She buried her hands in my hair and thrust her hips into my face. She was getting close. She was on the brink of coming apart and I was ready. I wanted it. I wanted my name on her lips when she did.
“Again, Faye, say it again.” I demanded against her pussy.
She complied with no hesitation. “Rhett!” My name was a scream from her lungs as she came apart. Her back arched, her legs shook, wrapping around my shoulders. Her body convulsed. The salty sweet flavor of her drenched my tongue covering me. And I was like a good little boy, lapping up every drop.
Every. Fucking. Drop.
NINE
Faye.
I stared at myself in the mirror. The one that hung over the white porcelain sink in my apartment. But I didn’t really see the woman on the other side. I was too busy listening to the footsteps against the wood floor. Rhett’s footsteps.
My heart was still pounding, jumping around in my chest from when I exploded all over his tongue. I shouldn’t have let him. I should have made him leave. I shouldn’t have agreed to give him the stupid tour of my apartment. None of it should have happened. Last night shouldn’t have happened.
Fear snaked through me as I stared at myself. The woman staring back was me. Her dark hair long, and sex ruffled. Her skin was clear, normal, like always. Though there was something else, a sense of something I didn’t like there. It was hope. I sucked in a breath as I recognized it. It made the fear inside me combust until I was bleeding with it.
I could remember that hope, I had felt it before. As I stood in his apartment. The one he and Sarah shared. The place where I was an outsider, a stranger, an intruder. I had been a twenty-year-old girl in love with a man she couldn’t have. But I had hoped anyway. I had put it all on the line, just to be ripped apart. To be left alone for six years.
The tears slipped down my face. I watched them. They were clear, glassy, a reflection of my skin. Disgust ripped through me. I wasn’t that girl anymore. The girl with blood dripping down her face while her daddy fucked her from behind. The broken, bruised, drug addict. The monster who chose to take her own life. The shell of her former self. I wasn’t that person anymore. I hadn’t been that girl in years.
But suddenly I was that person. I stared at the woman in the mirror and I was back there in those moments where all I wanted was to escape, through drugs, through death. I stared at the pink scar on my arm. I would wear it forever. The choice would live in my skin for the rest of my life. Just like the one on my heart. The one put there by Rhett. By the man who had come back into my life only one day ago, but somehow he had blown through my world like a tornado, trashing everything new and pretty and leaving nothing but the shell, the hull. The thing I really was, exposed. Poison. Sickness. Filth. That’s what I was.
I dressed up the dirty parts of me. I was so clean all over, fresh, new. So pristine, but the filth always had a way of leaking through. I was poison. I had wanted to poison him with the hate. But I hadn’t. It hadn’t worked. I didn’t need it. I came, last night and this morning, without the hate I had needed for so long.
I shook my head. And now this shell of me, this stupid little girl had something more. She took something from that. From those moments when she was able to lose herself in something that wasn’t bitter and deceitful. She had hope.
I wanted to squash that feeling, that excitement. I wanted to stomp on it, just like he had stomped on my heart all those years ago. I needed to kill this before it was too late. Before I was broken all over again.
“Faye…” Knuckles wrapped softly. My heart jumped into my throat. I watched her swallow. The woman in the mirror. She brushed the tears away, and straightened her stiffened back. She was still naked, her breasts heavy, full from Rhett’s mouth on them.
I turned away from her, that hopeful woman, and snatched my clothes off the floor, stabbing my feet into my shorts. “Just a minute.” I didn’t look in the mirror once I was dressed. I couldn’t look at her again. If I did I would fall apart, and I didn’t want him to know. He couldn’t know. I took a deep breath. I can do this.
“I’m gonna take you back to your car now,” I said as I opened the door. I sucked in a breath, shocked to find him blocking the doorway. He was dressed too, back in the wrinkled suit he’d worn here last night.
“This isn’t it.”
“What?” I took a step back.
“This isn’t it, Faye.” He exuded masculine power. It dominated the air in my tiny bathroom. He didn’t cum. The thought popped into my head unbidden. The second I came down from the high of my orgasm I ran to the bathroom to lick my wounds.
“Did you cum?” The image of him jacking off on my bed, popped into my head, his naked body sprawled across my covers, his cock in his hand.
“Just now?” He leaned against the doorframe, as if this was the most casual conversation in the world. As if our history didn’t go back to hell, and we weren’t talking about his dick. “What do you think?”
I eyed him. “Yes, I think you did.”
“You’re wrong.” He took a step toward me into the bathroom. My body responded and I hated myself for it. Barely five minutes had passed since I came apart on his tongue and I was already ready for him again. “I didn’t.” He leaned closer. “When I cum, you’ll be there.”
I looked away. I couldn’t keep my eyes on him, not when he was looking at me like that. Like I was the only woman in the world. Like I set him on fire. Me and me alone. “Doesn’t matter. I’m taking you back to your car.”
“I want to take you somewhere.”
