by Lexi Whitlow
In none of my fantasies did I consider someone like Ash, someone who would take my body and make it sing, building desire and tension and arousal to points beyond my understanding, thoughts clouding and turning to mist as he touched me.
People on the street walk past us, and I could care less if any of them see what we’re doing in Ash’s car. His hand roams over my breasts, his other buried between my thighs, and his lips feel slow and tender against mine, even as his hand presses harder and harder against my body. The heat rises through me, slow this time, reaching my breasts, through my spine, cascades of warmth filling me. I buck against his hand once and then twice. He pinches my clit at the height of it, forcing another shock through my system. He groans like he takes pleasure in playing my body like this. I open my eyes and see a look of satisfaction on his face—the same look I see when he comes inside of me.
He brings my face close to his and kisses me on the forehead. “You’re a good girl, Sunshine. So good when you come for me.” I look down and see that his cock is hard, straining against his jeans. My mouth waters—and he catches me looking at him. “And so hungry for my cock.” He kisses me again. “But I’ll wait and give you the best fuck of your life after you marry me. Now go. I can’t see you after noon today—bad luck.”
When his hands leave my body, I feel abandoned all at once, like there’s a piece of me missing. I stare at him, trying to read his face. “But this marriage isn’t real. What does any of that matter?”
He reaches over me and opens the door, my gaze still locked with his. “Go on, Sunshine. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, bright and early.” I slide out of the car, and as the door closes behind me I hear Ash say something to me.
It sounds like, “Who said it isn’t real?” But before I can tap on the window he pulls away, and I’m left alone in the street, as time stands still around.
Present Day
The next night, we leave our cars at the hospital, and Ash walks me the two miles home, the summery night breeze whipping around us. There’s a part of me that wants to reach out and take his hand, but that doesn’t fit with the Ash I knew before, the man that promised to protect me by making me his. The man with the scheme. In hindsight, it was a very stupid scheme.
It would make me laugh—if I hadn’t been so alone when I ran away, if I hadn’t come here, hating him and loving him all at once, and never expecting to see him again.
File for abandonment, the lawyer said. It’ll be easy, the lawyer said. You’ll never even have to see him.
“I have money.” It’s the first time Ash has spoken in the mile since the hospital. He keeps looking ahead and walking, and I nearly trip on a crack in the pavement.
“What money? What are you talking about? Money for what?” I catch my balance, but I stay frozen in place.
Ash keeps walking, and about twenty steps ahead, he realizes I’m not beside him. He turns, and in the streetlight, his tattoos look like shadows, his hair like burnished copper. “Not as much as I’d like. $25,000, maybe 30. I’ve got some stuff tied up in different places.” He shrugs, and some of that old casual confidence shows through. A chill runs down my spine, and desire registers in my body, lower and deeper.
“For what exactly?” The words feel dry in my throat.
“For your mom. I want to help.”
I close my eyes and swallow hard. It’s easier when he’s not trying to help me. When he’s just a pretty face who walks with me so I won’t be alone at night. That’s much simpler than the man who left me, who missed the worst days of my life, who sent me letter after letter. The man who showed up here and won’t let me forget him.
“Ash—” I start. My voice nearly breaks again. It’s done that so much in the past few days that my throat is sore. “Ash, you can’t do that. That’s for your gym, isn’t it?”
“It is. But this is more important.” He shifts to the side and puts his hands in his pockets. “I know you won’t accept it, but I’m telling you, I have the money. I could help.”
“Why would you—”
“You’re my wife,” he says, and suddenly I feel like I’m looking back in time. Ash looks and talks just like he did when I first met him, but there’s a different cadence to his voice, like he’s calmer and more reserved. “You’re family. Your mother, she’s family too. I’m not in Cullen’s inner circle anymore, but I still hold to that. ‘Family comes first, and so it ought.’”
“I can’t—” What can’t I do? Save my mother?
“Just walk with me. You can think about it tomorrow.”
“You know I can’t accept this.”
He comes to me and takes my arm, walking me into the night. My apartment has been the place I escaped to since I moved back here, and now Ash is invading that too. We’re quiet as we approach the condos, simple and gray and very different from the big, expansive beach houses that adorn the peninsula. I sigh and hope he’ll disappear into the night behind me—not because I want him to disappear, but because it’s far simpler if he doesn’t stay.
“You think about it, Sunshine. No need to decide anything tonight.” He leans over me and opens the screen door to my condo. My pulse quickens, even though it shouldn’t, and the familiar tingly feeling takes over my body, just like it did when I first met him. There are old things waking here, emotions at work that I don’t fully understand.
“You don’t need to stay, Ash.” I unlock the deadbolt and step inside, kicking off my sneakers. My attire is far different than it used to be in New York, but the way Ash looks at me makes me feel like I’m wearing my black tube dress and six-inch heels. “I can’t decide now. And I think you should go—before I jump into anything.”
