He knew instinctively the headlights turning into the car park were hers, long before she finished swiping lipstick over her mouth in the mirror and swung out of the car. He could have sworn he could smell her perfume, the moment she opened the door, and sucked the last of the stale nicotine from his cigarette, wishing he'd done so earlier so he didn't have anything contaminating the smell of her, the taste of her. He wondered distantly whether she would mind if he kissed her in public. The uncomfortable sensation was amplified by the idea that he didn't yet have the green light to let every motherfucker in town know she was taken. Claimed. His.
Was she his?
The primitive thing in his chest growled a non-negotiable yes.
Now he just needed her to agree.
Things were not going according to plan.
Alannah had dallied at the office as long as it was reasonable to do so and then a little more for good measure, just to ensure Rex had time to leave before she got home. She managed to kill the best part of another hour getting ready. She fended off the where-are-you texts from Kayla with one-sentence responses until she actually started calling. She even drove the five minutes to the Local, just so she had a getaway car ready in case of emergency.
All that planning, undone because Rex was outside when she parked, inhaling the last of a cigarette, and she could only describe the look on his face as 'bleak'. He waved her over and, unable to stop herself, she went.
"I didn't know you smoked," she managed as he ground the butt out.
"I don't. Well, I normally don't."
"Normally?"
"It's packed in there, hot as hell and stuffy." He kept his eyes fixed on the ground near her feet. "I don't usually mind being in small spaces, but with that many people… I was getting a bit edgy." His shoulders were tight, rounded defensively, like he thought she might think less of him for admitting a weakness.
Al checked the distance between them, easing back slowly, not wanting to push the claustrophobia.
"You can come closer," he said quietly, still not looking at her. "I don't want distance from you."
"Are you sure? I won't be offended if you need your space." What was the protocol here anyway? What should she expect? A public kiss from her live-in friend-with-benefits? A polite nod? A fist bump?
"I'm sure."
She stepped closer, and when he raked his eyes up from her shoes to her hair, she knew she'd done well investing that hour in getting ready. Her Grecian-style dress was long, wrapping around her waist with a bow securing it under her breasts. His gaze was fire-hot, and despite the sticky night air, shivers raced in the wake of his eyes drawing over her. Rex gripped her arm and pulled her closer, not stopping until she was tucked up against him. Her body was always online when he was around, but this felt different—like an electric current was passing between them, and the release of the tension that had raised Rex's hackles shuddered through both of them. She blinked into his eyes—leaning as he was, he was suddenly of a height with her, and the change was disorienting—and kept her own eyes open as he pressed his lips to hers.
"You're not meant to have your eyes open," he muttered into the space between their lips.
"How did you know they were, if you didn't do the same thing?"
He hummed a laugh. "Caught me. I, um, I like the moment you see me afterward, after I kiss you."
"Why?"
She felt as much as saw him lift a single shoulder in a shrug. "You've got beautiful eyes. I like having them on me."
The warmth in her chest was disorienting, sticky happiness dripping through her ribcage, coating everything in gold.
"What made being inside hard tonight?" Al asked.
"Too many people. Too much noise."
"I didn't realise it was a problem for you."
"It isn't. At least, it hasn't been. Shrinks say you always have to be on the lookout for symptoms, though, even years later. It's heavy, worrying whether I can trust my mind to relax or if I need to stay… I don't know, vigilant. There are stories about people who hear a certain accent or smell a spice mix and it just flips a switch in their brain." He hesitated. "And sometimes they hurt people they care about."
"Was today a bad day?" Al asked. "Maybe there was another reason for you to be stressed?"
"Nothing unusual." His arm briefly tightened around her waist. "I spent the first hour looking at the door, to be honest, wondering when you'd get here. Didn't want to miss you in the crowd."
"I'm wearing heels," Al said without thinking, as though that made her seven feet tall and outlined in neon.
"I noticed," Rex said evenly. "What do you call this dress, then?"
