The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  When I saw Oliver’s fury and tears, I almost felt bad about my invasion. But someone needed to confront the slippery critter about his lying, and I seemed to be the only person in his world with the backbone to do it.

  Oliver charged me on his knees to try to shove past me and out.

  “Nope.” I squared my shoulders to block the doorway. “Not happening.”

  “Then get out of my space.”

  I was sure Oliver wanted me gone, but he hadn’t put an exclamation point at the end of his order. A flush bloomed over his face and body, tinted the bramble drawings on his arms. I had to close my eyes to collect myself. On his knees in the boudoir. Pinked copper skin.

  Focus.

  “I’ll leave,” I said, “if you tell me why you ran. What did I say? What are you so afraid of? And don’t lie.”

  “You!” That was an exclamation point. A big one. Oliver flung his hand up to point at me with an unsteady finger. I admired the way he could yell and cry at the same time. “You’re not welcome here! Why won’t you just… leave? You make me…”

  Like a toddler bent on prolonging a tantrum, Oliver flipped between hurt and outrage as he yelled on. I watched and waited and listened with all the compassion I could muster. He swung his arms, tried to catch his breath between angry sobs and repetitions of the same basic message to Go away! He dripped snot, swiped at his tears, scratched his hands and arms on the thorns, tried so hard to stop showing me his pain.

  I didn’t interfere.

  Oliver finally deflated with an exhausted sigh and used the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe his face. “I really hate you,” he gulped. “So, so much.” He stabbed me with his best effort at dagger eyes.

  Maybe Oliver did hate me. If so, his hatred had helped him expend a heck of a lot of energy—old, nasty energy that had been bottled up way too long.

  “It’s pretty safe to hate me,” I said. “I’ll be gone soon.”

  Oliver tried to stand. His shoulders curved against the sharp ceiling. A blue shard of glass bounced off his neck. “What do you want from me, Grant? Whatever it is, say it, so you can take it and go.”

  I decided to give Oliver a breather before I took another shot at exposing his wound. There was plenty else I was curious about.

  “Well, since you asked, I want to know why you’re with Freddie. He’s all wrong for you.”

  “Does this look like a slumber party to you?”

  “Sit down. You look ridiculous trying to intimidate me in a crouch. And you’re bleeding.” I nodded at his hand. Blood dripped from his finger.

  In a graceful collapse, Oliver folded to sit with his legs crossed. He dabbed at his hand with the hem of his shirt and flicked a wary look at me. “I won’t discuss Freddie with you.”

  “I see. When I kissed you in your secret car, you kissed me back, but Freddie’s your boyfriend and you don’t owe me any explanations. Makes perfect sense.”

  “You stole that kiss under false pretenses.”

  I shook my head. “Any false pretenses were yours, buddy. You were begging for it.”

  “Was not.”

  Oliver’s petulant resistance made me snort. “What would Freddie say about the kiss you were so adamant he not know about?”

  “Freddie and I have an open relationship. It was the DeVille I didn’t want him to know about.”

  “Whose side are you on in this argument? Why kick me out of the car when you so obviously wanted to kiss me and you and Freddie have an open relationship? Did you wish I were Freddie?”

  Judging from the flash of surprised distaste on Oliver’s tear-streaked face, his answer was no.

  “Then I don’t get it,” I said.

  Oliver squirmed and dabbed at his hand again, though the bleeding had stopped. “A guy’s allowed to get off on his fantasies in private. You… interrupted me.”

  “Mmm. Juicy. What was your fantasy about?”

  Oliver’s answer was to turn bright red, unfold a long leg, and kick me half-heartedly. I grabbed his ankle and took the conversation in a different direction to try to shock some truth out of him. “At your house when I was working on the proposal, I overheard Freddie talk about his trip to Whidbey next week and how he wants you to go with him.”

  Oliver’s inability to leave his property hung in the small space between us, a live, almost visible thing.

  “So?” Oliver jerked his foot out of my grip and folded his arms.

  “Wow. Whatever has you by the throat must have happened when you were a child. Look at your pout. Just… Come on. You need to share this stuff with someone. Talk to me.”

