by Maria Luis
“Butt stuff,” I tease, feeling my mood lighten with the hilarity of the story. “What a way to get initiated.”
I’m treated to Gwen’s husky laughter. “Poor panda is more like it.”
My brows shoot up. “Poor panda? First it was the poor curator and now you’re swapping loyalties?”
She gives a delicate shrug. “I mean, the panda was probably lonely.”
“Buy him a panda blow-up doll. Problem solved.”
Gwen rolls her eyes but her smile is so bright and lovely, and it’s all for me. “Only a guy would ever suggest that.”
“That’s because women are worried about the panda when, in reality, it’s the poor curator who’s getting reamed.”
She wrinkles her nose at that, and it’s so damn cute that I catch her hand and kiss the fluttering pulse at her inner wrist. Being able to touch her whenever I so please . . . fuck, it feels good. No, it feels right. No matter what sort of shit Dave pulls, I’m not willing to give Gwen up—what we have is too special.
I refill her wine glass and then do the same to mine. “Have you heard from your mom at all?”
Her shoulders droop and she stares at the Chardonnay like it might have all the answers to her questions. “No. I should probably call her—scratch that, I know I should. But I feel like I’ve just reached my breaking point, you know?” She takes a sip of the wine, then rotates her wrist, allowing the Napa Valley blend to gently swirl in the bowl of the glass. “It’s weird, I guess. You can know someone your entire life and still not understand why they do the things they do.”
Gwen’s astute observation hits way too close to home. Have I ever understood Dave’s motivations? Not really—unless they truly boil down to anger and jealousy only. It’s no way to live, and over the years . . . well, I guess I’ve been holding out hope that Dave’s been operating with something more than just revenge on his mind.
Considering he tied you to a chair, probably not the case.
I tip my wineglass to my lips and down it in one go.
“You had me thinking about something the other day,” I say, setting the glass down on the marble and pushing onto my feet.
Gwen’s blue eyes follow me. “You mean, you can think about something else besides your penis?”
Laughter climbs my throat. “Minx.”
She lifts her hands. “Just asking a question for womankind everywhere.”
“Yeah, well, how does womankind feel about my penis?”
My cock strains against my jeans when she trails her gaze down my chest to my crotch. “We like him, a lot.” Her mouth tilts upward. “He’s just so damn pretty.”
I didn’t think it was possible to fall in love with a woman over talk about dicks. Hell, it’d almost be preferable if that weren’t the case. But with her blue eyes shining with mischief and her wineglass still clasped in one hand, I know that there will never be another woman who matches me like Gwen does.
In some subconscious way, I’ve known that for years. It’s why I only ever involved myself in superficial relationships where the “deepest” we got was just burrowing under the covers. From the start, Gwen has captivated me like no one else—showing, in return, that I’m the right man for her has proved marginally harder.
With a finger to her chin, I angle her face to best receive my kiss. My lips slip over hers, soft and easy, and my palm moves to the back of her head. She moans against my mouth. I hear the clink! of her glass hitting the marble just before she turns fully in the stool so that she can rest her palms on my hips.
I try to imagine what we look like together—a tatted-up man with hard edges but with, according to her, pretty-boy model looks. A redhead with smooth, creamy skin and the kindest heart behind her steel exterior walls.
A guy from Southie. A woman from Boston’s upper elite.
Romeo and Juliet, Boston-style.
I nip at her bottom lip and then pull back. Her skin is flushed, and I doubt I’m any better when I rasp, “I have something for you. Then, after that, be sure you have a plan for your fantasy kiss. I’m going to deliver on it, one-hundred percent.”
I leave her sitting on that stool, her fingers pressed against her lips, her legs spread because I’d taken my place between them. The urge to turn back around and make love to her on the kitchen island is strong.
But she deserves something from me first—it belonged to her father and now it should belong to her.
