Heartstopper

by Lauren Landish

  "Not your style, I take it," I chuckled. It was now confirmed. She came from money, but the fact that she had rebelled enough to pick her own university told me something, too. "What made you go to Georgia Tech?"

  "It's close to home," she said, "and it's got one of the best hard science reputations in the South. Georgia Tech produces graduates that do things, not graduates that just talk about things. That's the sort of people I like. What about you? Where'd you go to college?"

  I laughed. "I've got a BTM from HKU."

  "A what?" she asked, twisting around to look at me again. My hand was temporarily upset with the now-missing weight of her breast until she was all the way turned over, pressing herself against me and making sure my chest was now ecstatic.

  "Black Top Masters from Hard Knocks University," I expanded. “The only education I've gotten past high school was courtesy of the Army. I started college but left before I completed my degree. Financial issues mostly, though I did get in trouble too. I wasn't a very good student."

  "You mentioned jump wings in the bathroom. How long were you in?" she asked, moving closer to me. We were both feeling it now, but were taking our time, exploring each other's mind as well as our bodies.

  Still, there were so many ways to answer her question, and few that I was comfortable doing. "I enlisted when I was about twenty-one, a few years after I finished high school," I said instead. "After doing my training at Fort Benning, I was in the infantry for the rest of the time."

  "Really? So you're a real soldier then, not one of those armchair paraders," Abby said in a way that told me she was impressed not so much that I had been a soldier, but that I was the sort of person who wasn't afraid of hard work. "You don't seem too banged up to me."

  “Looks can be deceiving," I replied. "The top and bottom three molars on the right side of my mouth are artificial. I caught something to the jaw there one time, and they had to fix it all up for me. I was surprised the Army did a good job. Even if you took a good look inside, you wouldn't notice a difference."

  "Not someone's rifle butt, I hope?"

  I was impressed. This girl knew more than she let on. Either that, or she had a penchant for enjoying war movies. I hoped it was her intelligence, because I personally can't stand war movies. They gave me flashbacks. "No, not a rifle butt. Actually, it was a brick. They gave me a Purple Heart for that one. What about you? Why biology?"

  Abby grew serious and looked up above my head. "My mom and my big sister were killed when I was little. Head-on collision with another driver. Mom was in her Honda that she liked for running us around town while the other driver was in one of those big Fords they used to make—the Expedition, I think? You know, the small tank they made for a while."

  "Expedition, Excursion, Excalibur. I forget the exact name, but I know what you mean," I said, lowering my voice to a comforting level while she shared this painful memory. "They were pretty popular for quite a few years a while back. Was the guy drunk?"

  She shook her head, tears coming to her eyes. "No, it was still early afternoon, and Mom was coming to pick me up from my Gymboree class. I took that while my sister took her piano lesson at the teacher's house two miles down the road. The driver was a diabetic who was trying to treat his disease through self-medication and trying one of those no-carb diets. He went into diabetic shock behind the wheel of his truck and drifted over into Mom's path. Even though they were both belted in, they hit each other going forty-five each. The crash . . . I don't remember the funerals, but the newspaper clippings Daddy kept said there wasn't much left. And all of it could have been avoided if the guy had known how to eat right for his diabetes. Later on, when I was in high school, Daddy had a small heart attack—too many Sunday breakfasts at Cracker Barrel. That made up my mind, and I decided to go into biology. Later on, I'm going to specialize in nutrition and really work to make sure things like what happened to me don't happen to anyone else."

  We fell silent, this time a comfortable one. While my body was aware of the nude young woman in front of me, my immediate desire was not to have sex, but instead to protect her. I held her close and we lay there in silence for a moment.

  I saw the glistening drop of the tear that was still on her cheek and wiped it away. "I know that was painful. But I'm glad you’ve used it to fuel your desire rather than dismiss it."

  "You have to take the bad things that happen to you and turn them into good things," Abby replied. "That's what Daddy taught me during the years it was just the two of us. Sheesh, I must sound like a total daddy's girl, don't I?"

