Never Knew Until You

by L E Royal

  Kristina studied her for a long moment, and Parker studied her in return. Quiet, still, the same pull, the longing that had found her in the hospital returned, and here, in the house that had just been beginning to feel like home when she’d lost it all, it was worse than ever.

  “You look beautiful. Did I tell you that yet?”

  The words were careful. Delivered as confidently as always, but there was a sliver of restraint in them, and Parker sensed it easily. She thanked her, smoothing her hands over the modest dress she’d picked out this morning for the library opening. It felt like forever ago now.

  “Where were you when Marion called?”

  She shot her an accusing glance, and Kristina held her gaze, defiant.

  “I was busy.” It was childish and she knew it, but a little part of her wanted to let Kristina believe there was someone else, another Brenna, another her. That life had gone on after her. If the thought of her with someone else still made her jealous, then good. It was clear from her stormy expression it did.

  “I have to shower.” She was as cool, as detached as Parker had ever heard her, and she knew she’d struck a nerve.

  “Let Caesar in on your way out.”

  Parker’s hackles rose at that.

  “What, you like guys now? Is that why you didn’t want to be with me?”

  Kristina’s face cracked, going from stormy to thunderous, as she struggled to her feet, clutching her chest, hissing.

  “We’ve been over this. I never said I didn’t want to be with you.”

  Parker shot up after her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, why you couldn’t.”

  “You know why I couldn’t.” They were moving slowly back down the hall, and part of her was panicking because she wasn’t ready for this to end; she wasn’t ready to be on the outside again, away from her. “And Caesar has nothing to do with it. He’s my driver and guard, nothing more.”

  Parker spluttered. “You have a bodyguard now?”

  Something flashed across Kristina’s face, and Parker couldn’t help but think she looked caught.

  “Who are you? Do I even know you at all?” Tears were spilling onto her cheeks, and she didn’t know if she wanted to surge forward and kiss her or turn and run. It hurt. It still ached like it was yesterday they’d said goodbye, and now, so confusingly, maddeningly close to her, with everything so broken and twisted, she wanted to burn it all and she wanted to drown in it.

  Kristina swayed on her feet, and Parker stepped up to her without thinking. She held her hips, careful not to touch her torso.

  “Was any of it real?”

  When Kristina’s dark eyes met hers, they were wet with tears, and Parker already knew. Kristina loved her.

  Her heart beat hard, and for a second, she believed Kristina was about to lean up and kiss her, and somehow they could find their way through all this together. Instead, Kristina finally stepped back, looking agonized. Parker knew she was trying to find the words to say goodbye again.

  “I’m not leaving.” She dropped her purse on the side table, decided, steely in her resolution as Kristina opened her mouth to protest. “The doctor said you need to be monitored for seventy-two hours, and I doubt that buffoon can even tell the time, let alone recognize the subtle causes for concern that can accompany a concussion.”

  Kristina wet her lips, one arm still around herself. She looked totally exhausted.

  Whatever had happened between them, Parker didn’t want to see her hurt, to see her suffer. Swiping her fingers across her cheeks, she promised herself she would stay to make sure Kristina was all right, nothing more, and then… She didn’t let herself think it, not yet.

  “I’m going to run a bath for you.” She strode off down the hall, leaving Kristina to trail slowly behind her.

  THE HOUSE WAS quiet when Parker stepped out of the shower. She had run the bath. She’d laid out clean underwear and sweats and tried to ignore the way her heart constricted at the now-painful familiarity she had with Kristina’s life. She’d turned on the coffee machine and dug around in the un-emptied dishwasher for Kristina’s favorite mug, and went to the store for the low-fat creamer she insisted on when she saw she was out. Parker had also studiously avoiding running into Caesar and his stupid shiny black car that was still parked in the driveway, just barely. The sun was long down behind the horizon before she’d headed to take her own shower.

