by Zoey Parker
“How do you two know each other?” Dan asked. He sounded polite enough.
“We’re married,” Ben responded flatly.
Dan went from red to white in an instant. The little bit of poise he’d managed to collect prior to Ben’s sudden bombshell of a statement went whistling away with the wind. I almost wanted to laugh. This was the smooth, handsome guy who’d had me feeling like I was tripping all over my tongue at the park? God, that was just a few months ago. It hadn’t been that long, not really. So why did he seem like a child when he stood across from Ben? How could these two men even be the same species? Ben was calm and composed, while Dan spluttered, trying to find something reasonable to say.
“That’s, uh…wow. Lovely. Great. Um, awesome, I’m really happy for you, Carmen. Wish I’d gotten that date when I had the chance, heh.” As soon as the awkward joke came bumbling out of his mouth, he looked like he immediately regretted it. Ben didn’t move, but a single muscle twitched in his face. It was enough to turn Dan into quivering putty.
Cassie was looking around at all of us in turn. She looked lost, and why wouldn’t she be? Heck, I was lost, and I was the only thing these men had in common. Aside from me, Dan and Ben were as opposite as two people could be. Dan was smooth, lean, clean-shaven, whereas Ben was this hulking, scarred, tattooed mess of a man.
A few months ago, I would have looked at him like he was from another planet. I wasn’t altogether sure he wasn’t. The difference was that now I knew it was a place I wanted to immerse myself in. I blushed deeper; my body was still ringing with the sensation of Ben burying himself inside me. It felt almost wrong to be standing around and chit-chatting with this youthful boy when just a few minutes earlier I had been in the midst of being filled with a real man.
Dan forced a dry swallow down his throat. “We should get going,” he blurted suddenly. “Gotta set up camp, and uh, firewood, you know, for the, um, fire…” he trailed off without finishing his sentence.
Ben nodded. “Good to meet you, Dan,” he said coolly.
“Likewise. And, Carmen, maybe see you…? Never mind. Have a good night!” He scurried off immediately, dragging Cassie behind him. They disappeared in the direction of the hiking trail that, according to a nearby sign, picked up just a little bit farther into the foothills.
Ben turned and looked at me. “Friend of yours?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
I couldn’t read his face. Was he angry? Disappointed? There was no way he could possibly be jealous, right? That wouldn’t make any sense. Or would it? I didn’t know. Like always, he was a mystery to me until he chose not to be. “Not really,” I said, my voice low. “We just met once. He, uh, asked me out. But nothing ever happened.” I added, “I swear,” for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
“Hmm.” Before I could figure out how to ask him what he was thinking, he turned and walked back to the motorcycle. “Coming?” he asked.
I hurried over and climbed on behind him.
He didn’t say a word the whole way home. I clung to his shirtless torso as we ripped down the highway way faster than we had on the way here. He seemed to be driving angrily, or maybe I was just projecting my worries onto him. I felt like I’d ruined the moment by bumping into Dan and not handling the awkward situation that had ensued. Ben and I had felt so close lying together in sunny silence on the riverbank. But now it felt like his walls were drawn up again, like he’d retreated from me just when I thought he’d finally begun to relax.
He didn’t say anything as we parked outside the apartment, as we climbed the stairs, or as he unlocked the front door and let me walk inside ahead of him. I was too scared of what he might say to probe just yet. I needed time to think it over, so I didn’t dare turn back around and ask him anything.
But just as I was about to walk into the bedroom to take a shower, he spoke up. “Carmen,” he said in a low voice.
I froze. Slowly, I pivoted on my heel to face him. He stood a few yards away, just inside the doorway, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest as he stared straight at me.
“Yes, Ben?” I said hesitantly. I couldn’t hold his eye contact. My gaze kept darting between him and the floor. He was smoldering—not quite angry, but he was hot with some emotion I was struggling to identify.
“Who was that son of a bitch?”
“He was no one, Ben. I swear. It was just like I said. He came up to me at the park one day and asked if I wanted to get dinner with him. But my dad never let me go. That was the end of it. We haven’t talked since.”
He growled something I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I asked.
“I said, I didn’t like him.”
I bit my nails as I looked up at him fearfully. He straightened up, unfolded his arms, and cracked his neck on either side. Then he took another step in my direction. I surprised myself when I cowered instinctively against the doorframe that led to the bedroom. What the hell? Was I afraid he’d hit me or something? He’d never even come close to threatening me or making me think that before. But the way he’d responded to Dan was a whole new side of Ben, one I’d never seen in all our time together. Maybe it had been lurking below the surface the whole time, just waiting for the right stimulus to come out.
I swallowed. It hadn’t really been that long, had it? Just a few weeks together, and before that, there was only the one night. He’d been nothing but courteous that whole time, if distant. But against that firsthand experience, I had a whole lifetime of hearing stories about the Dark Knights and the awful things they had been known to do to girls, at least according to the rumor mill. Beatings, threats, all kinds of ugly bits of half-heard gossip. A man like Ben was probably capable of doing lots of things I didn’t want to think about. There was every likelihood that this was one of them. Stick a toe out of line and watched it get smashed. Was that his style?
