Losing Leah Holloway (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 2)

by Lisa Regan

  There was only one thing that had changed. She didn’t tell her doctor about it, of course. The fleeting moments of satisfaction she got from her trysts with D.J. were not offsetting the enormous stress of carrying on the affair.

  It just wasn’t worth it.

  Her next attempt at ending things between them didn’t go well. They were locked in her laundry room. The kids were asleep. D.J. had snuck over under the cover of darkness as usual. He was pawing her, tearing at her clothes like he was desperate to be inside her. She still didn’t understand it. Every time he touched her, the questions niggled at the back of her mind. What did he see in her? Why did he want her? Was this some kind of cruel prank?

  She had to wait until he was finished. The sex was becoming rougher, faster, more like rutting. At first, he’d been very concerned with her pleasure, often taking his time with his mouth and hands, bringing her to new heights of satisfaction every time they did it. Lately, she felt like she didn’t even matter; he just needed a warm body to pump himself into.

  “D.J.,” she said as he pulled his boxers and jeans back up. “We need to talk.”

  The only light was seeping under the door from the kitchen, but she saw the glint in his eyes. “No, we don’t.”

  She bent over, fishing around for her panties. “Yes, we do. This—this thing between us, it really has to end. I—I can’t do this anymore.”

  He grabbed her hips, grinding himself against her, laughing as she slapped him away. “Oh, come on, Leah,” he said, sounding remarkably like Jim. Dismissive.

  Her hand seized on her panties and, nearby, her shorts. She leaned against the dryer and pulled them on. “I’m serious. I cannot do this anymore. D.J., you’re a—” She paused. What was she going to say? He was a nice boy? He didn’t act like a boy. A nice guy? The things he’d done to her were as far from nice as one could get. She was still appalled at what he reduced her to at times.

  “I’m a what, Leah?” D.J. coaxed. “You’re going to say I’m a great guy? I could have any girl I want? It’s you, it’s not me?”

  He wasn’t taking her seriously. Leah stalked across the tiny room, flicked the light on, and put her hands on her hips. “I’m married, D.J. I have a family. I’m nearly twenty years older than you. I mean, you had to know this wasn’t going to last forever.”

  “Leah,” he said. His face had transformed as she spoke, his smirk giving way to a more serious expression. She couldn’t quite tell what it was. She barely knew him. Of course she couldn’t read his expressions, but it looked like confusion. Maybe just a bit of panic.

  “Really,” she continued. “You had to know this was just … just … a fling. There was some kind of attraction between us, we’ve explored it, and now it’s over.”

  He held out a hand, beseeching. “Leah, please.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, D.J. I am. I should never have allowed things to go this far between us.”

  He stepped toward her and tried to touch her face. She turned away. “There is something between us, Leah.”

  She smiled weakly. “Yes, something physical, and it’s been … amazing, but I—”

  He pressed himself against her, pushing her against the door. “Because you’re amazing. Please, Leah, don’t leave me.”

  She pushed him gently, alarmed by his tone. Gone was the überconfident, ultramasculine lover who had handled her body so deftly the last two months. Before her now stood the boy he really was. Her skin felt clammy and cold. A coil of dread unfurled inside her.

  “D.J.,” she said, trying to sound soothing. “I’m not leaving you. You do understand that we were never committed to one another, right? This was just an affair. This was just sex.”

  “Incredible sex,” he said. This time, it was less an assertion and more of a question.

  “Sure, yes. Incredible, but it couldn’t go on forever. You’re young. You’ll find someone else, someone your age who isn’t married. You’ll forget about me.”

  His eyes glistened. Were those tears? Her heartbeat ticked up. Could he really be that infatuated with her? She knew he was young, but was he really so inexperienced in relationships that he had developed a serious emotional attachment to her in such a short time, without ever having had a real conversation with her?

  His voice was high-pitched and reedy. “Leah, please don’t do this. I don’t want anyone else but you. I don’t care if you’re married.”

