Harder (Stark Ink Book 1)

by Dahlia West

  “It was my fault. I pushed him too hard. Tried to take him fishing. Father/son stuff. Didn’t sit well. He ducked out of a gas station on the way to the lake.” Pop hesitated a moment and rubbed his chin. “He was ten, maybe twelve. Missing overnight.”

  “Jesus Christ. Mom must have been out of her mind.”

  “She was. But she didn’t want to worry you and Dalton. She shipped Ava off to Gram’s house for the night so she wouldn’t find out. Anyway, we found him the next day. Or rather, the police did. In a park. They brought him home.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, we never went fishing again,” Pop said with a rueful smile. “I apologized. And found other ways to connect with him.”

  Ava stomped into the living room, wet hair plastered to her head and dripping onto a hastily donned T-shirt. She had on jeans but her feet were bare. “What the hell? You chased Sienna out of the house? Are you insane?!”

  Adam was unmoved by her indignation. “You’re telling me you didn’t know?”

  His sister’s shoulders slumped at bit at that. “I… I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “Sex with a minor is a very big deal, Ava.”

  “That’s what I meant!” she insisted. “I mean I didn’t think things were serious between them. I know she likes him. She’s always liked him. But she never talks about it.”

  Adam slumped against the back of the couch. The last thing he needed right now was teenage drama. “You should go after her. See that she’s okay.” He looked at the back door and sighed. “I should… I don’t know… talk to her mother, I guess.” More and more, Adam missed Mom. She’d know exactly what to do. And everything would turn out just fine. Adam, on the other hand, was likely to just fuck it up even worse. Apparently Pop agreed.

  “Leave it alone,” the old man warned.

  Adam shook his head. It would do no good to pretend it hadn’t happened. Maybe the best thing was to get in front of it. “Pop—”

  Pop’s face darkened and Adam saw the old man’s infamous resolve. “You’ve already shown more concern for that girl in ten minutes than that woman has for the last seventeen years.” Pop sat back in his chair. “And Jonah’s a good boy,” he declared, as if that was all that needed to be said on the matter.

  Adam looked down at the keys in his hand. After a long minute, he said, “Well, I have to find him, anyway.”

  Pop glared at him from across the room. “Don’t push my son away.”

  “I won’t. I swear I won’t,” Adam promised and headed for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Adam threaded the darkened streets, searching for his youngest brother. Pop said Jonah was a good boy. Adam wanted to believe it was true. Jonah certainly wasn’t the scrappy, belligerent child Adam recalled from years ago. Jonah may have filled out and eschewed his violent tendencies, but beyond that, Adam didn’t really know his youngest brother. He knew of no friends or even acquaintances, but then Adam hadn’t known something was going on between Jonah and Sienna, either. He also had no idea where Jonah would go if left to his own devices. Or even if he was coming back. Adam had to believe he was, though. After all, Jonah hadn’t taken much of his stuff. But that didn’t mean his next trip home wouldn’t be his last.

  At a loss for places to look, Adam tried the gym first, just in case, but it was closed. No lights were on inside the nearly-decrepit building, not that he could see, anyway. He rolled slowly past, picturing Jonah, who was taller than Adam by a handful of inches, bobbing and weaving in a boxing ring. It wasn’t hard to envision, actually. Jonah had quick fists and a killer instinct, both of which made the boxing ring make sense.

  Adam swung by the park that was closest to the house though he didn’t really think Jonah would be there. The darkened playspace cast long shadows across the grass that set it back from the road. Junkies had shattered the bulbs in the streetlights to give themselves some cover. The park was safe enough during the day, so long as you kept an eye out for dirty, discarded needles and pipes. It was not a place you’d venture into after dark, so he wasn’t surprised when none of the dark, hooded figures turned out to be Jonah.