"What? It's… long." This was true. "I'm decent." This was also true.
"You're the furthest thing from decent," Rex said. "I can see every inch of you through this fabric. It's so damn stretchy. Hugs every part of your body."
"W-why do you sound so angry about it?" Al managed.
"Because everyone else can see every inch of you too," he growled, fisting his hand in the fabric.
The door opened, noise spilling out into the night. Alannah stepped back, but Rex held on to the fabric of her dress for a beat before releasing it, standing up. He reached around to open the door for her but paused. "I told you, too stretchy. I could pull it right out of shape and the neckline hardly moved."
"You don't like that it kept me covered? If someone steps on the hem, at least I can't be accidentally exposed." She tugged on the door handle, but he was still holding it closed.
"You're right," he said, considering, "But it'll be a damn sight harder for me to expose you later."
She pointed to the bow she'd tied at her waist. "This isn't a big enough giveaway of how to get me out of it?" With Rex distracted, she tugged at the door handle.
"Don't tell me that now, sassy girl," he said, his unmoving bulk forcing them closer together as the door opened toward her. "Now I'm going to spend the whole night thinking about unwrapping you."
"Something to look forward to, then." Alannah tossed him a wink and spun away into the bar.
Al couldn't be entirely certain, but she was pretty sure Rex was the equivalent of fly paper for single women. Kayla had nabbed a table before Al arrived, and they'd seated themselves in the middle of the hubbub. The rest of the seats were periodically occupied and vacated by a revolving cast of characters. Everyone in town seemed driven to make an appearance at some point, though this could be as much due to the bar tab as the prodigal son sentiment that Kayla delighted in repeating.
Rex never joined them, but she could feel his eyes on her like she was lit by searchlights. Could everyone tell they were sleeping together? Not if the gaggle of women surrounding him was any indication. Maybe, Al thought bitterly, they could somehow tell from her inability to look away from him for long that he was not only good-looking but also a phenomenal lay. Maybe she was giving off some kind of sexually satisfied pheromone, unintentionally laying a strip of lights to him like guiding an aeroplane to ground. We are now coming in to land at Castlereagh, please remain seated until the seatbelt sign has been switched off. Then all bets are off, drape yourself across the man in blatant sexual invitation. She wasn't proud of the jealousy that twisted in her belly, though logically she knew she had no claim on him. They hadn't even had the conversation about sleeping with other people—what if he decided to bring someone home to her house tonight?
The violent response in her belly all but launched her up to the bar for another round, needing something to douse the flame.
She murmured hellos to people she'd seen at work just hours ago and waited for someone to serve her as the staff tried frantically to keep up with the pace of their patrons. Then the heat of Rex was at her back. He didn't speak to her, didn't touch her, but somehow she knew it was him. And her jealousy leaped even higher now, as he signalled for two beers from a bartender who had still yet to serve Alannah.
Who else is he buying drinks for? She tried not to ask herself the jealous
question, but she did anyway, running a film reel of faces through her mind, women who had happened to be hanging off Rex's body each time Al lost the fight not to look at him. To spite the voice in her head that asked why she cared whether he bought drinks for anyone else, she didn't even turn to look at him, instead focusing on steadying the pulse that she felt thrumming through her veins. She felt his gaze fixing there with the precision of a man who had spent considerable time exploring her body and knew where to find undeniable proof that she was worked up.
Finally, someone filled her order, but his body blocked her as she tried to step away with the tray. "Excuse me," Al muttered, not meeting Rex's eyes.
"Are you all right?" He was so close that his voice reverberated through her chest.
"Fine."
"You seem…" He halted.
"I'm fine. I need to drop these off."
He looked like he wanted to say more, but Lauren Perkins was suddenly there, with her manicured hand laid proprietarily on Rex's arm and her sleek hair swishing around her shoulders. "You'd been gone a minute," she said. "Thought I'd come see what was going on." She seemed to notice Al for the first time. "Alannah, how are you doing?"
