Stranger

by Robin Lovett

  I follow her. My heart beats faster. “Are you afraid of me?” I want you afraid.

  She stutters an incoherent response that means yes, and she likes it.

  “Why are you wearing my shirt?”

  She scrambles faster, but her hand slips. “Because I—”

  “Take it off.”

  “But—”

  “Take. It. Off.” The bite to my voice is sharp, and she jerks in fear. I want to see her. I don’t want her covered from me. Ever. I need to know she’s there.

  “I don’t want to.”

  I grab her ankle. “I said, take it off!”

  “Fuck you,” she yells and kicks me in the chest.

  I’m launched backward, and the air is forced from my lungs. When I look at her again, she’s pelting across the sand as fast as she can back to her condo.

  I chase her.

  * * *

  It doesn’t matter how much I want him to devour me. When he looks at me like that, like he wants to consume me, my reaction isn’t what it was. Before he drew me in. Now I want to escape, even though I sought him out. My self-preservation instinct that was absent when I came down to the beach has reasserted itself. I don’t know how long it will last.

  “Stop!” he shouts after me.

  I don’t turn. I don’t slow. I run as fast as my feet can in the hot, shifting sand. I start up the steps to my terrace and see him chasing me. The feral look on his face spurs me.

  Fear slithers into my veins. I barely managed to hang onto myself last night. I won’t be so lucky this time.

  I bolt up the stairs and speed across the deck. I get the door almost closed, my hand on the lock, but he shoulders it open.

  I duck into the kitchen.

  “I will catch you.” He stalks me around the counter.

  “No, you won’t.”

  He stills and whispers, “No?” A sliver of reason enters his eyes. “As in . . . ?”

  A different kind of fear, one of disappointment, moves my tongue. I’m horrified to learn I want to run from him, but I don’t want him to quit chasing me. “Don’t stop.” I have to whisper it to say it.

  There is only animal in his eyes.

  His skin shines with sweat, and as he creeps closer, I smell him. I fight the urge to go to him.

  “You know you want me,” he taunts. “There’s no need to run.” He lunges for me, but I dash from the room and race around the couch.

  He comes after me in slow, measured steps. “Poor little girl, are you scared?” He leaps to grab me, but I dodge him.

  “What are you afraid of?” He tilts his head like a wolf. “Are you worried I’ll break you?” He bares his teeth in a snarl.

  I pivot down the hall, my bare feet slapping on the tile. He curses behind me and something lands with a crash. I scramble into my room.

  I slam the door closed and lock it.

  He pounds on the other side. “Open the door, Penny!”

  My pulse racing, I slide on my back to the floor, my breathing loud and fast.

  “You know you want to let me in.” His voice comes level with my ear on the other side of the door.

  I jolt and crawl to my bed. “Go away.” I wait for his response, but nothing comes. My back against the bed, I close my eyes and let my breathing slow. He can’t come through the door.

  A boom sounds and the door shakes, like something heavy crashed against it. I freeze—he wouldn’t . . . would he?

  Another crash and a splintering of wood at the hinges. It occurs to me how little I know about this man, about the lengths he’ll go to get what he wants. Except—I do know. I’m living proof. He’ll warp his life completely, even marry a stranger to get what he wants. A locked door is no obstacle.

  I’ve lost.

  The door breaks—hinges ripping from the wall, lock tearing through the wood.

  He steps through, bare chest and arm muscles heaving, and his voice growls thick, “You didn’t say ‘no.’”

  He stands over me, glistening with sweat, face blazing with hunger.

  I could run from him, but I’m paralyzed, mesmerized watching him and the strength with which he wants me. My eyes wander lower to find him already hard and straining behind his shorts.

  He stalks closer and licks his lips. “You’re going to taste good.”

  I have an idea. A wonderful, terrible, awful idea. I may be fixated on the need to be caught by him, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be on my terms.

  “Stop.” I hold up my hand.