  At the last minute, Adam turned sharply onto Vine Street and rolled through Dalton’s neighborhood. Adam had a key to the place, maybe Jonah did, too. If Dalton hadn’t given Jonah one directly, Adam supposed he could’ve swiped the spare Mom kept hung in the kitchen. Dalton’s place was dark, too, though, but his streetlights remained intact. Adam could see the grass creeping upward taller than it should have been. A piece of newspaper had blown into the yard and plastered itself against a hedge. Dalton’s tricked-out Ford sat in the driveway, a hulking, intimidating behemoth, much like the man himself. Adam glared at it, but then sighed.

  It was too easy to blame the truck and not the owner. And from there it was too easy to blame Dalton instead of aiming most or all of that laser-focused judgment onto himself.

  Dalton’s apartment stood empty because Dalton’s life was empty, drained of everything he’d ever cared about and he’d been trying to combat the slow leak by filling it up with whiskey. Adam had been too busy to notice, then at the height of his self-centeredness it had taken Mom’s cancer to get his attention. Not her aches and pains, not her constant, uncharacteristic desire for naps in the daytime. It wasn’t until Death came knocking that Adam had finally been jolted out of his self-serving reverie.

  Death had come knocking. And no one had been there to answer it except himself. Death had knocked and it was Adam who opened the door, the sin for which all the Starks were now paying, it seemed.

  Before now, Adam hadn’t given God much thought. Could not even decide if he believed in such a thing. As Mom lay dying, spouting nonsense and begging Adam to help her, he had decided if God did exist, then He was wholly uncaring and not worth Adam’s—or anyone else’s—reverence.

  It turned out both ideas had been wretchedly wrong. God did exist. And He did care. Because He was a vengeful God, after all.

  Adam arrived at the little one-story house without realizing he had driven there. One turn had led to another and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten here. Well, he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten to her door, but he knew damn well how he’d gotten to this point. He knocked on her door, not too loudly, though. He didn’t want to scare her.

  Calla opened the door minutes later, bathrobe tightened around her waist. She grinned at him. “Did you forget to kiss me?” She stopped, though, when she saw his face in the yellowed-porch light. Her own face became twisted with concern. “Adam?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he said quietly.

  Calla grabbed his arm and tugged. “What’s wrong?”

  A laugh bubbled up from somewhere inside him. “Everything.” Which wasn’t enough to describe it, but seemed accurate, nonetheless.

  She led him inside and closed the door behind him. “Is it your dad? Is he okay?”

  Adam shook his head. “We’re not okay.”

  He shuffled into her living room. Her couch looked inviting, a place to crash. Falling asleep and never waking up seemed like heaven to him at his point. He couldn’t do that, though. It wasn’t the reason he was here.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he announced suddenly.

  “It’s not that late,” she assured him.

  “I mean, I shouldn’t be with you.” He straightened his shoulders and looked her in the eye. She deserved that much. “I’m ending it.”

  Calla’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute.”

  Adam shook his head. “No. It’s over. It has to be.”

  “Do I even get a say?”

  “No, you don’t!” he shot back. “Because if I don’t walk away then you’re next!”

  Calla’s mouth closed, then opened, then closed again before she finally said, “What does that mean?”

  Adam shook his head and looked away. He looked at her orderly house, all her nice things, her nice life… He couldn’t be responsible for her losing all of that. “Yo
u don’t know me,” he said finally. “You don’t know. Now D’s in rehab, Jonah’s missing and—”

  Calla held up her hand. “What do you mean, ‘Jonah’s missing’?”

  “I mean he walked out. I can’t find him. And Pop’s in a nursing home.”

  “It’s a day program!” she argued.

  Adam’s head snapped up. “Oh, is he going to get better, Calla?” he asked sarcastically.

  Calla, truthfully, couldn’t argue with that.

  “Pop’s fading, Jonah’s gone, Dalton’s gone. And if I don’t walk away, you’re next.” He paused to consider this. “Or maybe Ava.” He shook his head. “Everyone’s paying.”

  Calla stepped toward him, her face softening. “Adam, I know how hard this is, how much it’s hurting you. But you’re not alone and I know you feel like you have to take care of all this but it’s not your fault. You didn’t—”

  “It is my fault!”

