“Yeah.” I sat up, keeping my toes tucked under his thigh as I hugged my knees to my chest. “I want to help people like that again.”
“Kids?”
I nodded. “Maybe women, too.” Not that I was exactly in a position to act objectively right now. But maybe someday.
The idea took hold in my mind. Helping kids like Alec and I had been. Helping women who’d been victimized. If nothing else, at least I could empathize.
He sat up. “Am I stopping you from doing that?”
I shook my head. “Actually, you’ve been pushing me that direction without even knowing it.” I’d started volunteering for CASA because of the stories Alec had told me about his youth.
I waved my hand. “I mean the whole safe house, can’t-be-seen-in-public thing sort of works against the idea of steady employment, but you know.”
“And massage?”
“Maybe I’ll just keep a few of my special clients.”
“A few.” His eyes narrowed.
“Just the really sexy ones.” I rested my head on his shoulder, grinning. “What about you? No trial. No asshole billionaire trying to kill us. Where would you be, Alec Flynn?”
He shrugged.
“Come on.” I pushed his shoulder. “I told you.”
He rocked back, as if I’d shoved him hard, and when he came back he looked me right in the eye.
“I’d be working on planes. Preferably when they’re on the ground,” he said. “And I’d be trying to convince you to marry me.”
Twenty-five
I slept. I’m not sure how, after Alec had dropped the M word, but I did. After we’d talked, we cleaned up and went to bed. We didn’t mention what he’d said—we hardly had spoken at all. He hadn’t seemed upset by my silence. To the contrary, he seemed pleased to have made me nervous.
If he only knew.
I told myself we’d been playing the hypothetical game, that’s why he’d said what he had. But I’d be kidding myself if I said I thought he wasn’t telling the truth.
He’d fallen asleep first, looking as peaceful as he had when he’d told me all his favorite moments were spent with me. Watching him, I made up lists in my mind of all the reasons why he and I wouldn’t work out. “One of us might die” being somewhere near the top. Then that we hadn’t collectively spent that much time together. A dozen more followed, including that he was out of my league. I even made up scenarios where women passed him their numbers and cornered him in restaurants.
And then I fantasized about kicking their asses and punishing him with the best blow job he’d ever had.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imagine letting him go again. Ever. And that was the most frightening revelation of all.
Finally, his breaths became hypnotic. I’d fallen asleep in his arms, waking in the late morning with such a feeling of rightness it couldn’t be anything but wrong.
I’d slipped out of his arms and gone to the living room, where I promptly started cleaning again.
Marriage. Fucking Alec and his fucking pillow talk.
I was scrubbing the sinks when I heard him call my name. Something in his tone had me dropping the sponge and racing around the corner into the bedroom, yellow rubber gloves still sudsy.
He was rising from bed, naked, semierect. His hair was a just-been-fucked mess, and his body was entirely too lickable. But there was panic in his eyes.
“Alec?” I kept my hands up so as not to drip on the floor. “What’s wrong?”
He blinked at me, and my throat went dry as his gaze shot over the tank top and panties I wore. Then he sat, beckoning me closer.
“Nothing,” he said gruffly. “I didn’t know where you were. Are you cleaning again?”
I turned my hands. “Caught.”
Our knees touched. He opened his legs and pulled me between his thighs. “Do you always wear these gloves?”
“Sometimes.”
He tugged up the hem of my shirt, showing off my belly button. His thumb started there, and drew a slow line to the waistband of my panties. All my concerns from last night went up in smoke.
“Maybe we should take this off and you can show me how you scrub the floor.”
I smirked. “Dirty boy.”
He pulled one glove free, taking his time to reveal my forearm bit by bit.
“Very dirty,” he said, throwing the yellow rubber on the floor and moving to the other side. “Feel free to take the necessary action.”
I laughed. “There’s no point at all in wearing clothes around you.”
“Nice to hear you’re catching on.”
But as his fingers slipped within the side of my panties, he paused.
He turned me, and I followed his gaze to the bruises on my hip. Looking at them brought a tender ache between my legs, an echo of last night’s activities.
He kissed that spot slowly. My breath hitched at the rasp of his stubbled jaw on my side, but his lips were feather soft.
He eased my shirt higher. Examining my ribs, my other side. He gathered the fabric and moved it over the swell of my breasts. Hard peaks formed under his gaze, but he frowned at another bruise on the left side of my chest.
That, too, he kissed.
“Are you very sore?” he asked.
I was a little, but even this touch was enough to make my body blush and my heart stutter. The need for him was unquenchable. Sore or not, I would take him again, and again.
“I’m all right,” I murmured as his mouth lowered to my nipple. His eyes drifted closed as he drew me deeper, and I gave a small gasp at the gentle way he touched me. His arms circled my back, petting me softly, never too tight.