26
Gwen
Marshall reenters the kitchen with a small cardboard box and a blank expression on his face. Without a word, he pulls up the stool beside mine and sits down. He’s lost his ball cap, and his brown hair looks like he’s spent the last five minutes raking through it with his fingers.
Is he nervous?
I eye the closed box on his lap.
Should I be nervous?
Swallowing hard, I force the question that’s begging to be spoken. “Is this a parting gift?”
Pewter eyes blink back at me. “Why the hell would you think that?”
“I-I don’t know.” But I do know. In the past, my relationships have always come to a close with some sort of trinket. Bracelets, necklaces, gift cards—yes, gift cards—and a host of other items have all been shoved into my hand as the man I was dating decided it was time to go on his way. The fact that all those men left doesn’t bother me. Our arrangements were always temporary, at best. No, it was the fact that they felt inclined to give me a little “something” before they took off that made me feel cheap.
I’m not proud of the way I lived my life for so long. Even so, when a guy you’ve dated presses a gift card to The Cheesecake Factory into your hand on his way out the door, you grow accustomed to feeling . . . trashy.
“Gwen.” Marshall’s hand lands on my thigh and gives it a quick squeeze. “Look at me, honey.”
I risk a peek up at his handsome face.
With his brown hair tousled beyond repair and his gray eyes practically searing me with their intensity, I know that whatever he says next is the real deal.
“I’ve wanted you for six years.” The words are said softly but with a sharp edge. “There’s no fucking way I’d walk away now, not when I finally have you where I want you.”
“And where is that?”
He shakes his head with a small smile playing at his full lips. “In my home, Gwen.” He pulls me forward to meet him with a palm to the back of my head. I go willingly, eager for another kiss, eager for another taste of this man who has turned my world upside down. “I have you under me, on top of me”—I slap his arm and he lets out a husky chuckle—“I have you eating the food I cooked for us and drinking my wine. I’m not willing to let that go . . . are you?”
My nails scrape the fabric of his jeans on their way to ground zero—the hard erection I see shoving mercilessly against his zipper. “No,” I whisper against his mouth, “but I sure know what’s involved in my fantasy kiss.”
With a deep groan, he pushes me back onto my seat and shakes a cardboard box that’s wider than the length of my forearm. “Not yet. After.” When I fake a pout, he curses under his breath. “Fuck, you’re temptation and a half, honey. But we’re doing this first.” He shoves the box at me. “Open it.”
The brown box gives me absolutely no inclination as to what could be inside, and so I give it a little shake and hope I’m not rattling something that’s alive inside. I jerk my gaze up to Marshall’s face. “Is it a puppy?”
His laugh is the stuff of sexual fantasies, it’s so damn throaty. “It’s not a puppy, Gwen. You think I’d put something adorable and fluffy in a box with no holes?”
“I just had to ask,” I grumble, pulling the cardboard leafs open. I tilt the box toward me, palms sweaty with anticipation . . . “Thank you for the gloves?” I pluck one out and lift it this way and that. “Not exactly my size but I could do some damage in the rink?”
The hockey gloves are red, thick, and tattered. Maybe this is Marshall’s way of saying he’d like f
or me to attend all of his hockey games? I wouldn’t be opposed to it—I love watching him kick ass on the ice.
“No, they’re—” Marshall heaves out a breath and then tugs the other glove out of the box before stealing my glove away. “These are the first hockey gloves I ever owned.”
Oh.
I gently try to pry them out of his grasp. If they belonged to him, then I absolutely want them. This is way better than a T-shirt of his to keep, am I right? Not that I’d sleep with these gloves—they look a little worse for wear—but I’d set them upright on my bedside table so that I can see them each night before I hit the sack.
Warmth sluices through me, and I give the gloves a harder tug.
Marshall finally lets go with a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I’m a little sentimental toward them.”
I set the box on the island and then curl my arms around the gloves in my lap. “Would you rather keep them?”
