Rites of Passage

by Catherine Gayle

  That was all it took to get me hard as a rock.

  But sex would be the easy way out, and I knew it. If I gave in, wouldn’t I just be allowing her to run away from whatever was haunting her? Turning a blind eye to it?

  Yeah, I realized that went directly against everything I’d decided earlier, with the whole she’s-more-likely-to-open-up-after-sex idea, but it seemed like my best option. If all we ever did was jump in bed together, we’d never get anywhere.

  And I wanted to get somewhere. I wanted to get to know her. To be with her, and not just on a physical level.

  This was the first time I’d felt that way about anyone since I’d kicked Chelsea out. Our divorce had taken place almost two years ago—not long after I’d found out that the Thunderbirds had picked me up in the expansion draft.

  And to be honest, I’d never thought I’d get into another relationship again. The idea of trusting someone else that much didn’t seem like a possibility, and considering the HIV diagnosis, I couldn’t imagine any woman who’d want to trust me. Why should she believe I’d gotten it from an ex who’d been cheating and not the other way around? Professional athletes weren’t exactly known for their great skill at monogamy, after all.

  But the more time I spent with Ravyn, the more I wanted to spend with her, and that didn’t seem likely to just go away anytime soon.

  Call me a romantic, but I’d always wanted the sort of relationship my parents had. They’d been together since high school, and I’d never seen a couple more perfect for each other in my life. They worked hard at it, of course, but they knew it was worth working for. That was what they’d shown me and Melody throughout our childhoods, and they were still showing us today.

  Because of that, I’d never felt like a bigger failure than the day I’d called to tell them my marriage was over. But now I was starting to feel the urge to try again, only this time, with Ravyn. Call me crazy, but something told me we’d be good for each other, if we could both find a way past our hang-ups.

  I wanted to give it a go.

  She lifted her lips toward mine, but I angled my head and kissed her on the cheek. That wasn’t enough to stop her. With a sort of determination I hadn’t seen from her before, she took the opportunity to place wet, openmouthed kisses along my jaw and neck. It felt so right, the temptation not only to let her continue but to join her was overwhelming.

  I had to put a stop to it now or there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d avoid giving in. “Ravyn,” I said, kneading the nape of her neck.

  She let out a contented hum but kept kissing my jaw.

  “Stop, baby.”

  “Want you to fuck me,” she murmured, her lips locked to my skin.

  That was never in doubt. “I want you to talk to me,” I insisted.

  But she dropped a hand and found me hard as a spike, then rubbed over my shorts to get me even harder. “You want to fuck me, too.”

  “No point in denying it, but now’s not the time.”

  She didn’t give up easily. At all. Before I knew what hit me, she was tugging at my clothes and trying to get me naked, and my dick was absolutely on board with her efforts.

  “Ravyn,” I said more insistently, putting both hands over the tops of hers to still them. “We need to talk.”

  “Why do we need to talk?” she demanded, her lips hovering over the jagged scar on my neck, tickling my skin.

  “Because I need to know what we are to each other. And I need to understand why you flipped out when Dana left her baby with you for a minute. And why you couldn’t even look at London’s baby because you were in full panic mode and ran straight past them.”

  With every word out of my mouth, she grew more and more tense until she was nothing but a knot of rigidity on my lap, her cheek resting on my chest.

  At least she’d stopped grinding against me. Maybe now we could actually talk and make some progress.

  But when she finally spoke, her voice was terse. “I was in the pool, wearing your clothes and nothing else when a bunch of people I’ve never met before show up, and you want me to just be happy-go-lucky? Sorry, but that’s not who I am.”

  “I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Might as well have.”

  I sighed. This wasn’t going like I’d hoped. Ravyn’s hackles were raised, and now I was in damage-control mode. I stroked my hands over her back, hoping the action would soothe her and not set her off even more than she already was. “I was asking about your reactions to the babies. Because it seemed like you reacted especially strongly to them.”

  “I’m not a kid person.”

  “You seemed to be doing fine with Carter when it was just the three of us. Well, and Snoopy, but I don’t know that the puppy counts as a person.”

  “Fine, then I’m not a baby person.”

  “Is that why you’ve got that adoption symbol tattooed on your chest?” I asked before I could think better of it.

  Whatever small amount of tension had started to melt away from her limbs returned full force, and she pulled away from me, crawling off my lap to put as much distance between us as possible while still sitting on the couch.

  I felt her loss immediately, but now that I’d gone there, I couldn’t unsay the words. I had to keep going. “You never denied that you were pregnant,” I pointed out. “You only denied that you were a mother. So did you give the baby up for adoption? Is that what happened?” Because the alternatives—that she’d miscarried so late in her pregnancy or that the baby had been stillborn—were too awful to contemplate.

  Ravyn wouldn’t look at me. She stared at her lap as if it held the answers I was seeking. But it was her tears that shattered me. They fell one at a time, making slow tracks down her cheeks and leaving dark indigo stains on the denim of her jeans.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” she finally choked out, and I took a shaky breath.

  “Then tell me what it is. Let me help you.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too late for that. I’m beyond help.”

