by Ella James
“Anything.” I bury my mouth against her hair.
“What happened after Shelly died? Where did you go, Luke? How did you come to be at Mother’s house?”
My throat feels tight and full. She doesn’t know this part? If she doesn’t know, how can I tell her? I can’t tell her that about her own mother. Her biological one. So I tell a lie. “I was at juvie,” I say slowly. “I ran away.” I rub her shoulder. “By then, people knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was bad. I went through more than twelve foster homes. They knew I was a bad kid.”
“Shelly didn’t. Shelly loved you.”
“I fucking know she loved me,” My throat constricts. “She loved me,” I whisper, “and that was her mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake,” Leah says.
“She fucking died.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“It was my fault,” I snarl. I get up off the bed and point to the door. “You need to go now, Leah. I can’t talk about this anymore.”
“I can’t just go!” Her shoulders rise and fall, as if she’s close to crying. “I care about you. I love you, Luke.”
“I can’t sign on for that,” I tell her, moving back toward the bed. I hold my bandaged hands up. “I can’t even touch you.”
“Yes you can.” Her chin juts up. “You have.” She stalks out of my room and slams the door.
CHAPTER SIX
Leah
There’s a playground right across the street, across a field with bike paths, on the other side of some tall hedges. When I’m in the kitchen, loitering and obsessing over Luke, Echo tells me about it.
After I leave Luke’s room, I find echo in the den, teaching Lana how to do something on her own iPhone. Lana tries to catch my eye, and I refuse her.
I kneel down and wrap my arm around Echo. “It’s playground time,” I say. “You want to go?”
“Heck yeah!”
His nanny, Hally, turns around from where she’s making him tomorrow’s school lunch.
“Do you mind?” I ask her.
“No. No ma’am.” She smiles, and I can hear the Southern in her voice.
I hand the camera to Lana while Echo runs about the house, getting his water bottle and putting on his shoes.
“He’s doing fine, but if you want this,” I hand it to her, and she takes it, giving me a quizzical look I dodge.
Echo and I spend the next two hours at the neighborhood park, and I find out that Luke did foster him first.
Apparently, Luke had volunteered with some program that put him involved with an inner city child who was “at risk for bad things,” as Echo put it. When Echo’s Mother, a crack addict, moved them out onto the streets, Luke stepped in and offered to take Luke temporarily.
“He loves me,” Echo tells me from the top of an orange slide. His smile twinkles. “That’s why he adopted me.”
When the two of us get back to the house, Lana hands me the monitor.
“Sleeping,” she tells me. “I don’t think he needs me here. I’ve been in contact with some local doctors I think he should be seeing. Particularly a good trauma therapist.” She hands me a sheet of paper. “Do you mind if I go after tonight, Leah?”
“No. Of course not. Lana—” I throw my arms around her. “Thank you so, so much.”
“Only for you, my lovestruck sister.” She gives me a funny little smile and strokes my cheek. “Be careful with that, please?” She taps my chest, as if to say ‘be careful with your heart’.
I nod slowly. “I will be.”
We go over some of his vitals logs, and before the strike of midnight, Lana is pulling away from the house in her rental car, bound for a hotel near the airport, where her new husband has been waiting for her.
I know I should probably do the same, but the moment she leaves, I also know it’s not going to happen. I don’t feel finished here yet. I don’t feel that I can leave, no matter how tired I am of loitering in the kitchen area and making small-talk with Hally.
I don’t sneak to his room until both Hally and Echo are asleep. Then I leave the little, second-story room I’ve been assigned and tip-toe down the stairs. I find his door unlocked and consider it an invitation.
I find him sleeping, propped upright in the queen bed, his bandaged hands in front of him. I slide under the covers with him, tracing the hard contours of his body with my hungry fingers.
His eyes flutter. He groans and rocks his hips against the air.
I reach under the covers, and I start to stroke him. He wakes up in phases, his eyelids fluttering, his mouth pulling taut, his hands hovering in the air, wanting and unable to take what they need, as I have.
He’s rock-hard and groaning when he leans over and bites me on the throat, and I can tell by the strength of his jaw that he’s frustrated.
“I’m supposed to call the shots. You,” he murmurs angrily, “take what I give you. He can’t pull his dick out of my hand, so his eyes drift shut with the pleasure of my strokes, but at the same time, he barks orders at me.”
“Let go of me and stick your ass in my face,” he says. “I want to lick that pussy and that ass before you ride my cock.”
A few more strokes for good measure, and I’m taking down my night pants. I press his shoulders gently back against the pillows and climb onto his face, where his mouth and hands ravage me until I’m screaming so loud I worry Echo will hear me through the walls.
