Untouched

by Lauren Hawkeye

  It broke his heart to watch her quiver. But as though exerting the strength of her mind over her body, she relaxed muscle after muscle, unfurling from the tight defensive position.

  Her eyes, when she finally sat up and looked at Nate, were full of mortification.

  “I am so sorry.” Alexa hugged her arms to her chest, her face flushing crimson. “I don’t know what the hell happened. You touched my scars, and it… I had déjà vu.”

  “Anything you want to share?” Nate kept his voice deliberately casual. He of all people understood wanting to keep one’s demons hidden.

  Raking trembling fingers through her hair, Alexa blinked up at him, then worked her way back to standing. “I was… in a bad car accident. I can’t tell you more than that, because I don’t remember. But that’s where I got the scars. I… when you touched them it must have triggered something.”

  “Did it make you remember anything?”

  Alexa hesitated, then shook her head. “No. It’s like… the memories are right there, so close I can almost see them, touch them, taste them. But I just can’t grab hold of them, no matter what I do.”

  Her tone was colored with frustration, and the way that she avoided him eyes told him that there was something more, something she wasn’t telling him.

  The cop in him wanted to push.

  Despite these strange feelings between them, though, he had no right.

  “You can tell me, you know.” Though his arms ached to hold her, to soothe away the wild look in her eyes.

  If he did, she’d bolt, and possibly never come back again.

  This time when she looked up at him, weariness was etched in every line of her face, putting his heart in a virtual fist and squeezing tight.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t remember.” Her words were heavy, and Nate suddenly understood that, no matter what his own issues were—they paled in the face of whatever this woman was carrying inside of her.

  He wanted to press. But he understood enough to refrain.

  “I should go.” The way her arms wrapped around her body, the hunch of her shoulders, all told him that she desperately wanted to be alone.

  “Thank you.” Alexa whispered, her words raw.

  He’d honor what she wanted. He’d be an ass not to. But he wasn’t going to let her pull away.

  He knew firsthand the trouble that came with that route.

  “Alexa.” He waited until she looked up, then made a show of fisting his hands at his sides. Slowly, giving her plenty of time to stop him, he leaned in.

  She didn’t stop him, so he brushed the most gentle of kisses over her lips.

  The confusion in her eyes nearly broke his heart.

  “I’ll see you soon.” Though it went against everything in him to walk away from a woman in need, he was not about to presume that he knew better than she did.

  So with that light kiss burning his lips, he forced himself to walk away, waited until he heard the click of the door locking behind him.

  As he walked home, he wondered what secrets lay in the memory of Alexa Kendrick.

  Chapter Eight

  Alexa retrieved the book before she could talk herself out of it. Needing to feel sheltered, she retreated to the small bedroom where she had been sleeping, creating a nest out of sheets and the comforter that held the scent of Nate’s skin.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Nate had been kissing her. More than that, she had been kissing him. For the first time in what felt like forever, she’d felt complete, as though the missing chunk of her memory had never existed in the first place.

  Then Nate had brushed his fingers over her scars. Just a light touch, nothing that made her feel threatened. Out of nowhere images had exploded behind her eyes, so bright and so fast that she hadn’t been able to catch on to any of the strings long enough to follow them back to their source.

  She’d definitely seen barbed wire, inky and black, like that which had taunted her outside of the prison. There had been an impression of the attic, the one right above her head, as well as the damn mysterious book that was currently sitting in her lap.

  There had also been her father. She barely remembered the man, and her mother certainly hadn’t kept any photos of him around. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d recognize him if he walked right up to her on the street. Yet, there he had been, more an impression of him than a concrete image, along with a whisper of the word sorry.

  That was it. Not much, but when combined all together with a dizzying fear of needing to escape or else lose her life, enough to send her into blind panic.

  She was mortified that she’d reacted like that in front of Nate—worse, while he’d been touching her, because she wanted to do a hell of a lot more touching. But it had been a knee jerk reaction, that blinding fear, the scarlet pain.

  Was it… could it have been part of a memory? Something from the accident?

  But what did her accident have to do with her father, or this book?

  “Just open it,” Alexa muttered to herself as she stared down at the book. It was such a nondescript object, just a pain black book, but the one glimpse she’d already had of the inside made her stomach roil.

  Her fingers were cold as she slowly, carefully, drew back the cover, then skimmed over the entry that she’d already read.

  The words made her faintly sick, as they had the first time. But now she pushed herself to carry on.

  I picked her out of all the girls there that night. You could tell from lookin’ that the rest was all skanks. Whores. Dirty girls. But this one, she was clean. She was bright. Light. And I was dark.

  Alexa was overwhelmed with the urge to slam the book closed, to take it back up to the attic or, even better, to burn it and flush the ashes down the sink. But something urged her on, and though she couldn’t quite believe what the words were telling her, she kept on reading.

  Girls like that, they’re easy to fool. Trust just oozes out of them, like sweat, ya know? They want to think that everybody’s good. Or that they can fix the bad ones, make them come around.