I was surging with the desperate desire to run away and hide. My skin was crawling with anxiety and fear; my mouth felt dry and sticky. I forced myself to stop chewing my nails and instead to clasp my hands in front of me obediently. Maybe, if I acted apologetic—even though I’d truly done nothing wrong—he wouldn’t hurt me too badly.
He stopped when he was right in front of me and spread his feet wide. I was quivering from head to toe. This was it; the punch was coming. Everything up until now had been just a honeymoon period, a brief oasis in time before the hitting started. The future looked bleak from this moment forward. It looked painful.
Ben raised a hand towards me. I closed my eyes, waiting for the strike to land.
But instead, he cupped my chin softly. His fingers were more delicate than I ever could have imagined.
“Open your eyes, Carmen.”
I forced them open, trembling.
“There’s something you should know about me,” he growled. “I’m a jealous son of a bitch. I don’t share. Never have. I don’t play nice with others. When I want something, I want it all to myself, now and forever. And you…you’re like nothing else I’ve ever had before. With you, the need to have everything is more intense. It’s clawing at me. I don’t just want you now. I want you from years ago. I want your whole life. Do you understand me? I want you to belong to me so completely that it’s like you’ve always been mine. The thought of another man even looking at you makes my skin crawl. I’m a flawed man, and this is one of my deepest, but it is what it is.”
He paused to look deeply into my eyes before continuing. “The thing is, I can’t and won’t force you to accept those terms. I meant it when I told you I’m not your prison guard. Your old man may have taken away your choices, but I’m not him and I won’t do that. So you need to decide right now. You can stay here, with me, on my terms. Or you can walk out the door and go anywhere you like. It’s your call.”
He let his hand fall away from my chin and crossed his arms again. He took one last look at me, like he was trying to soak up the images of me, sear me on his retinas, as if it might be the last time he would ever
see me again. Then he walked around me and into the bedroom.
“Ben.”
He was halfway across the room. The light overhead cast dim, twisted shadows across his muscular back. He stopped, but didn’t turn to face me. The air was thick and heavy.
“Ben, I’m not going anywhere. I’m yours. No one else’s. Just yours.”
Slowly, he turned around. He was bigger than ever, it seemed, or maybe that was just my imagination running wild. The fear that had corrupted my thinking was transforming into an intense, trembling energy. How could I ever have thought he would hit me? Of course he wouldn’t. Of course not. It felt like the last vestiges of doubt were getting purged from me in a flood of emotion I couldn’t possibly resist. The only thing I could do was give into it.
Give in to him.
“I’m not a normal man, Carmen. If you’re choosing me, you have to know it won’t be a normal life.”
“I don’t want a normal life. I want this. I want you.”
Before I could stop myself, I ran over to him and jumped into his arms. He caught me without blinking, and my lips crashed into his. His skin was still damp to the touch from the river, and as he threw me onto the bed beside us, my wet hair splayed out like a fan over the comforter. He fell on top of me, his body hot, his touch roving and insistent.
I didn’t want to be wearing clothes for a second longer. Without waiting for him, I stripped his baggy shirt over my head and immediately reached for the buckle of his jeans. He slid out of them and tugged at mine, not even bothering with the button but instead just forcefully yanking them down until they were off and gone, and he could take his firm cock and push it into my hot, desperate cunt and start to fuck me, to fuck me hard and fast and with the most furiously intense passion I’d ever seen or felt or heard of. I was moaning by the third stroke and it felt like just seconds after we’d begun that I was coming. I wasn’t sure whether I was coming because of his manhood penetrating deep into me or because of his masculinity pouring around me like hot wax, but it didn’t matter, because I was coming either way. I clawed at his back and felt blood start to run from where my nails dug deep, but that didn’t matter either. What mattered was his mouth sealed against mine and the frantic pumping of his hips to drive deeper and deeper into me. He wrapped my legs around his waist and used my hips to pull me towards him, to ensure that every single inch of him was diving as far as possible into me as it could go and then just a little bit more. He stroked a rough thumb across my clit and the lightness of that mixed with the thick density of his fucking made my eyes roll back into my head and my toes curl.
Ben wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and forced my head up. “Look at me,” he commanded. He hadn’t stopped thrusting since the moment he entered me. I didn’t ever want him to stop. Little moans and whimpers escaped my mouth as he stared into my eyes like he thought he could see my soul there. He started talking. The words poured outwards like a tidal wave. Neither of us cared if they made sense. What mattered was that it was his voice, Ben’s voice, my husband’s voice and the voice of my baby’s father, that came rough and never-ending.
