by Ella James
“Thanks. And have fun out.”
“Will do.”
As I turn, I realize I didn’t ask their names. And strangely, I don’t stop her. I don’t need to know right now. Not right before it’s time for bed. I just want to snuggle up with Bear and have a dreamless night.
TWENTY ONE
NICCOLO
January 1, 2012
1:28 a.m.
My motherfucking father: popular as all fuck politician, shithead of a person. Everyone in Breck knows it. I can’t imagine how Kim bears it. I’d have left him years ago. When I get back—I’ll have to go home to Kim before returning next door to Jamie—I’m going to make another bid for that. I could move her out to California. No one would know her there. I think she could really benefit from that. It’s got a lot of sun, like here, and no Dad.
Fucking perfect.
When I find that fuck, I’m going to haul him home. And then, behind closed doors, I’m going to punch him in his fucking teeth. Kim’s friend Leah saw Dad at a coffee place in Fairplay with a woman who was not Kim. When she called John crying, he told me, but I asked him to handle it because I was enjoying Jamie so much. Also, I trust John not to throat-punch Dad. His temper’s not as hot as mine is.
So he went. And then he texted me when Jamie and I were settled in the theater and said he’d tracked Dad’s iPhone via Dad’s Apple login info, and Dad and the woman were at what he thought was a ranch near Blue River. He said he needed to get back and check on one of his buddies, and he wasn’t sure what he should do, anyway. Ring the doorbell?
So I told him we’d switch places.
Kim’s my stepmom, but she’s better to Casper and I than our own mom ever was. Rumor has it Dad cheated on her, but that’s not true. Mom cheated on Dad, and after that, I guess he has a trust problem or something, because he’s fucked around on Kim, the sweetest woman ever—she gave John her Nice Genes—from almost day one. It’s shameful. Dad should feel ashamed, but I’m not sure he does.
I’m about to ask him. If I can find this fucking place. If I can get out of Breckenridge. It’s snowing hard as hell.
GWENNA
December 31, 2015
“Barrett?”
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.
“Hey…” I rub his broad, bare back. He turns toward me. I wrap my arms around him. I woke up from my own dream, and I’m so glad I did.
“Hey baby. It’s okay. We’re here together.”
He’s shivering. “I dreamed about Breck.”
I rub his arms and back with my warm hands.
“He used to do this knock. This secret knock from his older brother’s frat. I heard it. It seemed so real, Piglet.” I take his hands. They’re shaking.
I ease him down in the bed with me. I kiss both hands. “You’re a good man, Barrett. Breck loved you. I know he did, because you are impossible not to love.”
His eyes squeeze shut. His mouth flattens. He looks pained. I wait for him to ask me some anguished question, I can almost feel it coming. But he pulls me very close, holding me tightly, so I can feel his chest shaking a little. And I can feel it still.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
As we drift off to sleep, I think I hear a knock at the window.
There’s no question about it. Something is off with Barrett. I’ve noticed him staring into space a dozen times since we landed in Denver, staring at me more than normal, looking troubled, with his dark brows notched and his pretty lips melded into that pensive line.
I don’t know what’s wrong, and I don’t want to ask, because after the information that he volunteered about his friend last night, I don’t want to pry. So I just try to stay near him, to hold his hand.
The strangest thing is, looking out for him is making me feel better. With his hand in mine, I feel less alone here. I smile at him; he smiles at me. There’s something comforting about loving on him.
We spend the last day of 2015 inside this bubble, taking fabric to a woman who works out of a little cottage north of town so she can sew Barrett a Zoro mask and alter a black blouse for me to wear with my red bandana; sitting beside each other in a small booth in a sandwich shop downtown, Barrett’s arm around my shoulder, even as he eats; touring a candy factory where he buys me salted caramel fudge and I buy him a massive chocolate bear; buying cowboy boots and black jeans; picking up the rest of our costumes; and finally heading back to the Madisons’ place just in time for pre-party hors d’oeuvres. I’m surprised to find Jamie eating goat cheese dip and crackers with her parents, no Nic in sight.
