Stranger

by Robin Lovett

  Layla tilts her head. “Penny, why haven’t you told us about him until now?”

  “He’s from Nashville. He knew my father. He . . .” I dig for as much truth as I can find. “He’s met my brother. He knows more about my family than I do.” Most of what he knows is lies, but I don’t need to divulge that.

  “Blake knows? And he’s okay with this?” Amisha asks.

  Stick to the truth. “He’s not okay with it. Pretty much pushed me out of his office yesterday. But it’s not like he can stop me.”

  “Is this a money thing? You get your trust fund when you’re married, right?” Layla, too perceptive. I wish I could turn off her brain. I need to find a way to stop talking or she’s going to figure out the whole thing.

  I force a smile. “I’ll introduce you to him this weekend. We should all go out.” Maybe they’ll calm down if they meet him. Not likely. Logan’s even scarier close up than he is from afar. I can’t envision him ever being social and talking to people, but if he wants this charade of a marriage to look real, he’s going to have to find a way.

  “But who is he?” Amisha leans on her hand. “You haven’t told us anything about him.”

  “He’s a . . .” A lying, manipulative asshole who wants to ruin my life and every good memory I have, who kisses like he’s starving for sex and looks at me like he wants to eat me. “He likes camping.”

  Layla laughs sarcastically. “You have so much in common.”

  “He loves the beach,” I add too quickly.

  “What does he do?” Amisha asks.

  I have no idea. I gulp. I can’t answer and this is embarrassing.

  “You don’t know.” Layla crosses her arms again. “Why did you marry him? You only met him, what? A week ago?” Her inquisitive eyes might be merely curious to some, but to me, they’re dangerous. If she figures out what’s really going on, it could ruin everything. If she and Amisha find out, they’ll want to help. And the way they’ll help is by calling the police. Which is exactly what can’t happen.

  “I should get home.” I pick up my purse and stand. “But we should definitely make plans to hang out this weekend so you can meet Logan.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Wait!”

  “Penny, come back!”

  I don’t look back. I walk out of the restaurant, not looking at anyone, going straight to my car with a disturbing sense of relief. At least the man I’m going home to I won’t have to lie to.

  Chapter Ten

  I’m cooking when she opens the door.

  I shouldn’t be in her kitchen, but I haven’t had a kitchen in weeks. I need to eat and she has food in her fridge.

  She drops her purse on the table and stares at me.

  The circles under her eyes are a lot bigger than they were two days ago.

  It’s because of me. I’m stressing her.

  Good. I’ll make it worse, inflicting it on her body and her mind. My plans have solidified today. There’s nothing more torturous than being denied something you want. And if she wants sex, I have to find out how badly that includes me. If it’s as bad as I think, my new plan is by far the best I’ve ever thought of.

  “You’re cooking,” she says.

  “I do eat.” I stir the pan.

  “What are you making?” She walks into the kitchen and I don’t like it. It’s too domestic. Her, coming home to me cooking. It’s too familiar. I should’ve made ramen on my cookstove out on her deck.

  “Stir fry.” I frown at the vegetables and meat frying in the pan.

  “Smells good.”

  She comes close to me. Too close. Despite everything I’ve done to make this woman afraid of me, the more scared she is, the more she can’t stay away. Her arm brushes mine and I can smell her.

  Over the sesame seeds and the soy sauce, stronger than the steam or the food, it’s her.

  She smells like girl. Like too much sugar, too much sunshine, and way too much soap. Why does she have to be so clean?

  “I’ll make rice.” She too gracefully goes to the cupboard.

  I refuse to watch her. But I can feel her behind me. Her softness and too gentle movements. It should make me want to get rid of her. I don’t have to hang out in her house. Why am I here? I should be down on the beach.

  But I’m not.

  I’m in her kitchen with her pulling out pots and pans behind me. And I want to touch her.

