by Ash Harlow
He changed the angle of his thrusts, drawing an appreciative murmur from her.
“Fuck, yeah.”
“Potty-mouthed little imp.”
“I’m going to kill you when we’re done in here.”
“You’re killing me now.”
“So cold…and so hot.”
“I know, intense, huh?” He took one hand in a glide down her stomach, to reach between her legs cupping her and squeezing her swollen labia around his cock as he continued to surge inside her. She bucked against his hand and with that her back arched as her orgasm tore through her. As she rose to him she released her hold on the handrail and took the full force of the cold water over her chest and breasts, pulling the last gasp of air from her lungs.
He kept her there, back bowed, one hand at her neck, the other holding her close between her legs and lunged one final time into her. He shouted her name as he climaxed, too overwhelmed to keep it to himself as she spasmed around his cock, drawing every agonizing drop from him. Vince left the shower stall first, grabbing a towel and holding it open for Lulah. “Here, imp, let’s get you out and dry before you slip off down the drain.”
She closed the faucet and stepped into his arms.
He took his time drying her, knowing that this could well be the only chance he ever had to care for her this way.
She stood quietly as he adjusted her body so he could reach all of her places, the crease between her elbows, the tuck beneath her chin. He went to his knees, taking care to dry between each toe, the arch of her foot and around her ankle before making his way up her legs. He tapped inside her knee and at his unspoken request she parted her thighs. He took a new towel, dry, and paid attention to each thigh, placing a kiss midway up when he was done.
Standing now he reached the hand with the towel between her legs, cupping her and steadying her with another hand on her shoulder. He stood like that, putting increasing pressure between her legs, and bent to place a soft kiss at the corner of her mouth.
She shifted slightly, up, as if to take his mouth to her but he moved away and she settled as he finished his task.
“You’re so beautiful, Lulah,” he said as he allowed her to pick up a corner of the towel and dry his chest.
She touched the swelling on his lip. “I hurt you.”
“And I hurt you, too, so I guess we’re even.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He tested the split again with his tongue, and he wanted to trouble it, chew it, forever keep the wound raw as a reminder of Lulah’s pain.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They never made it to the restaurant, never made it farther than the bed and room service. Vince stacked the dishes back outside the room and now lay alongside her on the bed.
The lights were switched off, curtains open, with Las Vegas, in all her neon crystallized glory, winking and strutting, flashing her garish plumage at them through the window. Lulah dropped her head back on the pillow.
“How on God’s earth did we end up here? Honestly, a week ago you’d never have convinced me that we’d be lying here together in a Vegas hotel room.”
Vince trailed a finger up and down her arm. “Welcome to my life. Unpredictable, abrupt with change.”
She rolled to one side, matching his tracing finger as she followed the tattoo of the flight of doves that appeared to be released from the bend inside his elbow, taking to the sky across his bicep to his shoulder. “Are you going tomorrow?”
“Uh-huh.” He stared at the ceiling, his arm slipped around the back of her now, cradling her against him. “I’ll pay my respects to Doc, and work at putting him to rest in my mind. I swear it’s like a lawn cemetery in my head these days.”
“After that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get on the road for a bit.”
His casual tone belied the fact that they both knew he needed to finish the break he’d started when Doc passed. If that concluded with Doc’s funeral, that would be a logical end but Lulah understood that where Vince was concerned, there was nothing predictable and his nightmare never seemed to end.
“You know, I love you, Lulah. I think I’ve loved you for a long time but I’ve suppressed it because I don’t want a place on the list of people who have let you down. Line three, Vince Marr, totally unreliable bastard.”
“Only when he switches the shower to cold.”
“That makes me sound almost normal.”
“Your love...it’s different than the others, though, isn’t it?”