  “There is nothing I want to talk with you about.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So. Freddie doesn’t know about the car?”

  “Don’t call it the car. It’s a DeVille. It’s a 1968 Cadillac Sedan DeVille.”

  “For God’s sake, Oliver. What I call the damn thing isn’t going to change the fact that you’re lying to Freddie, and not only about the car. Super basis for taking your relationship to the next level. Kudos to you.”

  My pissy tone seemed to please Oliver. He looked at me directly for the first time, calculation in his gaze. With a sinuous move, he uncrossed his legs and arms and crawled toward me across the rugs. “You know… it was a pretty good kiss.”

  I’d seen that look before, during our brief tryst in the car. Over the past week, I’d remembered it while I stared at the top of my tent and imagined more, imagined being stuck in that car with Oliver for hours.

  “Stop it, you devil.” I put my fingers up in the sign of a cross. “I know that trick. You’re trying to use your… your creative, messed-up, intuitive…”

  Oliver didn’t stop slinking toward me, and it rattled me.

  “Your intuitive… um. Thingies. Your stuff,” I stammered. My skin tingled under all the dust.

  “My stuff, huh?” Oliver inched toward me.

  “You’re trying to distract me, using… um, a diversion. To keep me from poking at your wound.” I scooted sideways to unblock the doorway.

  “Now you let me go?” Oliver lifted his eyebrows. “After you went to all the trouble to corner me and make me bleed?”

  “Yup.” I waved at the tunnel. “Have at it.”

  “Remember what happened in the DeVille?”

  Even though I knew what Oliver was doing, I could barely keep my thoughts together. “Whatever you’re so determined to avoid must be big if you’re willing to seduce me just to prevent me from helping you confront it.”

  “In the DeVille that day, I was fantasizing about you,” Oliver said.

  He was probably lying. I pressed my eyelids together.

  “I imagined you pinning me down so I couldn’t escape. I hadn’t invited you into my fantasy, and yet there you were. And then there you were in person. Right there with your hands on me.”

  In the patience of the clear afternoon, Oliver’s long sigh filled the air, trailed off in a gasp that sounded like arousal. “Remember how you rested your weight on me when you kissed me?” he asked in a whisper.

  “No.” I squeezed my eyes tight, backed into the thorns to get away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I’d lusted after Oliver for weeks, but I didn’t want to get sexy under circumstances that might compromise him in the vulnerable state he was in.

  “Who’s lying now?” Oliver asked.

  I reached blindly for the tunnel opening.

  Oliver touched me. He ran his hot palm up my arm.

  I remember. I remember what your mouth feels like under mine.

  “After you kissed me, after you left, I revised my fantasy.” Oliver’s knees pressed against my thigh. “I imagined you driving me around all night while I hid on the floor in the back under a blanket.”

  Oliver’s words and slow voice pulled me under.

  “You sto
pped the car where no one would find us.” I felt Oliver’s breath on my cheek. His lips brushed my ear. “Every day, after you slept, we had sex. That was the one thing, the only thing that kept me safe.”

  “That is so messed up,” I muttered.

  “It’s my fantasy. I can do what I want in my own mind.”

  “Is this a fantasy you tell to Freddie?” I tried to push Oliver away. I didn’t want to hear a reconstituted fantasy about Freddie. “You know what? Stop.”

  “Shh.” Oliver pressed his fingers hard to my lips. “I’ve never shared my fantasies with anyone.”

  “That only tells me how desperate you are right now to stay hidden. You’re using your fantasy as a weapon. That’s not—”

  Oliver took his fingers off my mouth and kissed me.

  My hands clenched with the heat and wrongness of it, with the effort required to resist him. I opened my eyes, to make sure I wouldn’t push Oliver into the thorns when I shoved him off me and left.

  I shouldn’t have opened my eyes.

  Pink lips, red beard, sharp eyes.

  This is such a bad idea.