He’s standing in the doorframe, leaning halfway inside my apartment. My eyes are drawn to his shirt, his carefully sculpted muscles making the fabric stretch across his torso. “And I won’t push you,” he says. “But I want you to know that I’m here. I wasn’t then—and I don’t know what happened after you left—but I am now.”
I gulp. His steely gaze bores into me, bringing up a surge of old longing. “Nothing happened. You didn’t show up—some other guy did instead of you. So I came home, and I left. Like I’d always planned. I was sad then, but I’m not anymore. I’m glad you’re—you’re trying to help. That we’re—” I wring my hands, trying to think of a word for what we are. “Friends?” I try to sound certain, like I’m sure of what I’m saying. But Ash lifts an eyebrow.
“You sure about that, Summer? Friends? Don’t you remember what it was like?” He moves closer, and I’m deeply aware of his presence.
“What what was like?” I put my hands on my hips and stick my chin out, backing a step further away from Ash. Of course I freaking remember. His hands on my body, tracing patterns over my skin, lips brushing against the tops of my thighs, and then buried between my legs until I couldn’t bear it anymore. But it was just sex. This is a friendship, maybe, one that might see us through a separation. But it isn’t anything more. It can’t be. I decided that a long time ago, didn’t I?
Still, I gulp when he steps closer to me. On any other man, the healing wound on his cheek would make him look like a mess. But on Ash, it just looks rugged, sexy. The kind of sexy that makes a woman’s brain cease to function, the kind that makes a woman forget.
If men think with their dicks, hell, sometimes I think with my—
And maybe I should stop thinking that way. If only he hadn’t offered to help, or walk me home. Or if he didn’t exist at all...
“Sunshine,” Ash says with a wry grin. He leans in, gently taking a lock of my hair between his fingers, and draws his mouth close to my ear. His hot breath brushes against my skin, and a shiver runs down my spine. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He touches me on the nape of my neck, the shiver intensifying, traveling through every cell, every pore, and reverberating through my entire body.
Maybe it’s that I didn’t have time to take my fill of Ash. I wasn’t even with him for a full season. May
be if I’d worn out on him, maybe I wouldn’t be here right now, not moving, not kicking him out, just letting him touch me, whimpering as his knuckles brush against the skin on my chest. Like he used to, he wraps one arm around my waist and pulls me in close. I want to scream, cry, kick him—and all of it for reasons I can’t fully define.
Before I can get my wits about me, he brings his mouth close to mine, his lips barely touching me. Searing heat rushes through my body, and for a moment, I lose myself in his lips. It doesn’t remind me of the first time he kissed me—not quite. That was more desperate, one of those midnight kisses that are greedy and quick. No, this reminds me of the kiss after the wedding, when we drove to the Hamptons and locked ourselves inside. We were just pretending then, but that kiss was still electric, the world slowing down around us for that moment in time, his lips strong and firm and reassuring.
This kiss is like that one—utterly and soul-crushingly real, drowning out all of the pain and all of the history, and all of the anger I held against this man for so long. When he pulls away and brushes that stray cowlick of strawberry hair behind my ear, I almost crumble. I almost grab his wrist and pull him back to my bedroom.
But that’s not who I am anymore. And neither of us should keep holding on to something that happened so long ago. I keep trying to tell myself that, but that’s the thing that doesn’t seem real—the idea that we shouldn’t be doing this. That’s the thing that seems like a lie—not our marriage, not his offer to help, not the pain I’ve been shoving down and hiding for so long.
“You should go,” I say, avoiding his eyes, but still not moving.
“I can go now,” he says, his voice low and gravelly. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re friends again. And I don’t plan on letting you go this time.”
You didn’t let me go. You left me, standing in the middle of the street by Macy’s, waiting for you like an idiot.
My pulse quickens. He’s still holding me, his thumb making circles at the small of my back. My legs feel like jelly, my skin fever-hot. But there’s a tightness in my chest too, which I still feel whenever I think of the night he left me. It used to be white-hot rage, but now it feels like an old sadness, a wound that scarred over the anger and never fully healed.
Ash doesn’t know that I cried the whole bus ride home, that I wouldn’t eat for days, that I was lucky as hell I got into MSF, because at least then I had something to do, other than worrying about him and hoping he was alive. That I ended up lucky to be alive, forget employed.
“My decision is final, Ash. Case closed.” I purse my lips, and put my hand to his chest. I can feel his heart beating beneath my touch, and for a second, I remember what it was like to have him inside of me.
It takes everything I have, but I push Ash away. Gently, but firmly.
“Case closed about tonight, or...” He lets his voice trail off, moving no further than I pushed him.
“About... tonight.” I step back and cross my arms tight over my chest, trying to drive away the heat that started to pour through my body the second I saw this man today. I don’t want to think about how good it would be to know his body again, to get to that place he was always able to take me.
Ash nods, considering this. “I can accept that. If you let me take you home again tomorrow.” His steel blue eyes sparkle just a little, and one corner of his lips raises into a lopsided grin.