  His shout reverberated off the walls. Calla froze.

  Adam frowned. He shouldn’t have yelled at her. She didn’t deserve it. “It is my fault,” he repeated, though, because she needed to hear it.

  “Adam—”

  “You don’t know me!”

  “I do know you. You’re an honest and decent man. You’re—”

  Adam shook his head. He was tired, so tired, of all of it. Everything. He wasn’t a good man. And Calla needed to know. As hard as it was, she deserved to know. If only because it would make her accept that he was leaving her. The truth would set her free. He nearly laughed out loud.

  “I’m not a good man,” he told her, interrupting her argument.

  “Adam—”

  “My mother didn’t die of cancer.”

  The announcement seemed louder than it was. Or maybe he was imagining it. He wasn’t sure.

  Calla frowned at him. “What?”

  “She didn’t die of cancer,” he repeated. Strangely, every time he said it, he felt better, not worse. Like shedding old skin.

  “I don’t… I don’t understand. I saw the obituary in the paper. I read—”

  “I killed her.” The silence in the room seemed impossibly louder. “I killed my mother.”

  Calla said nothing.

  “Do you know what hospice care is?” he asked her. “I thought it was home care, you know? Nurses coming and going, but taking care of her at home. But that’s not what it is. Oh, they come the first time, to set up the paperwork. And then they give you all these pills, medications for different things. And an emergency pack that you put in the fridge. But they don’t take care of them. You do. By yourself. You write down all the doses, or at least I did, to keep track. It was all fucked up, though. One pill is too much, half a pill isn’t enough. By the time you’ve got it figured out, everything’s changed. The pain is worse, in a different area. And you have to start all over. Eventually you switch to liquid morphine. Because they can’t swallow anymore.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, at the fan turning slowly, hypnotically. God, he was tired.

  “We lost her on a Monday,” he confessed. “At least, that was the last time she was coherent. So we lost her, but she didn’t die.” He kept his gaze on the fan, because he couldn’t look at Calla. She needed to hear it, and he needed to say it, but he couldn’t look at her, couldn’t face letting her down so spectacularly. “I would fall asleep in the chair, and black bile would come up, out of her nose, her mouth, into her hair. I washed it, changed the sheets, but it kept coming. Then she started foaming at the mouth.”

  Calla raised a hand to her own mouth, whimpering a bit. Adam wanted to spare her, but he couldn’t. Or maybe he wouldn’t. He was a selfish bastard, after all; maybe Calla was the final person he’d taint with his lies, with the truth.

  “I called the nurse. She said to break open the emergency kit in the fridge. There was a vial of Ativan in it. It would stop the foam.” Adam closed his eyes, wishing he could keep them closed forever. “There was also a second vial of morphine. One bottle wasn’t enough to get the job done, but two…”

  His face was wet, but he was too tired to even lift his hands to wipe his cheeks.

  “After it was done, I called the nurse again. She came and took the inventory while the funeral home attendant wheeled Mom out. I kept waiting for her to call the police. I was ready. I wouldn’t have fought. She wrote down all the pill amounts, the number of Fentanyl patches left, everything. I kept waiting to be arrested, but no one came. She patted me on the arm and walked out of the house.”

  Adam opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. “It’s a hell of a thing to kill someone and no one says anything. Like it wasn’t a thing I did, like it wasn’t a choice I made. Like it never happened. But it did happen. And my family’s been paying for it ever since.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Adam watched as Calla finally understood exactly who he was. He pushed off her couch and straightened up.

  “You’re not leaving,” she declared. “And you’re not leaving me.”

  Adam turned to argue but she cut him off.

  “What you described is not living, Adam. But it’s not dying, either. You spared your mother from suffering any longer than she had to. From what it sounds like, even one minute less was a gift. I can’t imagine how hard it was to do, though. But God isn’t punishing you for it. I promise you, He isn’t. I know things are hard right now and it seems like it’s getting worse every day, and it is, but it’s not punishment. It’s just life. I know it’s not punishment because things are going to get better. For all of you. Dalton’s getting the help he needs. Ava’s doing better in school.”