Acid roiled in Al's stomach and she gestured at her full tray, masking her escape as the delivery of drinks. Kayla was still in her seat and Alannah dropped into her own, face hot, teeth hurting from the sweetness in Lauren's voice. She tried to shove down the feeling of being back in high school, all gangly limbs and uncontrollable hair. Quiet. Beige.
"Are you all right?" Kayla asked.
"Yeah, yeah. Just feeling a bit warm."
"Is it anything to do with the prodigal son and his harem over there?" Kayla tilted her head to indicate the group behind her.
"Oh good, you noticed them too. Is it just me imagining things, or are they, um," she said, pausing, searching for the right word.
"Being excessive?" Kayla offered. "You're definitely not imagining that. You couldn't prise Bea Barrie off him with a crowbar."
"I feel like an idiot," Al found herself confessing. "I don't have a claim on him. I'm not even officially his landlord. I'm his… housemate. Housemate with benefits."
"I'm not sure he'd describe it that way," Kayla noted. "Based on all the staring at you he's been doin'."
"Don't sugar coat on my account," Al said. "Look at all those women. None of them has a hair out of place, and I'm…" She gestured to her wild curls, already starting to frizz in the humid air of the bar, to what little makeup she knew how to do, which was probably already smearing. "He's probably too dazzled by them to even look for me."
"You just haven't seen it because you've been staring at your beer mat whenever you're not stealing glances at him. The tension between the two of you is so hot, I'm impressed nothing has spontaneously combusted."
Alannah heaved in a sigh. "It's come close a time or two." Or ten, she added to herself. But all the confession did was make her miss the heat of his touch, and then she was back at the start of the cycle, knowing she had no claim on him and trying to convince herself that she was fine with that.
Rex's mother Gina joined their table shortly afterward, slotting into the mismatched group with hardly a blink. "Thank you so much for having Rex," she told Al with a hint of tipsy breathlessness, cheeks pink. "It's so kind of you to host him."
"You've already thanked me more than enough times," Al said, as much to stop Gina bringing up the incident that drove Rex to her as anything else. "He's a very easy housemate."
"They train them that way in the army, I've heard, military precision."
"As long as he doesn't try to run drills until I've finished my morning coffee, I'm fine with it."
"He's a difficult man to please, my Rex," Gina mused. "Always had the bit between his teeth about getting out of this town, needed to get away from the Castlereagh clan for a while. Needed to be himself, but first he had to find out who that was."
"Do you think he figured it out?" Al asked.
Gina's smile was so similar to Rex's that it was almost unnerving. "I think my boy was ready to come home. It's hard, being the youngest, especially of a big family of boys." She took a sip of her drink, swaying slightly. "Do you know, if he had been a girl, we were going to give him my name?"
"I didn't," Al said slowly, not following the change in topic.
"There was a Regina in each generation of my mother's family, but after Jared, Eric, and Nathan, we had all but given up hope for a little girl. Regina was the only name we would have given our daughter; fortunately, it would have worked with the Castlereagh surname. Regal, you know? I used to call him King Castle." She sipped at her drink again. "But Rex turned out to be male, very rudely, so we gave him the male version. We tried not to put too much expectation on him, but as the bearer, I suspect it contributed to his drive to get out of Shepherd's Creek. It's hard to carry the weight of four generations on your back, especially as a youngest child."
"Do you think he's back for good now?" Al asked.
"I think he thinks he is," Gina said after some thought. She tilted her head, fixing Alannah with a slightly tipsy gaze that nonetheless made Al feel six years old again. "But then, we all do until we find something new we want to explore."
Al realised she'd been holding her breath for the answer and exhaled in a rush. "He's lucky to have you to come home to."
"I'm just glad he came home at all. Five years was a long time to have him gone. There's only so much FaceTime a mother can settle for."