  He pauses and tilts his head in question.

  I crawl backward, shimmy out of my bikini bottoms, and let my legs fall open.

  He stares where I want him to, where I know I’m swollen and wet, so turned on by him chasing me that no other foreplay is necessary. The aggression drains from his face. His shoulders relax, and his expression turns helpless, as I knew it would.

  Unable to tear his eyes from my nakedness, he falls to his knees and crouches before me. His hands glide up my inner thighs. His morning stubble scratches the tender skin, and he buries his face between my legs.

  I collapse on my back, thanking God I let him catch me.

  His tongue lands where I want it most, licking and spinning fast.

  My nails scrape at the floor, grabbing for something, anything to hold onto. I hear my voice groan “More.” He brings my body to life, stroking my nerves, burning pleasure through my blood.

  I’m a slave to his mouth, rendered useless except to lie here and take what he gives me. Spirals of ecstasy climb my spine, reaching higher, arching my back. I come, my body sucking everything from his mouth, clenching, desperate to have all of him driving inside me.

  My eyes crack open to see his head rise. His lips, glossy from me, curve in a sadistic grin. “It’s my turn.”

  I glance at his lap where he’s hard. Though my body vibrates with the need to have him inside me, I’ll gladly take him in my mouth again.

  He growls the most animal sound I’ve yet heard from him. “Not this time.” He grabs my hips and flips me over, pulling me to my knees. He pushes my head down until my cheek meets the floor and tugs my ass in the air.

  The T-shirt slides down my chest, baring my back. It’s a humiliating pose—him staring at my backside, refusing to look at my face, me unable to see him. It’s the same one he put me in last night—the one where I came just from his cock frictioning over that perfect spot inside me. My breath quickens. It doesn’t matter that I’m still coming down from orgasming on his mouth—I want it again.

  He scrambles and swears behind me, and I realize that he doesn’t have a condom with him.

  I clench my eyes shut in disbelief that I want to help him. Through my teeth, I say, “In the nightstand.”

  I hear the drawer open and close, and the condom wrapper crinkle. I rest and wait, impatience twisting my core in empty spasms, frantic for him.

  Then he thrusts into me, and I keen in my throat. It’s like last night. Him taking all of me in the most brutally ecstatic way. Me too insatiable to deny him anything.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’m fucking her with every ounce of me that craves vengeance. Every piece of me that needs revenge, I pound it into her, and she gives it to me.

  She’s the one with the power, and she’ll steal my soul if I let her.

  But it doesn’t make me stop.

  Losing myself in her, letting her take me as hard as I’m taking her—I need it.

  She comes again, her body bowing toward me, gripping me and robbing me of control. She rips the orgasm from me. If I had thought to make it last, her tightening around me imprisons my will to do anything but come inside her.

  I collapse onto her, and she crumples to the floor with my weight.

  There are no words, and I don’t know what to say. Before she was my enemy’s daughter. She’s still that, but now she’s also something else that I refuse to name. “Wife” being the least of the possibilities.

  I get off her and walk to the bath
room to dispose of the condom. When I come back to her, sitting on the floor in my T-shirt, her hair unruly around her face, I realize I didn’t kiss her mouth or her nipples, again.

  I stalk to her, ready to do both.

  A female voice sounds from the hallway. “Penny?”

  Penny groans “Layla,” and hangs her head.

  I grab my shorts and put them on. “How did she get in here?”

  “She has the door code.”

  “I’m changing that. Stay here.” I walk out the door.

  Layla sits on the back of the couch, her hands demure in her lap. “Am I intruding?” Her impish smile means she knows she is and isn’t sorry at all.

  “We’re busy. Penny will call you.”

  “But I’d like to see her.” She peers around me toward the bedroom.

  I block her view. “She’s not coming out. Maybe you can see her tomorrow.” But Penny walks out of her room, still wearing my shirt, her legs wobbly, her face flushed. Maybe I do like her dressed in my clothes. It makes her enjoyment of what I’m doing to her more obvious.

