by Tyler King
Or I out myself. Cram Echo and Avery back into the same body and forever give up the notion that they can be separate people.
My eyes drift toward Ethan, searching for confirmation or encouragement, as I have done since before I knew why. Despite his withholding information that sat me smack in the middle of this incident, I’m still drifting toward him. It’s unconscious, subliminal. No more within my control than the directive that tells my hair to grow or my skin to heal. It’s both comforting and terrifying. Because there’s something here, real and tangible. But it’s also an affliction. If I’m not in control, it’s controlling me.
Ethan reaches across the space between us to lay his hand on my arm. Too tired to conceal his affection or having no intention of doing so.
“You don’t have to hide who you are,” he says. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”
Men with blue eyes are dangerous. They make you believe in miracles.
“Never liked Echo anyway. Think I’ll stick with Avery.”
* * *
Before we can leave for the day, Ethan and I go back to the Slaughterhouse to gather our notes and laptops. All that’s left of the war room are scattered pages of my father’s writings, notepads, and empty coffee cups littering the conference table. Going around the room with a waste bin, I pick up trash while Ethan collates the loose sheets of Patrick’s book into file folders.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
All things considered, sure. But no, not really.
“We need to talk.” I set the bin on the table.
“All right.” On the other side of the room, Ethan steps back to lean against the wall.
“You used me.”
He crosses his arms, a flat, impassive expression staring back at me.
“I managed you.”
“How is that different?”
“It’s my job to—”
“I’m not your responsibility,” I snap back. “I didn’t ask for a mentor.”
“You need one.”
My hands clench, nails digging into the tabletop.
“Why is it so hard for you to let me make my own decisions?”
“You want to be a reporter? This is the job. Work your sources. Kick the doors down. Do whatever’s necessary to get the story.”
“By manipulating me? What happened to right and wrong and everything else is a lie?”
“Like you manipulated the men inside that building?” He pushes off the wall to place both hands on the back of a chair, leaning over the table. “You made a lot of promises to them about telling their side of the story, getting their message heard. Tell me with a straight face you meant every word of it.”
“Of course not,” I shout. “But that’s—”
“Different? How? You were just trying to help because you’re such a patriotic American? Or because the longer you kept them on the phone, the better your version of the story?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Welcome to the real world, Avery.” Sarcastic and smiling, his arms gesture wide through the air. “If you thought it was all noble quests for truth and justice, getting a goddamn medal hung around your neck, you should have joined the fucking Peace Corps. Most of the time, the news is a dirty business. You either hike up your skirt and jump in the mud, or you wash out.”
“Fuck you. I’m not a child.”
I don’t understand where this side of Ethan is coming from, but it makes me want to hurl furniture at him. Condescension isn’t a turn-on, and neither is having my integrity questioned by a man who, lately, has a complicated relationship with the truth.
“No,” he says. “You’re not. So grow up.”
“Oh, is it time for my maturity lesson from a man who can’t go one day without throwing a tantrum in the office?”
“You are such a fucking brat.”
“Suck my dick.”
He flinches and stands upright. Then a smirk creeps across his lips.
“Excuse me? Did you tell me to suck your dick?”
A snort escapes me, and I slap my hand over my mouth.
“Jesus Christ.” He shakes his head, laughing. “This girl just told me to suck her dick. I have nothing to say to that. I’m honestly impressed.”
The giggles set in like a bad infection.
“Shut up.”
“Also a little appalled.”
It must be fatigue, or my brain chemistry is out of balance, as I head into day two without my medication, because I double over. Almost collapse to the floor. Hysterical laughter bursts out of me, so convulsive and painful I can barely breathe. He comes to stand over me as I clutch a chair to stay on my feet, dry laughing with no sound able to escape my chest.
“We’re delirious,” he says and rubs my back. “I’m an asshole, and you need a nap.”
I get myself under control, standing upright and wiping tears from my eyes. The release feels good, cleansing. Like yanking off your bra and popping open the button of your jeans that has held in your gut like a finger plugging a dam.
“I’m still mad at you.”
He tucks my hair behind my ear. “I know. I’m sorry. I was trying not to overwhelm you all at once.”
Turning away, I grab the waste bin and set it back in the corner. “Don’t make those decisions for me. Let me be overwhelmed. If I’m going to react, if I’m going freak out and have a meltdown, let me. At least I’ll know you respect me enough to let me be my own person.”
“You’re right,” he says, coming toward me. “I made a mistake, but I can do better. Don’t write me off yet.”
“Well, I didn’t say that.” I look up into his eyes, still enamored by their vivid depth. “I can be attracted to you and mad at you at the same time. I’m great at multitasking.”
“I see.” Licking his lips, Ethan smirks. “So I’m forgiven?”
“You kidding? You called me a brat. Start with groveling and we’ll see where it goes.”
“Oh, I can grovel.” He brushes past me to grab his laptop and folders, then whispering in my ear: “I’ll give new meaning to the word.”