I glanced up at him. “Why?”
“Because.” He ran a hand through his hair, a look of panic spreading across his features. “I just do.”
“But—”
“No buts, Faye. Don’t. Don’t get caught up in it.”
“Caught up in what?”
He eyed me, his green eyes watching me so closely. “The past.”
His words hung there between us. The reality of all the things that had brought us to this point. All of the horrid things. The terrors. The things Taylor had done to my body, my life. They all fluttered through my mind, and I wondered if they ran through his.
“I’m not ready for this to end, not after just one night.”
He seemed so sincere, so certain. As if he was holding his breath, preparing for what I had to say.
“Okay.” I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have let it be okay. He deserved punishment for the hurt that still laid on my heart. But I didn’t have it in me. Not after last night, this morning. That disgusting hope bloomed even more in my chest. I wanted to hate the feeling, to be disgusted by it, to be disgusted by myself. But I couldn’t.
Shock covered his face for a moment, before he hid it.
“Good.” He reached out and grabbed my hand.
I should have flinched, or jerked away, but I didn’t do either. I let my fingers slip between his. I let them tangle together. I reveled in the feeling, the way the warmth traveled from my fingertips to every inch of my body.
“Pack some things,” he said as we walked out of the bathroom.
“What for? I—”
“Faye.” He turned back to me. “Please. You’re on spring break, right?”
“I…am.”
“Then I want to do this.”
I frowned. “Do what?”
“This.” He gestured between us with his free hand as if he didn’t know what word to use. “Just pack some things, please.” The plea was in his voice. A desperation. As if he was clinging to something invisible. Something he didn’t want me to see. I hated how my heart responded to this, to him. Speeding up at the idea that he was as eager to spend these moments with me as I was with him.
“Just one night.” I dropped his hand and turned away, heading to my bedroom. Each step filled me with fear, each item I shoved into my bag filled me with dread, but I wasn’t going to change my mind. It was too late for that.
“You want to come in?”
“
“Yes,” he answered.
“I’ll just wait for you out here.”
He looked at me, but I didn’t look at him. Looking at him would change my mind. Looking at him would mean that I would go into his average red brick home, and part of me feared I wouldn’t come out the same person. I had packed my things, belongings, with the intention of staying the night, but I could still change my mind. Those things didn’t mean I had to stay. They didn’t mean I was bound to him. They didn’t mean anything. They were just clothes in a bag.
“I want to smoke anyway.”
“Okay, I won’t be long.” He climbed out of the car, slamming the door. I waited until he was inside before getting out of the passenger side. The black Lexus he drove was new, and fancier than the car he used to have. Of course his house was a lot nicer than the apartment he used to have too. It seemed I was wrong. Rhett had changed and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
The cigarette felt good against my lips. I inhaled the sweetness, filling my lungs with it. It calmed me.
“Faye?” I jumped and spun around, surprised to find Cayden standing at the end of the driveway. He looked the same, even though it had been six years since I’d seen him. His blonde hair shone in the midday sun, spiked up in the front. His face was tan and youthful. He wore jeans and a t-shirt. “Wow, it’s really you.” He approached me slowly, a smile spreading across his face. It was almost contagious. Almost. He was the one who had lightened all those dark days we spent going through bank statements and anything that would lead us to putting Taylor away forever. He was the one who never took anything too serious. It didn’t hurt that he was a playboy in the flesh, practically perfect from his high cheek bones to his clear blue eyes.
“It is.” I blew out a lungful of smoke.
“I didn’t believe it when he said it was really you he was taking out.”
“He told you?”
Cayden stuck his hands in his pockets. “Of course he told me.”
I didn’t know what to think of that.
“I live just down the street. That house.” He pointed to one down the way that looked very much like Rhett’s.
“Nice. How’s Katie?” I didn’t much care, Katie and I had never been close, in fact she had always looked at me like an unnecessary nuisance when I’d worked for Cayden at the law office. Treating me like a bug to be squished beneath her expensive heels.
He shrugged. “The same.”
“You haven’t married her yet.” It wasn’t a question, of course Rhett had already told me.
He shook his head slowly. “Nope.”
I expected him to elaborate at least a little. He didn’t.
“That’s too bad.” I took another drag on my cigarette, eyeing the small flower garden next to the driveway where bluebonnets were thriving.
“Not really.” He leaned his hip against the car.
“Is she still friends with Sarah?” I shouldn’t have asked or brought her up at all.
“Sarah?” He made a noncommittal sound. “No, haven’t seen her in a long time.”
I hated the relief that tingled in my skin.
“I see.”
He eyed me for a moment, the toothy smile that had lingered on his lips slowly faded. I almost felt bereft at the loss of it. It was silly, why would I care if he was smiling? But I knew why, it felt like old times, Cayden all smiles, brightening all those dark moments.
“You’re different,” he said.
“Thanks?” I looked away from him, feeling the poison slipping from my lips.
“I get it, you know.”