“You’re mine, all mine. I want all of you, no, need all of you, won’t stop until I have all of you. I put a baby in you and I’ll do it again and again until we’re both dead and gone, and even then, I will own you and keep you to myself. I don’t share, I won’t share, I can’t share. Carmen, you’re mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”
He came again, hard, filling me up for the second time in as many hours. I knew it then: I loved him.
# # #
A little while later, after we both had showered and put on clothes to sleep in, we were lying in bed together. I was curled against his side with my head on his chest, rising and falling with his breaths.
“How is it better every time?” I murmured.
He knew what I was talking about, of course. My heart was still fluttering from the sex, despite how much time had passed. My body was exhausted, but my brain refused to let me sleep.
He rumbled something I couldn’t hear because my ear was pressed on his pec. What he said wasn’t important, though. I had everything I needed already. I had him next to me. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. Before I knew it, we were both asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ben
I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when I clomped into the clubhouse the next morning. My body was a little sore from all the roughhousing with Carmen, but I’d never felt lighter on my feet. I felt downright giddy, like a fucking schoolgirl. But goddammit, I loved it.
My mood immediately took a down turn when I waltzed around the corner and into the hallway. Spark and Slick looked up at me from where they sat on the floor with half-empty boxes arranged messily around me. They blinked a couple times, looking like goddamn zombies, then turned back to the papers without saying a word. I frowned.
Stepping into my office, I saw Jay and Duncan hunched over the conference table. Judging by the frightening number of cigarettes smoked down to the butt and stubbed into the ashtray in the middle of the table, they’d already been there for hours.
As I walked in the door, Duncan roared “Argh!” and stood up suddenly, flinging his seat behind him and plunging a knife into the wooden tabletop. He was seething. I could almost see the steam rolling out of his ears. His eyes were bugging out of his head, rimmed with red, while his nose flared out like a bull in the ring.
He heard me clear my throat and raised his gaze to me, but it was like he could barely see me through the haze of fury clouding his vision. “This is fucking impossible!” he snarled. He picked up a sheath of papers and shook it in the air over his head. “It’s all fucking ruined! I can’t read a goddamn thing. We’ve been here for hours, fucking hours, and we’re not anywhere closer to finding this shit!”
“Calm down, Duncan,” said Jay. His voice was level and cool, as always, but I’d known him long enough to hear the exhaustion underpinning it. I guessed the night’s rest hadn’t helped restore their patience much. They both looked ready to eat a bullet rather than dig through one more pack of water-stained files.
Jay looked at me. “Not going well?” I asked.
He took a fresh cigarette from the almost-empty pack at his elbow and tucked it in between his lips, then retrieved the lighter out of his breast pocket. “Not exactly,” he growled while lighting it and taking a drag. “Just too much damage from the flood. Here, take a look. This is the best thing we’ve found.” He held out a browned piece of paper, turning up at the edges.
“That shit is useless, I’m telling you,” Duncan muttered as I walked over and took the paper from Jay’s hand.
“It’s all we got,” Jay replied.
I studied the page. It looked to be a newspaper clipping. If I squinted, I could make out the date. It was from a few weeks after Olaf and James’s wife were found dead. The headline read, With No End in Sight, Murder Investigation Called Off. The article was still damp, and most of the ink in the paragraphs below had run together. I didn’t think it mattered, though, because the first line said, “Lacking promising suspects and any substantial evidence, local police have temporarily suspended their investigation into the murders of…” before trailing off into blurry nonsense.
My eyes roved over the sheet, looking for anything else that might be useful. I felt Duncan watching me and nodding his head. “See?” he said. “Useless.”
Something caught my eye. “What’s this?” I asked.
Jay frowned. “What?”
I held out the page and pointed out something on the bottom edge. “What’s that look like to you?”
He brought it close to his face, wrinkling up his nose as he tried to get a good view. “Ain’t shit,” Duncan said from across the table. “I’ve looked at that thing a hundred times already.”
“Ben’s right,” Jay said. “It’s something.”
“Lemme see that again.” I laid the clipping flat on the table and hunched over.
Duncan and Jay came to stand on either side of me and together, we all stared down at the handwritten scribble I’d noticed just below where the text of the article ran out.
“Looks like turnip,” Jay said.
“No, it’s turning,” Duncan countered. “That’s a g, not a p. See the little squiggle underneath?”
“That’s just a pen mark, not a g. C’mon, use your head. Didn’t they teach you kids how to read in school?”
“Joiner,” said a voice at the door behind us. “It’s a name. Joiner.”
All three of us whirled around immediately. “Sorry, boss,” Slick said, panting. “He insisted he had to see you. I was just gonna bash his face in, but he said you’d know what was going on.”
“That’s okay, Slick. Let him in.” Slick stepped aside and John Hunter came shuffling into the office. He looked like he was favoring a bad knee, and he was wearing a bathrobe and house slippers, but it was the folder clutched in his fist that really had my attention.
