Love in the Dark

by 12 Book Boxed Set (epub)

  He is silent for a moment before speaking. “When I was little, I always had this image in my head, my happy place to use your term, where I’d go to when …”

  With his silence, I can feel his body tense up at some memory. I reach out and put a hand on his knee, drawing lazy lines with my fingernails. I know I shouldn’t, but “the fixer” in me prevails. “When what, Colton?” I can feel him shake his head back and forth. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Babe, it’s old news,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, effectively pushing me away before hopping abruptly off the rock. “I’m not the only kid who’s had a rough go of things.” Emotion clouds his voice as he walks a couple of feet away from me. I start to speak when he talks over me. “Don’t bother, Rylee.” He chuckles a self-deprecating laugh. “I’ve been picked apart and put back together by the best of them. A waste of my parents’ money if you ask me, seeing as none of them fixed or erased anything.” His next words are barely audible above the sound of the surf, and I’m not sure if he means for me to hear them anyway, but they bring a chill to my skin when he speaks. “I’m damaged goods.”

  I want to reach out to him. To tell him that a person who is damaged goods doesn’t help elderly women with chores and make neglected boys feel special by standing up for them. I want to tell him that he is worthy of love and a real relationship. To tell him that what happened as a child—whatever horrible, unimaginable thing it was— does not define who he is today or where he is going. But I say nothing. Instead, I trace the lines of his body with my eyes, wanting to reach out, but unsure how he’d take it.

  I am so focused on Colton, that I don’t see Baxter bound up in my periphery until he decides to shake his wet fur all over me. I screech out loud at the bite of the cold water hitting my skin. Colton whirls around to see what happened and lifts his head up to the sky laughing at me. A deep, sincere laughter that lights up his face and eases the tension in his shoulders.

  “Baxter!” I shout as Colton walks back to me, removing his sunglasses and hooking them onto his T-shirt’s neckline. I look up to him, a false pout on my lips. “I’m all wet now.”

  Colton presses his thighs between mine so he stands in front of me while I stay seated. The rock’s height brings us to almost eye level with each other. A slow, salacious grin spreads across his lips and he raises an eyebrow at me.

  “All wet, huh?” he asks as he places his hands on my hips and pulls me into him, his hips between the apex of my thighs. “I like it when you’re all wet, Ryles.”

  I swallow loudly, the clouded look in his eyes hinting at passion and desire and so much more. He leans forward, bringing his hands up to my shoulders, his thumbs rubbing back and forth at the hollow dip where my collarbones meet, before brushing a kiss on my lips. I bring my hands up to skim my fingernails up his chest and then around to the back of his neck and play in his hair before tugging his head forward, deepening the kiss. The low groan in the back of his throat excites me and ignites me, sending licks of white-hot pleasure to every nerve. Despite the barrage of sensation his lips evoke on mine, he keeps the kiss slow and soft. Soft sips, slow licks of tongue, slight changes in angle, and soft murmurs of sweet nothings that seep into my soul and wind around my heart. Colton backs away with a shaky sigh after placing a kiss on the tip of my nose.

  Oh my, the man sure knows how to kiss a woman senseless. If I was standing right now, I think I’d need someone to help me because he’s made my knees weak.

  He tilts my head up so that my eyes are forced to look at him. I feel shy under the intensity of his gaze. He just smiles softly at me and shakes his head as if he can’t believe something. Baxter nudges at him, jealous of the lack of attention, and Colton laughs, reaching his hand down to pet his head. “Okay, Bax, I don’t mean to neglect you!” He takes the ball out of Baxter’s mouth and turns around to chuck it down the beach.

  I hop down off the rock and watch Baxter take off, kicking up sand as he goes. “He’s fast!” I exclaim as I feel Colton’s hands slide around my waist, pulling me back into him.

  He wraps his arms around me, my back to his front, and he rests his chin on my shoulder. My body relaxes and yet perks up with awareness at the feel and warmth of his body pressed against mine. I close my eyes momentarily, drinking in the uncensored affection that Colton rarely displays.