  The certainty in her voice broke me. I couldn’t stop myself from brushing away her tears with the backs of my fingers. Hell, I didn’t want to. I needed to touch her as much as I needed my next breath.

  And then she looked up and met my eyes, hers filled with so much pain that it ripped me in two. “I surrendered my baby,” she choked out. “I couldn’t take care of him, so I walked into the hospital and turned him over to a nurse. I don’t know anything about him—if he has a good home or if he’s stuck in foster care, or if he’s really better off than he would have been with me. There’s no way for me to ever find out, either. So I’m stuck with not knowing. And I probably gave him HIV, because I didn’t know I had it.”

  With those words leaving her lips, she dissolved into a flood of tears. So I did the only thing I could. I lifted her onto my lap again, and I held her close to me, letting her cry on my shoulder for as long as she needed. She didn’t fight me this time. I doubted she had it in her to do so.

  All I knew was I didn’t have it in me to let her go now. And I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  I DON’T KNOW how long we sat like that, Drew stroking my back and running his hands over my hair, me with my face buried in the crook of his neck and my tears staining his shirt dark orange.

  Long enough for me to wish I’d never opened my big mouth and said a damned word, because he was playing the good guy again and I knew there was no such thing unless they were named Rick. At least not in my life.

  Long enough to realize I had never allowed myself to tell someone the awful truth of what I’d done, outside of the doctors who were always on my back. Surrendering a baby like I had wasn’t illegal, but that didn’t make it any less horrible—a truth I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life.

  Long enough to understand that as soon as Drew walked out the door of my apartment, I’d never see him again, because I sure as hell wasn’t ever going back to that support group now that he knew the truth, and there was
no chance he’d fabricate another meeting with me like he had when he’d walked into Rick’s shop. Why would he want to spend time with someone who could walk away from her baby like that? I wasn’t an idiot. The fact that I could do such a thing said a hell of a lot about me, none of it good, and no man in his right mind would ever want to have anything to do with me once he knew the truth. He’d probably just held on to me as long as he had because he needed a moment for reality to sink in. To realize how utterly disgusted by me he was.

  Long enough to come to the realization that I’d never felt so protected before as I did with his strong arms around me, holding me in the sort of embrace that said I was precious.

  Long enough to know that I’d never feel this way again, because it was all a big, fat, stinking lie. I wasn’t precious. Anything that told me otherwise was nothing but bullshit, and the sooner that sunk in and stuck, the better off I’d be.

  Drew couldn’t be as nice as he was acting. He couldn’t care about me or want to protect me, and even if he did want to, there was no way for him to do such a thing. How could someone protect me from myself? How could anyone forgive what I’d allowed myself to become?

  It would be far better to disabuse myself of this notion right away. Allowing myself to fall into the trap of thinking this thing between the two of us was about anything more than sex would only make me hurt worse when Drew walked out of my life. Because he’d never return.

  It was amazing how many tears a body could produce. Sometimes over the last year, I’d thought I was all cried out, that there were no more tears I could possibly cry in a single lifetime because it simply wasn’t possible to have more fluids leak out of my eyes. But then something like this would happen, and a new flood would drag me back under like a riptide.

  The knowledge of my guilt smothered me like a wet, woolen blanket, and a thousand what-ifs threatened to eat me alive.

  What if I’d gone to a health clinic during my pregnancy, even though I didn’t have insurance?

  What if I’d learned I had HIV before giving birth? They could have potentially given me drugs that would have lowered the risk of passing it on to my baby. The doctors had told me this now, which only increased my sense of guilt.

  What if I’d left for the hospital as soon as my labor pains had started instead of convincing myself it wasn’t truly labor since I wasn’t due for several more weeks? Again, there were ways they could have minimized the baby’s exposure. And I could have been sure the baby had the best care possible. Hell, I could have started taking care of myself a lot sooner than I did.

  But who was I kidding? I wasn’t even taking care of myself now.

  And what-ifs didn’t help in the present. They only kept me in a downward spiral with no chance of pulling myself out of it any time on the horizon.

  If ever.

  People kept telling me things would get better, that I’d find my way out of the darkness if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward. Hard to think they weren’t all liars, full of a bunch of bullshit that someone had fed them for so long that they’d started to believe it.

  I wasn’t anywhere near gullible enough for that.

  Somehow, the reminder that things were just as bad as they’d ever been and I didn’t have any chance to come out on the other side of it was exactly what it took to calm me and staunch the torrent of tears.

  But then I felt like a bigger idiot than normal, because not only had I told Drew the truth but I’d allowed myself to wallow in the fleeting comfort of his arms. It was always easier when I kept my distance, because then I wasn’t tempted to believe, even for a moment, in the inherent falsehood of fairy tales. And that was all he could be—a fairy-tale prince.

  I straightened away from him and climbed off his lap, drying the dregs of my tears on the hem of my T-shirt.

  “Hey,” he said, reaching for my hand like he wanted to pull me back down to his lap.

  I skirted away from his reach and went into the bathroom to wash my face, determined not to look at him. Because I didn’t want to see his concern or disgust or whatever it was that he’d throw my direction.

