by Bethany-Kris
The side of her curved lips.
How her lashes framed her cheeks.
Tell her, his heart demanded.
How much longer could he wait?
“Chip called,” Malachi lied.
It was for the best.
He forced himself to think that way.
To believe it.
The news perked Gracen up in bed even more, blinking fast. “Oh?”
He found sadness when she pulled the blanket back a bit more, and the shadows between them went away. Malachi untangled from her and rolled to his back. There, he stared at the ceiling because it was easier than lying to her face.
“Yeah, when I stepped outside earlier,” he said.
Her next breath washed against the side of his arm. She didn’t say anything but stroked her fingertips down his arm and wrist, trailing the thick veins she’d proclaimed to like best about his arms.
The silence urged him to speak.
Lie again, really.
“He’s got a small project starting up tomorrow and could use another guy. I didn’t feel right saying no.”
If there was trouble brewing inside the church on the hill, he’d keep her far away from it. Starting now.
If not for her sniffle, he might not have looked down in enough time to see her wipe at her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” Malachi said as he rolled back into her. Their limbs tangled under the blankets all over again as he urged her, “Come here, let me hold you.”
It took her a few seconds to mutter a low, “Sorry.”
“For what?”
She refused to lift her face from under his chin. “It’s silly, I guess. I was planning the week like we’d have more time.”
He hugged her close. One hand up the back of her sports bra, and another tight on her warm, soft hip. “Come on, we will,” he insisted, his mouth pressed against the top of her head. Just not here; not right now, he refused to add out loud. Malachi had time to work those details out. “We’ll find some time to carve out for each other. If we want to, it’ll be there.”
Cheesy, maybe, but true.
They’d gotten this far, so that had to count for something.
“Well,” came her mumbled, sad reply, “what time are you going?”
He squeezed her a little harder.
“I don’t know, probably early.”
Which meant most definitely.
Gracen’s shoulders shrunk down even more.
“Don’t do that,” he told her, planting a kiss on her head.
A sigh answered him back, but she didn't pull away.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he urged.
Although, he almost certainly knew the answer.
Gracen stayed quiet until Malachi forced her hand by rolling them both her way. With his lower half fitted tight between her open thighs, he used his arms to loom over her laughing form on the bed. Their movement knocked the duvet down around them.
“I do have work in the morning, you know,” she said, her hands curving around both his wrists.
“Mmhmm, in a bit,” Malachi agreed before he dropped a kiss on the soft skin on the high points of both her cheeks.
Then, he placed one to her lips.
Gracen’s smile stretched wide while her legs wrapped around his waist to hook at heels on his back. “Just say you want sex.”
“I do,” he admitted—with her, always—unashamed, “but I also want you to tell me what’s on your mind. It doesn’t help to stuff it down, and I don’t want you to do that with me, babe. I can’t make it better if you do that to me.”
She stilled under his gaze. Nervousness fettered over her pursing lips.
“If you’re heading out tomorrow, you can’t make it better, anyway,” she explained quietly.
“Try me.”
He just had to push.
The woman beneath him finally broke.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I needed someone to stay, so it’s hard to know that asking you to do so won’t make it real. Maybe I need some time to figure out how that makes me feel, or what it really means. A part of me doesn’t want to need someone at all, but I don’t think it’s normal to feel like that, either.”
They both faced their own double-edged swords, apparently, even if the weapons didn’t look the same. It felt cruelly fair for hers to hurt him, too, especially when his secrets would undoubtedly do the same to Gracen.
The truth had to hurt.
For Malachi, it wasn’t anything new.
Gracen blinked away another stray tear that disappeared before it finished falling down her cheek, and said, “I don’t like being sad with you. Five minutes ago, we were great.” Her hands grabbed tighter to his wrists. “Can’t we go back to that place?”
Could he pretend—isn’t that what she really meant to say?
For her ... well, he could.
He would.
Tonight.
Chapter 30
Gracen awoke before her alarm clock made her do it. She blinked, listening to make sure the familiar high pitch beep-beep-beep wasn’t the reason for her interrupted slumber, but no. The bedroom was too quiet. Too dark. With all the shades still pulled, not even the morning sunlight could filter into the room to wake Gracen.
It wasn’t her alarm.
Gracen rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. She blinked again. A cold bed hugged her spine, and air found her hands when she searched with one arm on the other side of the bed. That’s how she knew. The white stucco on the ceiling looked back at Gracen, and she felt the realization settle even heavier into her heart. She didn’t even need to turn in the bed to prove her instincts right.
The bed was empty except for her.
Gracen woke up alone.
Briefly, she considered it might just be the bed that was empty and not the room. She consciously chose to ignore the new ache in her heart that said she was wrong while she sat straight up in the bed to survey the dimly lit bedroom. Hoping all at the same time that she would find Malachi lacing up his combat boots at the end of her bed like the morning before, grinning in that way of his. She adored it so much.
No such luck.