  "You're not the worst I've heard," I said with a smile. "You should have known one of the girls that I went to high school with. Not only was she a daddy's girl, but she had her father wrapped around her little finger too. She was insufferable to deal with."

  "Well, you won't have that problem with me," she laughed back. “We butt heads a lot. Still, he’s my daddy. I know, I know, that is supposed to give me all sorts of strange complexes or mental problems, but I seem to be doing all right."

  "I'll say." My stomach gurgled, and Abby looked down, patting lightly on my stomach. "I guess I really am hungry."

  "So am I," she said. “Do you have something I can put on? I really don’t feel like getting back in my dress already.”

  "I'm sure I can find something for you. You could just use a t-shirt of mine. I'm big enough that it might just drop past your hips."

  Abby took my offerings and put them on. As she stood up, looking younger and cuter than ever, she started to laugh.

  "What?"

  “Nothing, it’s just funny. We just met, and I’m already wearing your clothes." She laughed again, looking down at the massively oversized t-shirt and shorts. “By the time breakfast is over, I'm going to be claiming half the bathroom and putting my toothbrush in there."

  When I didn't answer, she lowered her eyes, unconsciously crossing her foot behind her heel. I wondered if this was the pose and expression she took when her father chastised her. If so, I was surprised the man was able to deny her anything. She was so adorable. “Sorry. It was just a joke. I don’t mean to sound like I’m already head over heels or anything.”

  I laughed. "Trust me, it's a tempting offer. But yeah, let's not get ahead of ourselves, or else your father might have a barrel for me. One belonging to a shotgun."

  "I think Daddy would like you. You're the sort of guy that he likes, confident and real."

  I wasn't so sure of that, but I wasn't going to tell Abby my misgivings as I went to the kitchen.

  "You did save my life, after all. That has to count for something. Dane, what exactly did you do in the military, anyway? Were you some kind of platoon leader?"

  I chuckled, shaking my head. "With this ink? The commissioning boards would never even take a look at me. Besides, they like those with college educations to become officers. No, I was just your run of the mill, eleven bravo grunt.”

  I brought over the cheese and crackers. I'd found some grapes in the fridge and put them on the plate as well.

  "I'm twenty-nine," I admitted. “I’d probably have been promoted, but I had a bad habit of not exactly following orders."

  We kept chatting, and after we snacked a bit, we both drifted off to sleep, but when I woke up, she was standing at the foot of the bed. Her eyes were wide with shock and a slow-growing anger, a photograph in her hand. I knew the photo. It was from the side of the refrigerator, and one that I wanted to get rid of but never had. Chris had left it on the fridge from the old days, and I'd never hated it enough to actually take it down. Besides, it reminded me of how I'd screwed up my life.

  For Abby, though, there was something different in her eyes. There was awareness, and a growing look of betrayal, which cut me to the bone. "How do you know Chris?" she asked, pointing at the photo. "Who the hell are you?"

  Chapter 5

  Abby

  When I got in the shower, the warm water helped me wash away the exhaustion of the evening. My mind and my soul
were refreshed, recharged, and ready for more. It’d been a long time since I'd gotten so little sleep, yet I wanted the time with Dane to never end.

  It seemed that with every word we shared, every touch and every time our bodies came together, we grew a little closer. And the sex . . .

  No man had ever given me the sensations he gave me, no man had ever been controlling, powerful and unrelenting, yet tender and comforting at the same time. It was as if every touch said, I'm in control and you are powerless, but I will protect you and keep you safe.

  Washing my aching breasts and the tender areas between my legs, I smiled at the fresh memories. I'll be the first to admit that until that night, I'd led a pretty sheltered life, and I still believed that my little outburst against my father led to it all. If he’d just have allowed me to do what I wanted, I can’t imagine ever going back to a stranger’s place, no matter how drop-dead gorgeous he was. Even if he’d just saved my life.