When his tongue has bathed me thoroughly, and the heat of my arousal drips down my thighs, he withdraws his tongue from my throbbing flesh.
“Face away from me,” he says, “and ride my cock.”
I peel the covers down off him and find him standing straight up, pointed toward the ceiling. Sinking down on him causes us both to gasp. I bounce a few times, and he shudders.
“This is mine,” I whisper.
He groans my name. “No promises.”
“I’m not asking for promises,” I hiss, using my thighs to find a rhythm that will make him pant. “I’m not asking for anything but pleasure.”
That’s a lie.
I want it all from him. His thick, hard cock filling me up, balls bouncing beneath me as I ride. I want the heat we generate, streaming through me like a drug.
When I notice that he hasn’t come, despite how hard he is inside me, I turn around, ease him back down against the pillows, and suck his throat until it’s bruised. He’s thrusting his hips underneath mine, moaning and hissing and starting to grab at me, despite his injured hands.
His lips and tongue dance with my own, and then he pulls away. “Bite me,” he snaps.
“What?” I groan.
“Bite me—on my neck.”
I know without asking that he needs it hard. So while I bounce on his cock and stroke his cheek, I draw a little blood with my teeth.
He explodes inside me, then sags limply back, his eyes shut and his mouth open.
When, in the quietness of the room, he wraps his arm around me and draws me to him, I think that I’ve won.
His mouth finds my forehead. His kiss is soft and warm.
“I need time to think, Leah. Maybe a lot of time.”
My eyes tear up. I sleep up against him anyway. And then, a few minutes shy of four o’clock a.m., I kiss his cheek and go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leah
Three weeks later
The next few weeks are hard. Which really doesn’t cover it at all. One night, on a Tuesday, after spin class, I call Lana and tell her Luke’s connection to Aunt Shel.
She listens wordlessly to me as I go over everything again, needing to tell the story to someone. Needing to figure out my feelings.
After I hang up the phone, I realize one thing still doesn’t make complete sense to me: Why would Luke have mentioned me to Mother? Why would my sisters and I have come up at all? He’d never met us really. Aunt Shel, she loved us, I know, but she was so much younger than my mother. We saw her once or twice a year, an
d I can’t imagine her home being filled with pictures of us.
So why mention us? Why mention me, as Luke had said he did?
I toss and turn all night, as the soreness in my thighs and calves set in, and when the sun comes up, I brave the chilly morning air and run a few miles.
When I return to my door, breathing hard and dripping sweat, I find my mother sitting on my doormat, her knees drawn up to her chest, her sad smile setting off alarms inside my head.
“Mom?” I gape down at her.
She holds out her hand, and I help her up.
“Is everything okay? Where’s Dad?”
“We’re all fine.” Again, that weird, sad smile. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” I unlock my door and wave her into the den, where I grab my water bottle and start guzzling.
My mother wanders into the kitchen, and a chill runs down my spine. “Is it Laura? Lana? Mom, is someone sick?”
My parents are nearing cancer age, and I’m always worrying about things like that.
But my mother shakes her blonde head and leans against my countertop. “It’s not that, Leah, honey.” Her mouth pinches into something that’s definitely not a smile.
“Mom, you have to tell me why you’re here. You’re giving me a heart attack.”
She walks around and out of the kitchen, coming to a stop in front of me in my cozy living area. “Why don’t we sit down on the couch together, honey?”
“No. Just tell me, Mom.” I start rationing my breaths and relaxing my tense muscles one by one.
Finally, my mother sits down on the edge of my couch and looks up at me.
“I’m afraid there is a secret I’ve been keeping, Leah. One I now realize has to come to light.”
“What?” Blood roars like a jet inside my head. My mother reaches out and grabs my hand. I sink down beside her, hollow-headed and cold. I can feel it coming: something awful. “Tell me, Mom.”
She covers her face with both her hands as her shoulders start to shake.
*
In one of the fairy tales Luke used to tell when he was Hansel, a king and a queen ruled together in every life, without knowing that, each time, one of them was destined to kill the other. He told me it was an old Native American legend, but when I Googled it, years later, I never could find anything to confirm the truth of that.
I think about his fairy tales as I fidget on the plane. He would make up hours’ worth of stories about the damned king and his queen, telling me of their ridiculous adventures, which always took a turn for the macabre at the end. Sometimes, they would kill each other, and on other occasions, one of them would die for the other in far-fetched sacrifices.
