Take Me Tender

by Christie Ridgway

  “I’ll do it.” The walk would clear her head and lower her body temperature. Though she was trembling, her skin felt hot to the touch. “You pick up the food and I’ll be right back.”

  She didn’t want to think about what would happen after that. So she focused on the group down the beach, realizing even before she’d reached it that the number of partygoers had tripled in size. The music was as loud as before, and some of the kids were dancing. Girls gyrated, facing each other in little knots. Despite the fast tempo, couples swayed in slow motion, plastered together like they were having sex on their feet.

  She smelled beer and the sticky sweetness of wine coolers. Skirting a sleeping bag, she noticed an entwined couple was snuggled inside. As she passed, the boy reached for a tall can of malt liquor half-planted in the sand.

  A cold slick of sweat burst over Nikki’s skin as a few feet away she saw another boy, backlit by the fire, pour a stream of liquid from a Boda bag into a girl’s mouth.

  She rewarded him with a voluptuous kiss.

  He palmed her breast and she laughed, pushing him away. He pushed her in return and she ran, him taking chase.

  Nikki wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and squinted through the smoke. Where was Fern?

  A trek through the center of the party zone didn’t bring her any answers. She wound her way through more dancers, and then around a circle of young men playing drunken catch with a football. It was an older crowd mixed in with the younger, she noticed, but there was still no sign of Jay’s cousin.

  Finally, Nikki moved to the dark perimeter of the gathering, hoping some distance would give her a better view. No familiar, girlish figure. She shuffled back, preparing to turn away and report her lack of success to Jay.

  But a hand clamped heavily around her upper arm. “You can’t leave now,” a man’s voice said. She was turned in one quick movement.

  Nikki stiffened. “I—” But her protest was stifled by strange, cold lips that tasted like dark beer and garlic. The man’s hands squeezed her shoulders and when she tried yanking away, they only bit harder.

  With that, years fell away. She was fifteen. So young. Stupid. Sad.

  Another dark party. Other drunken guests. Other hands biting, other lips that were too hard and then too wrong.

  You can’t go now.

  You can’t leave me like this.

  Give it to me, baby.

  You owe it to me, baby.

  A hand clamping her breast. A palm over her mouth to stifle her protest. Biting pain between her thighs. And the last tears she’d ever shed, colder than snow, colder than death, trickling from the corners of her eyes to her temples and into her hair. Until then she’d thought sex was a way for him to make her feel loved. Now she knew it was a way for him to make her feel less.

  A strangled oath brought her back to the present. She was on the beach and on her feet, the stranger’s kiss over. No one was touching her breast. There was nothing between her thighs. But a sick dread still held her in its thrall. Fear tasted like blood in her mouth and her skin jittered, the old memory continuing to crawl across it like spiders.

  “You’re not Connie.” The hulk of a young man who’d caught her was staring down at her, his eyes blinking with the rapidity of a strobe light. His hands still held her shoulders, but now Nikki realized they were holding her upright. “Shit, lady. You’re not Connie.”

  She didn’t stick around to introduce herself. She broke free of him, if not from the past still swirling like dark smoke in the air, and ran back the way she’d come, her breath loud in her ears, her knee stabbed by fiery pains. But that didn’t matter, not when she was trying to outrace the years and all that she’d promised herself she’d leave behind. Nothing would have stopped her until Ventura, maybe even until Oregon, but then another man’s hands found her shoulders and caught her up against him.

  Jay. She knew him instantly. Jay. Jay. Jay.

  Nikki flung her arms around him and buried her cold face in his warm throat.

  “Cookie. Nikki. What’s wrong?” His embrace was firm and his chest wide. He was keeping her as close as Connie’s guy had, but this was different. So different.

  Jay bent his head and pressed his cheek to hers. He smelled so good, like one of the slick, scented inserts between the pages of NYFM. His touch was as gentle as his voice was urgent. “Nikki, tell me what happened.”