  My sex life thus far had been pretty vanilla—I'd never done some of the things that I'd read about in magazines or online. Even Shawnie, who was no party girl herself, described my sex life as boring. In fact, most often, sex for me had been lying there while the guy grunted and thrust for a little while before rolling off me and gasping for air. It was the epitome of a bad sitcom, and I was supposed to be in the wildest days of my life.

  But with Dane, we'd done things I'd only dreamed of. He tasted my body and ran his tongue along every erogenous spot I had. I knew from the first touch of his tongue between my legs that I wanted more, and that I’d never be the same again.

  Still, even a long-repressed body eventually tires out, and it was time to wash up and go. Soon enough, the water finished sluicing the dried sweat and sticky residues of our repeated lovemaking from my body, and I felt as refreshed as I was going to get. I'd picked up my panties and bra from the floor of the bed area of the loft, tossing them in the washer on a gentle cycle. Now, after no heat tumble drying, they were probably the freshest thing I had to put on.

  "This one goes out to all you girls having breakfast . . . in last night's dress," Katy Perry had said, and I smiled to myself thinking about it. Damn right. Fixing my left shoulder strap, I looked at myself in the mirror, thinking I wasn't looking all that bad. I looked more like a girl who'd overdressed for breakfast than a girl who was still dressed from the night before.

  I finished teasing my hair with my fingers, wishing that Dane had an actual hair brush, or at least some sort of band I could use to pull my hair back into a ponytail.

  I made my way out to the kitchen, and I could still hear Dane snoring softly. I looked around, knowing he must have coffee. I’d gotten into a habit of having a nice steaming mug every morning, and I simply could not function without it. I saw the coffee maker, and next to it a clear glass jar that obviously had ground coffee inside. I remembered Shawnie's admonition to me that coffee should be stored in a cool, dark, airtight place to preserve the most flavor, especially if it'd been already ground. "Shawnie would smack you upside the head for that."

  Still, the aroma that came from the canister when I opened the seal was heavenly, and I quickly got a pot going. I preferred my coffee with milk or cream, so I turned to the fridge, reaching for the handle. I had the door halfway open when the photo held to the other side by a magnet caught my eye, and my hand froze. With trembling fingers, I took the magnet off the face in the photo it had been covering, my mouth going dry.

  I hadn't seen or heard from Chris Lake in years—not since he had what he described as an "incident" in Iraq. I'd been in high school at the time, so proud to be dating a handsome guy like him. I was even more proud of the fact that he was a soldier, and at the time, I thought he was out there defending our country. His final letter to me was long, and I remembered it was somewhat rambling. He'd lost a friend, he said, and another went to jail for the killing. As I looked at the three faces in the photo—one was clearly Chris, the other clearly Dane, but there was another that I didn’t know. Right then, fear stabbed icily into my heart.

  Marching to the bed, I stood at the foot, not sure what to do or say. Fear kept grabbing at me as I saw the things that I dismissed earlier. The amateur nature of some of Dane's tattoos . . . they could have just been ones done hastily in the service, or could they have been prison ink? When he talked about his time in the military, he hadn't really said where he'd been or even why and how he'd gotten out. Had he been the man Chris had told me about? Had I spent the night making love to a murderer? It couldn’t be. Dane seemed nothing like a killer . . .

  Before I could say anything to wake him up, he stretched his arms to the sides and opened his eyes. He blinked a few times when he saw me, obviously confused by what I was doing standing there. "How do you know Chris? Who the hell are you?"

  Dane's eyes flickered between the photograph and my face as anger and shame built within me. "Abby, I . . .” he said, his voice trailing off into silence. For the first time, I saw secrecy in his eyes, and shame of who he was and what he'd done. "This isn't my apartment."

  "Well, that explains a few things,” I said, trying not to sound snippy and vindictive. I've got a temper, and a very sharp tongue to go with it if I let it loose. "Anything else around here not yours?"