After a moment he stood, taking me with him, and turned to lay me on the bed. He kissed every inch of me. My neck, the inside of my wrist, each one of my ribs. He kissed my toes and the backs of my knees and the insides of my thighs. And finally, he kissed that place between my legs.
The soreness evaporated. My heart felt like it might burst. He was so careful, so attentive. He worshipped my body—I could feel his intent in every slow stroke of his tongue and press of his lips. There was no struggle, no staggering flash of heat. There was a softness to this pleasure, and as the warmth shivered through me, I sighed.
He held me after, and when I palmed him, and stroked him to his release, he barely met my gaze.
* * *
He left not long after to meet with his lawyer downtown. I tried to keep myself busy in his absence, but I could only clean so much. There was a television, but though I stuck an old DVD in the player, I couldn’t sit still long enough to watch it.
I tried to think about Miami, but nothing new came up. I needed to go there, see if anything jogged my memory. There had to be something that showed I was there that night with Maxim Stein, I just had to find it.
Somehow that didn’t seem satisfying enough.
Hiding from him wasn’t exactly satisfying either, but it was keeping me alive. I wasn’t exactly dying for a replay of the whole kidnapping routine.
I called Carolyn again, and after filling her in on my relationship status, she asked if I was having buyer’s remorse.
“Buyer’s remorse,” she said. “You know, you’ve lusted over those Louboutin pumps for months, but after you buy them you can’t even enjoy them because all you can think is, Did I really just drop a thousand dollars on shoes?” She laughed. “Too much self-disclosure?”
I grinned.
“No remorse,” I said. “I love being with him. It’s the times in between that are hard.”
“How come?”
I was sitting on the floor in the living room, my back against the couch where we’d gone crazy on each other last night. For some reason, it was hard to look at it now.
“I guess I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I said.
“Well, let’s hope it
isn’t a Louboutin pump.” She chuckled to herself. “Is this waiting for the other shoe thing new?”
My initial reaction was to say yes, but if I was being honest that wasn’t entirely true. The day my birth mother had taken me swimming—one of our best days, really—I’d known it had been our last. Then there were the countless nights lying in a new bed, wondering when my new dad and mom were going to send me back to foster care. In high school I’d questioned if Amy was really my friend or if she just pitied Orphan Anna, and when I’d first fallen for Alec it seemed all I could do was wait for him to leave. Even Frat Boy’s pictures last night had felt more like an inevitability than a true shock.
“I guess I’ve been thinking that way awhile now,” I said.
“Would you call yourself an expert?”
“In pessimism?”
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever you want to call it.”
I frowned. Therapy wasn’t exactly making me feel better about myself today.
“Maybe.”
“No judgment from me,” Carolyn specified. “You seem like an intelligent woman, Anna. Smart people learn from their experiences so they can anticipate what to expect in the future.”
“But I keep coming back to him, even when I know this is going to hurt me.”
“Has he hurt you?” she asked.
Alec had never directly hurt me. His lies and omissions had been wounding, but he’d made up for them. It was all the chaos that surrounded him that was dangerous.
“No,” I said.
“So you keep expecting heartache, and he proves you wrong,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to be vulnerable when you’ve spent a lifetime protecting yourself.”
“I don’t like being vulnerable,” I said, thinking of Maxim Stein and the pictures.
“Not many people do.” She adjusted the phone, making a soft whooshing sound. “Being vulnerable isn’t the same as being a victim.”
“I’m not a victim,” I said quickly.
“I didn’t say you were,” she said. “But how’s thinking like one working out for you?”
Okay, therapy was definitely not making me feel better today.
“So what am I supposed to do, think happy thoughts?”
“You’ve practiced assuming the worst will happen, what would happen if you tried changing things up?”
“Bad things,” I said, exasperated. “The last time I tried changing things up someone took me, and drugged me, and took pictures of me, and I woke up by a Dumpster without a clue where I’d been for three days.”
In her silence I pressed my forehead to my raised knees. My wounds, that had only started to heal, were exposed. She’d ripped the Band-Aid right off.
I wished Alec were here.
“Take a deep breath,” she said after a moment. “And when you’re ready, let’s talk about that.”
* * *
By the time Alec came back, I was emotionally drained. Carolyn and I had talked for over an hour, and even though she’d patched me back up before we’d ended, I still felt weaker than before.
Not weaker, she had said. Just exhausted. She’d told me avoiding the things that had happened to me would make them fester. It was a defense mechanism. It was what I’d done for years with my birth mother, which was probably why I still carried around her baggage.
I didn’t want her to haunt me anymore.
I didn’t want Maxim Stein to haunt me either.
I just wanted Alec.
From the veranda, I watched him drive up, park, and sit in the cab of the SUV for two full minutes before exiting the car. I didn’t know what he was doing, but when he stepped outside he looked as heavy as I felt.
He walked to Matt’s car, and after a short exchange, they shook hands through the driver’s side window, and Matt drove away. It seemed odd—Matt usually stayed through the night. But maybe Alec had offered him some time to crash again.
