by Holly Hall
When our eyes meet again, he looks regretful. Maybe he didn’t mean for me to see the predatory way his features changed. “That’s not for you to worry about. What I wonder is how they know about us.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t told anyone. Not Lynn, or even my family.”
“I know. I trust you. Something must have changed recently, but we can worry about it more in the morning.”
The morning seems so far off, yet it must only be hours away.
Dane’s voice is gentler when he says, “Can you think of anything else?”
I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about the two men—I’m sure I’ll be seeing them plenty in my nightmares—but I know Dane’s just trying to work this out. He needs to know as many details as I can recount. I look down at the tile, and I let the men intrude my thoughts like they intruded my home.
“I couldn’t see much beyond the masks—ski masks.” My pulse quickens and my breathing shortens. I remember . . . what was it? Something about fingernails. Scales? “A tattoo,” I say quickly. The man holding me had a tattoo. I saw only part of it, about here,” I point to a place on my forearm and wrist. “Scales of some sort, I think. I only got a glimpse. His fingernails had black dirt underneath them.”
Dane’s eyes are unfocused, looking toward the counter. “I’ll check around. See what I can find out.”
I sigh and let my eyelids fall. My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
“What’s hurting?”
“Everything. Mostly my head.”
“I should get you some ibuprofen.” He goes to turn away, but I reach out and stop him. The sudden, desperate movement makes us both look down to the place where I’m gripping his forearm.
“No,” I say, sounding more strained than I mean to. “Please stay. Don’t . . . I just need you to be here for a minute.”
His eyes soften, filling with concern. “I’ll stay for as long as you need me to.”
Need. It’s my dirty word. The one I’ve had an aversion to for as long as I can remember. It’s something Jenson probably wishes I had felt more often and what my sister blamed the dissolution of my marriage on. I pride myself on not relying on anyone, no matter how many times my mom told me how men appreciate being needed, and here I’ve just told Dane I need him without blinking an eye. I’m too tired to care.
I nod my head over toward the clawfoot tub occupying the majority of the wall to my left. “I need to soak in that tub for about ten years. But I don’t want you to leave.”
“Okay,” he says carefully, as if I’m already submerged and he doesn’t want to disturb the water.
Dane fetches my bag from the other room and sets it within reach on the bathroom counter. A quick survey of the items he procured from my shower reveals that he brought just about everything. Even the bottle of frilly, aromatic bubble bath I use only on special occasions. Bless him. Dane pushes up his shirt sleeves and kneels to turn on the bathtub faucet, adjusting the water temperature while I grab the necessities and, on second thought, the bubble bath. If there was ever an excuse to use it, I think this situation qualifies. My clothing options are less numerous. I guess, in my haste, I didn’t bother packing pajamas, but there’s an oversized t-shirt and a cheeky pair of underwear that will suffice.
“Got everything you need?” he asks.
I nod again, my blood pressure rising by the second when I consider the consequences of asking him to stay. The lights are bright—almost blindingly so—and up until now, we’ve only undressed in the dark. “Will you turn around?”
He doesn’t ask questions, he doesn’t hesitate, just turns and braces a hand against the wall opposite the mirror. It seems like such a silly thing, wanting to hide from his eyes what his hands have already touched, but undressing in front of a man beneath harsh bathroom lighting seems like too much of a shock for my fragile confidence. I feel like I’m wearing all my past years—the stress, the anguish, and even the happiness—and each of those feelings is displayed as white lines, or dimples, or curves on my body. I know it could be worse, it could always be worse, but his strong, sure capability makes me overly aware of all the ways my own body is lacking.
With one last inhale, I summon the courage to peel off my panties and scrubs in one quick motion, then whip my top over my head, unsnapping my bra and shrugging out of it. I lay everything neatly on the countertop before stepping into the churning bathwater. It stings my skin. And it’s heaven.