  And she did. The words she’d never told another soul. They crept out of their burial plot at the back of her mind like creatures from the dead, covered in dirt and rattling like bones. The truth came out, yet still she found a way to detach herself from it, if only a little.

  “He hurt her. She didn’t want him to, and she told him no, but still, still, he hurt her.”

  Eleven

  I’m a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.

  —GEORGE CLOONEY, ACTOR

  In his kitchen, Jay made his crappy version of coffee. He didn’t think Nikki would notice it anyway, not after he dumped some whiskey in her mug to disguise its bitter taste. With the half-and-half in hand, he slammed shut the refrigerator door with his elbow, rattling the relish jars and beer bottles inside. As violent as the action was, it didn’t do a thing for his vicious mood.

  Damn the woman! Each time he thought things between them were going to be simple, she scrambled them up.

  He glanced over to where she was sitting on the couch in the living room, before the fire he’d lit to warm her up. His eyes closed. Hell, at least he should be truthful. The person he was mad at was himself, because he couldn’t get his feet to move backward like they usually did when a woman made things complicated.

  Instead, here he was, hovering: lighting a fire, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, making Irish coffee—the kind of things that made him uncomfortable when a lover was doing them for him.

  She’d wanted to head to her own home once they’d left the beach, but he’d even gone so far as to pocket her keys to keep her near. What had happened to the Jay Buchanan who’d written to his fellow men that he’d given up on women?

  More important…so much more important…

  What had happened to Nikki?

  He took the heavily doctored coffee into the living room and pressed the hot mug into her hands. She took it without a flash of her usual smile and that bugged him, too. Christ! He didn’t need this. Inhaling a breath, he told himself he’d get the story out of her and then take her home himself.

  She pursed her lips—he looked away—to blow across the top of her coffee, then ventured a sip.

  “Feh!” The mug landed on the coffee table in front of her with a clunk. She glared at him. “Are you trying to poison me, Buchanan?”

  A grin broke over his face as he fell for it—as he almost fell for it. Though he wanted her to be her usual prickly self, he couldn’t fool himself about it no matter how hard she tried. Those blue and green eyes, usually so clear and bright, looked as dulled as beach glass.

  Dropping to the coffee table to face her, he grabbed the cup of hot liquid and pressed it on her again. “Drink, damn it. You look worse than it tastes.”

  “I noticed you didn’t serve yourself any of this swill,” she grumbled, but he watched until she took another healthy swallow.

  “I’m drinking my whiskey straight tonight.” He wasn’t drinking at all, knowing he was going to get back in his car and drive her home ASAP. He didn’t need booze affecting his driving ability or softening his resolve.

  Get her story and get her out, Buchanan.

  Her next swallow gave him the go-ahead to his plan. “Now, Nikki—”

  “Are you sure Fern’s okay?”

  Nice try. But he surrendered to the stall. It wouldn’t last long—he wouldn’t allow it. “I told you. While you went on your odd little adventure down the beach, God graced my masculine beauty and charm with cell reception. I got through to Fern and Marie’s mother, though that was admittedly a home landline
, so I didn’t tax the Almighty as much as I might have. My cousin left the beach bacchanal earlier than expected and was watching a Veronica Mars marathon with her friend when I called.”

  “Bless your beauty and teen detectives,” Nikki murmured, then took another sip of the medicine he’d made.

  “Speaking of which, I called the cops when you were in the bathroom.”

  Her gaze flew to his face. “Nothing happened.”

  “Uh-huh.” Right. “Not to you, maybe, but that beach party was trouble waiting to erupt.”

  Nikki sat back on the cushions. “You’re right. And you were right to call the police.”

  Jay leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. “Why didn’t you think of it?”

  “I told you. Nothing happened out there to me.”

  “I caught you in my arms after you were tearing down the beach like the devil was after you, cookie,” he said. “I know what I know.”

  Her body, shaking as if buffeted by an arctic wind. Her heart slamming against his chest like it wanted out of hers, until he made her swear on all that was sacred, including Julia Child and that Italian guy, that she wasn’t physically hurt.

