It was as close as I could’ve gotten without causing him pain, but not nearly close enough. I’d wanted to sneak under his skin and disappear. I’d wanted to dissolve inside him.
“I love you,” he’d said into my hair, and I’d breathed shallow and even against his chest, like my heart wasn’t breaking.
I hadn’t lied to him. They hadn’t hurt me, not really. Not like they had him. All they’d wanted with me was to keep me out of the way; his girl, the mute freak. But in beating him they’d broken something inside of me, something unrestrained and terrible, and now I can’t put it back together, no matter how hard I try.
I am splintering.
Logan looks up with a drawn half smile when I enter the room. His face is badly beaten, one eye swollen and dark, his lower lip slightly puffy, the tear in his cheek from the bite of that chain sown shut with ten tiny stitches and held together with stark white steri-strips. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, gingerly stuffing his hands down the sleeves of his ruined shirt, spotted with dark stains. I cross the room quickly to help. Though he tries to hide it, Logan’s breathing catches several times as I work the shirt over his head. As gently as I can, I pull it down over his bruised body, the fabric, stiff with dried blood, slowly covering the landscape of pale, old scars and newly discolored flesh.
Badly bruised ribs, the doctor had told us. Not broken. But Logan is still breathing shallow like every inhale is agonizing and I’m not sure what the difference is.
“Thank you.”
I can feel his eyes on me as I nod and grab the small stack of prescription orders from beside him on the bed.
He watches me as I grab his hand and we walk together out the door, down the hall and into the crisp fall morning. Some of my unease lessens as we leave the hospital behind us, but not much.
Logan doesn’t argue when I slip behind the wheel again, for once not opening the door for me. In my hands the steering wheel feels almost ordinary, like I’d never spent so much time hiding at home. He closes his eyes with his head back against the rest as I drive, the muscle in his jaw tightening, holding his breath at each tiny bump in the road.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Logan asks at a stoplight and I tightly shake my head. He doesn’t ask again, but as the light turns and I press the pedal I can feel his eyes on me. The silence stretches between us.
We stop in the drive-thru at the pharmacy to fill his prescriptions, and thirty minutes later I’m pulling the car up into his driveway and he’s asleep in the passenger seat next to me.
My hands are gripping the steering wheel in bloodless fists and I forcibly relax them, but they shake as I turn the key to kill the engine.
“Okay?” Logan asks quietly, clearly not as asleep as I’d thought.
I force a smile at his broken face. It shouldn’t be possible to keep hurting like this, when everything inside me is already crushed and ruined.
“It happened again,” he says, and when I look back at him he’s staring out the windshield, his eyes unfocused. “I blacked out. He went for you and I just - I don’t remember a lot of it.”
I reach for my phone. You were trying to protect me.
“Is he -?”
I scowl. I couldn’t care less about any of them. He’s fine. He’s not any worse than you are.
Logan considers this, his bruised eyes heavy and half closed. “They got what they wanted from me.”
Blood, I think bitterly. But he continues.
“I won’t get off this time.”
No one’s going to the police, I type, shaking my head. Not with Dylan involved. The cop’s son.
In my head I see Dylan’s dad like he’d been last night, the sounds of his son’s fists sinking into Logan’s body as he’d dispassionately turned away. Maybe now his wife-beating asshole of a partner was rightfully avenged.
Logan doesn’t seem convinced, or maybe he’s just too bone-weary to care.
As I grab the keys and turn to get out Logan stops me with a hand on my arm. “Thank you.”
I’m not sure what he’s thanking me for exactly but I nod anyway and practically leap from the car. Logan follows more slowly, moving tentatively with an arm around his ribs. I meet him at the other side, letting him lean on me as we torturously climb the front steps, muffled sounds of discomfort slipping from him as his boots scrape over the cement.
Once inside the house I help Logan back to the bedroom and out of his soiled shirt, tossing it directly into the trash, still warm from his body. I kneel down and untie his boots and swipe off his socks. His jeans are stained too but not as bad, and besides he’s already lying back atop the covers with a tight, pained sort of exhale.