Gracen found herself staring at the shadowy stairwell leading to the rooftop porch, and an otherwise quiet bedroom. At least, when she reached over to turn the bedside lamp on, the darkness slipped away. Mostly. If anything, though, that only made the emptiness of her bedroom all the more apparent to Gracen. Like the unsettling hole growing in her heart. On the surface—at a quick glance, really—nothing else about the bedroom seemed out of sorts or any different than it had been when she went to sleep the night before.
With Malachi, of course.
Except he wasn’t there now.
Neither was the black overnight bag he had placed on the chair in the corner of her bedroom when he’d first arrived. Or the wireless charger base he’d kept plugged into the wall on her side of the bed. She didn’t bother to get right up and rush to check the en-suite bathroom for his toiletry bag and shaver.
Why bother?
The truth stared Gracen in the face and laughed.
Blatantly.
Maybe foolishly, Gracen dared to believe Malachi hadn’t just gotten up and left as soon as the sun lifted in the sky—without even a proper goodbye. She let herself hope he’d gone to grab breakfast at the cafe on the hill and had his things ready in a pile downstairs to pack on his bike later.
Hadn’t he told her the night before—when she asked when he planned on heading out?
Probably early.
Gracen should have made Malachi clarify how early he meant—foolish, yes.
Because she found his note as soon as she clamored out of bed, and reached for the housecoat tossed off the bedpost. Shrugging it onto her naked shoulders, she reached for her phone on the bedside table, still plugged into its charger. Her morning alarm was ten minutes away, but she even forgot about turning that off when she plucked up the phone.
His note
waited underneath.
Gracen’s hand clenched tighter around her phone at the sight of Malachi’s handwriting that wasn’t entirely familiar to her. His name at the bottom of the two simple sentences couldn’t be missed, though.
Written on a corner piece of yellow notepad paper—likely from the one in the kitchen that Gracen and Delaney used to write groceries and other necessities needed throughout the week—she stared at the sentences. Unseeing the words despite them being clear on the paper in black ink and clear strokes.
She could read it.
Gracen just didn’t want to.
In fact, she picked up her discarded panties and sports bra from the night before and didn’t once check the note while she did it. In the process, the bottom of her foot found the condom wrapper she had discarded along with her clothes.
“Christ,” Gracen mumbled, peeling the wrapper off her foot.
She glared at it.
For longer than necessary, sure.
It was easier than remembering how Malachi had told her he would be leaving, and all she had wanted to do was tie herself around the man so he couldn’t go. Not even sex—as good as it was; and it was always good with him—had been enough to satisfy that urge for Gracen.
Nor did it do her any favors.
After all, she still woke up alone.
Gracen didn’t forget about the note but reading it would do nothing for her at the moment. She spent the next few minutes discarding the dirty clothes and tossing the condom wrapper in the bathroom’s trash can. She picked out a jumper to wear and hung it on the back of the bedroom door before heading into the bathroom once more to finish up her morning business.
Eventually, she came back to the bathroom doorway while she furiously brushed her teeth; the only way she found to relieve a bit of the tension filling up her body. Every bone, muscle and nerve felt it. Each in a different way, too.
Her anger was real. Gracen couldn’t put her finger on the why. The obvious, Malachi leaving, didn’t ring as a good enough reason. The fact he didn’t say goodbye and left her to wake up alone and figure it out on her own hadn’t helped, no. She still didn't think that should make her as frustrated and annoyed as she currently felt.
That was the bigger problem.
Gracen eventually checked the note and read the two lines her lover had hastily scribbled out for her to find. Once the alarm on her phone started ringing and she had no choice but to cross the room where the ripped paper still waited.
I’ll call you later, babe. The road looks better in the morning. —Malachi
It wasn’t even a proper goodbye, and the note was all that he’d left behind for her to find other than their late-night conversation in bed. How exactly should that make Gracen feel?
Certainly not wanted.
Definitely alone.
So be it.
Gracen had gotten used to being this way after so long.
Have a safe ride, she thought.
*
“Where’s Malachi?”
“Gone,” Gracen said, slamming the fridge closed.
Harder than she intended.
She didn’t offer more details about her missing counterpart, either, despite the fact his lack of a presence couldn’t be missed in the kitchen that morning.
Delaney didn’t overlook Gracen’s attitude, and her tone pitched slightly higher in her curiosity when she asked, “Gone?”
“Gone,” Gracen confirmed, turning away from the fridge with a carton of eggs in hand. “Jetted this morning before I had even got out of bed, actually.”
At the table, Delaney’s eyebrows lifted high. “What?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Really?”
Gracen couldn’t help but sigh. At the stove, she got to work on cracking eggs to mix up in a pan, still trying to work out how she felt. Surprise, like shit.
“Really,” she told Delaney. “You want some scrambled eggs?”
“Sure ... Are you mad?”
“A little.”
Delaney muttered a quiet yikes under her breath. “I thought he had planned to stay the week?”
“Me, too.”
Plans changed, apparently.
She didn’t add that information out loud.