  Oliver scurried to block the tunnel. “You woke up and climbed into the back seat to get to me. Yanked my legs.” Eyes locked on mine, Oliver stretched his legs toward me, freckled shins under a light brush of hair. “I resisted.”

  “To hell with this. And to hell with you, you jerk.” I rose to my knees and shoved a hand down my pants to shift my hard cock up from where it pinched.

  Oliver wiggled his feet. “You pulled me onto your lap.”

  To hell with rug burns too.

  I grabbed Oliver’s ankles and pulled hard, manhandled him onto my thighs. The stark pleasure of my hands on him burned away all my reluctance. I ripped out the band holding Oliver’s hair, shoved my hands deep into the thick mass, and buried my face in it, in him. He smelled like oranges and sweat and berries and hot metal. I breathed deeper.

  Oliver rippled his body, rubbed at me with his hips. “And then you kissed me.”

  I did. God help me. I kissed Oliver Rossi. Used my thumbs to lift his chin, covered his entire mouth with mine and rushed him, my hunger a hurt I pushed into him.

  Oliver flailed. His feet stuttered on the rugs. I thought he was trying to escape so I followed, kissed him across the open space, unwilling to let him go. Only when his back hit the thorns and he pressed into me did I realize he’d been trying to find a foothold to keep his balance. I put an arm around Oliver’s back and hugged him close.

  He felt dangerous in my arms, like a wild animal I’d trapped, an untamed creature who might chew through me to get free. But he spread his legs and leaned into me, ate me back until I had to pull away to protect our teeth. I closed my eyes against the onslaught of sensory input.

  As soon as our mouths separated, Oliver panted more of his words into the humid air. “You… made a fist. Put it between your legs so I could—”

  I held Oliver’s thrumming body closer, clenched my fingers at my crotch. When he wrapped his legs tight around me and humped onto my fist, his mouth savage on mine again, I opened my eyes.

  Spangles of light on scraped caramel skin.

  Loops of satin hair snared by thorns.

  His mouth.

  His astonishing mouth.

  I hung on with all my might.

  Chapter 60

  Oliver

  I don’t want to remember.

  But what I wanted didn’t matter.

  The memory came for me anyway, tracked me as I became a fox and fled to my safe den, followed me inside. I couldn’t block the memory or stop it, even as I raged at Grant. If I’d been alone, I could have turned my back on it.

  Grant took that option away.

  When he brought the car into the crowded space of my den, I became Coyote-Fox.

  For the first time since I was a child, I felt the shift, stretched into my Coyote-Fox pelt, my protective fur, grown to fit the man I’d become.

  Fox smelled sex in the air.

  Useful, Coyote mused.

  I knew Grant, knew him well enough. He’d cut off my paw to try to save me, slash a new wound to fix the old one, force me to leave part of myself behind in the trap.

  Only if I let him.

  I slid my right paw… hand up Grant’s arm, my same hand that had rested on Dad’s thigh in the back of my mother’s car.

  I shook my head to clear it.

  Don’t remember. Let the trap keep my paw. I don’t want to be free.

  Coyote told Grant the fantasy of being together in the car in the safety of hiding. Told him and told him, until Grant took over the telling. I followed along in my mind.

  It’s one of those days when we crash together. I thrust my hand into the heat-shocked space inside his shorts and find a dick so hot my hand blisters. My squeeze makes him hiss and kiss my ears and yank my hair. I like that so I pull his dick harder, make noises against his ear to fill in the backbeat. That fast, he comes in my hand with a groan that tells me he hadn’t meant to, not yet.

  His huge fist beneath me blooms into a spread hand with fingers against my hole in a hard dig. Right there. There. He knows when he gets it right. He slows everything then. Slow kisses up my neck to my mouth. Slow tongue inside my open mouth that I can’t close to kiss him back. There. He moves his other hand from my back to my dick. Slow hands right… there. I slow all the way to stop. Freeze while he does things to me like he knows a better fantasy.

  I came with a full-body spasm that lasted a year.

  His fingers kept at me until I reached into my shorts for a swipe of my cum to feed him. When he turned to take my thumb into his mouth, I yearned toward him again.