  “Hmmm, you always smell so good.” He nuzzles my neck, and I can feel the vibration of his words against the sensitive skin beneath my ear where his lips press. “It’s scary how easily I can get lost in you.”

  I still at his words. As much as I want and need to hear these words, my mind chooses this time for insecurity and disbelief to rear its ugly head. Images flash through my head. Page upon page of Google images with Colton and his BBB. He is so smooth. So practiced. How many women has he uttered these words to?

  “What is it, Rylee?” What? How does he know? “I just felt your entire body tense up. What’s going on in that beautiful and intriguing head of yours?”

  I shake my head, feeling silly for my thoughts and yet afraid of the answers. When I try to pull away from him, his arms tighten around me. “It’s nothing, Colton.” I sigh.

  “Tell me.”

  I take a deep breath and steel myself to ask the two simple words swimming around in my head. “Why me?”

  “Why you what?” he asks, confusion in his voice as he releases his hold on me.

  Despite being let go, I take a step away and keep my back to Colton, lacking the courage to ask him to his face. “Why me, Colton? Why am I here?” I can hear him take a deep breath behind me. “Why not one of the score of women before me? There are so many others that are so much prettier, sexier, skinnier … why am I here and not one of them?”

  “For someone so sure of yourself, your question astonishes me.” His voice is closer than I had expected. We stand in silence and when I do not turn around to face him, he puts his hands on my arms and does it for me.

  “Look at me,” he commands, squeezing my biceps until I comply. He shakes his head at me, disbelief and, I think, a little bit of surprise etched in his features. “First of all, Rylee, you are an extremely beautiful, tremendously sensual woman. And that ass of yours,” he pauses, the guttural sound in the back of his throat is one of pure appreciation, “is something men fantasize about.” He snorts. “I could sit and admire you all day.”

  His eyes lock on mine and I can see the honesty in his eyes. A part of me wants to believe him. Wants to accept that I am enough for him. He moves his hands from my arms to the sides of my ribcage and then slowly runs them down to my hips and back up.

  “As for these, I have to admit, sweetheart, that I’ve dated mostly waifs in my years, but damn, Rylee, your curves are so incredibly sexy. They turn me on like you wouldn’t believe. I get hard just watching you walk in front of me.” He leans into me, his arousal pushing against me, and kisses me softly on my parted lips. He rests his forehead against mine, his fingers playing idly with the tie at my neck. “As to why they are no longer here?” he murmurs, the words fanning over my face before pulling back so that his green eyes burn into mine. “It’s simple. Our time was over.”

  I pull back from him, trying to wrap my head around that last part. “They just up and left?” I try to hide the desperation in my voice, as I suddenly need to know what I’m in for. “I mean, why was it over?”

  He looks at me momentarily before answering. “Some found others that could give them more, some caused too much drama for my liking, and some wanted the white picket fence and two point five kids,” he answers indifferently.

  “And–and I assume that you ended things with them then?” He nods cautiously, the cogs in his head turning as he tries to figure out why I want to know. “Did you love any of them?”

  “Jesus, Rylee!” he barks, running his hand through his hair, “What the fuck is this, fifty questions?” He walks a couple of feet away from me, exasperation emanating off him, but I’ve asked this much, I might as w
ell find out what I really want to know.

  I sit down in the sand, aware that Baxter is a ways down the beach, and hug my knees to my chest, twisting my ring around and around on my finger. “No, I need to know what I’m getting myself into.” Colton’s eyes snap up to mine, an indiscernible look on his face. “What I’m already into.” I sigh more to myself than him, but I know he hears because I see the muscle in his jaw tic at the words. “You told me that you sabotage anything good. I need to know if you loved any of them.”

  He steps next to me and runs a hand through his hair. I have to crane my head up to meet his eyes. “I’m not capable of love, Rylee,” he deadpans, his voice a haunted whisper, before staring out to sea and shoving his hands in his pockets. “I learned a long time ago that the more you want someone, the more you covet them, and need and love them … it doesn’t matter. In the end they’re going to leave you anyway.” He picks up a shell and tosses it. “Besides, someone can tell you they love you, but words can lie and actions can fake something that’s not.”

