Deeper

by Blue Ashcroft

  He’s breathing hard, and he waits a moment, just watching me. I start to calm, but my heart is still racing. Whatever was about to happen, never happened, and I’m both sad and relieved at the same time, because I don’t want to betray myself. Or William. One should only be allowed so much happiness when one is a murderer. I feel like today, no, in all my time with Knight, I’ve had enough to be grateful for the rest of my life.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” he says, leaning over, pulling me to him, holding me to him in a way that keeps me warm but doesn’t stoke the fire I don’t want stoked right now. “I went too fast. So hard not to go fast with you. You’re so hot.”

  “You are too.” I stroke his back, wondering what I’m missing right now because of my stupid trauma. “Was there something else?”

  “Yes.” He kisses the top of my head. “Something wonderful. Something I’d love with you. But I don’t think we should. It’s more to the side of sex.”

  Damn.

  “Rain, I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.” He rests his head against my shoulder.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I love you,” he says quietly.

  I freeze against him. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what he wants me to say. That’s his mistake? Falling in love with me? Maybe a mistake because I can’t give it back, but no one said he couldn’t. He doesn’t owe William anything.

  “Knight. Thank you.” I push against him a bit so he sits up. I sit up too and lean against him. My heart is slowly calming, returning to a resting pulse.

  “For what?” He puts an arm around me.

  “For that. For everything. For being so patient. For making me feel so good. For being willing to stop before I got hurt.”

  “Hey, that’s what I’m here for,” he says quietly.

  I laugh and bump against him, and he bumps me back. It almost knocks me over even though he did it gently. He’s just so much bigger than me, and I really, really like it.

  “Knight, do you think we went too far?”

  He looks at the ground, then back at me, then back at the ground. “I don’t know, Rain. I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Rain, I don’t know what you want me to say. Are you saying you did more than you wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I guess. I don’t know much about sex. I didn’t think I needed to, since I wasn’t going to have it.”

  “Rain, that’s insane.”

  “I mean, I know the mechanics, but how much counts? Like, is what we did sex?”

  He laughs, he actually laughs out loud. “No, Rain. Not even close. I could make you feel a million times better if we actually had sex. I hated preventing you from feeling what I know you were about to feel. I wanted you to feel that way and I wanted to be the one who gave it to you. Your first.”

  I blush. It’s still warm inside from the passion between us, and even memories of William can’t drive it out.

  “Rain, I know you said you can’t love me, I understand. But I think I deserve to know why. What happened. You know all of my crap.”

  He’s right. He deserves to know. I sit back on my hands. “Can we go back out on the beach? I can’t think here, alone with you.”

  “Fair enough.” He picks up our stuff and helps me stand. My legs feel like Jelly and I somehow stumble forward and back out onto the beach. Far down the way a man is playing fetch with a dog and throwing his ball into the beach. Beyond him a girl sits reading. Both little dots in the distance.

  We place our towels a ways from the water where we’ll have a good view but still be able to hear each other and sit side by side.

  “When I was a guard at my last job. I killed someone,” I say, before he’s even done adjusting his position.

  He freezes, stops breathing for a split second. I can feel it against my side. Then he resumes, waiting for me to explain further.

  “My boyfriend. We were breaking rules. We made a chain on a slide.” Each word from my throat feels like a dagger I’m heaving up just to throw it into my own chest. “I was the one who let it break. It collided, he went flying. Sixty feet onto pavement.”

  “Rain…”

  “I know, I’m heinous. I’m a murderer.”

  “Rain.”

  “He’d just asked me out that day. He’d switched trainings just to be with me.” I know Knight is probably creeped out right now by my stone cold face. I know I probably look like a robot. I reach up to scratch my eye and discover tears. I’m crying for William. I’m finally crying for him, not just because of a sudden grief wave, but because I’m finally acknowledging it all. I’m finally facing it, and I hate it. I don’t want to.

  “Rain.”

  “I know.” I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say I’m horrible for even allowing myself the wonderful time we’ve had together today. Then he’s going to say I’m an idiot for making pledges William didn’t ask me to make.

  “Come here.” He holds out his arms and gathers me into his lap, where I sit, crying and feeling stupid and small in his huge, muscled arms.

  I have no right to cry against him. He has bigger losses than mine. He actually loved Camille, whereas I was just hoping to love William eventually. I never got a chance. In a way it was kinder that I hadn’t said yes to him sooner. But if I had said yes, maybe he wouldn’t have been at that training. Maybe he wouldn’t have died. Death at seventeen leaves so many what ifs.

  “Rain. My Rain. I’m so sorry.” His voice is deep and gravelly, and I can tell he’s in pain for me. With me. He holds me tight, so tight it’s like he knows I’m about to burst into a million pieces if he doesn’t hold me together.

  He isn’t lecturing me about my rules. About the way I chose to cope. I know he probably will. He won’t be able to deal with it when he realizes he can’t talk me out of it. Can’t therapy me out of it. I can’t break my word. I won’t.