“Come ‘ere,” he mumbles, his voice slurred from the painkillers I’d given him in the car, from his body’s self-preservationist slide into total exhaustion.
I hesitate. I want to run, to flee from that house and his blood and those dark eyes that I know better than my own, looking at me with such love and trust, saturated with pain. I want to, but I just slip out of my shoes and socks and jeans and coat, all still splattered with his blood, and climb onto the bed beside him. I’m careful not to hurt him as I lower myself to his side, my head on one of the few areas of his chest not darkened with bruises.
But when I close my eyes I see his knees giving out beneath him, see him collapsing to the ground with a spray of blood.
“Shh, Love,” Logan murmurs against my hair, and I realize I’m crying again, silently. Tears are trickling the length of the raised, white scars on his chest, cutting wet paths down over his discolored ribs. “It’s okay. Shh. It’s okay.”
I awake with a scream trembling, silent on my lips. As softly as I can I slide out from the curve of Logan’s arm, my skin crawling and my heart in my throat. Silently I stumble from the room and down the hall, catching myself on the back of the couch in the living room and hanging my head, dragging air in deeply, stirring the embers of my lungs. They are scorched, burnt from overuse, and I can’t erase that, can’t make everything go back to the way it was.
There’s too much inside me that I can’t hold back anymore, and I’m suffocating on the purge.
My arms are shaking and I want to throw my head back and scream myself raw, want to pound my fists against the wall until I can’t lift them anymore. I want to draw blood, draw pain up from the unholy depths within me before it slices me to pieces.
I drop my chin to my chest, my breathing labored and loud, raking my fingers back through my hair, pulling to feel the sting in my scalp.
God, I’m going crazy.
I can’t make it stop, can’t stop the feeling that I’m crawling out of my own skin, that something sick and twisted is emerging from within me behind the echo of my own scream.
I’d done it. I’d used my voice. And now I couldn’t stop the memories, the flashes of pain and shame and terror that slap at me. Memories of that night two years ago mixing now with new ones, ones of Logan, blood-splattered and broken, the wet slapping sound of flesh pounding into flesh, the dark horror in his eyes when he’d looked at me.
I stumble into a run, only barely making it to the bathroom by the front door before dropping to my knees in front of the toilet and heaving violently. I hadn’t eaten anything since the ice cream the previous afternoon so very little comes up, but even still my stomach twists painfully, squeezing for more.
When it’s finally done wringing itself out I stand and flush, wiping my mouth on a washcloth by the sink and staring at myself in the mirror. There’s a small fleck of Logan’s blood on the side of my jaw still and I reach up with one trembling finger and scratch it off with my nail. It flakes away easily. And then I’m just gawking at this girl in front of me, naked but for her grey t-shirt and underwear, sickly pale and covered in clammy sweat. Her long hair is hanging stringy down her back and she’s shaking, wracked with fear.
Always the fear.
It makes me sick. I feel my right hand slide instinctually over my left wrist and cl
ose my eyes, willing myself to stop. But Logan is the only one who can make this feeling go away and I refuse to wake him, not after last night.
I just want it to stop. An oblivion of terror, and I’m lost in it.
Twisting away from the mirror, I’m not sure where I’m headed until I’m already walking past the doorway to the kitchen, through to the entryway, hovering at the threshold there and staring at that little table.
Such a small thing. This cold object, just big enough to grip in one’s hand, and it had controlled me so easily; controls me still.
I step forward, my bare feet silent against the chilly tile floor. I’m shivering violently as I reach out, slipping the drawer open with just a whisper of sound and staring down at its dark contents. Logan’s handgun, resting there, a solitary black shape against the blonde wood of the drawer. I reach for it and my hand closes around it. It’s surprisingly heavy as I lift it out.