  A shudder runs through me. What a sad, horrible way to go through life. To always want, but to never have, because you think it will be taken away without notice. To be so hurt that you think it’s the words and actions that hurt rather than the person behind them. My heart is wrenched for the poor little boy who lived a life without unconditional love. It aches for the man before me. A man so full of passion and life and possibility but denying himself the one piece that can help make him whole.

  Oblivious to my line of thinking and my overwhelming pity for the lonely boy within him, Colton continues. “Did I think I might have loved any of them? I’m not sure, Rylee. I know how they wanted me to feel. How they wanted me to demonstrate and reciprocate, but I told you, I’m just not capable of it.” He shrugs his shoulders as if this is just a simple fact of life. He turns and looks at me, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “What about you, Rylee?” he asks playfully. “Have you ever been in love?”

  I look at him for a beat and then back out to the waves, searching for the memories that are there but slowly fading. A wistful smile plays on my lips as they come back to me. “Yes. I have.”

  “Baxter, come!” Colton yells before holding his hand out to help pull me up from my seat in the sand. “Let’s head back,” he says as he keeps my hand in his, and it’s not lost on me that he has not responded. We walk in silence for a while, and I can sense he wants to ask more but is unsure how.

  He sighs. “I have no right to even feel this way,” he says, running his hand through his hair, “seeing as how my past is so …” He drifts off without finishing when he meets my eyes. “Why does it bug me? Why does the thought of you with someone else drive me absolutely crazy?”

  A part of me likes the fact that it bugs him. “You surely can’t think that I’ve been waiting around my whole life to be your plaything, Ace.” I laugh, shrugging away the unease I feel about the next question I know he is going to ask. I rarely talk about what happened. I never speak of the after effects. Of the indescribable loss that can never be forgotten. Of the horrid, callous words his family said to me. Their accusations that still haunt me to this day.

  Despite the passage of time, I still feel that sharp pang of grief when talking about it. Time has dulled it some in the two years since the accident, but the images burned into my mind will never fade. The guilt still weighs so heavily on me at times that I can’t breathe or function. In the past it has prevented me from living again. Taking risks and putting myself out there. From taking a chance like the one I am taking with Colton. I try to hide the shiver that runs through me at the memories and prepare myself for how much I to want to reveal.

  Colton looks at me, a ghost of a smile on his sculpted lips. “Spill it, sweetheart. What happened?”

  I take a deep breath. “There’s not much to tell,” I begin, staring at the sand in front of us as we walked casually. “We were high school sweethearts, followed each other to college, got engaged, were planning our wedding ...” I feel him stiffen beside me at my last words, his fingers tensing in mine. “And he died a little over two years ago. End of story.” I glance over to find him looking at me. I’m glad the tears that usually fill my eyes don’t come. How embarrassing to be in love with one man and crying about another.

  He stops, tugging on my hand until I falter. Sympathy fills his eyes as they search mine. “I’m sorry,” he says gently, pulling me into his chest and wrapping his arms around me. I bury my face in his neck, finding comfort in the steady beat of his pulse beneath my lips. I wrap my arms around him, inhaling his delicious scent—so new yet so comforting. He brushes a soft kiss to my temple, and his tenderness is so unexpected that tears burn in the back of my throat.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, leaning back to look at him and smiling softly.

  “You want to tell me about it?” he prompts as he runs a hand down my arm and grabs my hand, bringing it up to his mouth and placing a kiss on it.

  Do I want to talk about it? Not really, but he deserves to know. Most of it anyway. He pulls me to his side and puts an arm around me as we start to walk again. “There’s not much to tell, really. Max and I had pre-calc together. He was a senior and I was a junior. Typical high school romance. Football games, prom, each other’s firsts.” I shrug. “I followed him to UCLA, stayed with him throughout, and then we got engaged my last year of college.” I watch Baxter bite at the waves again, and it offers a welcome diversion from what I’m going to say next.

