He replaced his tongue with his thumb, rolling the hard kernel of her clit, and reached for the condom.
“Undo my pants,” he said, and the words weren’t even out of his mouth before she’d lifted herself forward and gone to work on his belt, the buttons of his jeans. Her cool hand slid around the base of his cock and he groaned.
“Hurry,” she said.
He put the condom on with shaking fingers and then rose up on his knees. He grabbed the back of the couch with one hand and her knee with the other and pressed slowly into her. Inch by hot, wet inch.
“Fuck, Shelby. So—”
“Good.”
He looked down at her, caught the glimmer of her eyes and held them as he slid deep into her, then pulled up her knee and slid even deeper. He felt like he was right under her breastbone. Right next to her heart. And staring into her eyes he knew she felt it, too.
He wanted to believe no one had ever had her like this. Ever.
Because he’d never been had like this. Ever. All the way. And it wasn’t just sex, it was everything. Every single fucking thing about her.
She closed her eyes, breaking the contact.
“Look at me,” he growled.
“Ty—”
He stopped moving. “Look at me.”
Her eyes when they opened were furious. She knew what he was doing and it was cheap, but he didn’t care. He’d use whatever means necessary to make himself important to her. To tie them together even if only for a few minutes.
He cupped her cheek, his fingers pulling at the fine hair at her temple, and the words, the words he knew he shouldn’t say, that were so new he had no business thinking about saying them, rose to his lips, and as if she knew—and hell, if she felt half as connected to him as he did to her, she totally knew—she closed her eyes and turned her head, burying her face against her arm.
“Just … fuck me, Ty,” she breathed.
Right. Not love. Not even close.
So he did what she asked, because he was such a simple tool, helpless against her complexity.
Chapter 21
Shelby carefully pulled her pants on. She glanced around the shadows for her underwear but couldn’t find it. Tomorrow morning she’d come in and get it before the Saturday classes.
Then she remembered she’d cancelled the classes for the week.
Then the rest of it, like an avalanche, settled back down around her.
She hadn’t slept more than four hours a night all week.
Mom was confused. Angry.
Every candidate she’d interviewed had seemed terrible. And she didn’t know if their righteousness was real or a product of her guilt. The woman today, Melody—she’d seemed okay, but Shelby was beginning to doubt her own judgment. Was she the right woman by merit or because Shelby was at the end of her rope?
She swallowed the small moan in the back of her throat and put her face in her hands.
“Shelby?” Ty asked, from where he sat on the carpet. “What can I do?”
“You just did it.” She tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t funny.
“Your mom?”
“We’re coping.” That was all she could say, a bland half-truth that didn’t come close to the ugly reality. We are falling to pieces, more and more every day.
“Is there … is there anyone else who can help you? Sisters, brother, aunts, uncles?”
“It’s just us. Just Mom and me.”
“A nursing home?”
Her ponytail had come loose, and when she spun her head to look at him, she was glaring at him through long strands of hair. But he got the point and lifted his hands as if she’d pulled a gun on him.
“All right,” he murmured. “No nursing homes.”
She couldn’t imagine this house without her mother. Couldn’t imagine being able to breathe in it if she weren’t there.
“Where’s your dad?” he asked.
The silence was so thick and so heavy she could hold it in her hands, watch it drip onto the floor. He’d fucked the anger out of her, but now she was left with nothing. And half the time it was the anger that kept her moving.
And that man, her father, seemed more and more like the poison at the root of her life. Nothing she ever did was untouched by him.
“He died. My first year of college. That’s who she thought you were the other night. When she told you to leave.” He sat on the floor, on the rug in nearly pristine condition rolled up and left on her front porch like a child at an orphanage.
Suddenly, she thought that of all the things that had washed up here on her property, Ty was somehow the most amazing. The most surprising. He came as one thing and had turned into another. Actually, he’d turned into a dozen other kinds of things. He kept multiplying when she wasn’t looking, growing more important. More useful. More endlessly … necessary.
“Was she talking about you?” he asked, quietly. “The girl he didn’t deserve.”
“I’d imagine she was. Though he really didn’t deserve either of us.”
His silence was a very specific question, a very clear demand for more, and she knew in her heart she should stand up and go, put an end to this thing building between them because she would never be able to be what he needed, but … she couldn’t.
Her inner stores of strength and wherewithal had been used up this week and she was beyond empty. But still she tried, because being alone was so much easier than being with someone else. She pulled her legs together as if to stand up, but that was as far as she got.
She opened her mouth to tell him he should go, to tell him actually to leave, but instead she told him everything else. As if the story had just been waiting for a weak moment to get out.
