Stranger

by Robin Lovett

“Why? You did a great thing. Bringing her to the hospital.”

  His back to me, he stops. “Don’t mistake. I didn’t do it for her.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  He turns to me and conflict mars his expression. Indifference is what he tries for, but something more vulnerable wins. “I did it because it’s what I always wanted to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His gaze lands on the floor, and he fills his lungs with air. “It’s what I couldn’t do for my sister.”

  I still. It all makes sense. Of course he would want to help. I feel guilty it surprised me at first. “That’s good. That’s not a bad reason to—”

  “It’s a damn selfish reason,” he snaps. “Don’t mistake me for good.” His defensiveness makes me wonder how helpless he was when his sister needed him, how painful all of this is for him.

  “How did it happen? How did she die?”

  He grabs a chair in front of him, his grip so tight his knuckles turn white. “I heard her crying at night and didn’t know why. In the daytime, she put on a tough face for me, but I knew something was wrong.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  He tilts his head toward me, his hair shading his eyes. “I convinced myself it was just the stress of school. The stress of my mom and her unpredictable benders.”

  Though he’s reluctant, I think this is like the files. He wants me to know, even if he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  He leans on the chair with both hands and looks at his feet. For a moment, I think he’s not going to tell me, then he whispers, “She was thrown off a highway overpass.”

  My lungs seize, and I have to sit down.

  His posture, defeated, something I never thought I’d see from him, altogether different from his usual domineering front. Like he’s finally let down his guard, however briefly.

  I’m afraid to hear the rest, but I want to know and sense he needs to tell it. “The cops came to your house and told you?”

  “They said she jumped.” He inhales a stuttering breath. “But I went to ID her body. She had strangle bruises around her neck and abrasions from ropes around her wrists. They kidnapped her from school and murdered her. Not that anyone cared to listen to me. Or notice.”

  Bile rises in my throat. “Who did it?”

  “I’ve looked and looked. There was no evidence. They left her car parked next to where she . . . fell.” His eyes meet mine, tender and full, full of years’ worth of pain. “She wouldn’t have left me. She kept going to school. She kept working those long hours on campus, because she couldn’t afford to lose the job or her scholarship. She was that determined to make a better life for herself, for us.” He gazes at the ceiling and repeats to himself, “She wouldn’t have left me.”

  I’m speechless. I knew what he’d been through was bad. I didn’t know how bad. There’s nothing I can say that would help him.

  He pulls out a chair and sits in front of me. “She didn’t jump.” His words ache, vulnerable, and desperate for me to believe him.

  His hand lies on the table, fingers spread. It’s such a strong hand, a wide hand. Long fingers and muscled veins prominent on the back. But it wasn’t always so strong. It was once smaller—one of a teenage boy who blamed himself for not saving his sister.

  I cover it, letting my small hand comfort him. I lift my gaze to his. “I believe you.”

  His mouth turns down, and his throat works on a swallow. His lips open like he’s about to say something, but nothing comes. He stares at our hands and wraps his around mine.

  The sea of emotion ebbing between us is as strong as the waves outside my door. His gaze meets mine and it overflows with sensitive things I never thought I’d see there—gratitude, admiration, pain. It’s a perfect echo of my own heart and all the things streaming through my blood begging to be released, yet too strong to be expressed by mere words.

  “Say yes?” he whispers.

  I squeeze his hand and mean my answer more than I ever have. “Yes.”

  He clutches my face and kisses me with all the anguish oozing from his words. His mouth, his hands pull on me with a strength that robs me of breath and launches me into his chest.

  He urges me from my chair to the table in front of him, then he eases the straps of my tank top down my shoulders so gently, goose bumps cover my skin.

  My breasts freed, he brushes my nipples delicately, almost reverently. The touches are feather light and tickle my nerves, so they overwhelm my brain and send heat rushing between my legs.

  Every movement of his fingers is slow and savoring. He nuzzles between my breasts like he wants to burrow his face into my chest. Like he wants inside my heart as much as my body.

  Too intimate. Too much emotion. But I could never stop him.

  He draws my straps past my elbow and seeks lower, caressing my belly. The way his cheeks brush my skin, it’s like he’s caressing his face against me, enamored with the feel of me against him.

  It’s so different. He’s not taunting me or teasing me. He’s feeling me.

  I like it but don’t like it. It’s like he cares, like I’m giving him something.

  It feels . . . tender. It makes me feel tender, almost like it hurts. Almost like, if he keeps doing what he’s doing, I’ll crack open and never be able to stitch myself back together again.

  I free my arms from my straps and pull his head back. “Open your pants.”

  His eyebrows raise, masking his needy expression. “What are you giving me in exchange?”

  I imitate his authoritative voice. “Do it and find out.”

  He watches me a moment, letting me stew and wait, wondering if he’ll let me give orders this time. His sits back and reaches for his belt.

  My original thought, to get on my knees and suck him to full hardness, is abandoned when I see he’s already there. I glance at his face. “From kissing my chest?”

  “From wanting to fuck you since you left my bed this morning.”

  Still—after how many times last night—he wants more of me. “Why?”