Grasping it in my right hand I hold it in front of my belly, reaching with the other to touch a finger to the muzzle, the hammer, to slide it along the sleek edge of the barrel. My pulse pounding in my veins I adjust the thing in my grip, staring at it from some distant part of me, my hand slick with sweat around its hard shape. I’ve never been on this side of a gun before and I’m not sure what to do. I slide my last three fingers and thumb around the handle, grasping it in a choking grip, my first finger stretched alongside the cool metal length of the barrel.
An image scrapes across my mind; his face over me, grunting, and I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe through clenched teeth.
No. I will not be afraid the rest of my whole fucking life.
The awful sound of my own silence fills my ears, masking even the roar of my blood.
My eyes tightly closed I hold my breath, turn the gun in my hand once and then bend my arm to press the round tip of the barrel against the underside of my jaw.
There. That’s it. Exactly what it felt like.
I’m standing there, gritting my teeth and reeling from the feel of that hard metal kiss again, but at least I don’t feel like I’m turning inside-out anymore. At least there isn’t any screaming.
Logan’s tight voice breaks across the cold silence.
“Bree, Love, put down the gun.”
I open my eyes first, unmoving, and I see him standing there, frozen in the doorway. He’s staring at me, his whole body tense. In his wide, dark eyes I see dread and pain. And barely restrained terror.
My arm drops automatically and Logan lurches forward, ripping the weapon from my hand and sharply dismantling it, the clip and the unchambered bullet clattering across the floor before he viciously flings the gun itself, now empty, down the hall.
“Jesus! Fuck!”
I flinch, but not from the curse so much as the feel of his body as he crushes me to his chest, his arms iron around my back. He’s shaking.
“Damn it!”
He pulls back suddenly and shakes me hard, his hands biting into the flesh of my arms, eyes burning and bloodshot and totally livid.
“What?” he yells in my face. “Tell me! Tell me what’s so bad you’d come out here to this but you couldn’t even wake me up!”
I’m shaking my head, and I can feel tears pouring down my face but I can’t stop them and they just keep coming faster. He’s glaring at me, fierce and hard, waiting in a tightly coiled rage. And then something shifts minutely and it all drains out of him, leaving him empty and brittle. His shoulders sag, his eyes swollen and tired and miserable.
“Bree. Please, God, just talk to me.”
It’s the break in his voice that does it.
A sob jerks out of me, and then another and another, coming faster on each other until I’m clasped to Logan’s chest and I can’t breathe through the pain of it. He’s guiding me, his arms around me, moving cautiously with his bruised ribs, and I don’t question it, I just follow. A gentle pressure and I’m sitting on the living room couch with him lowering gingerly to his knees in front of me.
He’s looking up at me, worried, and I reach out, softly touching his swollen face, the broken skin of his cheek that had needed to be sewn back together, the flesh around it red and angry. I’d watched them do it.
“I’m okay,” he says softly, reading the look in my eyes.
He scoops up my hands and places them on his chest, right over the raised, parallel ropes of his scars. He’s not wearing a shirt and I can feel the heat of his skin, the heartbeat thrumming beneath my palm.
“I’m okay.”
But I shake my head tearfully because he’s not okay. They wouldn’t have stopped; they would’ve killed him had I not opened my mouth and screamed for help and now I couldn’t put it all back inside again. I’m coming apart; the shards are slipping, wet, down my face.
I love him so much it’s breaking all the last pieces of me that were whole.
I slide my hands up to anchor them at the back of his neck and drop to my knees, crushing my mouth to his.
Logan goes absolutely still. Then his arms wind around my body, anchoring me, and he angles into the kiss. His teeth prod at my lips and I open for him, letting my head fall back against his arm, the ends of my hair pooling over the backs of my bare calves. His tongue is in my mouth and I can taste the salt of my tears and my hands are in his hair and my teeth clack against his because I’m trying to devour him.
“Logan,” I breathe into his mouth.
He rips away from me. For a second he stares at me with intense, impossibly dark eyes before crushing his mouth back over mine with a long, low groan.