  She made her way down the hall, borrowed yoga pants and a T-shirt that smelled like Kristina clinging to her still slightly damp skin, and looked for Kristina in her bedroom. Something stirred in the pit of her stomach at the sight of that wrought-iron bed frame, the familiar gray sheets. Memories assaulted her like physical touches, crawling over her toes and winding around her ankles as if they’d twisted in the sheets, up and up her calves like the drag of smooth fingertips, cold over her fingers like the iron in her hands, all swirling and settling in the pit of her stomach, the ghost of so many nights spent here, some of her happiest, freest, wildest ever. She turned and rushed back down the hall.

  Parker was breathless when she found her. Whether it was from the memories or the sight of her she didn’t know. Dark hair fell across her face, her body propped up at an odd angle against the arm of the sofa, the dim light of the lamp illuminating her sleeping form.

  Finally, Parker felt like she had a moment, time just to breathe Kristina in, to appreciate being back in her orbit, from the dark place so far from the sun that had become her life without her. She crept forward and sat beside her, taking the throw from the back of the oversized sofa and tucking it around them both. Kristina was small like this, still, as beautiful as she had been in any of their moments. Parker had fallen in love with her for all her brazen confidence, for all her cool commands and sexual prowess, and the new outlook on life she had shared with her. Yet studying her now, she knew she had fallen in love with this side of her too, the side of her she could never quite touch. Something smaller and less sure lived underneath Kristina’s dominant persona, and all the moments, the soft kisses and the teary confessions, where it had reared its head, Parker had loved it just as much.

  Amanda had been the known, the planned, the expected. Kristina was everything beyond, yet somehow, Parker felt she belonged with her more than she ever had with Amanda.

  Kristina’s hair was silky between Parker’s fingers as she brushed it back from her face. Her thick lashes brushed her blanched cheeks before Kristina opened her eyes to catch her.

  “Parker?”

  She nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat.

  “Think you can make it to bed?”

  Kristina groaned.

  “At least scoot down a little bit so your neck isn’t sore in the morning too then?”

  Complying, together, they worked Kristina’s battered body down and sideways until she lay on the sofa, her breaths shallow from the pain. Parker made a mental note to do some research on broken ribs. She had no idea if this level of pain was normal. By the time she spread the throw carefully over her, Kristina’s eyes were already closed.

  Forcing herself to stop hovering, Parker turned, not ready to spend her first night in the house in the guest room.

  “Parker.”

  It was barely a whisper, but when she looked back, Kristina’s eyes were on her. If Kristina had known what she wanted to say, it must have died on her lips. Silence stretched out, but somehow, Parker understood. Sitting herself down on the carpet by the sofa, she reached up slowly and carded her fingers through Kristina’s thick hair.

  “Go to sleep, honey. I’ll be here.”

  Kristina closed her eyes, a long sigh leaving her lips. Parker’s already-broken heart shattered.

  Chapter Twenty

  SHE WOKE COVERED in the same throw she had tucked around Kristina the night before. When Parker opened her eyes, blinking in the bright light from the long window, Kristina was staring down at her, her expression unreadable. A joke about IHOP for breakfast was on the tip of Parker’s tongue, ye
t she couldn’t quite bring herself to make it, excusing herself to the restroom instead.

  When she returned, two steaming mugs of coffee and a bottle of pain pills in her hands, Kristina was still sitting there, and she looked haunted.

  “Hey.”

  She set Kristina’s mug, fancy creamer and all, down on the coffee table beside her and sat at the opposite end of the sofa. The strangeness of it all swallowed her—being back in the house, the familiarity of being near Kristina that hadn’t managed to die, even over their time apart.

  “Thank you.”

  Kristina’s voice was scratchy, her bruises looked even worse than the night before, and Parker ached for her. Silence hung heavy, and even the warm steam from her coffee cup couldn’t slice through it.

  “If you want me to go—”

  “That’s exactly the problem. I don’t.” Kristina cut her off, turning to look at her, her eyes full of the intensity Parker had always known to live there. “I didn’t ever want you to go.”