  “Hi, Layla.” Her voice is low like sex, and it aches with impatience, like she can’t wait for me to get my tongue between her legs again.

  “So this is how you two spend your time now,” Layla says to her. “Screwing like rabbits?”

  “No,” Penny says at the same time I say, “Yes.”

  Penny ducks her chin and hides her face in her hair.

  Layla laughs. “You know, you didn’t have to get married to have round-the-clock sex.”

  I bite back my urge to swear her out the door, and try for a joke. “We’re in a honeymoon phase.”

  She ignores me and walks toward Penny. “You left the bar in such a hurry last night and weren’t answering your phone. You’re okay?” She says it so calmly, so patiently, I want to make her leave.

  Gentleness is the last thing Penny needs right now.

  She doesn’t need someone asking about the shit I made her read last night. She needs to learn who she is without defining herself as her father’s daughter. I’m helping her do that. I’m helping her escape but also helping her find who she is without the lies in her past, without all the things the man she called father told her to be.

  I shake the thoughts from my head. This isn’t about helping her. This is about revenge for me. And I feel better than I have in years. Like the pieces of myself I’ve kept hidden have a place in this world. Like I don’t have to hide the strongest parts of me in order to survive. Like there’s someone, one person, who wants me for me. My shoulders are lighter, my back is straighter, and I need to defend what’s mine.

  Penny glances at me, a loud, unmistakable request for help.

  I intercept Layla, putting my arm in front of her. “It’s Penny’s day off, so we’re spending it together. She’ll call you tomorrow.”

  She says to Penny, “Promise?”

  Penny retreats in relief. “Yeah.”

  I encourage Layla toward the door.

  She takes a second look at Penny and frowns. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I respond for her. “Penny’s tired. I’m afraid she didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  Layla smiles again, “That I believe.” She waves goodbye to Penny and lets me lead her to the door. She’s almost outside when she asks, “You’re serious about staying with her, right?”

  I nod. “Deadly.” Her brows wrinkle with concern, so I add, “Till death do us part.”

  “She means a lot to me. If you leave her, you’ll have to run real fast to get away from me.”

  “I won’t be leaving anytime soon.”

  She nods, satisfied and goes to her car.

  And I realize: It’s true.

  Well, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go. I may as well stay here.

  When I return to the main room, Penny’s not there, so I dig through her kitchen drawers until I find the correct instruction manual.

  I change the key code on the front door. No more surprise visitors. No one’s getting in this house except Penny and me.

  * * *

  I left my hat on the beach. I go down to get it and end up dipping my toes in the ice cold surf.

  It’s a perfect day. Not too hot, not too cold. A breeze blows across the waves, and the water shines cerulean in the sun. It mocks me.

  My chest is a chasm, a storm of too many emotions too strong to name.

  I sent away my best friend without talking to her, without telling her the life-altering things that are happening to me. But I can’t face her and tell her what’s happening with me—this shit with my father, this shit with Logan. I can’t put any of it into words yet, much less deal with her responses.

  Me and who I was, who I am, the definitions aren’t clear. If the man who was the only parent I knew is a rapist, what does that make me? What does that say about everything he ever told me and taught me and gave me? I don’t know if I can believe any of what I used to know. Any of myself. Any of my past.

  I can’t relate to myself right now, let alone anyone else. Except Logan.

  “She’s gone.” He walks up beside me.

  I’m hollow, surrounded by darkness, stranded at the end of a long tunnel—with him the only person who can reach me. “Thank you.”

  He faces the water, basking in the sun, not looking at me, his jaw as sharp as ever, the rest of his face guarded in its cool rigid angles. His expression hasn’t softened, it’s still unyielding, but there’s more to him now. Before, he blocked himself, presented himself like a two-dimensional machine of vengeance. Now . . .