  “Well, you should. What you think you feel for me, it’s just a crush. It’s not real.”

  Abruptly, his hands cupped her cheeks. He stared into her face. There were definitely tears now. “It’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt.”

  She put her hands on his wrists and tried to pull them away, but he held fast. “No, D.J.”

  His voice took on a new urgency, a firmness born of desperation. “Yes,” he said. “It’s real. How can you say it’s not?”

  She tried again to loosen his grip but couldn’t. Fear tickled the back of her throat. One of his hands snaked down, slipping beneath the waistband of her shorts, between her legs. “This is real. You know it just as well as I do.” His fingers worked, and in spite of herself, her body responded. “See?” he breathed into her face. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mouthwash. “You feel it too.”

  Her body raced toward climax, but she resisted, twisting away from him, prying his hand away. She knocked him back, against the washer. “No,” she said firmly. “We can’t do this anymore.”

  “But, Leah, I need you,” he pleaded.

  “No, you don’t, and I don’t need you. This is over. Finished. I want you to please leave and do not—do not come back again. I’m sorry, D.J.”

  He dropped to his knees, hands raised and clasped together, crying openly now. “No, Leah, no. Don’t do this.”

  She pointed to the door, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. “Leave.”

  He wrapped his arms around her legs, pressing his face into her stomach. “I’ll hurt myself,” he blurted.

  The temperature in the room seemed to drop by twenty degrees. She arched her back away from him. “What?”

  “I’ll hurt myself. I’ll kill myself,” came his muffled voice. “I have a friend, his dad has a gun. I’ll put a fucking bullet in my head.”

  “D.J., no.”

  “Rachel has Xanax. I’ve seen them. I’ll take the whole bottle.”

  She touched his head. His lustrous brown hair was stiff with hair gel. “D.J., stop. What about your family?”

  “Family? You think my family gives a shit about me?”

  “Well, I don’t know what your situation was before you came here, but what about your aunt Rachel? She took you in—”

  He spit her name. “Rachel? You think Rachel gives a shit about me? You really don’t know her, do you?”

  “I know that she—”

  “You don’t know anything about her. You should ask her sometime about the people she left when she moved here.”

  Baffled, Leah searched for a response. She had no idea what he was talking about. As a rule, she and Rachel rarely discussed their upbringings—Leah because hers was so traumatic and Rachel because she maintained that it was completely unremarkable. Nothing to tell.

  D.J. pressed his face deeper into her abdomen. His hands clutched the backs of her thighs. For once, there was nothing sexual about the way he touched her. This was pure neediness, and it scared the shit out of her.

  “I’ll do it,” he promised. “If I can’t be with you, I don’t want to live.”

  “No.”

  She didn’t know what else to say. His sudden turn from a man with endless swagger to the boy begging on his knees before her gave her whiplash. Was he serious? Would he really try to kill himself? Did he have some kind of mental illness? Again, the realization that she knew nothing about him other than what he looked like naked stung her. What had she gotten herself into?

  “D.J., please,” she tried. “Don’t hurt yourself. Not over me, not over
this. You’re so young. You’ve got your entire life ahead of you. You’ll find someone so much better than me. Someone you can start a life with.”

  He was shaking his head against her stomach as she spoke. “I only want you,” he mumbled.

  Feeling nauseated, she tipped her head back and closed her eyes. Her mind raced. What could she say? If she took a hard line and threw him out and he really did kill himself, could she live with that?

  No. She couldn’t.

  Even though Leah had long held mixed feelings about her mother’s suicide, it had been devastating, especially for Leah’s brother. Leah’s own abstract suicidal fantasies aside, she knew that suicide had long-lasting, horrific effects on those left behind. She would never wish such a thing on D.J.’s loved ones. Her mother’s voice crept into her head, rising like mist from the Shitty Childhood drawer of Leah’s mind.

  “People who really mean to kill themselves don’t talk about it.”