  His good humor drops. His face fills with all the things he won’t say, unfathomable things. Things I don’t dare give words to because I can hardly believe I’m seeing them in his eyes. “No more questions.” He nods to the floor. “On your knees.”

  I scooch off the table onto my feet. “No.”

  “No?” A surprise lights his features like he can’t wait to see what I’ll do next.

  I shake my head. I want to surprise him, to heal some of his childhood pain, if I can.

  I unhook my bra from my waist and toss it, then I stick my thumbs in my shirt and skirt. He stares at my navel, and his mask slips, the impatience lifting, replaced by hunger.

  I slide my clothes down my legs and stand in front of him, naked.

  He’s transfixed, his eyes wandering over me, from my legs upward, lingering over my thighs and hips—me bared to him fully. He hasn’t seen me naked except in the dark. Even last night, he left the lights off.

  I think I know why.

  He’s helpless looking at me. All his walls crumble.

  My skin flushes hotter, and my eyes fall to his lap, to his cock, thick and straining for me.

  I walk forward, place my hands on his shoulders, and straddle him. I rub myself over him, slickening him, bumping the head of him against the spot where I need it most. It shoots pleasure up my spine, making me afraid I’ll come just from that.

  My core clenches with the need to have him in me, and I’m mindless for it.

  “Wait.” He reaches for his wallet and pulls out a condom. I sit back to let him push his pants past his hips and suit up.

  His shirt is barring me from touching more of his skin. I grab the hem and pull it over his head. The strength of him, the contours of his muscles, the heat of his skin, I can’t touch enough. I need all of him, every piece of him.

  He positions my hips and thrusts into me.

  I barely have time to adjust, his fullne
ss stretching me till I’m bursting, but he’s already moving. I don’t have to respond, to feel, to think. I’m so close, like my body’s still swollen from last night, like all of me is waiting for him to give me everything it needs.

  I try to meet him, to move with him, but it feels too good for my limbs to gather the effort. I pant into his shoulder, grip his back, set loose the moans building in my throat.

  Pumping into me, he rocks against me where I need him to and the relief that I’m going to come brings me higher.

  But he stops, and I beg, “Please.”

  “Look at me,” he groans. I lift my head and see the sweat dotting his brow matches mine. “Watch me.”

  I can’t help moving against him. My eyes fall closed again.

  He grips my neck. “Eyes open.”

  I stare at his green eyes, brimming with intimidation and the forcefulness that awakens the fear in me. Except beneath it there’s something new. Something that snags at my heart and catches in my throat. If I could gasp, I would. I can’t be seeing what I think I’m seeing.

  I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to.

  This pain we have in common, this truth that defines our pasts that we strive to bar from our present, it tries to rule us. But we won’t let it. We can funnel it into each other, a mutual exchange. A feeding and being fed the priceless luxury of escape.

  He moves, and the pressure he creates inside me awakens overwhelming sensations. I don’t know how I keep my eyes open or how I’ll keep my head up to look at him.

  The waves of bliss race up my spine and every muscle in me tightens with the need for release. My forehead falls to his, and he supports my head with his hand. With me frozen, with me unable to help, with his hips working me against him—I know what he’s doing, why he’s making me stare in his depthless dark-rimmed eyes.

  Every piece of ecstasy I feel belongs to him, is from him, is because he gives it to me.

  I come, gasping, dissolving into everything he wills me to be. My desire, my need, my heart is so wrapped in him, I vanish and become his. There is only his eyes, there is only him inside me, there is only what he makes me feel, and if there is a world outside of him, it evaporates in his consumption of me.

  I lose more of myself when he climaxes. The orgasm rips through him and tears into me with an earthshaking intensity and destroys every piece of me that’s still hiding from him.

  I’m scraped clean, washed of every inhibition and filled with so much of him, I’ll never be rid of him.

  The urge to collapse onto him is the last thing I have the will to resist.

  I push away and stumble backward, my knees buckling, sending me to the floor.

  His stare is full of as much terror as I feel, and he makes no move to reach for me.

  I crawl away from him and crumple onto the couch in a pile of skin and bones.

  My whole body shakes, vibrating with things that are too much, too intense. I never thought I could feel this much. I have to close my eyes, concentrate, and remind myself to breathe, that my lungs exist and I need air to live.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  The only thing that penetrates—the sound of him walking down the hall and his bedroom door crashing closed.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I shut her out. I shut out the world.

  Who I have always been—a revenge machine—she’s eaten away. Forcing me to change, forcing me to feel things I don’t know how to feel, things that shouldn’t exist to me, things I shouldn’t be capable of.

  I debate moving out so many times one day, I’m driving halfway across town with all my stuff in my truck before I turn back.

  Why do I turn around?

  It’s not for money, it’s not for revenge. It’s for this pull in my gut. Even though I don’t want to see her, I’m devastated by the thought of leaving her.

  I never want to touch her again, but the thought of never feeling her skin makes me want to swear my life to her. If I had a heart, it’s replaced with terror. But I’d rather cut out my heart so that I can bear it than separate myself from her.

  For two days, I leave the condo at night before she gets home from work. I come back after she’s gone to bed, and I lock my bedroom door to make sure she can’t come in. Though why she would come in, I don’t know. It’s a wonder she hasn’t kicked me out.