  When that hadn’t cracked a smile, he’d been forced to clamp down on his own rising panic. A panic that he’d yet to get control over. He had a writer’s imagination, and he needed the details before he resorted to making them up himself.

  “Cookie—”

  “You know, I hate that nickname.”

  “Learn to live with it.” Like he was having to learn with this new turn to his life. Christ, he didn’t let himself get personal enough to lift the hood of a woman’s car, and now he wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he probed Nikki’s past.

  “‘He hurt her,’” he repeated back, remembering it word-for-word. “‘She didn’t want him to, and she told him no, but still, still, he hurt her.’”

  A log in the fire popped and they both jumped. Jay closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Crap. Damn woman had him on edge and he was never on edge. He liked his relationships casual, simple, and for God’s fucking sake, unbonded. But now he was soaking up Nikki’s tension like a frickin’ sponge.

  She put down her mug again and ran a hand through the tangled mass of her hair. It waved in matching agitation to their moods. “It’s really no big deal.”

  He threw his head back and made a sound that was part snort and part sigh. “What a disappointment you are. Here I thought you were different. But no, now you’re going all girly on me. I hate that. ‘No big deal,’ you say, and I’m supposed to read your mind and correctly interpret that to mean you’re mad I’ve forgotten your birthday, or the anniversary of the hour we met, or your favorite ice-cream flavor.”

  She stared at him. “You’re the one who insisted I wear pink. You’re the one who nixed my commando boots. You’re the one who’s made me hide my soul-deep devotion to Ellen DeGeneres.”

  His eyes narrowed. “And you’re the one who isn’t so funny that I’m going to lose the point here, cookie.” She wasn’t moving from the couch, but all the same, she was scrambling. Why couldn’t he just let her off with her bullshit and leave it at that?

  But he’d held her to him, her heart racing against his, her cheeks so cold she’d scared the hell out of him. His arms crossed his chest as he quoted once again. Damn his good memory. “‘He hurt her. She didn’t want him to, she told him no, but still, still, he hurt her.’”

  A moment passed. Then Nikki looked down at her lap, looked up. “Okay. Fine. Here’s the thing. In high school, I had a friend.”

  He let that sit for sixty seconds, then pinned her with his glare. “And I was voted Prom King and Most Likely to Sleep With the Playmate of the Year. Friends and admirers galore. Move on, cookie.”

  “I just had a bad moment, okay? At that party tonight, I was remembering something about my friend.” Beneath the yellow blanket his grandmother had crocheted a million years before, one shoulder lifted and fell in a shrug. “We…we were at a party. People were drinking. I lost track of her for a while. I thought she was with her boyfriend. She had a boyfriend—did I mention that?”

  “At party with a friend. Check. Friend with boyfriend. Check.”

  Her throat moved as she swallowed. “A boyfriend, Jay. A close boyfriend.”

  God, it was going to be morning before he squeezed this story out of her and got her home and finally out of his hair. “Okay. Close boyfriend. Meaning they engaged in sexual relations, I suppose.”

  “And…and…my friend didn’t think it—the sex—was all that it was cracked up to be.”

  “Oh, bummer. Because teenage boys are so well known for their technique.”

  “But he told her it was how she proved her love—and how he showed his. So how could she change the nature of the relationship?”

  “Uh, ‘no’? Or, ‘Gee, I’m not happy with how things are’?”

  Her hand lifted. Fell. “But there’s the problem. Some people don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  Ah, fuck. Of course, Jay had thought it might be something like this. He’d wanted the details because he hadn’t wanted it to be this. His eyes closed. “How old was your friend?”

  Shit. Friend. There was a crock of crap.

  “Fifteen.”

  She hadn’t even hesitated before slaying him. The damn woman had gone straight for the jugular. Fifteen. Fifteen-year-old Nikki with a boyfriend she’d been sleeping with within a year of losing her mother. And then, one night the son of a bitch hadn’t taken no for an answer.

  There was a special jail cell in hell for bastards like that, right?