The party was still in full swing an hour later. Al had stopped drinking, but no one else seemed to have the same compunction; the lone taxi company in Shepherd's Creek would, apparently, be having a busy night.
Unfortunately, Rex was still surrounded by a gaggle of women, but Al was just mature enough to wade through them to let him know she was leaving.
"Already?" he asked. She hadn't thought he looked tense before tonight, but there was a laxity in the muscles of his shoulders that made her wonder whether he'd been hiding that their living situation was wearing on him, along with the stress of returning to Shepherd's Creek. She didn't like the idea.
"Busy week," she said in non-answer. Rex excused himself from his gaggle of admirers and stood, and when he came close Al could feel the heat from his big body radiating to every inch of her skin.
"Are you sure you're all right? Do you want me to come with you?" Even his speech sounded more relaxed, she realised. If not three sheets to the wind, he was clearly at least two, and she found herself wondering whether a tipsy Rex would let go of his self-control even a little bit. Whether he'd still insist on caring for her, or if he might let her do the same for once.
"I'm good, but thank you. I'll leave the lights on downstairs so you can see when you come home. Just turn them off when you go to bed?" She bit her tongue to hold in the request he not bring anyone home with him. I don't have a claim. I don't have that right. I can't want it.
The thought echoed in a vast emptiness in her chest on the way home.
Rex wouldn't describe himself as an anxious person. Protective, yes, and sometimes cautious, especially when the wellbeing of people he cared about was at stake. But there was a degree of acceptance of risk that he'd needed to cultivate over the years, absolving himself of responsibility for the outcome of missions other than his own, trusting in the men around him to do their own jobs without oversight. It was a kind of arrogance in and of itself, to presume that his being there could improve the standard. In the army, he was forced to give up the delusion quickly, mostly because the people around him refused to tolerate it.
But clearly, he retained just a hint of it, because since Alannah had left the Local, he'd been worrying about whether she got home safely. He knew she'd driven, and she'd seemed sober as a judge when she let him know she was leaving, but there had been something off about her all evening. As though his sassy girl had somehow shrunk in on herself. He'd tried not to be obvious about staring, but it was an impossible task when the lig
ht seemed to preferentially catch her hair, when a candle was lit in his chest every time she laughed. He'd been lucky until now, to have her all to himself in the space that they only shared with each other, and not having her attention tonight was unsettling. He wanted to snatch her every time she stood to hug someone hello or goodbye, sit her on his lap and show the world there was a reason he tensed every time she touched another man.
Instead, he'd had a few drinks too many, tried to ignore the itch of his skin each time he felt the absence of her. His father had been trying to set him up all night, introducing him to women he'd known since childhood with muttered blurbs like he was reading from a dating profile. Do you remember Lauren? She's a barrister now. Recently split from her boyfriend, very career-oriented. I'm not sure if she wants children. Here's Bea, she's been drinking margaritas since six-thirty so beware of her wandering hands. She's the oldest of three girls and both her younger sisters have married, so she may be in the market for something serious. And then there was Jared, who could be at ease despite the meat market vibe, because everyone knew he and his woman belonged to each other. He pushed Rex toward woman after woman for an entirely different reason than their father—he kept making suggestive faces at the different single women who passed them.
Each time, it became harder to ignore the urge to wash the grime of the whole thing off his skin; though the party had nominally been in his name, it seemed like Rex hadn't had more than a passing chance to speak to the people he actually knew and liked, whom he'd gone to the effort to remain in contact with over the years. The whole night had swirled into a mass of sweaty bodies and raucous laughter and artificial floral perfume, of in-jokes that had been born and lived and died entirely in Rex's absence, of you-had-to-be-there stories that weren't funny the second time around, of relationships that had fallen together and apart into awkward avoidance of discussion without his knowledge, so he was constantly trying not to bring up anything new until he knew it was a safe topic.
He Comes Home Page 11