  Leah had been sixteen and depressed, and had threatened to off herself in front of her mother.

  “So, if you’re gonna do it, get on with it and shut up.”

  Her mother had been right. Leah was still alive and her mother was not. But could she trust that D.J. was all talk and no action? Could she take that chance?

  The laundry room door rattled. Leah yelped. She tried to push D.J. away but he held fast. Peyton’s voice sounded from the other side of the door, thick with sleep. “Mommy?”

  “Just a minute,” Leah called.

  Panicked, she pushed again at D.J.’s shoulders, trying to disentangle herself. “Let go,” she hissed.

  He raised his tear-stained face to hers, looking very much like a lost little boy. Her resolve weakened.

  “Mommy?” Peyton called.

  “Coming, sweetie.” She looked down at him. “Okay,” she whispered. “Please, D.J., don’t hurt yourself. Nothing has to change right this second. We can talk later, okay?”

  “You promise?” he said, a hopeful lift to his brow.

  She touched his cheek. “Yes, of course. I promise. Let’s not talk about this now. Everything is fine, okay? You go on home, and I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  Finally, he released her. She tried not to sprint through the door. She didn’t look back, slipping out of the room before he could respond.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Connor stared at Rachel, keeping his face blank, saying nothing, letting her fill the silence.

  “It sounds horrid, I know. What kind of mother hates her own child? But you don’t know what it was like. Sebastian left me alone with him all day. I had no idea what I was doing. All he did was cry. It didn’t matter how much I fed or changed him, whether he was hot or cold, lying flat or in a swing. He just cried, endlessly. Only Sebastian could get him to stop. Sebastian loved him. Instantly. Crazily. I didn’t even matter anymore, except for whether or not I was fulfilling D.J.’s needs, which of course I couldn’t.”

  “What about when he got older and was able to tell you his needs?”

  She rolled her eyes. “His needs were endless, and when I didn’t snap to, the tantrums were just unbelievable. When he was three, he chipped my tooth throwing a coffee mug at me because I wouldn’t let him play with an electrical socket. When he was four, he poured my hot coffee on one of Sebastian’s dogs. He liked that so much that he found other ways to hurt the dogs until we had to put one of them down and find homes for the others. He hurt me too. Endlessly. Always finding ways. I was lucky that he was so small or he probably would have put me in the hospital.”

  “What did Sebastian think of all this?” Connor asked.

  “It was a phase. Just a phase. He loved D.J. so much, he couldn’t accept that he was … evil.”

  “That’s a strong word to use about a four-year-old.”

  Rachel closed her eyes again, took another deep breath. “You weren’t there,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked at him, a pained expression on her face. “At five, in preschool, he pushed a girl off the jungle gym and cracked her skull open. He wasn’t allowed back. Sebastian paid all of the girl’s medical expenses and then some. The local public school wouldn’t accept him into kindergarten. They wanted him tested.” She used air quotes around the word tested.

  “I told Sebastian that D.J. needed to be institutionalized, but Sebastian wouldn’t hear of it. Not at first anyway. By the time I left, D.J. had become so violent that Sebastian began making arrangements to have him housed in a facility, to get mental health treatment.”

  “You still left,” Connor said.

  “I had to. I was so unhappy. D.J. going into a facility wasn’t a given. Sebastian was very conflicted. The truth is that I read stories about mothers who killed their own children, and I understood why. I thought about how much easier our lives would be if D.J. were dead. Even if he were in a facility, Sebastian would always be drawn to him. Would always want to visit. Would always want to try bringing him home. When I started having those thoughts, I knew I had to leave. Then an opportunity arose: My mother died. She had cut me out of her will, which was fine since the only thing she owned was a ten-year-old Honda hatchback. But she had forgotten to remove me as the beneficiary of her life insurance policy. I had five hundred thousand dollars. Enough for a new life. So, one day while Sebastian was at work and D.J. was napping, I left. I never looked back. I went as far as I could get from that life, that place.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