I don’t want to remember how I felt about him. I don’t want to block out every bad memory every time he shows up looking so irresistible. But with Ash standing here—refusing a divorce, offering to make everything better, to protect me and mine, above everything—well, it doesn’t do much for my resolve, despite every shitty memory that lies between us.
“Go now,” I say, trying to mean it. He shrugs. There’s something intimately familiar about the gesture, like it was there in my consciousness all along.
“Okay. But I’ll be back, Sunshine.”
His old nickname for me hurts every time he uses it, but I bite my lip and fight away the pain. It’s what I’ve done for a long time. I watch him walk away, and then I close my door and throw the bolt.
The thing is, when he’s here with me, it’s like no time has passed at all. It’s like the three years and all the space I put between us doesn’t mean a thing.
If I’d known he was living here in town, I would have found somewhere else to come home to.
The thought has occurred to me time and time again since I got back.
“Well, Sunshine, serves you right for not reading those damn letters.”
I hear his voice in my head as I fall into bed, scrubs and ugly white socks still on. These aren’t feelings I expected. The memories cropping up in my mind as I try to sleep bring to mind a different Ash than the one I vilified for so long.
I try to focus on that night I boarded the bus, the night he sent me away, but it fades out, like I can’t quite get a grip on it.
The other memories—the feel of his arms, his lips—those all seem clearer and more distinct.
When I finally sleep, the memories wash over me in a flood, and I can no longer hold them back.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Three Years, Four Months Ago
She looks small in the white sundress she’s wearing. Before we came into the church, she had on a gray UNC hoodie. She’s still wearing her Uggs, since New York’s weather hasn’t quite caught up to the season just yet. When she saw that the address I gave her was a church, she stepped back like it might bite her, but I pushed her in, my hand on the middle of her back. She doesn’t know it, but Cullen told me to go in and take her today. Take her God knows where, but he’s sick of Bianca’s shit, sick of her stiffing him for a hundred dollars here and there, sick of her not paying on time, and sick of her being a bitch. He figures Summer is the only way to get to her, but after today, he won’t be able to get to Bianca at all.
She promised Summer she was leaving town—but not even Bianca knows what we’re up to.
Summer taps her foot as she sits next to me. She’s nervous as fuck and still not convinced that this is the right thing to do. She said that shit when we came in here, and she keeps on saying it.
But I’ll be damned if I put her life in danger, and we both know how close that is to being the case.
If we weren’t here right now, we’d be on the way to one of Cullen’s safe houses in Queens, and what I’d have to do to her there wouldn’t be pretty.
It’ll be some shit when I explain to Cullen what I did. But every man has his reasons.
Since I quit fighting—and since I quit gambling too—I haven’t thought much about right and wrong. When I joined Cullen’s army to take my father’s place—and fill his debt—it was about survival, what I had to do to keep on living, to make money and pay off the debts I’d incurred at just about every exclusive gambling club in the city. My life was about recovering from the fight injuries and all that came in the wake of my many fuck-ups.
When you become a man—and I might not be one yet—there’s got to be someplace where you draw the line. Maybe I should have drawn that line a long time ago. And maybe it took the idea of losing something—even something as fleeting as my feelings for this girl might be—to make me wake up. But an innocent girl is where I draw the line.
Summer jabbers nervously about the decision we made, about how she might be putting me in danger. But I squeeze her thigh and say some bullshit about what a good lay she is, and the priest calls us up to the front. The old guy is probably drunk as shit even though it’s eight o’clock in the morning, but he’s the only practicing priest I could find who would even consider marrying us. He made some rumblings about how he doesn’t like to work shotgun weddings, but the $500 I slipped him seems to have settled it.
Summer, pregnant.
I get chills at the thought. Our marriage probably won’t last long enough for that, and she’s a woman with places to be. I don’t stop to consider what our lives would look like if she actually
stayed, because that isn’t part of the deal. I protect her, she leaves, we move on.
Why even think about it?
“You ready, Sunshine?” Her hair looks like it’s been slept on, a wild mess of sun-colored waves. I smooth it out and take her hand. Instead of protesting again, she nods and looks at me with clear green eyes that look like the surface of a lake. In this moment, she reminds me of what it felt like to be younger, full of hope and plans and all the shit I left behind when I tore my quad and couldn’t fight anymore.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she says as she squeezes my hand. I walk her up to the pulpit, and the priest reads a few words. Everything seems to flash by in an instant, like this moment is set on fast forward. People say that there are big moments in everyone’s life, things that a person will always remember. Up until now, all that shit had to do with the Family, and with my old fights, the injury, being holed up in the hospital for more than two weeks. None of it had to do with a woman. But as I stand with Summer and hear her say “I do” as the priest looks at us impatiently and waits for someone to produce a ring, I know I’ll remember this moment above everything.
Maybe because this is a stupid and senseless thing to do, and a totally reckless way to take advantage of my boss and his code. Maybe because Summer looks so vulnerable, with dark shadows beneath her eyes like she stayed up far too late. But it seems like there’s something else at work, something beyond my understanding, something that’s searing this moment in time into my memory.