“I expect…yes, I expect it is. Doesn’t make it any more reliable or any less painful, and I can’t trust myself enough to love you properly. More than that, I can’t give you a promise of my love because when the darkness rolls in, when the light leaves my soul that way it does, it’s like a malevolent entity, consuming any love I feel. I can’t be around your goodness and beauty when that’s going on. I don’t want to contaminate you.”
“Jesus, you’re speaking as if you have some sort of demon perched on your shoulder. And you don’t, Vince, it’s the PTSD.”
Now he was like a predator, gathering attack energy within his stillness, so that a mere twitch from him agitated the conditioned air in the room. His arm dropped behind her to the bed. When he finally spoke, anger compressed his voice. “I wondered when that would come up—”
“No, okay? Just no. Stop it. Don’t be mean, it’s not who you are.”
His breathing slowed as the tightness around his mouth eased. “I see the light at the end of the tunnel, Lulah.”
“Good, Vince, that’s good.” He’d pulled himself back quicker than usual and when she went to smile at him, encourage him, she was saddened by his eyes filled with despair still fixed on some other place, outside the room.
“Right now the light seems to be dwindling.”
“Now, maybe right at this moment, okay. But this isn’t permanent, this state.”
“This city is doing my head in.”
“If you need to go, Vince, you get on the road.”
“I don’t know what I need any more. It used to be so clear, my routine, my visits to Doc. Having him there, you know, as a safety net. I could always call him, leave a message and he’d call back, as soon as he could. Since Doc left, the way everyone does, I feel like the guy doing the spacewalk, floating in a dark galaxy on a tether that sustains me except I’m unable to rejoin the ship.”
Despite the air conditioning, she could see the perspiration pebble-dashed across his brow. She ran a hand over him, stopping on his chest, finding the galloping beat of his heart. “You’re all amped up and I’m sorry, I wish I knew what happened there. Can you breathe through this, Vince?” His shirt was damp against her palm, the rise and fall of his chest, fast.
“No.” He seized her arm, pushing it roughly to the bed and pinning it in place. “I’m so damned tired of breathing through these things. It never makes any difference, it doesn’t solve anything because something in my head drags me back there. I fucking hate this, you know? A couple of hours ago we were making love, fucking our brains out. I was like a king, being allowed to do that with you. I felt as if nothing could ever ruin that. Now I’m reduced to this. Fuck it, how long? How long will this continue, because I don’t know if I—”
“Calliope, up.”
As Calliope jumped up to be with them, Vince swung his feet to the floor, stood and backed away. “A dog? Really? Is that the solution? ‘We’re sorry the war fucked you up, son. Here, have a puppy’.”
Lulah knew he would hate himself tomorrow, but right now he had bucket loads of anger and hurt to release. “Go for it, Vince, let it all out, I’m not troubled, but you direct one piece of bullshit at Calliope or me, and we’re out of here. Understand?”
His restraint caught her off guard, and not only was he not breathing through it, but he scarcely appeared to breathe at all. He cocked his head, the corners of his mouth twisted back in a sneer. “Tough love, huh? How’s that worked for you so far? Ra
y didn’t come out so well after you tried that with him, but it might work with me. Worth a second try, is that what you think?”
“Now you’re behaving like an asshole.”
“Yep, total asshole, that’s me. Angry, nasty, poisoned with self-pity. But let’s stick with that tough love thing, because to make it work, you have to love in the first place. Do you get that? You’re so busy protecting yourself, making sure that the only people allowed in your life aren’t going to mess up your perfect plan, you don’t actually let anyone in at all. At least the empty home you make for yourself won’t be burdened with loan debt, but the emotional debt might be larger and more difficult to bear. I hope your growing bank statement is a comfort to you on a lonely night.”
“Bullshit. This is not you, at all, Vince. You’re being driven by your anger, and PTSD, and grief. Isolating little pieces of my life in order to insult me is pretty low.”
She left the bed, began gathering her things from around the hotel room, and packed her bag. Jesus, she could hardly breathe. How on earth had they so rapidly reached this place of horror? “Right now, I don’t feel safe around you, so I’ll find somewhere else to stay.”
