by Serena Bell
“And he beat her. He hurt her, daily, systematically, and nothing I did, nothing, would make him stop. I tried everything I knew. Everything. I talked, I yelled, I threatened, I cajoled, I bribed, I called the police, I called the state troopers, I called my biggest, meanest friends. I begged her to leave, I begged her to get help. And he kept hurting her. Over and over again. And I—I had to make him stop.”
“It wasn’t your job to exact justice.”
“But it was my job to take care of her,” he said quietly. “She took care of me. When it was hard. When it was impossible. She loved me when she should have been sunk in grief. I know that it was wrong for me to assault Arnie Sinclair, and I know that two wrongs don’t make a right, but there wasn’t anything else I could do. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that he was hurting her over and over again and there were still things left in the world I could do, right or wrong.”
“But if you could do that—if you could cut a man with a knife—”
Her face was agonized.
“How do I know—how do I know you wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what?”
He thought he might know what she was asking, and it hurt him to know she had to ask the question, but he understood, too, because what he had done had set him outside all the rules. It had exiled him from the world she lived in.
“How do I know you wouldn’t—hurt—me?”
“All I can do is promise you. All I can do is say that the decision I made to hurt Arnie Sinclair was the hardest decision I ever made, and I still hate that I made it and I still know I would make it the same way again if I had another chance. I know that probably doesn’t make me the kind of man you imagined yourself loving, but I can’t, and won’t, take it back. But I can, and will, say that you have nothing to fear from me. Ever. I would never, ever hurt you.”
She had turned away from him, and when she turned back, her eyes were full of tears, her face even more twisted with whatever uncertainty had taken hold of her. “But how do I know?”
He couldn’t make her believe him. All he could do was tell her the truth and hope. She had to decide how she felt about what he’d done and whether she could trust him to keep her safe. “You can’t know. You just have to believe me because you trust me. I think—”
He hesitated, because he knew he was about to throw down a gauntlet. And yet—if they were going to do this—if there were any chance—
“I think it’s the only way we can make this work. If you trust that I will never, ever hurt you. If you believe that the circumstances around that situation were unique.”
“But you’d do that again. Hurt someone who hurt someone you loved.”
He wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t lie to her. “Yes.”
She slowly leaned her head down and rested it on the steering wheel for a moment. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. “I’m tired of being alone, out on a limb, thinking I’m in it together with someone and then finding out it was all just a fantasy.”
“You’re not alone.” He reached for her hands.
She let him take them, but she wouldn’t look at him. “I told you the truth,” she whispered. “I told you—”
But she couldn’t say it now. Couldn’t name the secret she’d told him, or the shame she’d had to swallow to do it.
“And you didn’t tell me the biggest truth about yourself.” She said it flatly, which made it worse. “That’s not intimacy. All those times, I felt like I knew you and you knew me, but it wasn’t true. It was just what you wanted me to believe. Just—what I wanted to believe. Just like with Fallon. Jesus.” She started to cry.
The last time he’d seen a woman cry it had been his grandmother. She’d been curled around herself, nursing a sprained arm where Arnie had twisted it roughly just before he’d punched her, hard, in the stomach. Kincaid hadn’t been there; he’d come home to find her afterward, Arnie already off to wherever he went to cool down after his outbursts.
Kincaid had cut Arnie less than twenty-four hours later.
A minute ago, he’d told Lily, I would never, ever hurt you, but he was already a liar. And not just because he’d once made an impossible decision, but because he’d made the wrong decision here and now. She was dead right: She’d given him everything, every ounce of her passion, her secrets, her shame, her self. And he’d rewarded her by shutting her out. “I’m sorry. I suck with words, but I’m so sorry I made you feel that way, because Lily, I never thought anyone should ever make you feel that way. I hated Fallon’s sorry ass for leaving you hanging out there on your own, and if I made you feel like that…”
There were all kinds of ways to be savage, to be violent, and he saw now that you could do violence to someone with a gesture no bigger than the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. Smaller, even. A non-gesture. You could do violence to someone, to someone you cared about, to something you cared desperately about, by omission.
Words would never make it better, and maybe she knew it, too, because she didn’t protest when he stood and pulled her to her feet and kissed her, didn’t protest when he put his fingers in her hair and tugged her closer so he could get more of her mouth. And when he finally drew back, searching her face for something—softening, forgiveness, redemption—she nodded her head like she didn’t have the right words, either.
—
It started sweet.
It started with kisses, with his hands gentle in her hair. It started with him looking at her, checking in, asking permission.
She thought that it would be okay. At first.
But then it was fierce. Then it was her fingernails and his back, her teeth and his shoulder. Her anger, and all the ways she could punish and pummel. You should have told me.
For a while, she still thought it would be okay. When he grunted at the pain of her breaking his skin, when he kissed her back harder but broke the kiss to cry out because she’d pulled his hair, when he backed her up against the car, the metal cool on her bare thighs.