  Leah didn’t see D.J. for a week. She felt relieved, then guilty for feeling relieved. What if he had really hurt himself like he said he would? No, she would have heard about it. Rachel didn’t like talking about D.J. but surely she would have told Leah if he had done something terrible to himself. Leah reassured herself that wherever D.J. had gone or whatever he was doing—he was alive and unharmed. She couldn’t ask anyone about him. It would look too suspicious. As far as anyone knew, Leah and D.J. had only ever been in the same room together a handful of times and that was only for social functions. She didn’t even have his cell phone number.

  The absurdity of it struck her. For three months she’d been more physically intimate with this kid than with anyone else in her entire life, Jim included, but she didn’t even have his phone number. She knew he had a phone. Rachel had complained about having to put him on their plan when he arrived. It was less than a month later that she insisted he get his own plan. Mike didn’t want him on theirs, she had said. It was one of the only times she had ever acknowledged D.J.’s presence in their home. The new phone was a prepaid one. Leah knew this because she’d had a brief conversation about it the first time she’d seen it in his hand. They’d talked about his phone, but he’d never given her the number. He’d been sneaking into her house nearly every night, and she had no way of reaching him.

  Now she wondered if he was staying away on purpose—to make her worry, to make her feel terrible about the last time he’d been with her, for trying to break things off with him. She wondered how calculating he really was—had he meant it when he threatened suicide, or did he only say that to try to keep the affair going? How would she ever know?

  She couldn’t take the chance of him harming himself. She wasn’t that monstrous.

  By the time that week was over, she was torn between worry for D.J. and relief that she hadn’t seen him all week. It felt so good not to worry constantly about being caught, not to wrestle with her guilt, not to spend hours castigating herself for every time they had sex. She hadn’t realized how much energy she’d been expending by carrying on with him. For what? So she could feel better about having chosen a shitty husband? That week without D.J. just confirmed for her that she needed to end things. The whole thing was crazy. She’d lost her mind. Had some kind of break with reality. Temporary insanity. It wasn’t worth her marriage, her family, her friendship with Rachel, her life as she knew it. She would have to break things off if he came back. She had no idea how, but she’d have to.

  Of
course, faced with him in the flesh once more, she could barely catch her breath. She hated her physical response to him. He snuck in on Monday night, after the kids were in bed, settling near her feet as she dozed on the couch. She woke to his hand sliding up her thigh. She sprung upright, heart pounding. “D.J.,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “Miss me?” he murmured. His hand reached between her legs. At once, she wanted to both push him away and melt into his touch. She did nothing. His smile froze on his face. His hand stopped moving. “Leah,” he said. “I think we’ve been going about this the wrong way. I mean, I think I get what you were saying before.”

  Slowly, she shifted away from him. He pulled his hand back. She licked her dry lips. “Oh?” she said.

  His gaze dropped to his lap. “We should get to know each other.”

  “Oh, D.J., no, I don’t think—”

  He cut her off, meeting her gaze with an earnest look on his face. “What’s your favorite color?”

  She smiled and touched his forearm. “Oh, you’re sweet, but—”

  “I want to know things about you. Tell me, what’s your favorite color?”

  “D.J.,” she said. “Relationships are based on more than just knowing each other’s favorite things.”

  “What’s your husband’s favorite color?”

  She was taken aback by the question, but his steady gaze said he fully expected an answer. “Blue,” she said.

  “Rachel’s your best friend, right? What’s hers?”

  “Red,” Leah answered slowly. “But, D.J., that’s not how relationships work, and this, what we’re doing, this isn’t a relationship.”

  His brow furrowed. “But you said everything was okay between us. That we could keep going. I want you, Leah, and I want to know more about you.”

  She couldn’t deny the warmth she felt break open in her chest, even as she fought it. No man had ever said such things to her. Her husband had never even said such things. He had never shown that much interest in her.

  “I want you.”