by Riley Ashby
“I can feel you inside me,” I whispered, and he rushed to put his hand over mine. His fingers wound through mine as I started to move.
I couldn’t hold still. I wanted to feel him move, twitch inside me. I wanted to drag myself along his length and feel the full strength of it. His hand on my hip held me steady. He moved with me, slowly at first, and then faster as we became more comfortable. Our breathing rose and fell in tandem, mine catching in my throat as I pulled his hand on my stomach down to where we joined. He reached out and pressed on my clit, hesitating at first, then firmer. I let my hand fall onto his chest as he began to move his thumb along with his hips, driving pleasure through my body from every angle.
“Vail,” he gasped, “you feel so good.”
I grabbed his hand from my hip, not thinking about what I was doing, and brought it to my chest. He jerked away, but I held.
“Please touch me,” I begged. I was dying for it. “It feels so good.”
He didn’t move for some time, his chest rising and falling beneath my hand. His heart fluttered against my palm, and I pushed my breast into his hand even harder. Slowly, tentatively, he started moving. His hips bucked with mine, his thumb stroked my clit, and his hand wrapped around my breast as we moved together once more. My head fell back as I made myself aware of every place that we touched, every ridge of his fingertips pressing into my skin, and when I came, it was like it was the first time.
Every inch of me burned with electricity—from my spine to the tips of my fingers. I couldn’t have halted the cry that flew from my lips even if I wanted to, and I fell a little deeper when his voice mixed with mine, and he moved inside me with his own release. His hand stayed loose on my breast and my hip, not holding me too tight. Even in the throes of his orgasm, he was attentive to my needs, putting me first and making me safe.
When I fell on the bed next to him, he rolled to face me. His hand went to my face, pushing back the strands of hair and tracing over my lips and the tip of my nose before he finally leaned forward to kiss me.
“I love you,” I mouthed to him.
“I love you too,” he said out loud.
No matter what happened, we would always have that.
We spent two more days in the hotel while the final evidence was presented to the jury. I had no desire to hear or see any other part of the process, not that I was permitted to anyway. Ellery went back a few times, simply to be at the courthouse in case anything happened, but my other three companions stayed nearby. Castel never left my side, but on the second day, I convinced him I needed to be alone. He took me out to the hotel’s courtyard, a small oasis in the middle of this busy city.
“I’ll be through those doors,” he said, indicating the ones we’d come through. I nodded and kissed his cheek.
I sat in the sun, unheeding of the heat and humidity, and oblivious to the car horns and shouts from the street that dared to invade this sacred space. A sparrow landed a couple of feet from me, looking hopefully for food crumbs. I smiled indulgently as I tossed a few bites of my croissant near my feet. He hopped forward, chirping hopefully, before seizing a large crumb and flitting away.
I took a deep breath. This would be the hardest part.
“I release you.” I kept my voice low, not wanting anyone lurking to overhear.
“You don’t deserve forgiveness, even if doing so would bring me peace. I’m not sure I believe that it would. But I refuse to waste another moment of my life on you. You deserve no more of my time, no more of my headspace, and no more pieces of my soul. I release you to the universe and let it do with you as it will. You reap what you sow. And your harvest is coming.”
The door opened, and I heard footsteps approach. I turned to see Sophie, Castel a few feet behind her.
“They’ve reached a decision,” she said.
I looked back at the sky and nodded. “Then let’s go.”
*
The five of us were silent in the busy courtroom as the reporters who had gathered outside the door spoke in hushed tones. Someone had gotten a hold of my story and was presenting it as a gross miscarriage of justice. I hoped that after today, there would be no more reason for them to follow me around. I had no need to speak about it, and I had uttered my last words on the subject. It was out of my hands now. It always had been.
We stood as the jury foreman entered the room, then my mouth turning to ash as a church as the jury filed to their seats. There was no preamble and no indictment. Only three jury members had voted there was enough evidence to indict. As the decision was read, one of the jurors caught my eye. I nodded at her, and she gave me a tight smile.
My hands were hurting, and I looked down to see Castel clutching them both. His lips moved, but no sound came out. I blinked several times, and sound re-entered my world.
“Vail? Are you there?”
I put a smile on my face. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Are you all right?”
I pushed up on my toes and kissed him lightly. Despite the humidity, a spark flared between our lips when they met. “Never better.”
*
We exited as a group, for once not in a hurry to rush back to the hotel. I thought about the New York landmarks I had never seen, and the possibilities open to me now that I was free of this pain and the uncertainty of despair. But our heads turned in unison as the doors swung open behind us and Chase Reilly walked out into the open air, surrounded by officers and his lawyers, and reporters rushed up the steps to speak with him.
“Why is he here?” I asked as he walked down the middle of the courthouse steps. I thought they usually led prisoners out a side or back door to keep them away from prying eyes. I waited for the panic to overtake me, for the cold sweat to break out on my skin, but I felt nothing. He was nothing.