  “Knight. I can’t just break it,” I say. “I know you’re thinking I’m stupid, I know you think you can change my mind. You can’t. I’m going to live this way.”

  “But it is stupid. I’m sitting here offering you love, and life, and you’re going to refuse it because of some kid who died when it wasn’t your fault?”

  “He wasn’t some kid! If he hadn’t died, we would have been together. Don’t you get that? And it was my fault.” I want to tear out my hair. I could tear it all out and scream in his face and he still won’t know how crazy I feel, every day, every minute every second. The guilt tears me apart.

  I wasn’t strong enough to hold his handle. I wasn’t strong enough to just reject him sooner. I wasn’t strong enough to tell them all to stop the chain.

  I hate myself for the person I was, who simply went along with things I knew were wrong. These promises I made to myself, they’re the first things I’ve been able to keep, no matter who pressured me to change them. I can’t give up on them. They hold me together. They make everything make sense.

  This whole thing isn’t fair to Knight. I’m going to have to be the one to end it. This sweet, hot, strong man who has said he loves me, would probably stay with me, wait for me, hope for me. He has a habit of hoping for things that are hopeless. I’m going to have to be the one to kill those hopes.

  One more session like today and I might end up fulfilling his hopes and destroying mine. My hopes of a life with integrity, where I’m not a doormat anymore, one who gets talked into dating and then talked into killing the person they are dating. I need to be unpersuadable. Rules are rules, and if we just follow them, no one gets hurt. It makes sense.

  But I just want to hold him a little while longer. I could let him hold me forever. This safe space with him, with the sun, and the smell of the sea air, mixed with his own unique, masculine scent, something like rain and waves and beach wood.

  I’m going to memorize it, hold it inside me for moments when I’m feeling weak and want to give in. When I selfishly wa
nt to be happy more than I want to keep my promises, I’m going to remember moments like when we were in the water together. When he was taking me somewhere wonderful and promising to stay there with me forever.

  I want to go there with him, but there’s a huge wall in my head and I’ll never get over it. I need to free him so he doesn’t remain behind it with me.

  “Knight, I think we should break it off.”

  “You what?”

  “Break it off. I can’t do this anymore.” I summon the strength to pull myself out of his lap, ignoring every fiber that seems to be breaking as we pull apart. I stand, arms crossed. Feet planted firmly in the sand. If I just hold myself tight enough, my heart isn’t breaking.

  My heart can’t be breaking, because I can’t be in love with him. I’m not in love with him. I just care for him, as a friend. It has nothing to do with the times he’s saved me, when we’ve saved each other. It has nothing to do with the way he held my hand in the dark and told me about the girl who broke his heart into a million tiny pieces.

  It’s not the way he glared down on me on that bed in Chad’s house, after pulling Chad off of me when no one else cared. It’s not the way he dumped me because I refused to take care of myself and put others first. It’s none of that. He’s just hot. Just hot with tats and I’ll find another like him, some day. I’ll stay with them until they fall in love and leave them when I need to.

  It’s a horrible thought, but a steadying one, and I start to head back to the car. I stumble once, and Knight comes from behind to steady me, but I push him away. I’m already distancing myself from him in my heart, and I need that distance. He needs to stop being wonderful, or he’s going to ruin my life.

  William’s spine. His spine stuck out of his back. The thought makes me dry heave for the first time, and it’s a relief, because it’s what a person should be feeling at a time like this. If my stomach wasn’t empty except for seawater, I’d probably be able to empty it here, right in front of the boy I’m not in love with.

  “Rain, wait. We can make this work.”

  “We can’t. I know we can’t. It’s not fair Knight.”

  He stops fighting me and we get to the car, I get in and let him load things. I don’t even know or care if he got everything off the beach when he followed me. I could really care less. I left more than my stuff there on the beach today. Stuff I’ll never get back.

  Knight

  There’s nothing I can say. Nothing she’ll listen to. She’s right, I am stupid. I did hope I could change things, even as I agreed to her terms. How could I help wanting more? She’s wonderful. She’s strong. With her, my world isn’t dark anymore. I need her.

  Light rain beats down on the windshield as we drive back. “So what now?” I ask her.

  “We go back to working together.”

  “How can we do that? How can we honestly do that Rain?”

  “If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t have entered into this with me. You knew my terms.”

  I did. But still, I want her feelings. I want her heart. I’m okay with the fact that life isn’t perfect and we could both end up in a world of hurt simply by loving each other.

  She’s trying to cut me loose to protect me. But it’s like she’s running me over with a small train to avoid possibly running me over with a bigger one. I just want to shake her. I want to do something, anything, to shake sense into her.

  How can I just let her agree to spend the rest of her life without love? When her heart beats against mine, when I hold her close, I know for sure that there is nothing broken about her. But I don’t know how to help her see that.