  The look on her face when she crawled away from me—there was nothing pleasurable about the kind of fear transforming her face.

  I wait each morning for the front door to close behind her before I leave my bedroom.

  I’m a coward and I know it. But I’d rather avoid her than have to see her and be reminded of what she did to me, of how she raked me open and stole every piece of myself I’ve spent my life building.

  Inside her, there was no beginning and no end, it was endless and terrifying.

  It’s day three of my hibernation from her. I emerge from my cave a different animal, a new species, one whose first urge is no longer to hunt but to feel.

  I can’t name this thing, this word that I’ve heard but never understood. If love exists, we do not belong together, it and me. It’s not just a thing out of reach, it’s an unbreachable stronghold, a fortress built against me.

  Fate decided long ago I shouldn’t have it, and so I don’t need it to survive. Hatred, anger, those are my friends, with pain and sorrow their weaker cousins. But the unattainable love—for me to even think it—is a lie.

  After the door closes and she’s left for work, I head toward the kitchen and open the fridge, not bothering with pants or a shirt.

  The only communication we have—the leftovers I leave her for dinner.

  She ate what I made her last night.

  “I’d appreciate it if you put on some clothes.”

  My spine cements. It’s her voice. I don’t want to hear it, yet I yearn for it so much I must be imagining it.

  I heard her leave.

  I close the fridge and see her sitting in the far corner, stiff and unmoving in a chair.

  I swallow. “You left.”

  “I made you think I left.”

  My feet adhere to the floor. If I was able to walk, it was before I saw her.

  I always thought she was good looking. But her softness, her attractive features annoyed me. It was inconvenient. Her hair so blond it’s golden. Her eyes so blue, they’re gemstones.

  Now she’s . . . she’s . . .

  I can’t look. I stare at my feet and trudge back to my room. “I’m putting on clothes.” And maybe some armor. Or blinders.

  She’s so fucking beautiful, I can’t remember how to breathe.

  * * *

  I’m glad I was sitting. I would’ve had to from looking at him.

  It’s only his body that makes me stare. It has nothing to do with how I haven’t been able to take a step or a breath without feeling him like he’s still moving over my skin. It’s his muscles that overwhelm me, not him.

  His chest and arms—he must do push-ups or something because his muscles look sculpted. Like someone drew lines, took a chisel and . . . It makes me want to trace them, take him inside of me and never let him go

  I shake him from my head. I have to focus.

  Nothing can get me up from this chair, and when he comes back with clothes on, he will not be getting any closer to me than the far side of the coffee table. It doesn’t matter how much seeing him makes me pine for more of what . . .

  I cover my face.

  . . . what’s warped my mind into something I don’t want to be. Craving him is making me vulnerable, my body listening to a man who has no other design on me than to wreck my life.

  I can’t allow it.

  I have to quit him.

  But I can’t get rid of him until he gets the money.

  The hospital is too important to risk losing funding if he exposes my father’s crimes.

  His footsteps sound in the hall.

  I straighten my back and compose my face. I can do this without looking
like I’m desperate for him to jump me.

  He stops, stands, and stares.

  My defenses that I thought were solid against him disintegrate, and it’s not how he looks. It’s how he’s looking at me. The difference from two weeks ago—I’m dazed.

  He tries to mask it and fails. Gone is the brutal gaze from his days of stalking me. What’s in its place is no less terrifying.

  His stare still has an owning quality. I’m incapable of not being possessed by his eyes. The new part, the part where he looks at me like I light the sky and bring the storms and cause the tides to roll, that part make me want to run and scream.

  I thought I was afraid of him before.

  That was before.

  “Did you have something to say?” His voice is light, gentle, as terrifying as his look. The only comfort is the awkwardness in his stance. He’s as discomfited by the changes as I am.

  If I had something I needed to talk to him about, I can’t remember. The change in him, as the initial terror of my reaction wanes, thaws all the places I’ve been hardening. It filters through my veins and produces an instinctive response.

  Against all my previous resolve, I walk to him. My arms and my chest ache with emptiness, and I do the only thing I can do to ease it.

  I shouldn’t. For both our sakes, I should stop this. It’s not real. It can’t be real. It’s only going to hurt us.

  But I can no more stop myself than I can keep my heart from beating.

  I slip my arms around him and hug him.

  * * *

  I think she might have killed me.

  My heart slams so fiercely, her ear that’s pressed to my chest must be bouncing. She is all the softness that I have never been and never had. I resist touching her and stare down at her hugging me, feeling her arms wrapped around me.

  The top of her golden head, her fine hair pulled back in a ponytail, the little sigh she makes as she holds me tighter. I sift my fingers through her hair and stroke her head. It’s precious—that she’s hugging me. I remember getting hugs, before my sister died. I’d forgotten what they were like.

  I run my hand over her back, and she nuzzles into me. Inch by inch, I slide my arms around her. Her ribs lift and descend with each breath, and I feel it with my palms. Her heart beats, and I feel it against my chest. The urge to squeeze her, to wrap her against me, is so strong, I’m afraid I’ll break her.