“No, I—” He shoves his fingers through his hair, messing up the strands even more. “Maybe it’s better if I back up and tell the story.”
Tilting my head, I note Marshall’s high coloring. He’s nervous. “Only tell me what you feel comfortable with.”
“Yeah.” He slicks his hands across his jeans, like he’s nervous, and I’m so far deep in with him that I find the movement adorable. Yeah, I said it. Adorable. A word that no other person in the world would ever say to Marshall Hunt’s face at the risk of being knocked down to the ground.
Inhaling deeply, he lets it out on a slow, even exhale. “From the age of eight onward, I grew up in the system. My foster parents—I hate to say that they didn’t care about us kids. It’s more like . . .” He purses his lips, as though trying to find the right word. “It’s like they’d been bitten one too many times in the ass by life, the system, everything. There were seven of us kids and I was the youngest. I never knew what it was like to own anything. My clothes were handed down from the oldest boy to me, passing through four other kids before I slipped them on. Food was much the same. The oldest kids went first—they were always the hungriest.”
I think back to my own childhood. Adaline may have been crazy and she may have had a revolving door of husbands waltzing through, but Carli always saw me fed. Manuel always ensured that I was safe.
My heart aches for the little boy who had nothing, and I reach out to squeeze Marshall’s knee, offering silent encouragement.
His answering smile is fleeting. “As I got older, I started hanging with the wrong crowd. I desperately wanted to fit in. I wanted to be someone, other than the Gottim’s youngest foster kid. My new friends taught me a variety of life skills most people will never know. We stole bikes from the kids at MIT, hopped on the back of firetrucks like they were our own cabbie service. Because we were small, we’d climb into people’s backyards and swim in their pools during the summer. The way we saw it, everything belonged to us.”
There are so many questions burning on the tip of my tongue, but I force myself to sit still and listen.
“We grew bolder, too. In the middle of winter, we’d stop up the sewage pipes in the neighborhood. Blast off the fire hydrant with a little work, and then let the street ice over. Our skates were stolen. We didn’t have a real net. But every afternoon, we’d do it over and over again. That’s when I met your dad.”
Just like that, my body freezes and my brain immediately launches back to my father’s funeral. How I’d seen Marshall standing next to my uncle. Then, later, him comforting me in a side room.
“I don’t know whether your dad took pity on me or what, but he snagged me by the collar one day and dragged me off the ice. Shoved those gloves you’re holding into my arms and told me that if I got my ass down to the high school after I was done behaving like an asshole, he’d maybe consider letting me practice with the team.”
Would my dad say something like that? It pains me to admit that I don’t know. My memories of him belong to infrequent lunch dates with my mother watching us both like a prison guard. I can probably count on both hands the number of times Mark James and I were ever in the same room together—Adaline saw to that.
I swallow my grief. “Were you in high school at the time?”
Marshall shakes his head. “No, middle school. But your dad was the tenth-grade math teacher, along with being the high school’s head hockey coach. For weeks, I’d show up and be relegated to picking up the team’s towels. I carried those gloves around with me everywhere, convinced that one day he’d let me play. One day I’d own a hockey stick and pads and skates, and I’d make something of myself. Hockey was my way out of Southie, the only reason a school like Northeastern even looked at me.”
My tongue feels swollen, thick. As much as I want to jump up and down, and point at Marshall’s home and be all, “look what you’ve accomplished,” I can’t help but feel remnants of the little girl who used to beg her mother for the chance to see her dad. I was told multiple times over that Mark James had no time for me, that he didn’t care to see me. Knowing that he had time to take Marshall under his wing burns in a way that I wished it didn’t.
Have I really changed at all if I can’t find it in myself to put aside the pain?
I choke back a cry. I box up the little girl who so wanted love and was handed mistrust and judgment on a silver platter instead. And then I put her away—because I love Marshall, and if this is the moment where I’m forced to decide between wallowing in my own pain or comforting his, I will choose the latter each and every time.