  But when I picked her out, when I started to watch her, I already knew. I knew what I was going to do to her.

  I was going to get her to trust me, to think of me as a nice guy. I was going to get her alone. Then I was going to rob her, beat her, take her.

  Maybe I’d even kill her. Just ‘cause I could.

  Nausea swept over Alexa, one huge wave. Retching, she rose to her knees, not sure if she needed to run to the bathroom or not.

  The urge to empty the contents of her stomach subsided, but the chill, the cold sweat, did not.

  “Who are you?” Alexa ran her fingers over the book, which she’d slammed closed, her heart thudding against her ribcage.

  She had… she had too many thoughts swirling through her head.

  What was this book? It read like a journal… but whose? Why were they just photocopies, and not the real pages?

  The handwriting looked male, and the narrator was speaking about what they would do to a woman.

  Who had this happened to? The fact that it was hidden so carefully in the attic made her think…

  It couldn’t have been Estelle, her… her grandmother. Ellie would have found it while she was sorting through the attic.

  Did that mean… had it happened to Ellie?

  Why did she have the overwhelming sensation that her father was somehow involved, too?

  Her mind reeled, and she felt the panic that she’d managed to evade after the accident, slamming into her with full force. It left her shaking, clammy, short of breath, unable to keep still—rising from the bed, she began to pace the confines of the tiny bedroom.

  Maybe… maybe she was focusing too much on what she didn’t remember. Maybe… maybe she needed to try to zero in on what was still in her fragile memory.

  Breathing deeply, Alexa sank back down to the bed, wrapping herself in the comforter. The faint hint of Nate’s scent that clung to it shouldn
’t have comforted her so much, and yet it reminded her of his promise—that she’d be safe when he was there.

  Her mother had drummed it into her from childhood, not to let herself rely on any man. But needing to lean on someone and wanting to share the burden were, as she was rapidly coming to understand, not the same thing at all.

  “Focus, Alexa. What do you remember?” She squinted as her mind whirled. This was harder than she’d anticipated.

  Thinking back to the days after the accident, after she’d been patched up and started to heal… she remembered confessing her frustration to one of the doctors, a younger woman.

  “Why can’t I remember anything?” She’d felt so impotent, so useless. All she knew was what had been told to her—that she’d been in a tragic car accident, and that she was the only survivor. There was no one else involved with whom to share her burden.

  The doctor had smiled gently, but Alexa had seen the shadows, even what she thought might be rage in the other woman’s eyes. But when the doctor clasped Alexa’s hand in her own and replied, her voice was calm and soothing.

  “Sometimes events are so traumatic that our awareness rejects them.” The doctor had spoken slowly, clearly trying to find the right words. “The brain… tucks them away, until we’re able to handle them.”

  “Will I ever remember?” Alexa remembered almost screaming with frustration, the doctor’s hand squeezing her own.

  “You might. You might not.” That rage again, so carefully contained. “But if you don’t… it just might be for the best.”

  At the time Alexa had been too tired to argue that. But now… now she knew that it was time. Time to push through the shadows and find the truth, even if that truth was something she ultimately wished she’d left alone.

  So what did she remember?

  She had gone for a drink. Why? She was… she was celebrating a sale. Yes. Jia had called her that afternoon to tell her about one of her pieces selling for an astronomical amount of money.

  She’d been flying high, sitting there alone, and savoring her drink. She’d felt as though she’d finally proven, mostly to herself, that she could stand on her own two feet—that she didn’t intend to live in the shadow of her mother’s money.

  “I went for a drink, then… what?” Alexa recalled the image of sitting in the bar. She’d been sitting on a bar stool, swinging her feet with joy. She could almost taste the vinegar of the cheap wine she’d drunk.

  But when she tried to push past that image, her memory threw up a barrier. A great concrete wall, and when she rammed her fist against it, terror swooped down to clasp her in its greedy fingers. Sitting on the bed, clammy sweat slicked her skin as she rapidly retreated from the fear.

  Maybe… maybe she really didn’t want to remember. Maybe she wasn’t ready.

  “But I know what happened, damn it.” She’d been told—she’d been in a car accident. While she had to work through her survivor’s guilt, she understood and accepted that. She’d almost died. She’d spent nearly a month in the hospital, two weeks of it in a coma.

  So if she knew and accepted that, intellectually speaking… why couldn’t she call up the actual memories?

  “Argh!” Frustrated beyond words, Alexa stood, venturing out beyond the confines of the bedroom. Creamy yellow light from the street lights outside striped the shadows of night, and were a direct parallel, it seemed, to her mind.

  Some things well lit, and easy to see. . . and some shrouded in the dark.

  Her restless feet carried her to an old armchair that was lumpy with age. Curling into it, she stared out the window, squinting at the lines of the prisons that she could see in the distance.

  The other, more immediate question was… what did her father have to do with any of this? Her best guess was that the trauma of the car accident had shaken loose some memories of the only other big trauma in her life, the death of her father.