Until he pressed his body against hers and wrapped his hand around her wrists, and then she was afraid.
She was afraid, in a way she’d never been afraid of him before. Because all the times before, she’d felt him with her. In her head. Or thought she had.
Maybe she’d been stupid, that night in the diner, not to be afraid. She’d admired his height, the bulk of muscle that took her breath away, the coolness of his eyes, the remove at which he kept himself, but she hadn’t added it all up to danger. When he’d stood up for her against Markos, when he’d turned the force of his personal power and persuasion on the weaker man, she hadn’t thought, He could use that power for evil, too. She’d only loved that he was her champion and wanted to feel that power unleashed on her.
Now she was afraid of him.
Heat poured off him. His weight crushed her, cutting off her breath, and his hand felt like a vise around her wrists.
She didn’t want it. She didn’t want the heat or the weight, the roughness, the cuff, his bulk looming and threatening. She wanted him off her. She struggled under him, and he responded the way she’d trained him to respond, by bearing down harder on her. By tightening his grip, by grating out, “Hold still.” By pinning her to the car with his thigh between hers, right where it should have let her ride pleasure and pain to its logical conclusion—only this time, that wasn’t what happened.
She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move. He’d stabbed another man and gone to prison; he’d lived in a cage and eaten institutional food. For almost a decade his life had been a struggle for survival, and he hadn’t wanted her to know it.
She could smell his breath and his sweat and her own fear. Her throat closed up, her chest tightened, and she started to panic.
“Stop,” she whispered.
But he didn’t, of course. He used his grip on her wrists and his knee to flip her over. He covered her body with his and lifted her skirt, and she felt the seam of his jeans against the crack of her ass, where the thin slip of her thong lay.
If he wanted to, he could have her whether she wanted him to or not, which had been true all along. At any moment, from the very beginning, he could have done whatever he’d wanted to her.
And she’d let him put her in that position, let him make her vulnerable, because of this stupid, dangerous, unnatural need of hers, because she wanted something that she shouldn’t want, and she wanted it against all reason and against all judgment.
She was flooded with shame, and the potent mixture of shame and panic, his body crushing the last of her breath out of her, her cheek against the cold, grimy metal roof of her car, forced the word out of her mouth, barely more than a whisper—
Of course he would have heard it even if she’d only moved her lips, even if it had floated out on the barest breath, because he was listening that hard for it.
“Uncle.”
—
He released her at once, stumbled back as if she’d struck him, and for an instant the pain was so intense it was almost a physical blow.
He had wanted her to forgive him. To absolve him.
He had wanted to be washed clean in her.
Instead she had gone dangerously still under him, and even before she’d said the word, he’d known.
The peculiar trust that had existed between them—the unwarranted, unearned, undeserved trust—was gone. He had destroyed it, not with a single stroke but with his systematic failure to give her back the trust she’d given him.
Everything that had happened between them, from that very first inexplicable, improbable encounter in the alley to this moment, had depended on that now lost trust. Her whimper. That first time she’d splintered under his touch. Her willingness to follow him back to his house. The way she had held still while he’d bound her. Her faith had been utterly and completely without foundation, but it had still been the most essential stone in this precarious, marvelous structure.
She had once trusted another man enough to reveal herself, and he had humiliated and renounced her. The miracle was that she had trusted again, trusted him. That was what Kincaid had seen and sensed in her from the first, in the diner, that she was deeply and fully willing to believe the best about people, despite all evidence to the contrary.
But she didn’t believe it of him, not anymore.
She stood much more slowly, brushing the grime of her car off the front of her T-shirt and skirt. He’d dirtied her. Taken something that had managed to stay pure, even in a dark and rough and kinky place, in a world where people hit and hurt and cut, and sullied it.
She didn’t turn to look at him. She didn’t say anything. She patted her hair and straightened her clothes, and then she said, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Just that. She didn’t say what she was sorry for.
He reached a hand out, a kind of plea. “You don’t have to be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I’m sorry for—for saying ‘uncle.’ ”
“That’s why there’s a safe word. So you can say it if you need to.”
“I didn’t want to need to say it,” she whispered.
Even now, even though she wasn’t looking at him, even though he knew he’d lost her and that he’d broken the most precious thing left in a life that had had far too few precious things, she was thinking of him and how he felt and whether she had hurt him. At this worst possible moment, she was being the best possible person, and he loved her with all the power in him, straight through the futility of it. “It’s okay.”
She swiped a palm over her face. “It’s not okay.”
She didn’t say, It will never be okay again, but he knew it wouldn’t. He’d known it when she’d stopped struggling under him, when her body had gone limp to the very center of her being, when all the fierce resistance had gone out of her.
She dropped her hand from her face and drew herself up. Faced him for the first time. “Tucker got me a job.”