  “You know, I didn’t even think I’d be hired,” she says dully, staring out her window. “I thought when I told them about William, they’d laugh me out the door. But I believe in being honest, so I told them. I even told them I worked his shift. That’s what made Dave hire me.”

  “You worked his shift? The same day?” My throat tightens.

  “Yeah. No one else could. I was calmer than them. Just another sign it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault Rain. They all probably feel it was their fault,” I say.

  “His spine was sticking out of his back.”

  I curse and grip the steering wheel as nausea rolls through me. I’ve seen a lot of things as a lifeguard, but nothing that bad.

  “Sorry.” She puts her hands up to her face. If I wasn’t driving, I’d pull her hands away and tell her I’m not mad at her.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.” I’m just mad at the situation. I’m mad that I didn’t know sooner how fragile she is. And how strong she is. I’m mad that I haven’t handled things right, and I’m even madder that I don’t know how to fix them from here.

  He died on her. It was awful, it was gruesome. They were dating. It doesn’t feel like she loved him. The way she reacted to me made me instinctively feel it was the shock and wonder of a girl feeling those things for the first time.

  I remember the first time with Camille. So wonderful, even if I was so bad at it. Even if it was painful for both of us. The way we held each other after, stared into each other’s eyes and wondered at the intimacy of it, at how deep we had allowed the other person into our souls.

  I’ve already allowed Rain into my soul. I just need to figure out how to get into hers.

  The rain starts to fall more heavily against the windshield. From now on rain will always remind me of Rain. I’ve never known anyone with that name. And I’m sure that she’s never known anyone named Knightly. I appreciate that she doesn’t give me grief over it. Seriously, when am I ever going to find a girl who can live with my name without giving me crap for it?

  Or a girl who insists on protecting everyone around her.

  Or a girl who can kiss me underwater.

  Some things are worth fighting for. And even though I know the price of a fight fought and lost, I want to fight this fight for her. As we drive in the rain together, I can feel myself making promises again, promises like the ones I made Camille and myself. Promises that were stupid to make then and frankly insane to make now.

  But it’s worth it. I have to try.

  It’s a little bit of heaven with her. I don’t mind walking through hell first if I can do it with her and we can both come out together.

  The most important thing is, I’m already fairly certain she loves me. I just don’t know what to do from here. I know that I want to make one more stand.

  I can feel fire lighting inside me that hasn’t been lit since Camille died. I didn’t think I’d ever be on fire again. I’m willing to fight to the death for her. I knew it from the moment I held her in my arms.

  We hit a red light and the wipers are hypnotic as they dance with the rain. I look over at the girl beside me. She’s chewing her hair. Adorable. Mine.

  “Rain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks for today.”

  She nods. “Thank you.”

  There’s nothing else to say.

  She looks over at me as she unbuckles her seatbelt and I can tell she’s trying to figure out something to say. Maybe something to salve my wounds, though nothing would do that, and she doesn’t need to try.

  Rain being so paralyzed makes me brave. Maybe her pain makes me feel like I’m not alone in the world, like I’m not the only one suffering. Maybe wanting to be with her is driving me forward. Either way, I’ll come through for her.

  “Knight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for being so wonderful. I really do love working with you.”

  “Me too.” It aches to have her be ending it this easily. I get the feeling she’s really going to beat the crap out of my heart before this is over.

  Go ahead Rain. Beat the ever-living crap out of my heart.

  She gives me a kiss on the cheek and opens the door, looks back at me for a moment as a tear, or maybe a drop of rain, slides down one cheek. For a moment she stands in the rain, beautiful, just staring at
me. Then she slams the door and walks away.

  Good start princess. Good start.

  Chapter Twelve

  Knight

  It’s painful to train with Rain, to be just a coworker again, when I just want to scoop her up in my arms.

  I’m still determined to be with her. I just don’t know how to overcome all of this.

  Ally and Geoff start arguing over some minor detail of the rescue they’re working on, and Rain laughs and looks over at me. But I keep my eyes on Geoff. I might have an idea.

  There’s only one person I’ve ever gone to for girl advice, and though it might be stupid, it might just work.

  Rain announces lunch and I follow the guards to the guard room. When Geoff comes out after changing, I grab his arm.

  He curses and pulls away. “What you want Knight?” Resentment burns in his eyes, and I know I deserve it. We used to be friends. Used to talk all the time. He used to look up to me. We used to have Camille.

  “Can we talk?” I ask, folding my arms.

  “What, like chicks?”

  “Yeah. Like chicks,” I say. “Lunch on me.”

  He shrugs and just continues to glare. I sigh and walk toward the door, gambling on the fact that he’ll follow. He never could turn down a free meal.

  When we both get to the jeep, he opens the passenger door and swings in, like he has dozens of times before.

  “So what is it Knight? What should we talk about after four years of hell?”

  I put the jeep in gear and back out. “I guess we talk about hell then.”

  I pull up to the usual burger drive through. We both get our customary order. It feels like nothing has changed, even though everything has.