“They must have filed some sort of complaint to get him in the courthouse today,” Ellery said, his arm wrapping around Sophie’s waist and tugging her closer. Castel did the same to me. “They had to have known you were here.” He whirled on Tori. “How did you not know he was going to be here? You were in charge of keeping track of him.”
She was already on her phone, scrolling through her contacts and emails. “They got him released this morning. They must have paid someone to keep this quiet because they knew we’d be watching.”
The reporters were shoving microphones in his face, but the man had eyes only for one person. He narrowed his eyes at me, but I looked away without fear. He couldn’t hurt me anymore. I was done with him.
“Let’s go,” Castel said. “We don’t need to hear this.”
I nodded. I never needed to listen to anything this asshole said ever again.
As we resumed our trek down the stairs toward the street, I saw out of the corner of my eye a small brown-haired girl. I didn’t know her, but I recognized her look immediately. I saw the hatred in her eyes as she looked up at Chase and noted the way he smirked at her when she caught his eye.
She was one of his girls.
I paused halfway down the steps on a landing where reporters waited to shove microphones at Chase. They were so excited to speak to him, the perpetrator, that they didn’t even care about me. They didn’t care about the girl standing among them with tears on her face. They didn’t notice as she reached into her bag.
I didn’t hear the gunshot at first. It was Castel who pulled me to the ground, slamming me against the concrete before I knew I was falling. My ears rang. The world vibrated before my eyes. Feet darted every which way in front of my face, but there were no more gunshots. There was only screaming.
I was back on my feet being dragged away from the fray, but he didn’t turn me quickly enough, and I saw the body on the ground. I braced myself for a figure clad in blue stripes, hands and ankles bound in manacles, but it was high heels I saw splayed unnaturally across the ground. Slender ankles still not healed from the abuse she had suffered. She hadn’t been eating, even all these weeks later. She had never gotten back her strength.
&nbs
p; Sophie was crying, trying to get across the fray to the girl, but Ellery held her back. He pressed her face into his chest, staring at the body on the ground in grim horror. Castel’s hands moved from my waist to my face, trying to turn me away.
“Don’t look,” he begged me.
“She shot herself,” I said stupidly, my vision suddenly filling with his green instead of all that red on the ground. Camera flashes danced in my eyes, partially blinding me. I forced myself to blink. How do you stop bleeding from a head wound? Have the victim lie down. Apply pressure. Watch for signs of shock.
Castel didn’t say anything as he nodded once curtly. I closed my eyes and put my hands around his wrists, anchoring myself around him.
“I’m a nurse. I should help her.”
“It’s too late, baby.”
Footsteps approached us, the sure click of Ellery’s shoes and hesitant shuffling from Sophie. She had her back to the scene.
“We need to get them out of here,” he growled. I couldn’t agree more.
We were dragged the wrong way, back into the courthouse, as reporters flowed down the steps like a tide trying to get to the scene. I heard police sirens and could see the red and blue lights glinting off the building. I closed my eyes and trusted Castel to lead my steps.
I only heard one thing as the doors swung shut behind us, and it startled me so much I turned my head to catch a last glimpse of the scene as we closed ourselves inside the air-conditioned hall. Civilians gathered around the girl, crying and shouting. There were a million voices, the click of camera shutters, but I heard someone call above all the others.
“She’s still breathing!”
I tore away from Castel and sprinted back outside and down the steps, barely noticing that it was Chase I shoved out of the way as I dropped to my knees beside the injured girl. The blood on the ground came from her right hand, which lay in a mangled mess. The gun was scattered in pieces around us.
“Someone, get a tourniquet,” I shouted, already taking charge of the situation. “Who called an ambulance?”
“I did!” a voice yelled, and I could already hear that siren in the distance.
Someone pressed a belt into my hands that I immediately secured around the girl’s upper arm.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, gently pushing her hair back from her face.
“Josie,” she whispered, looking around wildly. “Is he here?”
I looked over my shoulder to see Chase being led back into the building. Castel was halfway down the steps to me but had stopped to hold Tori back from launching herself at him. “He’s gone. He’s never going to hurt us again.”
I expected to see relief, but all I saw was the same incomprehensible sadness I had experienced for so long. What had happened to this girl? Did she have no family or friends to take care of her? Or had the trauma simply been too much for her to overcome?
“Everything will be okay, Josie.”
She shook her head. “You can’t know that.”
I pressed my forehead against hers as Castel finally fell to the ground next to us, pulling Josie into his arms and rushing her down the stairs to meet the ambulance. A bystander presented a bloody bundle of tissues that contained a finger.
“Things will get better,” I promised her as I clutched her good hand. “You won’t have to be alone anymore. Do you understand?”
If she heard me, she didn’t respond. The ambulance doors closed as it took off down the street.
I had planned for us to be on a plane back to LA that night, but Vail insisted on going to the hospital. She dozed against my shoulder in the waiting room while Tori fetched food from the cafeteria. We ate in silence next to each other while I let Vail sleep, waiting for news from the surgeon about Josie’s prognosis.
“You put Vail in danger today. I couldn’t get to her because I had to hold you back from assaulting someone.”