* * *
Sitting in Ethan’s truck outside my apartment, my vision plays tricks on me. I could have sworn the door to my building was brown, or a dark shade of green, maybe. Now it’s red. This place just doesn’t feel like home yet. Not permanent or stable. There’s a blade hanging over my head, twisting on a thin, unraveling thread, like all of this is one tug away from coming to an end. It’s the consequence of never quite feeling like I had a home. Not since the only one I’d ever known went up in flames. The last decade spent as a visitor in my own life.
“Hey.” Ethan takes my hand. “I did hear you, okay? I’ll stop being such an overbearing jackass.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What’s bothering you?”
Exhaustion, mostly. And the cold, dark cloud that slides in when I’m off my meds. But there’s one other thing we haven’t resolved.
“I met your mom.”
He lets go of my hand to run his through his hair.
“When did this happen?”
“After our dance. I found her by accident.”
“Yeah, well…” He stares out the windshield. “Let’s not get into to it today, yeah?”
“If you want to talk…”
“What’s to talk about, right?”
If he doesn’t want to share this with me, there’s nothing I can do to make him.
I gather up my stuff and open the door. Ethan catches my arm just before I climb out. Conflict and uncertainty color his face. There’s more he wants to say, maybe too much at once, all crowded and confused on his tongue. He leans in and presses his lips to mine. Barely there but no less stirring. He exhales, tension in his jaw. I wish I knew how to take his pain away. To quell the turmoil inside him. But, so far, the only solutions I’ve found come with a prescription.
“Call me later,” he says, and strokes his thumb under my bottom lip. “Get some rest.”
I wat
ch him pull away from the curb. Then I head inside. When I enter the apartment, I find Kumi on the couch watching TV. She leaps to her feet as I toss my stuff on the kitchen table and make a beeline to the bathroom.
“Oh my God! You look like shit. Where have you been? Did you see what happened?”
I head straight for the shower, to be followed by a deep hibernation.
“I was there.”
* * *
Best I can recall, I closed my eyes sometime around eight Sunday morning. When they open again, splinter of sunlight shooting across my face, it feels like only minutes later. Then I feel something slide across my forehead. The scent of coffee, fried dough, and sugar tickle my nose.
“Good morning,” he says.
I roll over in bed, blinking and blind, to the blurry image of Ethan standing there.
“What?” I scrub my eyes but the image doesn’t get any clearer. “What are you doing here?”
The bed dips as he sits beside me.
“I caught Kumi as she was leaving. She let me in.”
Of course she did.
“Time is it?”
“Seven thirty. I brought you breakfast.”
It takes several seconds while I lick the dry ash from my tongue and scrape the crust out of my eyes before his words sink in.
“In the morning? What day is it?”
“Monday. I came to start my groveling.”
Monday. Fuck. We’ve got to get to work.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” I sit up and toss the covers off. “Just need to…”
“Take your time. I’ll wait in the living room.”
He places a kiss on my forehead and walks out, shutting the door behind him. When my brain catches up to the rest of me, I take a look around the room. He’s left coffee on the nightstand. A box of doughnuts on my desk. And a truckload of flowers everywhere else. Roses and tulips and gardenias. And other flowers I can’t name. Flowers I’ve never seen before. Maybe a few that only grow in the darkest of the deepest of Chilean caves. On my dresser and chair and lined up against the walls. On top of still-unpacked boxes at the foot of my bed.
Groveling.
Ethan doesn’t do anything halfway.
Out of bed, I stuff half a doughnut in my mouth and chug the coffee. Then I find Ethan in the living room watching TV on the couch. Like he’s always been here.
“You’re too much,” I say, taking a moment to appreciate the sight of him.
Even in worn jeans and a faded T-shirt, he’s impressive. Broad shoulders and long legs—almost too big for the room, he swallows it. I sometimes forget he’s only a few years older than I am. Ethan has the confidence and quiet gravity that defy his age. But then there are glimpses of a young man. In his wavy, tousled hair pushed back from his face. A few chestnut strands falling over his forehead. And his vivid marine eyes that stand out in Technicolor from across a gray room.
He gives me a little beckoning nod to bring me over, then takes my hand to yank me down on his lap. One hand braces against my back, the other tangled in my hair. He takes my lips like he hasn’t seen me in weeks. Starving and ravenous, sighing in satisfaction as he exhales. As if I’d forgotten. As though it were possible. The way his body fits with mine like a missing limb reattached. How every time he touches me, an empty space is filled that I didn’t know was there. That being in his arms reminds me what it is to feel at all.
“So you like the flowers?” he says against my lips.
“Eh, I’m not big on flowers. But that doughnut was on point.”
Ethan smiles, licking his lips in that predatory way he has.
“Such a brat.”
“See?” I squirm out of his arms and back away. “That’s going to cost you double.”
Lunging forward, he catches my wrist to pull me toward him and in a flurry I’m lying on the couch beneath him. Ethan pins me with the solid length of his body. Air leaves my lungs.
“You’re not getting away that easy,” he rasps at my ear.
His voice is like a switch that awakens every repressed urge I’ve ignored since the last time we were this close. All the urgent, fierce desire that erupted to the surface the first time he held me in his arms on the beach and made me want him. My fingers tug at his hair, needing an anchor as his lips go to my neck, teeth nipping at my flesh. He does something to me on an instinctual level. Like I’m only half-alive when he isn’t with me.