I lower myself fully before squeezing some lavender soap beneath the spray. The smell does little to calm my frazzled nerves, but the temperature seeps into my muscles immediately. I settle back into the belly of the tub with a sigh, clearing my throat to signal to Dane that it’s safe to turn around.
I may be hidden from view in the frothy water, but his eyes darken to sapphire for a moment before he draws closer and drops down onto the closed toilet seat beside the bathtub. He deserves a good soak as much as I do, but I’m too much of a coward to ask him to join. It makes for a nice visual in my head, though, and I have to focus on something else, anything else, to ignore the snapshots of dewy skin, wet hair, and slick muscles that seem to flash right before my eyes. He’s so close that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to. I grab a bar of soap instead.
When I begin to run the lather over my arms, the touch of his hand against my neck makes me stop in place. Giving in to the pressure, I angle my head away from him. His fingers graze over a spot on my skin, just above my collarbone, and no matter how gentle he is, I can feel my trapezius muscle pulsate angrily in response. The bite mark. I had forgotten about it.
“God damn,” he says through gritted teeth.
“It’s not as bad as—”
“You don’t have to make excuses anymore. You can tell me you’re hurting,” he interjects. “What else is there?” He’s cold toward the situation, but his concern for me is unmistakable.
I don’t want to complain, but his insistence brings my attention back to my mental list of aches and pains. “My shoulders, mostly. I think from when they held my hands behind my back.” I cross my wrists to demonstrate, and Dane’s jaw flexes. He gently takes my hands in his, turning them over to inspect my joints. Spots of purple are already forming. If I look hard enough, I can make out the shape of fingers.
“What I could do to them,” he growls.
“What can we do?”
Rubbing his hands over his face, he sits back. “Nothing, yet. They said it straight: we can’t go to the cops—half the time you can’t trust the police in these towns anyways. And if I act against them, well, it seems they already know what they can use to hit me the hardest.” I don’t have to ask what. Because of me, he now has a weakness. An Achilles heel. Dane sighs again. “We’re like sitting fucking ducks.”
Tears well in my eyes again. This being helpless thing is really getting old. “How can we hide forever?”
“We can’t. In fact, it’s probably more important to get back to your usual routines in the morning. They already know about you, so chances are they’ve watched you enough to know if you do anything out of the ordinary. Get your door fixed, your keys replaced, and go get a new phone. Go to work, run whatever errands you usually run, go to Lynn’s if you want, go home.
“Home?” The thought sends a shudder of fear through me. I don’t even know where home is anymore.
“Yes.” The word is hard for even him to say. “We can’t afford to give them another excuse to do something stupid. Especially when we’re not sure what all they know. I’ll do what I can to check around on my end.”
“Your end?”
“I still know some people.”
“People like Trey?” I ask, biting my lip.
“Yes. Only, some of them are still on my side.”
I shift in the water, bringing my knees to my chest to rest my cheek against them. This situation has never felt more real than it does now, with the evidence of its consequences staining my skin and Dane making plans involving the w
orld he’s tried for years to avoid. “Whatever you do, please be careful.” There’s so much I could say, but there’s so much more that prevents the words from coming out. My last shreds of self-preservation. Knowing how thin the blade we’re treading is.
“You don’t need to worry about me.”
I furrow my brows at him, and he chuckles. It’s a strange sound amid the ordeal we’ve found ourselves in, but it’s sweet. It brings me relief. Dane takes my hand and turns it so that it’s palm-up, pressing both of his thumbs down in the center, applying pressure and dragging them in circles.
“Is this okay?”
I close my eyes and nod. It feels so good I could cry. Once he’s finished with my palm, he skates over my wrist and starts on my forearm. I sink farther down and lean my head back, cracking an eye open to watch him. His forehead is creased in concentration, the corners of his mouth slightly downturned. An ache forms in the center of my chest, but he doesn’t sense anything is amiss. His eyes stay trained on his task.