She’s already wearing her pink contact lenses.
“Hey there, alien.”
She studies the bags Bear and I are holding. “Zoro and…”
“His sidekick.”
“A nameless sidekick?”
I shrug. “I thought of going as his horse.”
Mr. Madison gets a chuckle out of that.
“So when are you all going next door?” Jamie’s mom asks.
“I’ll probably go soon,” Jamie tells her. “Help set up.”
“We might go soon, too.”
After a few minutes of small talk, the three of us escape upstairs. Jamie tries to chat us up, but Barrett is clearly unenthused. I can tell he’s trying, which makes it all the more obvious. Jamie gives us both an understanding smile. “I’m going to put on my alien gear! See you next door in a bit?”
I nod.
While Barrett showers, I sit on the bed and look out at the window he was staring through when I woke up last night. I get up and go over to it, staring down at the snow. It looks like…footprints. In between the bushes. As I tip my forehead toward the glass and squint, I hear the door creak.
I turn, then jump as Batman appears in the doorway. “Oh my God! Nic?”
He nods, removing his mask.
“Wow, you’re…very Batman-like. You scared me.”
“Looking out the window?” he asks.
“Yeah. I thought I saw some footprints.”
He comes over to stand beside me. “Mine.”
“What?”
He nods. “Jamie was in this room last year, remember?”
“Oh yeah. I guess she was. Were you trying to signal her or something?”
He smiles slightly. “Yeah. Hope I didn’t wake you guys up.”
“No,” I lie. “Barrett hasn’t been sleeping very well,” I babble. “Probably the altitude or something.”
“Maybe. I can always feel it when I come back up here.”
He taps the window with his knuckles, then turns toward the door. “I guess my alien’s not in here.”
“Nope. You try her parents’ bedroom?”
He snorts. “Pass.”
“Yesterday she said she might make her eyebrows darker with one of her mom’s pencils.”
“Ahh.” He lifts his brows, and something about the moment makes my stomach rearrange itself.
Even after he leaves, I feel weird. Kind of spacey, like I might dissociate at any moment. That’s normal, I tell myself. This night is always going to be weird. We’ll go next door, show face at the party, and then go to the site of the accident.
I had thought about visiting the beer bar, too, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I don’t have to find out anything new on this trip. Maybe I should just try to move on. With Barrett, I feel like it might finally be possible.
When he comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, I lead him over to the bed and unwrap him. I take his thick cock in my hands and start to stroke it, while he moans and tweaks my nipples.
“Gwenna…”
“I need you,” I whisper, squeezing him. “In my mouth…or pussy?”
“Let me eat this pussy. Then…” He lays me on the bed, never finishing his thought as he peels my pants and panties down and gently spreads me… Tastes me with the tip of his tongue.
I grip his arms, moaning as his tongue trails up my slit, lapping gently at my throbbing
clit.
“Lay down so I can suck your dick.” I pull on him, and Barrett does as I ask.
I get him in my throat, playing with his balls as he makes my body tremble from the pleasure of his tongue. I start to ride his face, taking his cock deeper with every moan. I feel him harden…tighten…swelling, and he lifts his hips. He moans against my pussy.
I can feel his hips shake as he tries to keep from thrusting at me.
I moan, and he trembles. I can taste him. His tongue circles my clit. I focus on his balls, so taut and heavy in my hands. I stroke them, stroke the base of his cock. Suck him deeper, work him with my tongue, and Barrett touches me just right, and I explode.
He holds out another second or two, and then he’s pulling out. I grab his hips, so I can swallow. We end up, sometime later, wrapped up in each other as the light outside the window turns a fuzzy, indigo blue.
“Bear?” I press a kiss against his nape.
“Mmm.”
I’m spooning him, but he turns around, onto his back, so he can get an arm around me.
“Scoot back over,” I scold. “Let me hold you. It makes me feel good,” I add softly.