  It should be everything she wanted to hear, but it was just exhausting because she knew this road, knew where it would ultimately end.

  “What do you want from me, Kristina?”

  She hadn’t meant to sound so tired, and as the impact of the words landed, their emotional echo ricocheted across Kristina’s face. Parker saw the shock, the rejection, the hurt, and then nothing. Her face was smooth as glass, and Parker knew that was the lockdown, because she was Kristina—Kristina who would forever be emotionally unavailable. The determination that leaked into her fine features next surprised her.

  “I moved to America when I was four.” Kristina’s voice wavered though it was toneless, matter of fact. “Before that I lived in Guaymas, in Northwestern Mexico, in an orphanage.”

  Her hands shook and Parker wanted to stop her, but the profoundness of the moment stole her breath to say the words.

  “My parents adopted me and Luis, my brother. I was nine when my mom died, and Luis moved back to Mexico when he turned eighteen. I was thirteen then. I already told you I knew I would inherit the family business from the time I was fifteen, and I met Calvin when I was seventeen.”

  “Kristina…” Parker reached across the sofa, ready to stop her, because all of it felt like a confession made under duress.

  “Let me finish.” The Kristina she knew rang in the command. “Please, Parker, let me finish because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make myself do this again.”

  Heart squeezing painfully, Parker sat back in her seat, holding Kristina’s eyes until they looked away.

  “I was always different.” The words were still toneless, as if she read them from a script. “It was hard for me at school, trying to learn English as well as everything else; then Mom died and Luis left. All I had was Logistica, and my dad, he believed in me so much, even then. But somehow, this validation from someone else, the attention from Calvin…it got to me; he got to me. He made himself so important in my life, and then used that importance to slowly and categorically dismantle me.”

  She sucked in a big breath.

  “I didn’t know liking girls was an option. I didn’t know there was anything other than him, because by the time he was done twisting me…”

  Parker’s heart broke when Kristina blinked back tears.

  “After a particularly bad hospital visit when I was nineteen, my dad found out what was happening and put an end to it. And I just…drifted.”

  Kristina swallowed hard.

  “Like my life was this knitted blanket, and it was blue, then one day someone came along with this thick needle and stitched red all through it, in and out and everywhere until there was almost no blue yarn left that you could see.” She licked her lips, clearly uncomfortable.

  “One day out of nowhere, all the red just disappeared, in a split second.” She kept her eyes on her lap, tracing a pattern on the side of her now cold coffee mug, over and over.

  “Even though the red was gone, the blue blanket wasn’t the same. There were all these…holes where the needle went through, where the red used to be, and there was nothing left to fill them. He made all these holes in me and they just…stayed.”

  A tear finally spilled over, rolling down her cheek. She let it fall, and Parker ached.

  “So when I was twenty I found the agency, and Mal, and I learned how to start to fill the holes, on my terms, in a way I found acceptable—a way I could control. And it really worked.”

  A sob cracked the words, and Parker scooted across the space between them.

  “It worked until you.”

  “Kristina…” An apology hung on her lips, for everything she had just learned, and for the damage she had done to Kristina’s delicate, if dysfunctional, lifestyle before her. “I never meant to hurt you. I was never supposed to fall in love with you either. I could tell you every single reason it was not what I planned or expected.”

  Her voice was thick with tears, and she was grateful when Kristina spoke.

  “I don’t think anything about me was what you had planned or expected. I remember how you tried to run from me that first day.”

  They shared a laugh. It was teary and tentative, but hope exploded somewhere deep in Parker’s chest anyway.

  “And I remember how you made me stay.” She blushed as she spoke, feeling like they’d somehow come full circle, back now in the room where it had all begun.

  “So if I wanted you to stay again, all I would have to do is…”

  She wiggled her fingers, and the embers of playfulness in Kristina’s tired eyes still made Parker burn. She laughed, soft but sad.