Dane’s fingers move skillfully over the striations of my muscles, pushing out lactic acid, almost causing me to groan in appreciation. He dips into the water, slickening his hands, and continues to my shoulders. When I wince, he proceeds more gently. They’re going to hurt more tomorrow. I can already feel it. I’m pushed to my limit when he reaches my neck, releasing a long, sighing groan as he pushes and prods at the manifestation of most of my tension.
“Good? Or hurting?” he murmurs.
“Good. Definitely good.” My eyelids are growing heavier by the second, but I can’t pass out and miss out on this. When I glance at him, I see that he’s watching me now. Our eyes meet, snag on one another. It’s impossible to look away. Unthinkable. But there are so many questions that need answering.
“How could they have found out about us? How could they know I’m more than just some fling?”
“If you were a fling, they wouldn’t have seen you with me more than once. I haven’t spent more than one night with the same girl in I don’t know how long.”
I’m not going to lie, that stings a little. Lines of girls marching through his bedroom dance in my head. “Someone at the party, maybe. And then the carnival. They must have been tipped off somehow. I didn’t tell anyone, Dane. I promise you.”
“I know. And you wouldn’t have to. It’s easy to slip after being out of the game for so long. There are a lot of hungry people out there, begging for bones. I forget how many are watching, just waiting for any information they can pass down the chain to get into someone’s good graces.” His hands dip below the surface of the water, sliding down my back on either side of my spine. I lean forward so he has better access, holding my breath as they travel lower and lower. He stops right at the two depressions in my lower back, circling and making his way back up. I breathe.
“I’ve been alone a long time. Not always physically, I’ll be honest, but the isolation wears on you just the same. I guess that’s why I was so reckless with you.”
My mind returns to the lines of girls. “You never wanted to pursue anyone else?”
His fingers run through the knots around my shoulder blades. “Maybe a little, but nothing like this. I didn’t want anyone mixed up in what was going on with my family. With you . . . I was stupid. Careless. I put your life in danger.”
It doesn’t feel good to be viewed as a stupid decision. “I’m a grown woman, Dane,” I remind him a little forcefully. “I made a few of the decisions that led us here.”
He leans forward so he can look me in the eye. “It was my responsibility to keep my situation contained. I should’ve sent you home the second you showed up at my house that night. I shouldn’t have had you over at the treehouse. There were so many opportunities to end it, and I didn’t.”
“Why?” I challenge.
“Isn’t it obvious? We’ve hardly gotten to spend any time together and I’m already helpless when it comes to you. I’ve made stupid decisions since you got here, but I’ve felt more alive than I have in years. It sounds crazy, even to me, but you came in here like a hurricane and destroyed everything I thought was real. I haven’t been motivated to change my life so much in years. Not like this at least. And I didn’t have many reasons to. Until now.” At some point during that knee-weakening statement, his hand has paused at the nape of my neck, so large his fingers stretch almost all the way around it. He’s looking at me with such burning intensity that I can feel every word he says and know that it’s true.
Before I can say anything, he continues. “I look at you and I can’t understand why you’re here when there are so many other places you could be.”
“I don’t belong anywhere else,” I say.
His shoulders seem to slump as he lets out a breath. “Well, as bad as it sounds, I’m a little glad you don’t.”
One look at the bathwater tells me the bubbles have dissipated, and I don’t know how long my bare body has been in clear view. With my muscles sated and warm, and weariness settling over me like a heavy blanket, I don’t care enough to cover myself.
“I should get out and change before I pass out and you’re forced to resuscitate me.”
“Wouldn’t mind that,” he says, but he rises from the toilet and stretches languidly, his shirt rising to reveal a slice of toned lower stomach. “I’ll just be right out here.” He hands me the towel from my bag and leaves the room.