His hands drop to my butt, hot and forceful, kneading me through the thin cotton of my underwear. He drags me against him and I shudder against the feel of his arousal, huge and hard beneath his jeans.
Logan groans at the pressure, his hips rocking against me, and he smoothes one of his hands up my back beneath my shirt and around to my stomach, his fingertips grazing the underside of my breast. He sweeps his thumb over me, dragging it roughly over the hardened nipple, and I grip his shoulders to keep from collapsing backward it feels so good. Breathing fast, Logan tugs down the lace of my bra and fills his hand with my breast and my body clenches hard, tightening with need.
“More,” I mutter against his mouth and then my hands are at his flat stomach and his breathing catches when I rip open the button of his jeans and tug down the zipper.
He shudders when I slip my hand down, sliding it over him, and then he groans into my mouth, his hips bucking wildly when I close my fist around him.
In less than a second he pushes me down onto my back on the carpet and tears my shirt off over my head, grimacing when the sweeping motion disturbs his recent injuries. His pupils are huge and his muscles are straining and he’s holding himself on his elbows and staring down at me as he shoves with his hips, thrusting himself against the grip of my hand. I squeeze my fist and see the answering burn in his eyes before he drops his mouth back to mine.
Logan lets me shove his jeans and boxers down over his hips, yanking them off to impatiently kick them away. Then he’s staring down at me and his hands are rubbing my thighs, circling, hot, just shy of where I’m throbbing for him to touch me. I need more.
“Please.”
Before the word has even completely left my lips, Logan’s fingers hook over the top of my underwear. He meets my eyes, silently questioning, before quickly slipping them off my legs and lowering himself down on top of me.
I can’t stop the moan at the feel of his hot skin dragging against my most sensitive place as he slowly slides the full length of his arousal between my legs. He’s shaking and my body is hot and aching and tight and I’m clutching his shoulders and panting and it’s still not enough.
When Logan pulls back I whimper at the loss, and then my arms drop to the floor and my fingers dig into the carpet when his hand covers me. He moves slowly, rubbing the heel of his palm against me, watching me writhe. When he feels my body tightening under his touch he dips it lower, spreading my thighs f
or the width of his palm.
He slips one finger inside me and my head whips back and my thighs fall open and I cry out but he’s already withdrawing. He spreads me intimately, sliding his slick finger over the throbbing center and pausing there.
My body tenses, my fingers clawing and my heels pushing and I’m arching up against his hand, trembling and taut and waiting.
Finally, watching me, Logan drags his finger over me, down one side and then slowly back up, wet and hot, pausing torturously at the peak and then down the other side. He moves it faster, pressing harder, circling the hot flesh until my hips lift up off the floor and I cry out as the orgasm rips through me.
“Bree,” Logan groans. He nudges my legs with his knees, spreading them, and then he’s on top of me and he’s fumbling for his jeans in the dark before I feel his hands between us, quickly covering himself.
I feel him nudge against me and he stops.
We’re both breathing hard and Logan holds himself up to look down at me, his eyes a mix of wonder and need and fear.
“Bree?” he whispers tightly.
And I realize he knows. He’s guessed it already, knows that dirtiest thing, and he still wants me.
But he’s terrified.
I nod and he waits for just a second, watching me. Then my eyes clench shut when he wraps his arms around me, under me, and he thrusts his hips forward, pushing all the way inside.
I gasp at the feel of him, warm and full and deep, so deep inside me. It shouldn’t be possible to be this close to someone, to have them invade every tiny part of you, the way Logan has. He’d worked his way into every crack, every fissure, widening them, prying them open, exposing what was inside. I could never keep him out.
He pulls back slowly, slipping out almost all of the way and then sliding forward again, burying himself deeply inside me with a muffled groan.
Logan’s face is in my hair, his lips at my ear when he whispers, “Are you okay?”
I nod against him but it’s not enough because he pushes up to look at me and I jerk at what it feels like, down where he’s buried inside me. It’s amazing and it’s incredible and it’s Logan.
A More Deserving Blackness Page 20