I met Alec at the door, and before either of us could talk, I rose on my tiptoes and wrapped my arms around his neck. He settled into me one breath at a time, until his muscles relaxed, and his hands fanned over my back.
“I missed you,” I whispered.
“I missed you, too.”
“What happened today?”
He didn’t let go or back away. He nuzzled his chin into the crook of my neck.
“Can we just sit awhile? Watch a movie or something? I can get Mac to make us something.”
“That sounds perfect.”
And it did, but I worried about what had happened to him today. As if reading my mind, he added, “I’ll tell you everything later. I just need to be with you now.”
Later didn’t end up being that night. We’d sat on the couch and cuddled, my head on his thigh, his fingers threaded with mine, both of us in our own separate worlds. We barely talked, and when it was time for bed, his hands never roamed.
I dreamed of black stars again that night, and when I woke in the morning, Alec was gone.
* * *
For two days it continued that way. He became increasingly more distracted, and distracted me every time I asked why. He touched me at every chance, and held me a little too tightly, and when we made love he was careful, and gentle, without the dirty words and hard passion I’d come to love. There was a sadness in him I couldn’t touch, and it worried a hole right through the middle of my chest.
He left to meet his lawyer during the day, and while he was gone he made me keep the prepaid phone in my pocket. He’d text friendly reminders every so often.
Lock the doors.
Did you lock the doors?
Check the doors.
I didn’t mess with him too much. Even though he seemed concerned, I was comforted by a police patrol car that I caught passing by, and even once turning around in the gravel drive in front of the apartment.
On the second night he told me that Matt had done what he could to remove the pictures posted on the Internet, but he couldn’t do anything if people had copied them to their social media sites. Our FBI tail still hadn’t come back to watch the apartment, and when I asked Alec about this, he said Matt was taking an extended break. Then he told me that Janelle was coming back from Miami, and that she’d found nothing but a surveillance video of a white sedan pulling through the gate early Saturday morning. She texted Alec an image of it, and when he showed me it did look vaguely familiar.
“You recognize this car?” he asked.
I pulled at my hair lightly, trying to trigger the memory.
“A few days before I went to that bar, there was this CASA thing—an art class.”
“At the Children’s Museum,” said Alec.
“Right,” I said, glancing up at him. He’d been to see his lawyer again, but wasn’t dressed for court. He was wearing a T-shirt and the blue ball cap that I now realized he wore when he was trying to avoid being recognized. The ends of his hair stuck out the back in unruly waves, and my fingers itched to throw that hat to the ground and grip it in my fists.
“I thought I saw you that night,” I said.
“In the café across the street.” He glanced down, a small smile on his face. “That definitely was not me.”
I shoved him lightly, but it made me feel all glowy inside that he’d been there that day, like some kind of guardian angel.
“Creeper.”
He shrugged. “The car.”
I refocused on the issue at hand.
“I’d gone to the park on the Bay walk, the one by your apartment.”
“Who’s the creeper?” he asked.
I glared at him. “I was just looking out over the water, and this car stopped behind me. A white car.”
“This car?”
He showed me the image on his cell phone again. It was grainy and at an angle, hard to make out clearly.
“I
don’t know.” I frowned. “Maybe. I had a bad feeling about it. I rode the horn for ten seconds before he moved.”
“Did you see anyone through the windows?”
“Tinted,” I remembered. “Too dark to see through.” I paused. An image filled my mind: a flash of lights as I hurried across a parking lot. A couple asking if I was all right.
“What?”
“The night. At the bar. I . . . I think this car was there.”
Alec was sitting straighter now.
“I think . . .” I closed my eyes. The memory was unclear and slippery. The harder I focused on it, the more it slid away. “I was wearing heels. I couldn’t move very fast. I’d parked, and was trying to go in, and this white car almost hit me. A couple outside asked if I was okay.”
“Why were you rushing?” he asked. “Was someone after you?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I was upset. About the whole you and Janelle thing.”
He leaned away, the scowl so deep on his face it looked permanent.
“That’s why you went to that bar.”
I realized we’d talked around this, but never actually about it.
I picked at my fingernails. Needed a manicure. Yes. Definitely needed a manicure.
“Anna.”
“I didn’t want to think about you anymore. It hurt too much.” I rose. “Please don’t apologize or go away. I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“All right,” he said after a while. He still wasn’t looking at me. I shouldn’t have said that. He hadn’t needed to know. I could have made up something else. I could have just told him I needed a break from Amy and my dad’s babysitting.
He finally looked at me.
“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?” he asked.
His telltale thumb was tapping on his side. Was he actually nervous?
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
He smiled, but his eyes stayed distant.
“I’ll pick you up at six.”
“Are we going somewhere?” That seemed like a bad idea.
“It’ll be safe,” he assured. He stuck a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door. “I need to check some things out and call Janelle about the car. See if they can find a plate number.”
The Confession Page 22