I finish bathing as quickly as I can in my drowsy state before pulling the stopper. As water gurgles down the drain, I dry off and step out, toweling off my hair. Dane didn’t shut the door, so I have a view of him reclined on the bed in the other room, one arm slung over his eyes and the other outstretched beside him. If I took just a glance, he would look like a man without troubles. But I can hardly take my eyes off him, and I know better. I pull on my shirt and underwear, brushing my teeth before flipping off the light.
Dane’s breathing is deep and steady, but he stirs when I lie down beside him. He extends his arm, scooping my head onto his shoulder, and I just lay there, as still as I can, absorbing his warmth. Oddly enough, it’s the first time we’ve been able to be together like this without worrying about the consequences. What’s done is done, what will be is already in motion. But I’m here and so is he, and I bask in him while my eyes droop.
“Everything will be all right, won’t it?”
“Yes. Everything good,” he says.
I think he meant “everything is good,” but I’m too tired to care, and I fall asleep to the sound of his sure words and the feeling of his fingers in my hair.
TWENTY
I startle awake in the muted gray hours just before dawn, noticeably cooler than I was when I fell asleep. My hand searches the sheets before my fatigued mind can figure out what I’m looking for. Dane’s gone. I jolt upright, eyes scanning the room. It’s empty. My head feels like it weighs five thousand pounds on my shoulders, and though I’m still foggy from sleep, a rising sense of panic propels me out of bed.
I descend the stairs cautiously, on alert for any strange noises that don’t belong. There’s nothing aside from the yellow glow of the work light. The opacity of the plastic sheeting distorts my view of the kitchen, but I can tell one shape doesn’t belong among the rest. I sweep the plastic aside and see him.
Dane is sitting on an overturned bucket, leaned over with his elbows on his knees, absentmindedly picking at his knuckles. It looked like he was staring off at nothing before I disturbed him, but now he focuses on me. This is the first time I’ve seen his eyes look so troubled. They’re red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and his shoulders seem to sag beneath the weight of the last eight hours. It’s unsettling seeing such a capable man in such distress.
I don’t see the blood until I’m only a few feet from him. It’s rusty-red, dried in the valleys between his knuckles. A quick scan of the room reveals the source: a fist-sized hole in the drywall, right in the spot where a refrigerator will go one day. Dragging my eyes from the evidence of some private outburst, I igno
re the hole and what caused it and place a tentative hand on his cheek, trusting that even someone his size needs comfort.
“I’m sorry. I was restless. I didn’t mean to wake you.” His voice is gravelly from disuse.
I squat down in front of him so we’re eye-level. “You didn’t. And I feel the same way.” I look around at the patchy, bare walls. Already, they feel like they’re closing in. “I don’t do the damsel-in-distress thing well,” I say with a self-deprecating snort.
He flexes his knuckles and drops his hands. “It’s not such a bad thing, needing help.”
“I guess not. I just wanted to build something on my own.” My mind drifts to the recent past, remembering how determined I was to make something of myself when I moved here. To soar without needing anyone to give me a boost.
“I know how that feels. But sometimes it takes more strength to admit you need help than to deny it.”
I’m not sure why the words that come out of his mouth still have the power to surprise me. “You are not at all what I expected, Dane Cross.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean I’m a disappointment,” he says with just a trace of a grin.
“Definitely not. You’ve lived in the same place for thirty years but somehow know more about life than the rest of us.”
He shakes his head, his weary eyes cast downward. “I guess I’m talking the talk before walking the walk. Soaking up what I can from the outside because I can’t be there myself.”
Coming from the mouth of someone who’s proven himself to be misunderstood, and good down to his bones, that statement is heart-wrenching. I can’t comprehend how much he longs for a life outside of Heronwood after all these years of dreaming and working for it. And now, seeing it all put at risk because of his feelings for a woman—me—makes me sick to my stomach.
I have to do something. I should leave. Remove myself from the equation. I don’t know if that thought terrifies me more than the prospect of staying.
“I’ve been thinking . . . the best thing for you to do is to get out. Go stay with your parents, or your sister. Let me handle this. Give everything some time to burn out.”
