She pats the mare’s shoulder, calming her down further. “I don’t know what’s real or not anymore, Gray,” she murmurs, looking out over the fields. “I thought I did, but …” She swings her leg over the mare and dismounts, biding her time as she searches for words. “I don’t. I don’t know you anymore. Or this place. Or you on a horse. And yet I don’t even know if I know me without you. I don’t think that was supposed to happen.”
I get off with her and start walking slowly, part desperate to drag her into the barns and get on with my thoughts rather than discuss anything. “I thought you’d evolved, Hannah.”
“I have, but I’m missing a part. Disconnected. My thuds have gone.”
My brow arches. “Thuds?”
“Yes.” She chuckles quietly and looks me over, a wide smile coming from nowhere. “Didn’t you feel it? Thud, thud, thud. It made sense then. I’d never felt that before. Not with Rick. Not on my own. You made that happen and now you’ve taken it away.”
“It was just the pills.”
Not that it was. I know that whether I want to admit it, or do anything about it, or not.
“No, it wasn’t. It was you. Us. I can still feel it now.”
As can I.
I look at the barns and keep moving, intent on not discussing anything to do with feelings or sensations that have no business being felt out here in the real world. Especially not here.
“Why would you take it away?” I sigh and take the reins from her, leading both the horses through the doors. “I don’t understand why you would dismiss it.” She comes around in front of me, her hands up in my face as if that might make me change my mind about the scenario we’re in. “Treating me the way you did wasn’t just horrible, it was still a lie, wasn’t it? I want the truth, Gray. Please. Why are you unavailable? What possible reason makes this undoable now were back here?”
Never was damn well doable.
Irrespective, the look of her here, the sight of her heated cheeks from the ride, the very thought that we’ve just enjoyed something together that I have never shared with anyone else, makes me think of possibilities I shouldn’t even fucking consider.
“Goddamn, you’re frustrating,” mutters from me. I heave the saddles off the two horses and steer them into the stalls, slipping the bridles off them the moment I can and closing the stall doors. “Compatible fucking doesn’t mean anything more than that. We’re good at it.” I turn to face her, watching as she waits for other words to help her out. “Shall we do it again? I hate those clothes on you.”
“Gray, that isn’t answering-”
I don’t give her a chance to respond fully. I’m at her body and pressing it back to the stall doors before she manages anything more. My fingers grasp and pull, wrapping her up into me so I can taste reality on her and pour as much of myself into that feeling as I can. She gasps and groans at the manhandling, some part of her attempting to push me off. It’s a poor attempt, as her mouth collides with mine, because I can feel that need in her as much as she can feel mine.
She’s lifted and carried to the dark depths of the barn, doors slammed behind me to keep anyone out that might venture in. Once more. Once more and then she can have all those fucking truths she’s after without anything softening the blow of them. But before that, before the pain, I’m having the thing I want again.
Everything becomes desperate, as her back hits another wooden wall. My hands, my dick, her mouth as we fall headlong into the very thing I should be denying again. I tug at her sweatpants, pulling them out of the damn way, and then loosen my belt and drive in the second I can. She grunts at the impact, her nails digging into my shoulders and pushing the jacket from them. Sweat soaks us both within minutes, our cheeks sliding over one another's in our frenzy. Hard and fast. Angry and frantic. And those goddamn lips keep licking at me, tempting me, showing me things in a future I don’t have.
I lift her hips and rip the sweatpants off her, pushing the sweater up to get to skin that isn’t available to me. Everything’s so torrid about her, so fucking intriguing and necessary for me. She moans again and reaches for my head, holding tightly to my hair and directing it to the taut nipples heaving under her rapid breaths.
“More,” she groans.
More.
It fuels me forward with every inch of pent up aggression I’ve got. My clothes get abandoned, the shirt pulled over my head and the jeans shrugged lower, and she gets pushed and tugged into any fucking position I can think about. Anything, as long as I’m inside her and feeling her around me – on me. It’s fraught, almost damn well panic driven as if I might not get another chance at it. Soft skin, harsh nails dragging on me. That fucking smile of hers that tells me she’ll take everything I’ve got and still tell me it isn’t enough to break her.
The groans and grunts intoxicate the air around us making this place, for once in its existence, seem real to me. I can feel it like I feel her. Goading, pushing, but now guiding, too. My lips soften at the thought, hips slowing rather than punishing her for daring to intrude on a life that was barren yet balanced without her.
She stiffens and moans again just as I bring her face to look at mine, her hands clinging on as an orgasm chases through her. Eyes like slits, venomous and passion filled as she stares into me without apology. Everything about that beauty floors me.
“Gray,” she murmurs, as I feel her vibrating around me. “Gray.”
The sound of that, the sense of hunger and reality it brings, makes the cum race through me until it’s burrowing home and finding some fucking solace that doesn’t belong to me in the slightest. It’s a picture in time. A moment that can’t be denied nor fucking forgotten.
My head drops, forehead leaning on hers, and I let the ricochets of coming ease down across us both. There’s nothing else for a while. Just us, breaths, this barn, the smell of fucking and the sound of the horses moving gently around us. If I could find a more perfect space of time, I wouldn’t try. It’s everything to me. Real, but for the land we’re on, and, for these minutes, truthful.