  “I think it would take a little more than that this time, Krissie.”

  The admission hung between them, and Parker knew they stood on a precipice, the edge shimmering dangerously close. Her heart beat hard because she didn’t know if Kristina would turn and run again, or take her hand and jump.

  When Kristina reached for her hand, her slim fingers shook.

  “I don’t want to be scared anymore, and I don’t want to watch you walk out of my life again.”

  Everything in Parker’s chest was crushingly happy and sad and torn.

  “You can’t say that just to keep me if you still don’t want—”

  “I’m saying it because I want to move on, because I’m tired of being controlled by the fear that the minute I let someone in beyond this criteria of what I find acceptable they’re going to use the way I feel about them to hurt me.”

  The hand in hers shook still.

  “I’m in love with you, Parker. I’ve been in love with you since… I don’t even know when. I’m sorry—”

  Parker cut her off. “Do you trust me?”

  The answer came quick and quiet, and enough. “Yes.”

  Parker leaned forward and kissed her.

  SOME THINGS CHANGED, others didn’t. Parker was breathless by the time they pulled up to the big house; the gates cracked open for them, the driveway lit against the backdrop of night. Kristina still drove like an idiot.

  She drummed the wheel with slim fingers, impatient, her eyes fixed on the wrought iron as it parted. Parker’s gaze drifted down to a pale stain on the arm of her girlfriend’s black shirt.

  “Looks like you have a little something there, Auntie Krissie.”

  Kristina smiled.

  They’d all been equally surprised by how well she’d taken to the title Roland had bestowed upon her at their second meeting with barely more than a glance and his sticky little hand on her expensive suit jacket.

  Realizing she was being watched, Kristina’s expression broke.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Parker loved her like this, light, playful, content, even as the car lurched forward entirely too fast, the garage door barely up before they were screeching to a stop inside.

  Kristina turned to her, her eyes questioning again.

  “I just never foresaw this. You helping me babysit, covered in spit up. So domestic.” T
he words were true but lightly teasing, and Parker watched their tone register, the interest playing across Kristina’s face as she caught onto the game.

  “You caught me, sweetheart. I held the baby, I played with Roland, I even went and fell in love with you. But do you know what didn’t change?”

  Her voice was slipping, spilling into something richer and darker, and Parker’s body was already responding, excitement stirring deep in the pit of her stomach.

  “No.”

  She left out the title she knew the situation demanded, licking her lips before she caught herself, sweet anticipation singing in her veins.

  Kristina pushed a button, and the engine went silent.

  “How much I absolutely love—” She turned to her, and Parker let herself burn under Kristina’s gaze. “—a great glass of wine and a bubble bath on a Friday night.”

  The words sounded like sex, and Parker was almost ready to agree. When what she had said finally registered, Kristina was already up and out of the car, leaving Parker to rush after her, frustrated, amused, excited.

  Kristina closed strong hands around her arms as she entered the house. She pushed her back against the wall, a soft breath of surprise leaving her. Kristina stepped into her space, intoxicating.

  “What about your bath?”

  Parker grit out the words against soft lips, her fingers already working the buttons on Kristina’s stained shirt.

  Kristina’s lips parted as if to kiss her, and Parker’s eyes fell closed in anticipation. Instead, a tongue slicked across her bottom lip before warm breath tickled her ear.

  “Maybe later. I thought first you might like the opportunity to make up for teasing me?”

  Head back against the wall, Kristina’s body pressed against her, and her bottom lip between her teeth, heat and anticipation spilling through her, Parker couldn’t help but grin.

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  About the Author

  L.E. Royal is a British born fiction writer, living in Texas. She enjoys dark but redeemable characters and twisted themes. Though she is a fan of happy endings, she would describe most of her work as fractured romance. When she is not writing, she is pursuing her dreams with her champion Arabian show horses or hanging out with her wife at their small ranch/accidental cat sanctuary.