  He sat up, pulling his knees to his chest and scooting back. It enraged me, seeing him trying to take a cute defensive body position when he was obviously more than he'd led me to believe. Or perhaps less, depending on how you looked at it. "Almost all of it," he sighed, looking around. "I'm house sitting for Chris while he took a couple of months in Europe. He wanted to catch a festival in Switzerland and the last of the spring skiing or something, he said. I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so he was basically doing me a favor. I've been trying to find a job the whole time."

  "Not too many people want to hire a murderer," I spat, my anger boiling over. Dane recoiled as if I'd slapped him across the face. Still, he didn't deny it, which for some reason made me even angrier. I guess I still had a semblance of hope that I was wrong. “So what were you doing last night, huh? Deciding to hang out with the other assholes and felons in the park? You all have some sort of convention or something?"

  "Abs, I never hurt you," Dane said, trying to defend himself. "I would never hurt you. I'm not like that."

  "No? Then what about the other guy in this photo? What's his name and where is he now?” I nearly screamed, almost throwing the picture in his face.

  Dane hung his head, guilty. "Lloyd. Lloyd James, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania."

  The name clicked, and now I could place Dane's as well. "Yes . . . Lloyd James. You know, Dane, you're kind of famous in some circles. Killers and those who betray their comrades aren't too popular in places like Atlanta. Why the hell did you come here instead of someplace a little less military-friendly? You have a death wish or something?"

  Dane shook his head. "Chris . . . Chris offered me a chance to start over. After the conviction, my family said they wanted nothing to do with me. My parents, even my brother and sister . . . nobody came to see me for the whole time I was in Leavenworth. Chris did, one time. He also wrote me a few times—nothing much, but he was the only one I could turn to. Abby, I'm not a good man, but I'm not an evil one either. I . . .”

  "I don't want to hear it," I snapped, cutting him off. "I'm out of here."

  I stormed my way to the entrance, where I found my high heels. Slipping them on, I heard Dane get out of bed behind me. "Abby, wait. There's more to the story than you know. Hear me out. No one else will.”

  "No, Dane," I said, my own tears finally threatening to spill over. "I never want to see you again. This was the worst mistake of my life."

  "Abby!" Dane's words followed me into the hallway, even though he didn't. They tore at my heart, which silently acknowledged that I hurt so damn much at that moment because I was hoping this could be more than a one-night stand. I should’ve known better, and I was being that naive little girl who thought she was in love after a man had given
her the fuck of her life.

  When I got outside, the muggy early morning air smacked me in the face, and I retreated inside. I saw that the Tower had a concierge, and I turned to it. "Excuse me," I asked the woman at the front desk. "Can you call me a taxi?"

  "Of course, Miss," the woman said. Taking my face and appearance into consideration, her eyes softened. "Is everything okay?"

  "No," I said, trying not to sob. "I just made the worst mistake of my life. Everything is definitely not okay."

  Chapter 6

  Dane

  I watched Abby go, fleeing into the empty elevator and the door closing behind her. I couldn't move, frozen in shock at what had happened in the last five minutes. Walking to the door, I stared at the elevator as the lights showed it going down all the way to the lobby. Part of me wanted to run after her, to charge down the fire escape stairs and plead for her to listen to me. If she just knew my story, if she only could understand, maybe there'd be a chance. But the other side of me, the side that had spent nearly five years in Fort Leavenworth as Prisoner Bell, stayed my feet. It was a good way to get myself arrested again, and from what Abby had told me about her father, a good way to fetch myself another felony, possibly even a sexual assault or rape charge. Two-time losers on a rape charge don't get much mercy from the State of Georgia, and the only way I'd see the free world again would be as a withered old man.

  The cautious side of me won, which disgusted me even as I closed the door. Something rustled at my feet, and I looked down to see the photo that had set the whole thing off lying on the tile. Abby must have dropped it when she fled the apartment, perhaps when she was putting her shoes on. Reaching down with nearly numb fingers, I picked it up, absently locking the door behind me as I looked at the faces in the photo. Myself, Chris Lake, and Lloyd James. The killer, his friend, and the man who'd damned me.