  It’s a strange sort of want. Like a physical pulling. Like a rubber band pulled taut begging to be released. Like it’s harder for me not to touch her than it would be to haul her against me and bury my fingers into her skin and my tongue in her mouth. It would be easier to take over her the way I couldn’t stop myself yesterday. My hands beneath her clothes, her fingers clutching my hair, begging to go deeper.

  And it’s almost like she’s begging for it again. Reaching in front of me to plug in the cooker, when there’s a perfectly good outlet on the side. Pulling open the drawer next to my hip for a spoon when there’s a perfectly good one in the jar by the stove.

  I turn the burner down to simmer, then back her into the corner.

  I cage her with my arms on either side of her, and her eyes widen in fear.

  “You want to play my game?” I can’t help my eyes roving over her face: her mouth, those pert little lips, her eyes, even her nose with these tiny freckles you can’t see except up close. She’s sickeningly sweet.

  Makes it all the sweeter when she stutters her answer. “I’m, uh, h-hungry.” She’s panting, her mouth open. I catch a glimpse of her pink tongue.

  I lean over her and mock her. “What do you want? Do you want more of me? Are you aching for me to give you the fuck of your life?”

  She shakes her head. “N-no.” But her chest is pumping air at a fierce rate and her tone goes up in that way it does when she’s lying.

  She does want more of me.

  I don’t understand why. But I can use this. I can work her to my advantage. Toy with her. Torture her. I would enjoy that. I would enjoy seeing her driven mad with wanting me—the man who’s out to destroy her life.

  Fear. And Need. Her body is stiff like she wants to run, but her eyes scream wreck me, use me, make me into something other than me.

  I lean toward her ear. “Are you tired of being a good girl?”

  She moans.

  “That’s not an answer.” I breathe against her skin.

  “Yes.” She shivers.

  “You like it when I scare you.”

  Her eyes fall closed. “Yes.”

  “You’re afraid I’ll make you do things you would never do.”

  Her throat works on a swallow. “Yes.”

  “You want me?”

  Her eyes flash open, those light blue ovals that are so clear, I can almost see myself.

  She wants me.

  I stand back and go to the stove.

  I have my answer. It should disturb me, surprise me: I don’t want her to want me. She doesn’t know me. No one does. No one will.

  I don’t want them to know me.

  But it doesn’t matter. My plan is accomplished. Now she knows she wants me. She’ll long for it. I’ll never give it to her.

  But I’ll taunt her without mercy.

  * * *

  The ocean waves crash down on the beach. With the tide rolling in, it’s as loud as thunder. But not as loud as the blood pumping in my ears.

  What he’s doing to me, making me want him, it’s getting to me. He’s my worst enemy, and yet I can’t get enough. I thought maybe those other times it was just the moment, that the adrenaline I got from him was a passing thing, that it would go away as soon as I was forced to spend time with him. But it’s turned addictive.

  The only good moments I’ve had in ages, the only two times I’ve managed to forget my misery in months, were when he kissed me.

  I scrub my face.

  I hate him for it. He’s a monster. I don’t want him.

  But when he does that—threatens me�
��I want more of it. I want him to keep going and not stop and . . .

  My breath freezes and my eyes squint.

  I don’t know who this person is who wants these things. He’s fucking with my head.

  I have to convince my brother so I can get rid of him.

  There is a way. It could work. If I can make Blake believe the marriage is real . . . but to do that would mean feigning feelings for the man who is ruining my family and my life.

  I can’t do it. There has to be another way.

  My stomach rumbles. I’ve been out here, watching the sun set, the sky turn peach and purple, the water glitter like crystals, for over an hour. Maybe if I go back inside he’ll be out of the kitchen.

  I sneak in, inching around the door. He’s not in the kitchen. I move as quietly as I can.

  I expect to find the pan he used on the stove, but there’s nothing. The counters are clear, the sink is empty. Clean. Like he never cooked anything. I run a finger over the stove top. It’s spotless. He wiped everything down.

  Did he eat it all? I’m still hungry, damn it.