Love hits me like I never thought it would. Need, lust, care and a passion so strong for someone that I can’t even tolerate my own truths any longer. I pull out of her and buckle my belt again, reaching for my shirt rather than be inside her for a second longer without the truth being out there in the air so she knows it.
She moves slowly, lethargically, as she pulls herself together again. Fucking sweatpants. She shouldn’t ever be in those again. I glare at them and her, annoyed by their lacklustre presence on her skin and struggling with what I’ve got to get out of my mouth.
Fuck it. Truth.
“The women, Hannah. All of them. I did that to them. Still am doing.” She looks up at me, every part of the beauty I’ve just witnessed now marred with confusion. “All me. I screwed around in their minds. That’s what I do. It’s who I am out here in the real world.”
Her body stops moving and her eyes widen, mouth poised as if something is about to come hurtling out of it. Nothing does, as true reality begins to settle in for once. “You want honesty, there’s some of it. Trials. I told you. I’m good at researching to get to my goal. Whatever the cost.”
She blinks, as if maybe this truth will disappear if she does. It won’t. I am nothing more than a chemist, a drug dealer as she once said. And worse, I’m the creator of the drugs, the one who ran the trials to begin with not caring for the affect it might leave on my test cases. “How do you think I made all those combinations of pills work in the first place? It was a by-product of something else, but that connection you felt was a chemical reaction produced by my hand to find answers I need.”
I swallow the temptation to tell her it is more than that with her, and I also hold back from going down roads that might make her culpable in something that is not her load to bear. I can’t do that, no matter how much I might want the possibility it would provide. She wants truths. Reasons why this can’t go further than it has. I’ll give her the most basic bones of
them, not allowing the sentiment involved to cloud her judgement.
My hands rough my hair in frustration, as I watch tears spring into her eyes. Much as they might anger me, aggravate and even cut shreds from me down in corners I thought lost and forgotten, anything but them now would be a lie.
And neither of us like those.
I sigh and lean back on a stall door, reaching for my pack of cigarettes and nodding at the sight of those tears. They’re the most real thing about this whole damn situation, because pushing me was only ever coming to this result. And now I’m too weak for her to avoid them.
There is only one more truth she needs to understand, and if she doesn’t ask to leave before we get back to the house, these won’t be the last tears she cries tonight either.
Chapter 14
Hannah
T he slow realisation of what this has been, of what those women are, hits me like a wrecking ball. I don’t know what I thought. That they were just mad maybe, but I didn’t … I don’t …
My back bumps into something, making me jump slightly. I can’t think straight, can’t understand what’s happening around me. My fingers start digging into my arms, thrumming a rhythm of some sort to try and find balance or cadence. Nothing works. I’m alone. No thuds like a moment ago. No taps. Just silence and his brooding features, so cold and desolate regardless of the heat I’ve just felt from him.
I turn and run, unable to think of anything to counter that truth, and sprint aimlessly through the grounds. I don’t even know where I’m running to, but all those women? All of them twisted up and strange shells of normality that have become odd and near deranged. He did that?
The thought has me running wildly, eyes searching for somewhere I can hide, think, or perhaps make a plan. What plan? What plan is there for this? I’ve been used.
Treated like a test case.
Analysed.
Dipping under a fence, I desperately pull more energy into me, and keep running across open fields. Maybe I should go back to that other place, let them treat me like I’m insane. I mean, I could be. Maybe I am. All the taps and thuds aren’t real, are they? They’re in my head, nothing more than that. He said as much. Not real.
My feet pound on, chasing down track after track, as my body cuts through tall grasses that we rode through a short while ago. And why that? Why go riding as if we’re something we’re not and then feel that softness from him again? I skid to a halt, head whipping back and forth for direction. It’s dark now, nothing but the lights of his house behind me to lead me there, or the dim lights across to the right to take me back to the madhouse and the gates.
“Hannah!”
Gray.
My eyes narrow, heart racing violently at the sense of calm my name out of his mouth causes in me. No. He’s not mine, not my home either, regardless of his come inside me. It’s like that woman said. He’s not anyone’s. Not theirs, not mine. I need to get back to the city, to the apartment so I can pack and find somewhere new to live. A car? I need one of those.
Spinning on the spot, I launch back in the direction of the house, hoping, beyond all hope, that maybe Jackson is here and he might drive me, or that maybe I can hotwire something. Not that I know how, but I’ll try if it means getting the hell away from this place. How could he do that to those women? And did he sleep with them all? Hold them and pretend it was something it wasn’t?
My head shakes at the thought, disgust settling in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t real. Never was. And he told me. He told me over and over again that it didn’t mean anything. That the two of us meant nothing other than what we were at Malachi’s.
“Hello.”
My feet skid to another abrupt halt, body turning to see who that was. There’s no one that I can see, but the grass is moving, as if something's coming in from the left. Monsters. I check left and right, up and down, searching the low, dark grounds. “Are you lost?”