“In college I took this psych class and when we got to the part about narcissism, it was like my head exploded. That was my father. Right there in the textbook. On the page. And not just a little bit. My dad was a narcissist with a god complex. He didn’t see anything that wasn’t a reflection of him. He was a preacher of this bullshit faith he cooked up, opened a church down along the south highway, a tent really. And he got every alcoholic, every addict, every wife-beating husband who wanted to believe he could change, he could be saved, and my father just … he just lied to them. He told them what they wanted to hear and they ate it up. They ate it up until they got drunk again. Or high again. Or beat their wives and kids again and then they’d come back to Dad, hat in hand, tears in their eyes, and beg forgiveness and Dad would give it to them. He’d absolve them of their sins and take their money.”
“How did he and your mom meet?” Ty asked.
“He sought her out. She was older, awkward, I think, around men.” She glanced over at Ty ready to joke “like mother, like daughter,” but Ty was staring at her so earnestly, soaking up all she had to say, that the joke died on her lips.
That’s right, she thought, he doesn’t see me that way.
The reminder was a painful tender sting.
“But she owned this farmhouse and she had a good job at the factory and was really well-respected in town, and he needed someone who would foot the bill for this church and someone who could make it seem legitimate and someone he could fool into thinking he loved her.”
“You don’t think he loved you?”
“I was seven, standing at the county carnival handing out fliers for one of my dad’s revivals, and I saw all these families … all these happy families. Dads with kids on their shoulders, moms taking pictures, kids puking up cotton candy after a ride, their moms stroking their heads, and I realized Dad was never going to love me like other kids were loved. That he was different and he’d made me different. He’d messed me up in some way and I hated him. So, I dumped all the fliers in the garbage and just wandered the fair all night. Dad found the fliers, and when we got home he—” She hadn’t thought of that night for so long, a horrible bloody thing she’d buried.
Ty made a low sound in his chest as if he could see the memory, the way the belt had smacked between
her shoulder blades, over her arms.
“Well … it was bad. But because I hated him so much, he lost all power over me. He could hit me, he could force me to pray all night long, he could haul me up in front of his bullshit congregation and make up lies about my sinner’s heart—but he couldn’t even get close to hurting me. I was so far away, so locked down, he couldn’t even get close.”
Her nasal passages burned and she wiped her hand under her nose, tucked her knees up to her chest, feeling the sting between her legs from Ty. From them together. “And it felt so good for a while to have all that power.”
“I’m sure,” Ty said. “I used to dream of having some kind of power over my parents. When they would fight, I used to wish I mattered enough to make them stop. But I never did. No matter how good I was or how bad, it didn’t matter. They were locked up in their own hell and I was never a part of it.”
“I’m so sorry,” she told him. Her measly spirit eased open, grateful for the chance to be kind. To offer him a share of the comfort he offered her. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. And I’m so glad you had your pop and Nana to show you that there was another way to live. I’m glad you’re that person for Casey. You’re doing so well with him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” She glanced away from the gleam of his smile. “Did your mom do that for you? Show you another way to live?”
“She loved me. Really loved me. And she tried to be a buffer, to teach me how to be useful, that no matter what he said I had tremendous worth. She just never seemed to be able to believe that about herself.”
“Did she ever try to leave?”
“I think there was a time when if it hadn’t been for me she would have left. But after that night when I was seven … she didn’t stand a chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
Oh, this was her darkest shame. Something she’d never told anyone. Never had the courage to share. “The angrier I got at my father, the more I hated him, the more he turned on my mom. She was like this open nerve for him. Everything he did made her jump and when I wouldn’t react to him the way he wanted, he just …” She remembered all of it with a knife-sharp clarity—all of the terribleness her father would smear all over Mom, because Shelby was impervious.
“Hit her?”
She shrugged. What were a few slaps, really, compared to the rest of it? “The worst was the way he would just grind her into dust. Make her feel like nothing. He’d pile on abuse after abuse, looking me right in the eye, wanting me to know that this was my fault. I’d gotten asked to Homecoming by a friend of mine and Mom and I bought this dress, this beautiful blue sequined, ruffled dress, and I knew I was beautiful in it. And Dad tried to hurt me. He called me horrible names, said things no father should say to his daughter, but I just stared at him. Dry-eyed and hateful. And I thought, ‘I win!’ But then he turned to Mom and told her he was embarrassed to have his congregation see him married to such an old woman. A woman who didn’t take care of herself. Who dressed like a man and did a man’s job. He just … crushed her, right in front of me. And all her internal light, it just vanished.”
In a heartbeat he was beside her, his hands at her back, and she flinched away from his touch. “Shelby, it wasn’t your fault.”
She laughed at him, because what a stupid thing to say. What a hope-riddled, naive thing to say. “Don’t laugh,” he demanded. “Don’t brush me off, Shelby. He was a sick man and your mom—”
“Was a victim, probably before she met him, but it doesn’t change anything, Ty. It doesn’t change that I let it happen, that I grew up knowing what he would do if I didn’t bend, just a little, just enough to keep her safe, and I still didn’t do it. Tell me who was worse. Him? That sick man, or me?”