Delaney seemed fine to let Gracen stew in her silence while she cooked at the stove. After grabbing the milk to add a splash to the mixture of eggs in the heating pan, she scrambled the yellow liquid again, and then tossed the dirty whisk into the sink. Out of the two girls, Gracen was the only one dressed and ready for the day. Delaney had yet to even run a brush through her hair or change out of her pink silk pajama shorts and matching spaghetti strap top, but with an hour to go before they had to open the Haus, she had lots of time.
“Did something happen?” Delaney asked while Gracen dug for a spatula in the cabinet. “You guys seemed great last night.”
Gracen had thought so, too.
“Not that I know of.”
Which made everything slightly worse.
“Not much for conversation this morning, I guess,” her friend noted.
Gracen couldn’t ignore the comment, so she turned at the stove so the two of them could see one another when she explained, “If I sound a little short, it’s not about you. He said something for work came up, or whatever.” But the randomness of the late-night conversation and then his disappearing act in the morning ... Well, Gracen couldn’t help but wonder if his story might have been bullshit, not that Malachi had any reason to lie to her. “I just woke up alone, and since we have work in an hour there isn’t a lot I can do. I know there’s not even any point in calling him to say hey, fuck you, so.”
Fuck you for doing that to me, she finished silently. Her heart screamed it—maybe the fact that she did hurt so much about the way he’d left should have told Gracen something about her feelings for Malachi.
No doubt, her friend got the point.
Delaney flinched. “Why not?”
The clock told the story better than she could, but gesturing to it did nothing. Delaney only glanced between the clock and Gracen with confusion setting her lips into a frown.
“Is it too early?” she asked.
“Partly. He’s probably still on the road, and he’s not going to talk when he’s driving his bike. I don’t know what time he left exactly, but—”
“It’s like a three- or four-hour drive to the Miramichi, right?” Delaney interjected.
“Four or more,” Gracen corrected.
“Let me check the cameras. Maybe if he left super early ...”
Gracen rolled her eyes and went back to the thickening egg mixture on the stove to break some of it up. The spatula acted as her weapon to take out her current mood, and the eggs became her unwilling victim. “Don’t bother.”
“Well, I am.”
Her friend’s no-nonsense tone suggested she didn’t care if Gracen liked her choice to check their two security cameras. After Checkered & Cheese had burnt down next door, Delaney came home a week or so later with two home security cameras she assured would be an easy install after taking a trip to the falls. So much so, that she set them up herself and downloaded the app to monitor the feeds on both of their phones. It took an hour at the most, so it was pretty simple to get the system up and running.
At least.
Gracen still didn’t care for the little white cameras over the top of their back and front doors, if she were being honest. The app pushed through notification after another and other alerts to her phone for everything—including a bug crawling across one of the camera lenses, or when it heard someone’s dog barking in the back streets behind their house. Nonstop. With one of the cameras being right at the front of the house, pointed at their driveway and the town’s main street, she could get a hundred notifications a day, easily, from just cars going by.
That was too much for Gracen. Obviously, she forced the app to go on silent. Rarely did she check the feeds, otherwise, and the cameras barely crossed her mind. She’d not even
mentioned, or thought to, the cameras to Malachi.
Too late now.
The cameras did, however, make Delaney feel safer in their rental house when she could just bring up her phone at any moment of the day to do a check on their cameras or run through the old feed to see if there might be something she missed. So, the cameras would stay. Gracen didn’t complain when her issues were fixed with a push of a button on her phone’s screen to quiet the many alerts.
A win-win, really.
Gracen finished the scrambled eggs, and plated the fluffy yellow goodness with butter and jam coated toast. Delaney, still scrolling through the camera feeds on her phone, helped by making two cups of coffee before the toast had even popped.
At the table, plates in front of them, Delaney finally glanced up from her phone.
“He left around four-thirty,” she said.
Gracen’s brow jumped in surprise. “What?”
That early?
It would have meant—after fucking, sex that had felt much more like lovemaking than anything else for the first time between them—Malachi barely had an hour or two to sleep before he got up, packed his shit, and left.
Just like that.
The way Delaney glanced back down at her phone, and avoided Gracen’s question, made her think she was missing something.
“What is it?” Gracen demanded.
Delaney let out an annoyed breath. “You’re sure he didn’t say anything—nothing happened at the manor yesterday? Because like, that’s all you two did, right?”
“No, nothing happened. Why?”
“The back camera just showed him getting his bike out and leaving.”
Gracen sat unmoved. “And?”
Delaney shrugged. “The front showed him meeting up with somebody before he was gone. I mean, wouldn’t they need to know what time he was leaving to be waiting out front like that?”
He met up with somebody, but hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort to Gracen. At her own home, no less. She definitely had a problem with that.
Gracen only had one question. “Who was it? Could you see?”
Delaney shoved her phone across the oval table with the tip of her finger until it reached Gracen. “You really should get used to checking the cameras, too. It’s not hard.”