He does, and I wrap myself around him.
“Do you want to skip tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“The party.” I play with his now-short hair.
“Do you want to?” He reaches behind himself, rubbing his palm over my hip.
“I don’t care. I’d probably vote ‘go,’ for Jamie. But I doubt she cares.”
“Then let’s go.”
He turns over on his stomach and pushes up on his arms, so he can look at me. His eyes are surprisingly soft.
“Do you want to talk? You haven’t...much.”
“About the accident?”
He nods.
I shake my head. “Not now. Maybe later tonight. I could tell you the whole story.”
He smiles sadly. “Okay, Pig.”
TWENTY TWO
BARRETT
December 31, 2015
The gun is at the bottom of my duffle bag. If you pack them right, the airport scanners never know.
One of those job perks they can’t take away…
I didn’t want to bring the gun.
I hadn’t planned to.
Then Blue called.
Things have changed.
I take the gun out of the bag and unwrap it. Then I don my black costume. I say a silent prayer before I leave the bathroom, .38 strapped to the inside of my boot.
GWENNA
January 1, 2012
1:42 a.m.
“Oh my God, you’re Jessica! From End of Day!”
The girl’s brown eyes are huge in her freckled face. Her jaw drops in stunned elation, and I nod, casting my eyes down for just long enough to steel myself. I’ve had some practice with this sort of thing since EoD came out. It’s an indie film, and like a lot of good indies, it’s developed a bit of a cult following.
By the time I glance back up, the girl has whirled around, the knot of her work apron riding up her mid-back, revealing a dancing Grateful Dead bear tattoo.
As I set my items on the Breckenridge General Store’s counter, she cups her hands around her mouth and bellows, “Come here, Silas! Jessica from End of Day is here, and she’s buying one of your dad’s gardenias!”
I hear the smack of shoes on the cement floor, then a high school guy steps out from between two aisles. He’s tall, with white-blond Justin Bieber hair. He sticks his hands in his pockets as my eyes roll up and down him, keeping his gaze on his sneakers, his face cool, while the brown-eyed, brunette cashier cuts her eyes at him. When he comes to a stop beside the nearest magazine display and doesn’t fall down at my feet, she gives him an incredulous look. “Seriously, Silas? You’re the biggest fan. Can you believe she’s fucking here?”
Never meeting my eyes, he gives her a sideways smile and murmurs, “No.”
I’m betting this boy has my Abercrombie pool party stuff, or my Burberry nothing-under-the-jacket campaign bookmarked in his spank bank. Which means it’s time to change the subject before we all end up embarrassed.
“Your dad grows the gardenias you guys sell?” I ask him, hoping to put everyone at ease, as well as steer the subject away from the movie. I’m a singer, not an actress—although I am proud of the movie.
The guy nods and finally, he looks me in the eyes.
“It’s a kind of insanity,” he says, revealing a retainer than makes his voice sound—well, like he’s got something in his mouth. “They won’t survive for long in someone’s yard. So they’re just house plants up here.”
I hover a fingertip over one of the satiny white leaves, mostly so I can break the stare he’s aiming at me like a laser beam.
“It’s probably insanity to buy one when it’s snowing this hard. I’m not even staying at my own place.” I smile at them before I realize my publicist would smack my mouth for giving details.
“Jessica,” the girl squeals, jumping up and down.
I tug Mr. Madison’s big black jacket down around my ankles before reaching in his huge pocket to grab my wallet out.
“That’s…not me,” I murmur, joking.
“God, she’s famous,” the girl says to the boy, scanning my four-roll pack of toilet paper. I pass her the plant.
“You’re a model too,” the boys says, “right?”
I struggle to suppress a cringe. “Yep. But really I’m a singer.”
“A singer?” the girl says.
I nod. “I have a record deal. My sound is somewhere between teenage Taylor Swift and old-school country. With a kind of bluesy undertone. Singing is my true passion.”
“Damn,” the boy says as the girl takes my cash. “You’re multi-talented.”