Tired of this conversation, the weight on her shoulders shifted enough that she stood. “My dad told me I was unlovable, that I was cold and unnatural. And that no one—no one—would want me. Not really. And maybe he was right, or maybe he just made me so scared that I would never try to test that. Never find someone who would fight through the distance I put around myself. But what he really taught me was that I’m not capable of loving anyone.”
“That’s not true.” He stood up, too, and she stepped away, out of the reach of his heat. His hands. She wanted no part of him touching her. Couldn’t bear it. “Look at the Art Barn, and what you’re doing for your mom. You can’t tell me that’s not love.”
“If I loved her … loved her like you’re supposed to love someone, I would have stopped letting my father abuse her. I would have stopped creating reasons for him to hurt her. I would have found one way to get us out of this house instead of finding a thousand ways to infuriate him.”
“You were a kid—”
“You’re only seeing what you want to see, Ty.” Braving the warmth of him, the ruining pleasure of his touch, she stepped right up to him, close enough that his beautiful face was all she saw and her face was all he saw. “I will still fuck you, Ty. You and only you. And I’ll help you forget the things you want to forget as long as you keep doing the same for me, but I’m warning you, don’t love me,” she told him. “Because I will never love you back.”
She left him there, in the gloom of her Art Barn, where his touch more times than she could count now had calibrated her, made her able to live in her own skin again. In this world that she’d made.
She left him there alone, because in the end, that was better for him than being with her.
“Bullshit.”
She dropped the door handle and turned. “What?”
Slowly, he straightened his clothes, shaking out his pants before buttoning them up, strapping on his belt. “I call bullshit.”
Was this a joke? His attempt at being funny?
“Everything you just told me, it’s awful. Honest to God, Shelby, if your father was alive I’d find him and—” He stopped, but there was no question what he’d do. The thwarted violence rolled off of him and it made her both nervous and delighted.
The man was long dead, the wounds he’d inflicted scabbed over, but never had anyone sought justice for what her father had done.
It’s because you never told anyone. Those well-meaning teachers, the social workers and friends’ parents. You never let anyone in. She knew that was true, but there was more to Ty’s anger, more to his coiled muscles and hard jaw, and she didn’t want to fully address it.
He’s falling for you, a voice whispered in her head. A young-and-terrified-and-hopeful-all-at-once voice that almost never had the nerve to speak up.
But she shut that voice out, because if it was true, if he was really falling for her, she would have to end it. No more anger sex in the barn, no more recalibrating touches, no more of the way he watched her—seeing something in her that wasn’t there, but seemed like it would be nice if it were.
“But it’s still bullshit.”
“That’s not funny, Ty.”
“I know. After my pop died, I ran for years. Picked up and moved every single time things got hard. Or boring. I bailed on everyone and everything for almost seven years. I thought that’s who I was, and despite everything my grandparents showed me I decided to live the way my parents did. Rootless, no ties, not needing anyone and not letting anyone need me. And then Nana got sick and Casey showed up—” He cleared his throat, his emotions sitting so close to the surface of his face she could see them. She clasped her fingers together so she didn’t touch him. So she didn’t reach out and try to ease some of his pain. It was exhausting feeling so much for this man. The sympathy and the grief and the affection and the anger—she was not made to hold so much. She was brittle and small; she did not expand.
She only broke.
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with two people twice in the same week, but you can make a choice now, Shelby. You’re not that girl anymore. You’ve locked yourself up in that house thinking you’re repaying a debt you owe your mom, but you don’t have to live in suspended anima
tion.”
“I haven’t locked myself up.”
He shot her a cut-the-crap look.
“It’s not that easy,” she said, knowing he was right but so was she, and nothing was as simple as just making a choice.
“I know. It’s really fucking hard. But my son walked across state lines to go looking for a new life, a new way of being. He shed all the garbage Vanessa piled on him and tried to get something better. You can do the same thing.”
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t speak for all her shocked outrage that he would try to marginalize this.
Ty glanced over his shoulder at the couches, as if what they’d done there were still visible. Their bodies, see-through and ghostly, still locked together. “I want something better, too. I deserve something better.”
When he looked back at her, she took a step away, nearly put a hand to her throat. The intensity and grief on his face, the resolve directed toward her, was something she’d never seen from him. Never seen from anyone.
“I’m no one’s dirty secret. And I won’t be yours anymore.”
“You’re not a dirty secret.” She was lying, they both knew it, and his hands scraped his hair from his face, tucking it behind his ears. She couldn’t look at those hands without wanting them on her. Without remembering and imagining and wanting.
But that was all she could give him. And she wanted it to be private. Secret. Not because she was ashamed of him, or thought less of him, but because her entire life she had kept the things she wanted very small and very secret—so her father could not touch them.
Hot shame flooded her.
“Then let me take you out to dinner.”
“When?” She laughed, because her schedule was tied to this house and everything going on inside of it and there hadn’t been time to even shower lately.
“Tomorrow. Next week. Whenever you can do it.”
Between the Sheets Page 25