  All of that was true, he supposed, but Adam didn’t feel any better. “Jonah walked out,” he reminded her.

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  He wasn’t hiding the truth so much as just too damn exhausted to tell the whole story.

  “Did he say he wasn’t coming back?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything at all,” he admitted.

  “So, he’s not gone yet. Not really.”

  “Pop won’t get better.” The looming specter of losing someone else was a constant presence these days. Adam didn’t want to give voice to the full truth—that his father would slowly decline, just like his mother until only a shell was left.

  “But he’s in a program,” Calla told him. “You’re getting help.”

  “Everything went to shit on my watch.”

  “Bad things happen to good people, Adam.”

  He scoffed. It was too pat, too trite.

  “What?” she countered. “Don’t believe me? When I look at you I see a man who’s worked hard his whole life. Who shouldered the burden of an entire family when they needed it, who took on the ultimate burden when it had to be done, to spare all the members of his family from that kind of pain.” She closed the gap between them, pressed herself against him, let him know there was no retreating. “I know you,” she said quietly.

  As Adam lay looking at the ceiling, all he could feel was the soft mattress at his back and the soft woman on top of him. He closed his eyes as Calla’s lips dragged along his bare chest. He barely recalled getting undressed. Exhaustion set in, darkening the edges of his vision. The lump in his throat felt like a boulder. “I can’t,” he whispered.

  Calla’s lips found his ear within seconds. “I can. For both of us.”

  “Calla,” he started to argue, but he found he couldn’t muster the energy.

  Her mouth came up against his. “Shhh. Close your eyes.”

  He obliged, or rather couldn’t fight it anymore anyway. His eyelids slid down as though they were weighted. He felt the slight breeze of the ceiling fan cooling the room. Her hair tickled his ribs and her fingers left warm trails down his torso. She took his shaft gently in her hand then slid her tongue from the base to the tip. Adam offered a small prayer that even though he wasn’t able to get up right now, he could still get it up. He began to swell instantly at he
r touch. Her hot breath against him felt like a kiss.

  He felt the mattress dip as she put her legs on either side of him.

  “Calla,” he repeated, but this time he realized he was urging her on. He didn’t care if it made him a selfish prick. It felt too damn good to lose himself inside someone else, inside her, even if only for a moment. His cockhead parted her folds as she sank down on him. Her warm, wetness enveloped him so tightly, so exquisitely, he thought for an instant that it must be what Heaven felt like, if he’d be allowed to go there. Memories flooded his mind and tears stung behind his eyes. As if she knew it, Calla took his face in her hands.

  “Don’t,” she said firmly but quietly. “I know you.”

  Adam started to shake his head, but she held him fast. Then her hands dipped to his shoulders. She gripped him fiercely as her hips pistoned, driving him to an orgasm he didn’t deserve.

  “Cum inside me,” she ordered.

  At this, Adam finally did open his eyes. Before he could make any argument against it, she lifted herself up and drove down hard on him again. She took his hands in hers, laced their fingers. Intertwined, he thought randomly. Tied together.

  “I know you,” she told him. “And you know me. Cum in me now, Adam. Just let go.”

  He did, though more than he’d meant to. Tears spilled as well, falling uncontrollably. Calla’s body covered his, not so much pinning him down as keeping him grounded, keeping him here. His body wracked with sobs and he could do nothing but wrap his arms around her and press her to him, as though just by being closer to him, she could make it all stop. Or witness it. And maybe that was enough.

  Calla said nothing, somehow knowing that there was nothing to say and that it wouldn’t be what he needed. She covered the length of him with her long, lean body. Her face tucked into the hollow of his neck and shoulder. She did the one thing he supposed she could do. She let him cry.

  Maybe hours passed, maybe only a few minutes. He didn’t know. When the tears finally slowed and his breathing evened, Adam tumbled into sleep, with a warm woman in arms. He slipped into a darkness so deep and peaceful, that he vowed never to wake again.