I glanced back at him. “What does that even mean?”
“He was an asshole back then, Faye.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I sucked on my cigarette like a straw. I didn’t want to talk about the past, about the reason I left them all behind. I didn’t want to be reminded. If I remembered, if I thought about it, everything would have to end.
“He treated you like shit.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Cayden.”
“But just remember that you don’t know a thing about what he went through after you left.”
I snapped my head back, the words having the effect of a slap in the face. “What are you talking about?”
Cayden shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. “Shit, I shouldn’t be saying this. But just know that he really does care about you.”
“How would you know, Cayden? We just saw each other again for the first time in six years.”
“You think he forgot about you during that time?”
I eyed him, feeling the fluttering in my belly. Those butterfly wings of hope. I snorted and shoved the feeling away. “Stop. Don’t be silly.” Because that’s what the whole conversation was. I hadn’t seen either of them in six years and here Cayden was telling me that Rhett cared about me. What world did I wake up in?
“I’m not.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Don’t hurt him, Faye.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” My mind spun.
“I don’t think he would survive it this time.”
I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of Cayden’s words, but the expression on his face kept the laughter in my throat.
“You can’t be—”
The front door slamming stilled the words in my throat.
“I thought we—oh, hey man.” Rhett came around the car and stopped, filling the space between Cayden and I. He wore jeans and Nike sneakers now, with a polo shirt that clung to him. His arms were full of things, but I couldn’t focus on them. My eyes latched onto Rhett. It had only been minutes since I last saw him, but I had the urge to drink him in again, fear pressing at the back of my mind that he would disappear completely if I wasn’t careful.
“Hey bro.” Cayden clapped Rhett on the back. “Saw you were home and came over, wanted to see if you wanted to go have drinks with Katie and I, but I see you’re busy, for once.” Cayden winked at me, his face breaking back into that contagious grin, and suddenly I felt better.
Rhett popped the trunk of his car and tossed the things inside. “Yeah, not tonight.”
Cayden nodded. “I let Badger out last night and this morning.”
“Who’s Badger?” I asked.
“You haven’t introduced her to Badger?” Cayden chuckled.
“We just got here.” Rhett shrugged.
“You won’t want to miss out on Badger, Faye. He’ll make you want to visit Rhett more often. It’s the only reason I’m even his friend.”
“Yeah, yeah whatever man.” Rhett smiled and flipped Cayden the bird. It was the most relaxed and playful moment I’d ever seen Rhett have.
“All right, catch y’all later.” He clapped Rhett on the back one more time before jogging off down the street. “Don’t forget to introduce her to Badger!” He called over his shoulder.
Suddenly Rhett and I were alone again, though this time I looked at him differently, curiosity burned beneath my skin. What did Cayden mean when he talked about what Rhett went through after I left? What is Badger, like an actual Badger?
“Where are we going?” I asked instead, stubbing out my cigarette in the grass.
A small smile spread across his face, taking my breath away. I don’t know how he did it. How that smile could make me melt, but it had always been the same. Since the first time he smiled at me all those years ago when I was just a little girl with a crush. It left me feeling breathless, the way his green eyes twinkled. “It’s a surprise.”
TEN
Rhett.
“Tell me something.” I sat across from Faye. She twisted her spoon around in her cup of ice cream.
“Like what?” She didn’t look up at me. She hadn’t met my gaze all day. Our conversations had been nothing but superficial small talk, through lunch, dinner and everything in between. I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps I was the hopeless person, the one that thought things would be different after last night, after this morning.
“Anything.” I’d brought her to Denton, a small city about an hour north of Dallas. I’d discovered it a few years ago when a friend of Cayden’s invited us to the opening of his tattoo shop. It hadn’t lasted a year, but the city square became one of my favorite places to go to think.
She shrugged, swirling her spoon in the melting concoction.
Frustration swam through me.
“Please.” I hated the way I sounded, but I wasn’t beyond begging. Not now, not after all this time.
She glanced up at me, her dark gaze meeting mine for the first time all day. “I don’t like ice cream.”
Laughter bubbled on my lips, escaping my throat, a foreign sound.
A smile quirked at her lips, which only made the laughter come harder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her lips curled, revealing her teeth. “You seemed adamant about bringing me here.”
“Of course I did! This is Beth Marie’s ice cream shop. They have the best homemade ice cream. I couldn’t just bring you to Denton without bringing you here.” I paused and watched her twirl her spoon some more. “Plus, everyone likes ice cream.”
“Not me.” She pushed her bowl toward me, still smiling. “You can have the rest of mine.”
“Oh my gosh, this is a crime. You didn’t even try it!” I nudged the bowl back in her direction.
“Cause I know I won’t like it.” She pushed it back toward me.
“You will like Beth Marie’s special recipe strawberry ice cream.” I picked the spoon up and loaded it with a big bite. “Just try it.”
She stared at the scoop with uncertainty. “I won’t.”
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