If they were to have any chance of salvaging this, she had to stop talking and leave, because the desire to strike out and hurt him the same way his words hurt her was overwhelming. All those other times, she’d smoothed his jagged side and grounded him when it all amped up, but now it seemed their lovemaking repositioned her too close. She became a target within his swing.
If she stayed with him and turned the other cheek, would he strike at that one, too?
Vince stood by his neatly stacked belongings, always packed and ready to ship out at short notice. “You stay here. Calliope and I will go. I need to hit the road, anyway.”
Now she was a child again, waiting for the person about to walk out the door, out of her life, to offer her the chance to go along, too. Or perhaps, if she stayed quiet and didn’t beg, he’d make an effort to say she’d be sent for when all was well again. But who knew what happened to the people who vanished from your life?
Like the other time, she would stay behind to look after her father.
Vince paused at the open doorway. His eyes cold, his brow furrowed with stress. “You were always going to see the real me one day. Guess it happened. Sorry I’m such a prick. Hope it didn’t hurt too much.”
The door closed with a harsh click, and Lulah sank back to the bed. Her hands were squeezed into tight fists.
Sure, Vince walking away pained her, but what hurt more were his angry words littered with scraps of truth. The way he’d neatly taken apart her life’s motivation and spread it on a table before her was shocking. Nothing like being told that everything you’d worked for was a lie.
Nobody had done that to her before. They’d taken the public-Lulah exactly as she appeared because her jolly untroubled facade fooled them all. Maybe it had her fooled, too, because what Vince showed her tonight shouldn’t have surprised her.
And her heart ached. It really did. As she tried to make plans to move on from here, she couldn’t find her way beyond that deep void in her chest, as though Vince had grasped some essence of her and ripped it away, taking it with him when he’d left the room.
She rolled across the bed to the place where he’d lain. She was cold, but as she pressed her face into his pillow, she could still smell him and immediately found herself back playing the pointless wishing game, wanting to go back some hours and start over again.
Lulah woke around two a.m., her arm numb, trapped beneath Vince’s pillow which she’d pulled to her chest and rolled beneath her as if to smother it, or hold it close.
He was gone, but still she’d stolen a wishful glance across the room, hoping maybe he’d crept back, entering the suite quietly that way he could, so as not to disturb her. But the sofa was as empty as the space in the corner where he’d kept his gear packed.
Sleep was beyond her now, and she switched on the bedside light to make some notes about the other parts of her life that headed towards chaos: Ray, Dog Haven Sanctuary, and the animal behavior degree that she wasn’t going to finish any time soon. She wanted to pack up her room and take a taxi to the airport to grab the first flight back home, back to her cabin, because if she arrived early, maybe Vince would still be around, and they could start this all again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
His demon haunted him on the drive back to Halo Peak, sitting alongside him in the pickup, dishing out phantom taunts when he became tired, or wanted to reach out and touch the passenger he’d hoped he would share this journey with. Touch Lulah. Take her hand, have her fingers at the back of his neck, and see the compassion of her gray eyes. That’s what he’d hoped for and that’s what he’d ruined.
At each comfort stop for Calliope, he’d stared at his phone, his thumb hovering over Lulah’s contact details before stuffing the phone back into his pocket.
As he walked Calliope, he composed messages of apology, carefully editing out anything that could be taken as justification for his behavior. But he couldn’t quite force himself to connect with her because doing that might well take them back to the terrible place they had left.
Vince spent the afternoon unloading Ray’s gear from the pickup, stacking it in one of the stalls on the opposite side of the barn from his workshop set up. He took extra care with the paintings, making sure they were in a dry, protected position. Lulah’s cabin was the best place to store them, but it didn’t feel right entering there with her away.