  Then he remembered Nikki’s general jumpiness. The way she sometimes skittered away from him if he came up on her from behind. The near-violent reaction she’d had that time he’d placed his palm over her mouth. It all made sick sense—and made clear that the night her Romeo hadn’t taken “no” for an answer, there’d been more coercion involved than “pretty please.”

  Now Jay felt sick.

  Ignoring the riot in his gut, he shot to his feet. “We’ve got to go now. I need to drive you home.”

  She straightened, too, his grandmother’s sunny throw falling off her shoulders. “Only to my car—I left it at Cassandra’s shop.”

  “I’ll drive you to your place. You’ve been drinking bad coffee. And didn’t I hear you tell Fern you have a fish? I need to bring you home safely to your pet.”

  She laughed a little, but the sharp sound cut. “It’s plastic, Jay. You wind it up and the fish circles around the bowl. I don’t need to feed it. It doesn’t even know I’m gone.”

  He stared at her. He was gone. He was a goner. Because despite all his single dude instincts, right now he could not let this blue- and green-eyed woman, this bruja, go home to an empty apartment and a plastic fish. Not tonight.

  Shit. Damn. Fuck. What was the bet he’d made with Jorge? It didn’t matter. He’d fallen under her spell.

  Temporarily, anyway. For this one night.

  She made a little sound of protest as he settled back on the couch beside her. He kept to his side of the cushions. “Shut up,” he said, “and now tell me exactly what happened out at Zuma.”

  She huffed out a frustrated sigh, then gave in. “Oh, fine. This young man on the beach…he…he grabbed me and kissed me. That’s why I spooked.”

  Jay refused to look at her. “Should I go find the SOB and beat him up?”

  “No. It’s kind of funny, now that I think of it. He sounded appalled when he realized I was a stranger. He’d mistaken me for someone named Connie.”

  “I don’t mistake you for anybody.” It was the uncomfortable truth. Jay couldn’t seem to dismiss her from his mind like all the other women who had come before. Settling back against the cushions, he propped his feet on the table in front of them.

  There wasn’t a chance he was going to sleep tonight, not with all that was rolling around in his head. And he didn’t think Nikki truly wanted to be
alone after her scare or flashback or whatever the hell it was that she wasn’t being entirely truthful about. Her friend.

  Christ.

  Leaning to his left, he snapped off the light beside the couch. The room dimmed to flame-gilded shadows. Outside the bank of windows, the spotlight on the roof illuminated the lacy-looking surfline.

  He slid lower and set his head against the back of the cushions, then rolled it left to take in Nikki. In profile, she looked so damn vulnerable and so damn sweet. His chest ached. “How do you feel about waiting for sunrises?”

  Her back stiffened. Her head whipped toward his. Uh-oh, Jay thought. She was going full prickle. What had he done now?

  “‘Waiting for sunrises’? Is that what we’ve come to?” She stabbed a finger at him. “I don’t think so, buddy. Instead, I think we’re going to have sex.”

  Twelve

  The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

  —ANAÏS NIN, AUTHOR

  There was no need of defibrillators with Nikki in the room, Jay decided, his mind spinning. She’d just startled the hell out of him.

  And she continued to stare him down. “Well?”

  He pushed his hands through his hair. “I thought we were having a tender moment here, God damn it.” So he sounded more aggrieved than understanding, but for pity’s sake, she’d knocked him on his ass.

  Again.

  “Tender? You’re looking at me with pity. You’re afraid to touch me just because I had a bad moment on the beach tonight.”

  “Nik—”

  “I’m not some victim, you know.”

  He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Not like your young friend in the past.”

  The eight inches separating them evaporated. “She isn’t a victim any longer either.”

  He groaned in frustration. “I thought you were against us having sex!”

  “That was before I learned that you’ll lose interest after our one-night stand, Wally Weasel. I figure one bout in your bed and then I’ll be free from your attentions. I can go back to making you delicious meals while wearing my favorite mannish footwear.”