I back up, trying to get out of the grass and into a small slither of light bouncing off the stoned driveway. There’s a form there before I make it, a head tilted at me as if I’m a mystery to be solved and a ball tucked under his arm.
“Erm. Hi.”
“Did you get lost?”
I inch forward cautiously, unsure how real this is and if I’m seeing things or not. He’s only a child. Ten years old maybe. Blonde hair. A healthy dose of cynicism in his eyes for someone his age. “Yes. Kind of. I was hoping that maybe Jackson could take me home.”
He kicks the dust and puts his hands in his pockets, scrutiny levelling his stare at me. “How do you know Jackson?”
“He’s a friend.”
Why is there a child out here all alone?
He shuffles a little and nods towards the house, walking alongside the fence near me. “Okay. I’ll lead you back.”
Walking silently, I watch him as he bounces a ball at his feet. It’s a sad vison. As sad as the look on his face that seems permanently etched in. After a while I begin to understand the feeling well, falling into my own sense of depression and confusion again. “Do you live here?” I ask, as I dip under the fence to get onto the road way with him.
“Yeah.”
“Does your mom work here?”
“Not really.”
I continue following him, part trying to work out why he’s here if his mother’s not and part not caring. Maybe his dad does. Who knows? Not my business anyway. And my mind’s too busy wandering to all kinds of things about the last few weeks of my life. If it is weeks. Could be months. Thoughts of Gray’s words sting all the more, as I walk. They bleed through me until questions start building into wild fantasies of what the hell this whole thing has been. I’m not insane. I’m not. I know that. Things are clearer now than they were at Malachi’s, but that doesn’t negate the things he said to me or the actuality of what he did to those women so millionaires could get high and enjoy fucking in some new realm of hedonism.
I look at these sneakers on my feet and the baggy sweats I’m wearing, trying to find realities that aren’t this one I’m now in. There isn’t any. I got one of my truths.
It wasn’t pleasant to hear.
My eyes narrow at the thought. One of my truths. One. How many more? I don’t know him, don’t know who this man is that I’ve been spending time with, enjoying, chasing. Irritation and some kind of self-loathing start bedding in, making me question all the things I’ve felt, been part of, and endured under him, as I listen to the footsteps of the boy shuffling along. The ball bounces again and again - thud, thud, thud. Thud, thud, thud – and a new realisation begins entering my mind. One I’ve never even contemplated.
“Charlie, go up to the house.”
My head looks up sharply, eyes peering at Gray’s sudden proximity. He’s off to the right, hands on his hips and half panting as if he’s been running to chase me down. The boy nods solemnly and starts walking again, only briefly glancing back at me before he’s disappeared into the darkness.
“Who’s that?” I snap.
“I’ve just said his name.”
“Why is he here?”
No response. Just a brooding temper that seems to be building and a slight look of apprehension about something. Maybe he thinks I’m about to report him to the authorities for being a … I frown, searching my mind for words that make sense. I don’t even know what the word is for abusing women to make drugs that make sex better. Either way, he should be nervous about that. I might. When I get away from here.
But that’s not what my question was about.
I stare at the boy disappearing, my heart racing with possibilities that I don’t want to even contemplate, let alone accept, because I never even asked him. Never thought, for one second, that he might have a family somewhere.
Giving him a wide birth, I scamper around the hedges and start moving in the direction Charlie was going in. I’ll just get back there and find Jackson, maybe then I can get the hell away from all this and find normality again. Every step hurts, though. Exe
rtion, exhaustion, but mainly just pain. Heartache even. I can feel it inside me, burning and sore, trying to find the man it thought it knew. Trying to find thuds that mean something again. And I can hear him, almost hear his breaths as if they’re still hovering over me, his lips less than a whisper away from mine.
Not real.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he calls.
“Home,” mumbles out of me. Not that I understand where that is. Maybe I thought it was him for a while, wanted that. It isn’t. I’m nothing more than a test case. “Away from here.”
He chuckles a little, reminding me of laughs that meant something, to me at least, and lips that kissed me. “How exactly are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t know you anymore and I want to leave.”
He sighs at that and closes the distance down between us, as if the things he said don’t mean anything to me and he can somehow magic them away. His hand catches my arm, spinning me to him. I snatch it away from him, for the first time since we met uncomfortable with the touch. Those things he said do matter. They prove all this to be the lie I was trying to deny, and my feet walking backwards away from him prove it too.
For once, for the only time since I’ve known him actually, he looks surprised. A little lost even. His hands go to his pockets, the scowl he’s usually so good at wearing faltering under my gaze.
“If it makes it easier to tolerate, I didn’t sleep with any of them.”
“You didn’t sleep with me.”
He puffs out a breath, a brow arched at me in irritation. “I meant, I didn’t fuck any of them.”
Well, that’s much better then.
“What do you want for that, Gray, a medal for chivalry?”
“Stop being antagonistic. You wanted the truth. I told you.”
“And what, suddenly everything’s alright? You,” my shaking finger points at him, and then back in the direction of the dim lights over there on the other side of these fields. “You played in their minds. Turned some of them insane, Gray.”
A Sorrow of Truths Page 10