He wouldn’t have guessed it was possible for the night to get darker, but he had to glance up at the sky to see if a cloud had moved across the stars. They were still there, vast and glorious, and the darkness was only in him. The darkness was between them, where there had been only brightness.
“Congratulations.” Somehow he kept his voice level and free of bitterness. Because he wanted success and happiness for her. He wanted her to cook and feed people, to own a restaurant and gather people around her, as many people as she could, so that as many people as possible could know what he knew about her, that she was the very best thing.
She gave him a questioning look. “I wasn’t sure. Whether to go.”
Don’t go.
Please don’t go.
That would be the height of selfishness. To ask her to stay here, with him, when they both knew—
But she didn’t know. She didn’t know all of it. Not yet.
“Technically I’m still doing time.”
She gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m on parole. Technically I’m still a convict.”
She drew a sharp breath, which he felt in a part of his gut as deep as the place where he felt her whimpers, a part of him that knew what mattered.
“Parolees are always looking over their shoulders, always worried they’re going to do something small that will get them sent back. A speeding violation, a parking ticket, a bar brawl. Rough sex where the other partner cries foul.”
“I wouldn’t have done that,” she protested, reaching out a hand as if to stop his words.
“I know.”
“When we were—I always knew—”
But between them, there was still the moment she’d gone limp, and that one word, that safe word, that had made everything dangerous between them.
“I could go back to OSP for setting foot in Yeowing or having a conversation with Arnie Sinclair or getting kicked out of a bar for drinking too much and getting pissy with the bartender.”
“That sucks,” she whispered.
He didn’t want her pity—that wasn’t the point. “Even when the sentence is finished, I’m probably never going to own my own landscape company. It takes a lot of resources to do that, and I have nothing. No family, no savings—”
“Without that will.”
He nodded. “I won’t be able to get a job that pays much more than minimum wage, probably ever. I won’t be able to volunteer in my kids’ schools. Hell, I probably won’t have kids, because I won’t have the resources to raise them right or send them to college someday. My life can blow up around me at just about any point, for just about any reason, just because someone finds out about what I did—and you’ve seen how hard it is to keep that a secret.”
Her eyes were wide and dark, shiny with tears. “You could go farther away.”
“Maybe I will. Once my parole’s up. Parole requires me to be somewhere in this county but not too close to Yeowing, and Rodney was the only guy who would give me a job, so that pretty much stuck me here. But yeah, in twenty months, I’ll be done, and at that point, I should probably get farther away, where no one knows me. But even then—it’s a small world. I’ll run into someone who grew up in Yeowing, who knows someone who knows someone, and everything I’ve worked for could go up in flames at any moment. I can’t give you anything. I can’t promise you anything. And you deserve—”
Damn it, his fucking voice had betrayed him, cracking like a teenager’s.
“You deserve everything.”
There were tears running down her face now, and everything in him cried out for him to take her in his arms, to wipe those tears away, but he meant exactly what he’d said. “Chicago can give you everything. Your life is in Chicago. You can make something great there. You can find a man who can give you the life you deserve. A guy like Fallon—”
“Fallon is a dick.”
“A guy like him, but without his dickish tendencies,” he corrected, and she laughed through her tears.
“I don’t want that,” she said.
For a moment, he thought she was going to say, I
want you, and his stupid, hopeful heart leapt. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if she had said that, whether he would have gathered her in his arms or told her to go, but at any rate, it didn’t happen. She made a half turn away from him, staring into the wooded perimeter of the parking lot.
Maybe if she hadn’t said uncle.
Maybe if she hadn’t gone limp between him and the car.
Maybe if she still trusted him, if she still believed that he could keep her safe, no matter what he’d done.
Maybe then.
But this was real life, with its implacable reality, with its hard edges that couldn’t be filed away or covered with bumpers.
“Take the job,” he said.
Chapter 17
“I took the job.”
It had taken a while for Lily to find a quiet moment with her sister, but now the kids were asleep, Reg was out bowling with the guys, and Sierra had put her feet up on the coffee table and was sipping a glass of red wine. Lily sat on the couch across from her. “I’m flying to Chicago on Friday.”
“Did you talk to him?” Sierra scrutinized Lily’s face, then frowned. “You didn’t.”
Lily had accused, she had listened. She had tried to understand, been willing to forgive, been willing to try, and then—
Uncle.
There was only so much you could take, only so much you could risk.
She’d been so sure this time was different, so sure that this time, they were in it together. And then she’d seen how far away he really was, how much he’d held back. How he’d hidden himself.
He hadn’t let her in. There was a gulf between Lily and Kincaid as wide as the one between her and Fallon.
And she hadn’t been able to reach across it, not even with that strange chemical bond between them.
“It’s complicated.” What an understatement that was.
Sierra crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “That’s what people say when they wimp out of doing what they know they need to do.”
“Back off.”
Something in Lily’s voice must have warned Sierra that she was dead serious, because Sierra lowered her shoulders and her expression softened.