Heat tingles on my cheeks. Clearly, I’m 12.
The girl starts belting out a Taylor Swift song I recognize while the boy shuffles his feet. Thank God, I’m out of there not long after.
I step outside onto the cement walkway and am pummeled by fat snowflakes.
“Christ…”
I cross myself for taking the Lord’s name in vain—a habit I picked up from Elvie—then cast my eyes to my boots and shuffle carefully toward the SUV.
Which doesn’t crank.
Like, seriously. This thing will not crank.
“DAMMIT.”
Just my motherloving luck.
I set the gardenia in the passenger’s seat and try again a few times. Nothing.
“Ughh.”
I look at my phone, even though I know already it will have no more than one bar. This is Breckenridge. My service blows here. Probably everyone’s service blows here.
I could go inside, but Jamie got a new number recently, and I don’t know it. I’ve got Elvie’s memorized. And Mom and Dad’s. But how will they help if they don’t know Jamie’s new number either?
I let out a big sigh. Then I rip the pack of toilet paper open, stuff a roll in Mr. Madison’s huge pocket, and blink down at the gardenia in the passenger’s seat.
I think it will probably freeze or something if I leave it here all night. The Madisons—they may not care to come and get the car until tomorrow. Cars are nothing to them. Cheap. Almost like bicycles.
With the gardenia under one arm, tucked partway inside my long down coat, I point myself toward the Madisons’ place and start the trek back. I’m young and healthy. I’ve got snow shoes. There’s a full moon, too.
What could possibly go wrong?
GWENNA
December 31, 2015
The weirdness of this night is a double-edged sword. One the one hand, it’s weird. Not cool weird—awkward weird. And no one likes awkward weird. On the other hand, it’s so weird, the weirdness occupies my mind, so I’m not thinking much about It.
I’m thinking about Barrett. And wondering what’s up with him. Why he seems so miserable.
I’m trying not to be, but I’m getting kind of worried.
I know him so well now,
I can just feel it. As we dance; he’s a good dancer, but it rolls off him in waves. When our fingers brush as he hands me a glass of wine, his curl away from mine. When I sit on this little couch-like thing to take a break from dancing, he sits by me, and he sits so close. His arm around me is so heavy. And when I look up at his face, at his eyes, gray-blue orbs that peer down at me from the center of the ovals cut into his mask, they look depthless—almost pained.
At one point, as I elbow my way toward the bathroom—he’s behind me, our fingers intertwined—his hand feels so damp, so still and stiff, I whisper-hiss, “Do you feel bad?”
When he doesn’t look at me, I say his name.
“Hm?” His eyes find mine. They’re wide, slightly intense.
We’re in a long, quiet hallway now. I nudge him against the wall, then wrap myself around him. I lift our joined hands to my mouth and kiss him on the inside of his wrist. Soft, tender skin. I bite it, and his hooded eyes lose focus.
I lift my lips off his wrist, wrap my arms around his neck, and pull him down to kiss him. God, I need this. I just need to feel him right now.
His kisses feel as desperate as mine do. His mouth is hard and punishing, soft and silky, gentle, frantic. His fingers thread through my hair, tugging as our tongues and lips dance, making my scalp ache. His breath is warm and wine-sweet, puffing into my mouth on low groans. His beard is short. It stings me. I don’t care.
I rock myself against his thigh and rub him through his pants until he moans into my mouth. I nip along his upper lip, then capture it between my teeth and suck. I love it when he gets hard in my hand. I love to tease his head, to torture him through fabric.
Every time my fingers trace his bulge, he breathes a little harder. His mouth on mine is ruthless. Finally he grabs me by the elbow, pulling me toward the nearest door. He opens it and we behold a bedroom, pearly from the moonlight streaming through two windows. He tosses me over his shoulder, smacks my ass, and shuts the door.
“Gwen. I have to have you now.” His voice is hoarse, almost emotional. His body’s hard—as if we’re headed for a nameless fuck.