  He is as real and complicated and multi-dimensional as any man I’ve ever met.

  His lips part and he says, loud enough to be heard over the surf, “I didn’t get rid of her for you.”

  “Then why?”

  “I did it so I could get back to fucking you.”

  I expect him to crack a smile, but he’s so serious, I do what I never thought I could do today: I laugh.

  His eyebrows lift. “What’s funny?”

  “You can’t say that with a straight face.”

  “Sure, I can. I take my fucking very seriously.”

  I laugh harder, and he almost smiles. Not one of his sadistic smiles. This one’s almost happy.

  He’s lived with this for years. I don’t know how.

  I knew the world was a terrible cruel place. That tragic things happen and people are capable of evil things. But I never thought good people could do terrible things. Or someone I knew and loved, or thought I knew and loved could do something so . . . so . . .

  I grip my hair. The burning question whipping through my brain: Why? Why did this happen?

  He blurts out, “Don’t do that to yourself. It’s not worth it.”

  “How would you know?”

  He shakes his head. “Asking why, trying to figure out the reason, will drive you insane. There is no reason for evil. It just is.”

  “How have you lived with this for so long?” I cover my heart with my hand, tugging at the soft fabric of his T-shirt. “It hurts. Here.”

  “The truth is more brutal than any contrived torture.”

  “How old were you when you found out?”

  “I was fifteen when the cops knocked on the door and told us she was dead.” He clears his throat. “It took me two years, but I bribed someone to show me her file.”

  It hits me like a slap across the face. “I’m so sorry.”

  He stares at me like I’m crazy, as though I said the ocean was made of glass. “What?” His eyes do something I never thought I’d see. They soften. And he looks almost normal, like he’s taken off the hunter’s armor and he’s just a man—one with a beating heart, not a bloodthirsty soul.

  I say it again. “I’m sorry about what happened. To your sister. And what you’ve had to go through.”

  “No one’s ever believed me before.” The loneliness—he tries to mask it, but it seeps through his voice. “Everyone else thinks she kille
d herself.”

  “Did she?”

  He shrugs. “That’s what the coroner’s file said.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  The softness drains from his eyes, and he is once more Logan the Vengeful. “You heard the voice of the woman on those recordings. Does that sound like a woman who was done being alive?”

  “No.” To the last minute of the third disc, she was angry. Every word she spoke was like a sword. “She wanted to fight.”

  “And she didn’t commit suicide. She died before her third case went to trial.”

  “How?”

  He shakes his head and refuses to answer. “The trial was dismissed. Without her testimony, they had no case.”

  “Was she killed by someone?”

  He picks up a shell from the sand and throws it in the ocean. “We’ll never know.”

  “And now my father’s dead too.”

  “Yup.”

  “Died in a hospital bed.”

  “I know.”

  “In his sleep.”

  “Too easy.” He picks up another shell and throws it into the water.

  “What did your parents think? Did they believe her?”

  “She never told us. Not me. Not my mom. She couldn’t afford to lose her scholarship or her campus job that was buying our groceries.”

  “She kept it all to herself?” I can’t fathom going through something like that alone. “Do your parents think she killed herself?”

  He gazes heavily at the horizon. “Our dad was never around before, so I never cared to find out after. Our mom . . .” He makes a bitter grunt in his throat. “She cared more about her liquor than she ever did about us. And that was before Louisa died.”

  When he doesn’t go on, I ask, “Is she still alive?”

  “No.” He chews his jaw. “They’d say it was from alcohol poisoning, but I’d call it a suicide.”

  I no longer wonder at him being so morbid. I marvel at his not being more fucked up. I watch the white foam of the water ebb around my feet. My toes numb to the icy waves. I can no longer feel them. “He was fucked up. Malcolm.” I don’t even want to call him my father.

  He snorts. “You could say that.”

  “I don’t mean just what he did to Louisa. I mean, as a father, too.” The confession comes easier than I ever thought it would.