  The cool water helped clear my mind if not my heart.

  But when I returned from the bathroom, I’d hoped—however unrealistically—that he’d be gone. That he would have taken the sudden return of my cold shoulder after his soothing one as a brush-off. That he’d used it as his excuse to get the hell out of my fucked up life as fast as his powerful legs would carry him.

  But he was standing there directly next to the door, his large frame seeming bigger than ever inside my minuscule apartment. He had his feet planted shoulder-width apart, arms crossed, and brows impossibly furrowed with concern. In fact, he was so close to my bathroom door that I almost ran headfirst into him.

  That frown was trouble. It meant he wasn’t finished with his do-gooder schtick, so I needed to head him off at the pass. I screwed up my courage and prepared to issue the final blow—something sure to run him out of my life for good.

  “Thanks for bringing—”

  “Did you paint these?” he cut in, not allowing me to get any headway. I must have blinked and stared in confusion, because he pointed toward the canvases stowed in my closet and said, “These paintings? Can I see them?”

  I was so taken aback by his interest in my art when I’d been trying to send him on his way that I stuttered out something completely unintelligible and waved a hand toward them. It could have been an invitation to look his fill, which was counter to what I really wanted.

  That was certainly how he took my incoherent mumbling. One of these days, I needed to grow a backbone and make it stick. Yeah, I’d gotten up the courage to leave my deadbeat parents when I was a teenager, but I’d run off with a guy who was more into his drugs than me. Then I’d finally left him, but it wasn’t like he’d put up any sort of attempt to keep me with him—and I’d stayed for years, with him essentially ignoring me most of the time because he was too high to care, before I’d finally grown the balls to head out on my own.

  That wasn’t exactly a stellar track record when it came to standing my ground and putting myself first.

  Drew swept the curtain to the side, not that it’d been hiding much, and took out a stack of my paintings. He carried them over to the futon and set them on the coffee table in front of him, lifting his head toward me and giving me an inviting smile. “Come tell me about them.”

  My feet felt like concrete blocks as I crossed over to sit beside him. “There’s nothing to tell,” I said, my tongue thick. The pieces in my closet were the ones I’d done most recently. I had a small space in a gallery that sold paintings by local artists. It was something Rick had helped me set up so I could earn more money. They didn’t sell often, but they went for a more-than-fair price.

  But the ones I had here? The ones I’d been painting lately? They weren’t the sort of art anyone in their right mind would pay for. They were dark and depressing, accurate reflections of my state of mind. No one wanted that hanging in their living room.

  Me, least of all.

  Rick and my doctors all thought I needed to keep painting them, though. Supposedly they were cathartic—a means of allowing myself to process the thoughts jumbled up in my brain like knotted and tangled yarn. So I’d painted.

  They were nothing at all like the art I had started to make a name for myself with. They were ugly and full of pain.

  And now, Drew was studying them like they’d tell him everything he ever needed to know about me.

  Maybe he was right.

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” he said.

  I blinked and shook my head. “Believe what?” I’d clearly lost the thread of conversation. Not uncommon for me lately. I was always floating around in my head instead of staying in the present.

  “That there’s nothing to tell.” He inched closer to me, not stopping until his thigh brushed against mine, and he picked up the piece on top. It was a self-portrait, so the la
st thing on earth I wanted anyone to see.

  Jagged, hateful, black lines. Hardly anything soft about it other than the fuzzy outside edges of the canvas, because there was nothing soft left in me. And tears. Lots of ugly tears.

  “Like this one,” he said. “I think this one says a lot. The baby floating in the tear speaks volumes.”

  “Yeah, but most people who would see that would assume I’d miscarried or something.” Which would somehow be easier for me to bear. Because it wouldn’t have been my fault, I supposed.

  Women miscarry all the time. It’s just a thing that happens. It still broke their hearts to lose a baby in whatever way it happened, I was certain, but it wasn’t because of anything they’d done.

  “But you and I aren’t most people, are we?” Drew said.

  And that was part of the problem. The idea that he knew the truth behind the painting, without needing me to explain it, made me want to crawl under a rock and stay there until there was no more guilt within me—which would never happen. I shook my head, because if I tried to speak, I’d break down again.

  He set the canvas down on his knees and put an arm around my waist.

  I cringed away from his touch. Couldn’t help it. The last thing I deserved right now was someone comforting me, but he seemed more determined than ever to do so, tugging me up against his side.

  “This is a lot different than any of the pieces I saw in your portfolio at the tattoo studio,” he murmured.

  I nodded, still untrusting of my voice and uncertain where he was headed with all of this.

  “A lot more personal.”

  “Too personal,” I croaked.

  “Maybe. I guess when you do a tattoo, it’s personal for the person it’s going on. But this is all about you. Is that right?”

  “Why does it matter to you?”

  My question was insolent and ungrateful, but Drew didn’t even bat an eye.

  “It matters because you matter.”

  But that was where he was wrong. I’d stopped mattering a long time ago, if I’d ever mattered at all.