  I open the fridge, and there sits a pile of leftover containers filled with the stir fry and rice. I open one and sniff. It smells good. So good I grab a fork from the drawer and start eating without putting it on a plate or heating it up.

  It’s so quiet I wonder where he is. Did he leave?

  I step around the cabinets, and he’s sitting on the couch, watching TV, the remote in his hand, feet propped on the table. There’s no sound.

  “Are you watching on mute?” I ask.

  “Hate commercials.” He doesn’t look at me. Points the remote and changes the channel.

  “You can stop the lies now,” I mumble around my food.

  His gaze swivels to me. “What lies?”

  “The part where you make up stuff to make me give you money. You can admit you’re a crook. How many women have you done this to?”

  His look grows impossibly dark. My fork suspends in midair.

  Oh shit. If his eyes were daggers, I’d be dead right now.

  He stands, the tension in him fire-hot. Somehow he looks bigger, like he intends to squash me like the bug I am. “Say that again.”

  I back away.

  “Say it again!” he shouts.

  My back hits the table, and I drop my food on it. “W-which part?”

  “The part about the lies.” His eyes round, like all reason has been swallowed by his carnal need to destroy me. “The part where you called me a crook. Say it again.”

  My throat cinches so hard, I don’t think I’ll ever speak again. My pulse leaps so fast, my heart feels like it’ll fly from my chest.

  He stalks closer, pure restrained violence. “The part where you said I’ve done this to other women.”

  I bite my lip on the urge to scream. If I thought I could outrun him, I would, but he’d catch me before I’d get away.

  He leers in my face. “Say it!”

  Incapable of words, I shake my head. My eyes dart side to side, seeking an escape. I see an opening down the hall. My bedroom has a solid lock.

  But he sees it too and grasps my shoulder. “You can’t get away this time.” He bends his head so his teeth are right next to my mouth. The same teeth that turn me on when he bites me. “I don’t care how empty your pretty little brain is. If you can’t comprehend the truth, that’s not my problem. But you will never, ever call me a liar.”

  I nod. I can hardly breathe, my lungs are so tight. But . . .

  I want his fingers to dig into my skin. I want to feel how much I inspire him to feel, even though he doesn’t want to feel it.

  But he doesn’t dig in his fingers. It’s worse. He strokes my neck in a tantalizing touch, making me wait and wonder when he will attack. “I’ve told you the truth. And before I’m done you will believe it. More than the money, more than making your stinking privileged life miserable, I want you to see the truth.”

  That unfreezes my tongue. “Never. Everything you said is a lie.”

  His nostrils flare, and I expect him to grab me. Instead, he kisses me.

  It’s not like the other times. The first time was all anger and bitterness. The second time was all tension and confusion. This is desperation.

  Every fiber of him, this anger machine, breaks down into molten need. He floods me and feeds me until I break too. My barriers of fear and denial dissolve into the empty hole that is me. But the breakdown frees something. Something that I’ve only peeked at of myself.

  It explodes from my chest and into his mouth, and my tongue is the wielder of everything I’ve spent my life taming and withholding.

  There is no truth in being good. Being good isn’t me.

  I don’t know what to call it, what piece of me this is but—it is me.

  Every frustrating ounce of anger I’ve locked away floods into my hands scraping over his shoulders and up his neck. I squeeze his head to my mouth harder, wanting to go deeper, ever deeper into his endless well of . . . whatever it is that he wants from me when he kisses me like this.

  He is bottomless, and I want to live there and bathe there and be what he needs me to be.

  He catches my hands off his head and pulls them behind my back. I whine in protest, but his mouth is on my neck, my head falls back, and I am pried open. My chest is aching, it hurts, but at the same time it feels so good.

  “Make me believe it,” I moan.

  I have no idea where those words come from, but he groans like it’s exactly what he wants to hear. He bends me back onto the table and anchors my arms above my head. His mouth is vicious over mine. “You will believe it. Every shred of truth you rejected.”

