiffened. “I didn’t have a choice!”
“Didn’t you?”
“No.” She pushed against his chest, shoving up to glare at him. “Where was I supposed to go? He was all I had! My mother left me! She ran off and left me and we only had each other! The only time she came back for me, she…she…” God, she wanted to hit him. Hit him and keep hitting him until that perfect beautiful mouth was red and swollen and he understood the pain ripping up inside her. “That—she—all she wanted me for was a fucking babysitter for the replacement kid she’d had without me! Was I supposed to leave him for a woman who never wanted me in the first place?”
“Were you?”
Those neutral questions. Those horrible, neutral questions that never judged and yet made her judge herself. She lowered her eyes, misery hot as nausea under her skin. “I don’t know. I…there…I didn’t have any real choice, not when Dad…when he…”
“You chose to stay with him,” Priest said. “And it may have been the kind choice, the humane choice, but you’ve spent your entire life wondering if it was the right one.” He covered her hands with one of his own, caging them against his chest. “Wondering who you could have been, if you’d gone away with your mother.”
“She came back for me,” she whispered.
“She did.”
“And…and you don’t even know what that means. I’ve spent my whole life hating her for not coming back for me, when she did. She just…came back for the wrong reasons. She wanted to take me away from Dad. It was all spite, all cruelty, wanting to make him sound like a burden and a failure instead of a man. It was all the things about her that I never want to be, but I—I—”
“You try to paint this in shades of black and white. If one is right, the other must be wrong.” He caught one of her hands, lifted it, pressed his lips to the center of her palm, tingling her flesh with the licking curls of his breath. “It is not so simple, firefly.”
She lifted her head, looking up at him. Looking into those fox-gold eyes that asked something of her, that needed something, that demanded every piece of her that had broken and shattered tonight. As if he would take her self-denial, her self-delusion, and swallow it into his quietness where it couldn’t touch her. Where nothing could touch her but his strange magnetic allure, the way even when she hated him she remembered his touch and how when he was inside her, she couldn’t think of anything but the fire within and the hunger that threatened to eat her alive. Couldn’t hurt, when her mind was silent and her body was screaming loud enough to drown out the aching cries of her soul.
“It isn’t so simple,” she whispered, “or you aren’t so simple?”
“Perhaps…both.”
He dipped closer, the space between them vanishing; the curtain of his hair fell over his shoulder, wrapping her in a shroud, shutting out the world outside. Shutting out the golden glow of that window into another world; a world that might never be hers again, until she didn’t have to think about the people on the other side of that window, the people she loved who laughed and smiled and hurt and lived without her.
“Would you hate me if I kissed you right now, firefly?” Priest breathed, and she trembled with a wanting she’d never have thought herself capable of.
“No. No, I…” Her damnation hovered on the tip of her tongue, and with a shaky breath, she let it free. “I want you to.”
He stilled. Stilled and looked at her, his gaze sharpening, feral and molten-hot. Yet for all that he studied her like a beast ready to rip her to shreds…his touch was gentle, so gentle as he cupped her cheek, tilted her head up, drew her in to him as if drawing her into the gravitational pull of the sun.
“Lucciola,” he rumbled. “Come desidera.”
No, that small voice inside her whispered. No, Willow, what are you doing…
She didn’t know.
But as he closed that last distance between them, she wanted nothing more than a burning touch that could make her forget she’d ever tasted heartbreak’s bitterness in her entire life.
And as his mouth pressed against hers, she leaned up into him. His lips were soft, so fucking soft, softer than any man’s should be, but that made it so much better when their heat touched her skin and his mouth yielded and warmed and gave just as much as hers, give and take and tease and touch in soft, feinting brushes that made her whimper and thrilled her down to the pit of her stomach. He tasted like she’d always thought being drunk would taste: like inhaling burning, sweet vapor that spiraled through her senses and made them strange and hot, overwhelming and overcoming until she could do nothing but melt.
He tasted her, and the slow stroke of his tongue was caramel melting across her lips. She moaned, grasping at him, and his arms locked tight around her, fingers bunching her shirt against the small of her back, those massive hands making her small and fragile and so easily broken, held in long, strong fingers that moved with such grace and deftness.
With each passing moment he sought deeper, rolling heat against her lips and deep into her mouth until she went slack against him. Her spine slipped and liquefied and she molded against him—and surely this must be madness when she hated him, hated everything about him, but his kiss and those rough hands on her body set her alight until she couldn’t think about anything else.
He broke back. Looked down at her, amber eyes simmering dark. Caught her in controlling hands, lifted her, spread her, set her back down with her thighs flanking his hips and her body straddling his lap—and suddenly she was open and empty and gasping out a heated cry, as she curled forward and clutched at his shoulders. She was naked under the shirt, her bare skin tingling, and as he shifted the hard ridge in his jeans
pushed up against her and nudged and dragged and teased. She whimpered, sank against him, went boneless, and he let out a low snarl of pleasure as he slid his hands underneath the shirt and curled the branding fire of his palms and those brutal, gripping fingers against her ass.
“Maybe you’re not so innocent at all,” he growled, then pulled her in to a grinding, taunting thrust.
She buried her face in his shoulder to muffle a cry. Her nails bit his chest, and he retaliated by dragging her down harder, his grasp forcing her hips to rotate and twist and crush her naked folds against him in grating shocks of harsh heat and that slick-licking wetness that came so fast, so fast, like her body had been waiting and he’d hit the right trigger to set her off. She wasn’t sure how it happened so fast—how the shirt ended up hiked up around her waist, how his jeans came open, how she ended up straining on her knees to lift herself high enough for his cock to fit between her thighs and press against her. His mouth was ravenous on hers, his hands demanding, greedy, and when he caught her waist and pulled her down she bled her scream into his lips as he surged up into her and filled her with every last inch.
He took her hard—his gentleness replaced by a near-desperate ferocity, her hesitation replaced by a frightened need to hide. He was all she could think about, pain buried under scorching pleasure that drove deep, drove hard, nothing but raw dirty fucking as she rode him and he bucked up to meet her. He bit at her mouth. She bit back. And she was fucking weak, because she’d sworn hours ago never again but now here she was with her thighs hurting and her insides bruised and battered and the thick head of his cock pushing and pulling in that way that spread and stroked her from the inside until her entire world narrowed down to that wild needy rhythm.
Faster. Faster, until the porch boards creaked underneath them and he slammed into her like he had a fucking grudge, punishing her with pleasure that cracked and struck as hard as a blow. She wasn’t expecting it, when it came. Wasn’t expecting it to come down on her like a summer storm, sweltering and full of lightning and far too quick, but the violence of it caught her up and threw her down and racked her with sweet convulsions. She panted, clinging to him as her body jerked hard against his. Then came his groan, his gasp, his teeth against her jaw and her neck, his stubble scouring her skin, an unfamiliar wetness spilling inside her to mingle with her own, and oh God she was a dirty, dirty thing because who gave a damn if he got her pregnant when she had only days left to live and there was something purely luscious about that dripping flood filling her?