“Yesterday was torture,” he groans, kissing my throat as his hand pushes my legs apart to accommodate him then hooks the back of my knee up around his hip. Ethan’s erection presses against my core. “I was going mad at home, alone, thinking about the next time I could touch you.”
My back arches, an involuntary response to him, his fervent passion, as his hand slides up from my leg to cup my breast and brush his thumb over my nipple through my tank top. I wrench my head back, straining for breath. We don’t have time for this now, but I can’t make myself stop. Dragging my nails down his back, I can’t let go. With Ethan, absorbing and magnetic as he is, I lose all sense of control. And when you’ve trained yourself to avoid anything too potent, too satisfying, a man like him is dangerous.
“I want you,” he says, his voice ragged and wild eyes staring into mine. “All the time. I can barely concentrate on anything else because now I know how soft your lips are and the way your back arches when I kiss you and how fucking great it feels when you’re scratching your nails down the back of my neck.”
He grinds himself between my legs, as if to accentuate his words. He then yanks down the neck of my tank top, almost ripping the fabric to expose my breast.
“Ethan.”
He freezes. “Do you want me to stop?”
No, and that’s the problem. I want more. All of him. Now and for hours, forsaking responsibilities. This is how it happens: the sudden infusion of the drug into my bloodstream that renders other concerns irrelevant. I know my heart and its tendencies. I can’t do casual sex. I’m not wired that way. And yet…
“Don’t stop.”
His mouth wraps around the hard peak, licking and tugging with his teeth. Ethan’s restrained power, the gentle violence of it, fills my head with primal images. Of shredding clothes and sweat-slick skin and the hard, firm planes of his naked body. Then his hand glides down my ribs to dip below the waistband of my pajama pants and cup my sex.
“I want to make you come, Avery.” Soft and tender, his fingers caress me as my eyes close. “I want to show you how it can be with us.”
One slow, deliberate finger pushes inside. I bite my lip to suppress a moan, clawing the couch cushion. He’s almost too much. The scent of his skin, the forceful intensity of his passion. Ethan is a man who overwhelms as a matter of course. He couldn’t temper himself if he tried.
“You’re so tight,” he whispers in my ear. He draws his finger out then back inside. “So beautiful.”
“Ethan, I…”
A second finger enters me, and I can barely stay still. My hips rise to meet him, greedy. But he forces me down with the full weight of his body pressing on his hand—into me.
“Let me give this to you,” he says, lips brushing against mine. “You deserve pleasure, Avery. And I think it’s been too long since a man’s given you any without expecting something in return.”
I don’t know how he came to that conclusion, but he isn’t wrong. And it’s so very typical of Ethan to see even that which I’d never show him. The phase in which I thought being a good girlfriend, loving someone, meant giving and giving until they’d taken it all for granted. So I surrender to him. Eyes closed, I think only of his touch, his kiss, and the building ache as Ethan brings me toward release with patient determination.
* * *
When we get to the office, Ethan’s still walking around with a rather self-satisfied grin on his face. We’re up against a deadline to finalize our article and don’t have much time to finish, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. As far as Ethan’s concerned, it’s just another su
nny day in paradise. He follows me into the snack room for coffee, standing too close beside me as I pour a cup and add cream and sugar.
“Stop it,” I say, feeling his stare.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re being positively obscene.”
“What’s obscene about looking at you?”
“It’s the way you’re doing it. It’s graphic.”
“Only in my head.”
I turn toward him, biting back a smile. “We don’t do that here. That’s the rule.”
“Come over tonight.” Beside me, he leans against the counter. “I want to cook you dinner.”
I take my mug and head back to my desk, Ethan glued to my shoulder.
“That sounds harmless enough.”
“I’m anything but harmless,” he says, lowering his voice as we reach our cubicles. “This way I have you behind closed doors, all to myself.”
“Keep it in your pants, sport.” I grab my notepad from my desk. “We’ve got a meeting.”
As much as I’d love to bask in the warm fuzzies and innuendo, the constant sexual tension and hyperexcitement when everything is new and unexplored, this isn’t the week to lose focus. Minutes later, we step into Ed’s office, where he and Cara are waiting for us. Seems the morning shows are calling. Radio stations and cable news. Now that our first article on the standoff has circulated, everyone wants a piece of us. Well, they want Echo.
“You two are part of the story now,” Ed says, sucking on a bright orange smoothie.
“Hang on.” Ethan takes a combative posture standing in the center of the room. “We’re not forcing Avery into—”
“No one’s saying—”
“Sure sounds like—”
“Bottom line,” Cara says over the bickering men, “we’re in the business of selling magazines.”
“Really?” Ethan slides into that blistering sarcastic tone. “Because I thought we were in the business of reporting the news.”
“Not all of us can live on sanctimony alone.”
“No, just the blood of the innocent and small, furry creatures. Right, Cara? How do you tolerate the daylight?”
I clearly didn’t need to be here for this. Ed slides me a sympathetic glance as Ethan and Cara engage in their favorite pastime. If I slipped out now, it could be days before either of them noticed.