  He wraps my fingers around the edge of the table above my head.

  His palms as hot as his lips, his fingers as biting as his teeth, they wander and take hold of me. Except it doesn’t feel like he’s taking, even though that’s what he means to do—to take away my denial. But it’s more he’s giving me back the truth—the truth of what it means to feel.

  I’d locked it away, for months, with the grief. And it’s a scorching as it returns to my skin.

  I don’t remember his hands seeking under my clothes, but they’re there. One hand inside my bra, the other between my legs, beneath my clothes, with nothing barring him from me.

  I writhe and moan in my throat, my fingers digging into the table for dear life, desperate to hold onto some piece of myself. The sensations radiate from his hands into my nerves and threaten the tenuous control I cling to, the last bit of resistance he hasn’t stolen from me.

  “Say it,” he groans in my ear. “Your father was a monster.”

  “You’re the monster.”

  He pinches my nipple and thrusts fingers inside me. I keen so hard my voice cracks.

  “Say it or I’ll stop: My father was a worthless shit.”

  “No.”

  Then he’s gone.

  His hands, his mouth. His body, his heat. Gone.

  I lift my head and see his back, walking through the front door. It slams behind him.

  I’m left lying on the table, my skirt around my waist, shirt around my breasts, and my lungs pumping as fiercely as blood screams through my veins.

  What he awoke in me isn’t something I can turn off or forget. The state he left me in, a throbbing explosion waiting to happen, decided my next actions for me.

  Hating that I can’t stop myself, I reach between my legs and finish what he started.

  Chapter Eleven

  Outside her condo, it’s dark, but I toss my flip-flops in the truck and run to the beach.

  I run as hard as I can for as long as I can on the wet packed sand near the water.

  I run until my lungs burn, my chest aches and I bend double at the waist to catch my breath. I turn back.

  I need her to believe it. My whole life I’ve told myself it didn’t matter that no one believed it. I suffered the silence of knowledge while the rest of the world lived in denial. But I’m tired, so
fucking tired of being alone.

  Why now, I don’t know. Why her—the weakness makes me feel things I don’t want to.

  I need her money and her misery.

  But my God is she sweet. This precious little thing breaking apart in my hands on a table in her living room. The torture I left her in—I wish I’d been able to stay and savor it. But it was all I could do to stop.

  I head to my truck. I should camp on the beach. It would be better than submitting myself to the temptation of having her in the next room. This is supposed to be miserable for her, not for me. Though I can’t help envisioning the other things I could have done to her, the infinite other tortures I could’ve inflicted on her. How long could I make her writhe and still deny her what she wants? How long could I make her tremble with the bliss of fear?

  I could go find out.

  No. If I start again, I might not stop. I have to re-evaluate my plan. I hadn’t counted on wanting her too.

  Definitely camping on the beach.

  But when I get to my truck, those plans are gone. Leaning against a prissy beamer, blocking my truck in the driveway, is Blake Vandershall.

  “What do you want?” I ask. Somehow I don’t think he’s here with a check.

  “It’s my sister’s house. I come here whenever I want.” He crosses his arms. “You’ve been on the beach for over an hour. I saw you leave. What the hell were you doing?” He sneers at my bare feet and legs coated in sand.

  “Running.” I go to the spigot by the porch to wash the sand away. “You got nothing better to do than sit out here for an hour and wait for me?”

  “My new goal in life is to get rid of you.”

  My feet clean, I turn off the water and face him. “Good luck with that.” There’s nothing on me. Anywhere. Except maybe a few speeding tickets. I’ve never even been arrested.

  “Who are you?”

  “I already told you.” I put my shoes on.

  “You’re some sort of criminal. I know you are. What do you want with my sister, besides money?” I turn to my truck to hide my smile. The bitterness in his eyes almost matches mine.

  I walk to him and stop inches from his face. “Her.”

  He straightens and meets me stare. “Excuse me?” The restrained fury in his tone contradicts the words. He may as well be saying fuck you.