  Her mother never spoke of it, and Alexa had always assumed that he had died while he was still with them. But these little snippets of memory…

  Was it possible that they had parted ways before his death?

  “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Why do I care?” Great. Now she was talking to herself. But while she was… well, she had a point.

  Why did she care? Why was she even here? She’d come because she’d felt drawn to get to know the sister that she’d never known she had… but Ellie had taken off, leaving Alexa alone, mired in her own uncertainty.

  Maybe it wasn’t a matter of focusing on what she remembered rather than what she didn’t… maybe she needed to stop fixating on the past and live in the present. She was young, she was thankful to be alive. She was on a journey to explore who she was, and she had an incredibly exciting connection with the sexiest, most complex man she’d ever met.

  A sudden flash, a visual of Nate and those muscles she’d gotten a glimpse of that afternoon… of those lean thighs spread on either side of her body…

  Alexa felt heat wash over her skin, burning away the anxiety. Reaching for it, she clasped it tightly with both hands.

  Why was she focusing on the past when the present had the potential to be so damn good?

  * * *

  Alexa stood by the tiny window in the apartment’s bathroom as she brushed her teeth before bed. The woman next door, the one who had dropped the bomb about remembering Alexa before running away with her freebie flowers, was taking out her garbage, rattling the cans in a way, it seemed to Alexa, to make as much noise as possible.

  Alexa watched blankly for a few minutes as the woman set the cans on the curb. She thought about offering to help the elderly lady, but the way that Mrs. Gunderson thumped the lids down on the metallic cans made Alexa worry that perhaps she would get thumped, too.

  This lady remembered Alexa. Her memories held things that Alexa’s did not.

  Her body tensed, itching to go down and demand answers from the woman.

  Remembering the stubborn set of the older woman’s mouth, she didn’t think she’d get very far. So after she spat and rinsed off her toothbrush, she did the next best thing.

  She called her mom.

  It might be best left alone, true enough. But… she had to know.

  “Alexa!” Her mother didn’t bother with a salutation, launching right into the conversation. “I’ve been worried.”

  Was it normal worry? Or was it because her mother was keeping things from her?

  Was she imagining things?

  “Sorry,” she replied automatically, returning to the chair in the living room. It was old and lumpy, yes, but it also fit her just right when she curled up and tucked her legs beneath herself. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Ready to come home yet?” On the other end of the line, her mother laughed lightly… was Alexa imagining the strain that she heard underneath the words?

  “Not quite,” Alexa replied quietly, and her mother’s laugh faded into silence. “I… I came across a place that seemed familiar. A flower shop.”

  “Is that so?” No pause, but this time Alexa was certain that she wasn’t imagining the tension.

  “The lady next door to the shop remembers you.” In for a penny.

  “Hmm.” Her mother didn’t even reply with words, and Alexa cringed. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, maybe flat out denial. Anything but the admission with silence that Tracy had been keeping secrets.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Alexa phrased the question cautiously, but inside… she wasn’t feeling gentle. No… she was angry.

  “I’m fine.” Tracy’s voice was clipped, and Alexa’s anger surged. She was mad? She wasn’t the one finding out how many things in her life had been a lie.

  “You sound funny,” Alexa pushed. Given her mother’s temperament, it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but she found she was past the point of caring. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

  “I’ll be fine as soon as you come home where you belong!” Tracy’s voice snapped out, the crack of a whip felt
through the phone, and Alexa did something she’d never done before.

  She hung up on her mother.

  The phone rang again immediately, and Alexa turned it off before tossing the thing across the room. Sinking into the chair, she stared across the dark room into nothing.

  Her mother always made so much noise, it had become habit to tune most of it out, to dismiss things out of hand. But this…

  Tracy seemed so very adamant that Alexa not go poking into things best left alone. And maybe that was a sign, the universe telling Alexa to smarten up and pay attention.

  Maybe instead of poking around Florence for secrets, she should go back to Phoenix, to her life. To painting. Move out of her mother’s, get an apartment.

  She thought of the book, of Nate… and knew that she couldn’t. She’d started down the path of something, and she didn’t think there was any turning back now. If she did, she’d always wonder what she didn’t know about herself, be it about her past or about what she could have had with Nate.

  Though she hadn’t known it when Ellie had first approached her at the Boxtree... Alexa was beginning to see that understanding her childhood might be the key to making peace with the now. Why, she didn’t know, because no matter how she turned it over in her head, she couldn’t find a connection.

  Yet, there it was, and ruminating on it more just brought the familiar frustration.

  Inhaling deeply, she made a conscious effort to focus on the now. What did she want, right now?

  The realization made her smile.

  Chapter Nine

  The weight of survivor’s guilt was nowhere to be found on Nate the next morning as he entered the prison.

  Ever since Jud had been shot, Nate had spent most of his time in a haze of numbness. It was easier that way—so much easier than being overwhelmed by all the emotions that were forever simmering just below the surface. But this morning, for the first time in memory, he hadn’t woken desperate for a drink.