The painting of Lulah on the carousel caught his attention the same as it had in Ray’s trailer. Now he found it more difficult to shrug off the coincidence of Lulah as a child, captured in oil, riding a carousel animal that could as easily have come from his grandfather’s workshop as any other. He put it aside. The picture needed framing, and he’d carve one for it. Maybe Lulah would like to hang it in her cabin.
Calliope followed him to his pickup and when he opened the door she jumped in and settled. He was headed for the Sanctuary to pick up Joker.
Marlo’s insight that made her so successful with the rescue dogs had locked onto his poorly concealed despair and her stubborn insistence that he join her and Adam for dinner was impossible to refuse.
At the highway junction he fought the desire to head in the opposite direction to that of the Sanctuary. If possible he would have stayed low at Lulah’s until she returned, but Marlo had always been difficult to resist, her vulnerability captured inside that tough little case and her knowing eye that saw deep inside him, understanding him at times, better even than Lulah.
The need to commit an act of penance had taken Vince through the gates of the Dog Haven Sanctuary as a volunteer over a year ago. Nothing worked for him since he’d returned stateside so he thought that if he did some good, something selfless, maybe that would extract some of the poison from his soul. On the road that day, he’d driven past the Sanctuary and decided that was as good a place as any to volunteer.
Lulah took him on at the Sanctuary without hesitation, never questioning the days he couldn’t turn up and grateful for the days when he did. And always he’d been aware of Marlo in the background, watching with care so that if anything alarming surfaced, she could send in Adam or come herself. A glance would tell her all was not well in Vince’s camp, but he didn’t mind.
He would practice what he would say to Lulah by talking with Marlo and Adam, because if he had to spend his life apologizing, he would gladly do that, although in his heart he knew that he should apologize once and move along. Could his carefully worded contrition survive contact with Lulah or would it fall apart?
Marlo and Adam remarked about how rough he appeared, and Vince admitted that he hadn’t showered since Vegas—since that shower with Lulah—although he didn’t share details with them. At the barn, he’d had what equated to a bird bath in a chipped enamel basin, but the water was cold and hard, the soap reluctant to lather. He accepted Marlo’s offer of
a shower, and when he’d finished, he found dinner almost ready.
“Marlo, I think the shower’s broken; Vince still looks like shit,” Adam remarked when Vince entered the kitchen.
“Yeah, but clean shit,” Vince replied.
“Is what happened in Vegas staying in Vegas?”
“I wish.”
Marlo shot him a glance as she poured him a glass of juice. “We can talk about Vegas once we’ve eaten. You guys set the table.”
After dinner, they settled in the lounge. The four dogs sprawled in a heap on the floor, sedated by the heat from the open fire. Vince explained about Ray, told them Lulah’s plan to have him move as close to Halo Peak as possible for convalescing. Finally came the silence that could only be filled by the rest of the story. Vince settled his focus on the dogs and prepared to talk.
“I’ve really messed up and hurt Lulah. When I took a break, headed off after I found out about Doc, I intended to stay on the road for a bit, but after a couple of days, Butch messaged me with the contact details he’d dug up for Ray. I thought I owed Lulah, having let her down over the auction and stuff, and if I went out and found Ray for her, tried to sort out his mess, well, that might compensate somehow.” He cast a quick glance towards Marlo. “Yeah, fair enough, roll your eyes, groan if you have to.”
Instead, Marlo shook her head. “You men are unbelievable with your misguided ideas of trying to fix stuff for the women in your lives. Why don’t you discuss things first?” She turned to Adam but there was no backup from him. “Oh, never mind.”
“I seem to have a black belt in fucking things up with Lulah, well, women in general.”
Adam laughed. “Relationships aren’t easy, but it’s more difficult when it’s a relationship you’re trying not to have.”
He’d taken Marlo’s hand and pulled her closer to him. Vince envied the move, the ease of it, and the comfort he knew that their bodies close, warm, pulsing, would enjoy.