Pressing the gloves together, I place them both in Marshall’s lap. “You need to keep these,” I whisper, hating the way my voice quivers with emotion. “My dad”—I suck in a deep breath—“he gave them to you, Marshall. They’re yours.”
He watches me with an inscrutable emotion, his gray eyes searching my face. “Put them on.”
“What?” I let out a rough laugh. “I don’t think . . . I mean, they’re a little big for me.”
“Humor me.”
Not wanting to disappoint him, even though I feel mighty ridiculous as I do so, I tug on the right glove. My fingers don’t even reach the tips and it looks like I’m playing dress-up. I meet Marshall’s gaze; he only nods his head in a “keep going” gesture.
All right.
As I slip on the left, he begins to speak, his voice a deep rumble that warms me up and strips away the hurt: “I’ve had the gloves for years. I should have given them to you on the day of your father’s funeral or right after that. I didn’t, and I’ll regret that forever. After you left, your uncle pulled me to the side to give me a box of your dad’s belongings. I looked inside. All hockey stuff.”
Inside the well-worn glove, my fingers brush against what feels like a sharp edge of paper. An envelope, maybe? Frowning, I strip off the other glove so that I can dig into the left one and pull the envelope out.
“I never really gave it much thought,” Marshall goes on, and even though I’ve got my focus on the task at hand, I can feel him watching me. “The other day when you were talking about your mom and your relationship with her, I decided it was time to give you these. I found the box again, thinking that there might be something else in there for me to give to you, too. A trophy of your dad’s, maybe. I don’t know. I just didn’t expect to find these.”
I want to pretend that my fingers aren’t trembling—that would be a lie.
Cracking the seal open on the yellowed envelope, my heart leaps to my throat as I widen the flaps. There are more envelopes, all much smaller with a RETURN TO SENDER stamp emblazoned across the front.
And they’re all addressed to my childhood home.
27
Hunt
Gwen’s beautiful face blanches when she opens the envelope—and I don’t blame her.
I didn’t open the envelope when I found it the other day; it would have been an invasion of privacy. Back in middle school, I remember Mark bitching about his ex-wife sending back every letter he wrote to his daughter. I wish I knew why he didn’t j
ust put down his foot and make shit happen, but you can’t ask questions to the dead.
All I know is that when I finally noticed the thick envelope in the box Mark’s brother had given to me, I suspected what they were, and that perhaps they’d unintentionally ended up in my box. Mark didn’t know about my relationship with Gwen in college, and so it makes little sense that he would have given them to me with some ulterior motive. Call it a stroke of good luck or not, but I knew Gwen had to have them.
I watch her now, the way she’s trying so hard to hold back the tears. Her shoulders shake with the smallest movements. She flips through the envelopes, not opening a single one but seemingly counting each and every time her father tried to reach out to her . . . and every time her mother stood in the way.
“You look like you need a hug.” My voice sounds as though I’ve swallowed a bucketful of nails. If she recognizes that I said the same words on the day of her father’s funeral, she doesn’t mention it.
But she does set the envelopes on the counter, along with the hockey gloves.
And then she’s throwing herself into my arms.
I lock her close, binding her to me as I whisper into her hair. “I’ve got you, honey. I’ve got you.”
Her sobs are quiet, her pain wrapped up so tight within her walls that the only way to tell she’s crying is by the way her shoulders shake with each indrawn breath. For the next few minutes, I only hold her. I cradle her to me like she’s the most precious thing I’ve ever held; I wrap her tight in my embrace, giving her every ounce of strength that I have, letting her know without words that I will keep us upright, that I won’t let us fall.
Baring my childhood to her wasn’t easy—particularly because I didn’t tell her the one event that changed the course of my life forever. It’s the reason that I ended up in foster care, the reason Dave went to jail, the reason he continues to blackmail me as though something that I did at eight years old should be counted against me for the rest of my days.