  “One weekend, Max decided to surprise me with a road trip. He said it was just what the doctor ordered before …” I falter, wondering how I should continue. Colton squeezes my hand in encouragement. “Before life got more hectic; new jobs, marriage … everything. We had no set destination, so we just drove. No one knew that we were going anywhere, so there was no one to expect us back home. We headed north and ended up by Mammoth, passing the town, but veering off a two-lane road not too far from June Lake. Thankfully it had been a dry winter, so there wasn’t much snow on the ground. Just a few patches here and there. It was early afternoon and I was starving, so we decided to explore and find the perfect spot for a picnic. Stupid us.” I shake my head. “We had cell phones with us, but without any service, we turned them off to not waste the batteries.” I stop now, needing a minute to remember those last carefree moments before life changed forever. I release Colton’s hand and wrap my arms around myself to stifle the shivers that race through me.

  Colton senses my anguish and wraps his arms around me, his body ghosting mine. “You guys were young, Rylee. You did nothing wrong. Don’t put whatever happened on yourself,” he says as if he already knows that the guilt eats at me like a disease on a daily basis.

  I take in his words, grateful that he’s said them but still not believing them. “We came around a corner on this winding road we were driving on. There was an elk in the road and Max swerved the car to avoid him.” I can hear Colton suck in an audible breath, knowing where this is going. “We veered into the oncoming lane and the tires grabbed the edge of the road because Max had overcorrected too much. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.” I shudder again and Colton holds me, his arms squeezing tighter around me as if their strength can ward off the inevitable. “I remember seeing the first trees as we went over the edge and started down the ravine. I remember Max swearing and it struck me as odd because he rarely swore.” My stomach lodges in my throat as I remember the weightless feeling as the car lifted from the ground and the centrifugal force that tossed me around like a rag doll as the car tumbled down. I reach up and wipe the single tear that has slid out of the corner of my eye. I shake my head. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear all of this, Colton. I don’t want to put a damper on our evening.”

  I can feel him shake his head as it’s resting on my shoulder. His arms are wrapped across the top part of my chest, from shoulder to shoulder, and I bring my hands up to hook onto them. “No, please continue, Rylee. I appreciate you sharing with me. Lettin
g me get to know and understand you better.”

  Maybe if I open up to him, he’ll feel comfortable enough to explain his past to me as well. I think about this for a couple of seconds and realize that as much as I can hope this might happen, the reality is that I feel relieved to be talking about it for the first time in a long time.

  I draw in a shaky breath before I continue. “The next thing I remember is coming to. It was getting dark. The sun was already past the crest of the mountain so we were in the shadows of the deep ravine we were in. The smells—oh, my God—they were something I will never forget and will always associate with that day. The mixture of fuel and blood and destruction. We were at the bottom of a ravine. The car was sitting on an angle and I was on the high side while Max was on the low. The car was mangled. We had rolled so many times that the car had crushed into itself, making the interior almost half the size it should have been.

  “I could hear Max. The sounds he made trying to breathe—trying to stay alive—were horrifying.” I shudder at those sounds that I can still hear in my dreams. “But the best part about those sounds were that he was still alive. And at some point in those first moments of waking up, he reached over and held my hand, trying to take away my fear from regaining consciousness in the hell we were embroiled in.”

  “Do you need a minute?” he asks sweetly before pressing a kiss to my bare shoulder.

  I shake my head. “No, I’d rather just finish.”

  “Okay. Take your time,” he murmurs as we start to walk again.

  “I panicked. I had to get help. It was only when I went to release my seatbelt that I felt the pain. My right arm wouldn’t work. It was visibly broken in several places. I let go of Max’s hand with my left hand and tried to undo the belt, but it was jammed—some freak thing the manufacturer studied after the fact. It was the result of metal jamming in the mechanism from the crash. I remember looking down and feeling like it was a dream, when I realized I was covered in blood. My head and arm and midsection and pelvis were screaming with pain so intense I think I would rather die than ever feel that again. It hurt to breathe. To move my head. I can recall Max mumbling my name, and I reached over groping for his hand. I told him that I was going to get us help and that he needed to hold on. That I loved him. I grabbed a shard of glass. Tried to use it to cut through my seatbelt but only ended up slicing my hand some and stabbing myself in the abdomen. It was brutal. I kept blacking out from the pain. Each time I would come to, the blinding panic would hit me again.”