  But the trap yanked at my hair, pulled me sideways.

  Vines snapped tight around his leg.

  Slash of red blood. Spooked eyes. Hard breaths like pain.

  Frightened animals, both of us, wounded by need.

  It made it easier, not hurting alone.

  Chapter 61

  Grant

  I stared into Oliver’s open face, into eyes filled with more than I had time to catalogue.

  My phone rang.

  Oliver closed his eyes, thus ending the best moment of my life.

  The call reminded me I had an appointment with Mitch. “Damn it. Damn it.” I took my thumb out of Oliver’s mouth and wiped it on my shorts.

  I expected Oliver to withdraw from me, but he didn’t. Without a word, he laid his head on my shoulder and sagged, sighed into my neck. To hold his weight and reach into my pocket for the phone, I had to shift the leg I’d shoved into the brambles when I’d lost my balance.

  “Ow. Hello,” I said into my phone. My voice sounded as scraped up as my leg.

  “Where are you?” Mitch said. “We’re here, but there’s no one around. Did you forget?”

  “Sort of. I’m so sorry. We’ll… I’ll be right there. Please don’t go. I really do want to talk with you.”

  Mitch wasn’t a bad guy, but he also wasn’t a go-with-the-flow guy. I pictured him checking his watch. Right on cue, he asked, “How long will you be?”

  “Um…” I looked around to assess, considered how far Oliver had run from the house. “Twenty minutes maybe?”

  Mitch sighed and hung up.

  “Hey.” I patted Oliver’s back. When he didn’t budge, I rested my chin on his shoulder. Just for a minute.

  When I glanced down, the tattered rips of Oliver’s shirt caught my attention. I lifted my hand from his back to find it smeared with blood. “Aw, hell.”

  Oliver answered with a soft sigh.

  We might have roused ourselves then—disengaged and wiped down—except Oliver’s hair had tangled with the barbed vines. We would have needed scissors for a quick exit. Grateful for the excuse to savor Oliver’s relaxed weight, I carefully recl
aimed his hair from the grip of the brambles. It took a while. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice a single hair, not if I could help it. The thick strands draped like cold silk over my hands.

  I didn’t assume our sexual interlude would change anything between us. It seemed obvious I was a trigger for whatever internal struggle Oliver was in the throes of dealing with. I wished I knew how to help him. My qualifications for determining what was best for Oliver were nonexistent. Which Oliver pushes me away? The Oliver who needs me to goad him to heal, or the Oliver who needs me gone in order to heal?

  After I’d freed the last bit of Oliver’s hair, I wrapped my arms around his neck and his lower back, to avoid the torn skin, and rocked him for a while, rocked us both.

  I didn’t close my eyes. I wanted to memorize the scene. In the upper layers of the bramble, in the brighter sunlight, fat blackberries bunched amid the green leaves. In the murky interior of the thicket, shadows shifted as the leaves above fluttered in the light breeze. Out beyond the edges of the rugs, rotted blackberries stained the bare earth.

  My gaze settled on the middle distance and lost focus, Oliver’s trusting weight and the fall of his hair over my arms all I wanted.

  My phone rang again. I poked at it on the rug by my knee to turn it off. I did want to talk to Mitch, but nothing seemed as important as being Oliver’s place to relax.

  Even if it only lasted until Oliver remembered he didn’t like me.

  Chapter 62

  Grant

  Forty-five minutes after my scheduled time for meeting Mitch, Oliver and I reached his yard. We made a pit stop at the workshop to clean up in the bathroom as best we could, and to put on coveralls to hide our ripped, cum-stained clothes, Oliver’s wrecked back, and my bloody leg.

  Oliver handed me coveralls with Matteo embroidered on the chest patch and mumbled, “Granddad’s,” like he wanted me to know, but didn’t want to have to say it. They were short in the legs and a bit tight in the armpits.

  Kai found us as we were zipping up the coveralls.

  I hugged Kai quickly, self-conscious about my odor after my romp with Oliver. “How’s your dad? If he’s still here, he must not be too peeved.”