I thought she would double down on her decision to go after Chase, but she hung her head as she chewed. “I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stand to see him there looking so smug while the two of them continued to suffer. I thought if I could make him feel a fraction of what they felt, it would be worth it.”
I hesitated, then leaned over and patted her knee awkwardly. She jumped, then forced out a tight smile.
“Thank you for sticking up for them.”
She nodded and went back to her sandwich. Nothing more needed to be said. But when Vail woke up twenty minutes later, she gazed wide-eyed at us chatting and laughing like old friends.
*
The surgeons reattached Josie’s missing finger, but her mobility was still to be determined. Several of the tendons in her palm had been damaged as well, and the doctors couldn’t account for her despondent nature. The attempted suicide was not a cry for help. She had intended to die.
The hospital wanted to keep her on a psychiatric hold for seventy-two hours to ensure she got evaluated for the help she needed. Ellery settled her bill and arranged for her to be flown to LA the moment she was safe to fly. We would leave the next day, as soon as she was stable, but Archer would stay here with Josie for a few weeks and then fly out with her.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with the woman. She seemed nervous around me, and I tried to respect her space. But she knew Sophie, and she and Vail had more in common than anyone ever should. The three of them spent long hours together while Ellery, Tori, and I worked from the waiting room, unable to leave them alone for even a few hours.
Vail and I were on a plane back to the West Coast the night they released Josie from the ICU.
“She’s made it this far,” Vail said, staring out the window at the fluffy white clouds that floated completely unaware of the turmoil we had experienced earlier in the day. “I believe she can make it a little bit further.”
I dipped my head to her shoulder, kissing her lightly. “You’re living proof of that.”
When she smiled at me, she still looked a little sad.
It was a strange sensation to be back at the house after the visit. No more threat of legal action hung over our heads. Her secret was out there, and she was all the stronger for us knowing it. She’d been freed from the guilt and shame of her desperate act. We took full advantage of the new situation by falling immediately into a deep sleep on the couch in the cottage’s main room with a cooking show on the TV playing a little too loudly. When we woke up, she made breakfast while I gathered my dirty clothes.
“I have to run back to the house today for laundry.” I didn’t like the staff doing it for me if I could help it.
She bit her lip, watching me shove my things into the small bag. She looked nervous.
“I don’t think this is working.”
I looked at her dumbfounded. What was she saying? After all we’d been through, all we’d experienced together, she was going to do this to me now?
“No,” I said, catching her hands and shaking my head. “You’re not doing this to me.”
“Cas,” she started, but I didn’t hear.
“This is not okay. We’re not giving up now. We have spent too long letting every little thing—and every big thing too—get in the way of us. I don’t know what’s come over you, but we’re going to work this out. Do you understand?”
Impossibly, she was smiling. I didn’t understand it at all. Was this a joke to her?
“I meant that,” she said, nodding toward the small room where I kept my things. A small bag of clothes that I took back and forth to the main house to wash. The cot that was barely slept on but made up for me all the same.
“Oh.” Somehow, this was almost worse. “You want me to go back to the house?”
She rolled her eyes. She still looked gorgeous doing that. “No, you dummy. I want you to move upstairs. Into the bedroom.” She blushed, and she looked so damn adorable I had to hold myself back from kissing her cheeks. “I know it’s kind of small, but we can get a bigger wardrobe, and maybe a bed too if we need it.”
She bit her li
p as I stared at her with my jaw open.
“I know it seems fast, but I’m so tired of waiting. We’ve both been so dense for so long, it just seems like—”
She laughed as I grabbed her around the waist, and she wrapped her legs around my hips as I lifted her off the ground in a kiss.
“Of course I’ll move in with you, sweetheart. I want to wake up every morning with your breath on my neck. I want to kiss your eyelids open after holding you through the night, every night. I don’t want to wait another second for our lives to start together after we’ve had so much time stolen from us.”
She beamed as I set her on the counter. I couldn’t stop smiling. “I wasn’t lying, Vail. You’re the most amazing person I know. And I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together.” I grabbed her left hand, tapping her third finger. “And keep this hand free.”
She seized my fingers and kissed them. “I love you so much,” she whispered. “I always have.”
“I know, baby.” I picked her up again, walking toward the stairs. “Let me show you how much I know.”
She didn’t tie my hands. I let her guide me, never reaching where I wasn’t wanted. It took every ounce of strength I had not to squeeze her full breasts when she placed my hands upon them. But when we came together, we saw stars.
Epilogue
I crashed into the water with a splash, sending water far over the edge of the pool. Rhiannon, our goddaughter, was laughing and clapping her hands as I surfaced, and even Ellery had a smile on his face as he wiped the water out of his eyes. I swam over to my goddaughter and lifted her out of her floating ring, spinning around with her in the water as she continued to giggle.
“Looks like someone’s feeling better,” I said, glancing over at where Sophie was sipping a drink at the edge of the pool. She nodded.
“That cold didn’t last too long, thankfully. Sick babies are the absolute worst.”