At the time it seemed funny. Creative. I was too young to wonder what the stories meant to Luke, if anything.
As I get off the plane at the Denver International Airport, and make my way to my rented Civic, I think I understand the stories—somewhat, anyway. Death and sacrifice are part of Luke’s own story. His life has never been normal. Like the fairy tale characters he made up to entertain us, Luke himself was always courting someone as a child. Trying to convince a family of his charm, so they would keep him. At one time, he signed on for a gang where initiation meant murder. I don’t know if he knew that at the time, at the age of 13, but maybe that’s how far he was willing to go to get some kind of family. His own family? Maybe he fancied he’d been sacrificed. Left at a public altar as atonement for some sin. Which one was it? Drinking? Drugs? That theme of abandonment had repeated itself throughout his life so far. And how many lives he’d had. A new one for each home he’d been in.
A little known piece of information about “Mother’s House” and “the fairy tale children” is that Mother had a camera in my room, and Luke’s as well. Both were mounted near the ceiling, small and undetectable from the rugs we paced. We never knew that we were being watched. But somewhere, in the basement of some FBI building, are months’ of footage of Luke and I, living through our private hells. Almost two years ago, I was contacted by a journalist from a Boston newspaper, who said she’d been investigating “Mother’s House” for years, and asking if I knew of “baby K.” or “the plans mentioned in Hansel’s journals.”
I called her a bitch and hung up, and the answer was no. I had no clue. I think that’s why it made me so infuriated.
The next day, she’d called back. “I read once that you thought he wasn’t real, or that your doctors thought that. There’s video of him—and you. He killed her for you, Gretel. I can show you some of it, if you can do an interview with me.”
I hung up again. That night, I took an Ambien to try to get to sleep. Six months later, I was seeing three different doctors to get Xanax.
My hand rubs my right pocket as I slip into my car and turn myself toward downtown Denver.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow morning is a special meeting of a fundraising arm of the Dave Thomas Foundation at the Four Seasons Denver. Unless Raymond lied to me, Luke is there already.
The hotel is a highrise in the bustling heart of the city. I give my rental to the valet and clutch the duffel on my shoulder as I walk inside.
My mind is a mess. I’m so nervous about seeing him again, I’m struggling to think of a way to get the hotel staff to tell me his room number.
“Why do the king and queen always encounter each other? Is there a reason for it?”
I hear his voice through the wall, even though I can’t see his face. His hand is in mine, and I can’t both look at him and touch him. “I don’t know,” he says mystically. “Maybe it’s fate.”
“Do you believe in fate?” I ask.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.” I chew my lip. The answer seems so important, and I feel stupid trying to decide. “I guess I’ve never thought about it. I don’t know what seems better to me. Accidents or things that are pre-arranged.”
“By God?” he asks.
“Or something,” I say.
His hand flips over, so his fingers can dance under my palm. “I guess it depends on the things.”
I stroke his thumb. “What do you mean?”
“If the things are good, it would be more fulfilling to think of it as fate,” he supplies.
“And if they’re bad?”
“Then accidents.”
I rub my face against his hand and kiss his fingers. “I think I’m going to have to go with fate.”
He steps out of the elevator a couple of seconds later. He looks breathtaking in slacks and a pale pink dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, exposing his muscled forearms. His dark hair is neatly groomed, his hazel eyes alight. Balanced on the palm of one hand is a pink, square, cardboard box. His eyes flit to the cake box as he strides into the lobby. When he lifts them up again, his gaze smacks into me.
I watch the color drain from his face and see his lips part in surprise. He shuts his mouth. Stops walking. He looks quizzically around the room, as if he’d like an explanation of how I got here.
I smile a little—terrified, self-conscious—and start toward him.
Our gazes break apart. His rolls up and down my body; mine devours him. Sharp pain wedges in behind my breastbone—like I’m missing him in real-time, already longing for…well, everything about this man. I’m addicted to the way he takes up space on planet earth.
His eyes rush over me as I move into touching distance. His face bends into something softer: a kind of precursor to a smile.
He reaches out to touch my shoulder. “Leah.”
I smile, small and nervous. “Hi, Luke.”
“Hi.” His voice is low, discreet, but his eyes are eating me alive. I stand, frozen, like a child licked by a dog’s tongue. I can only shiver in response to him. Maybe I stand there longer than I think, because a moment later, his free hand clasps my shoulder gently.
“Come here,” he says.
He leads me over to a small, brown couch, and we sit. I can only look at him. At his tan
ned face, sporting a sexy five o’clock shadow. At his warm, brown-green eyes. At his broad shoulders, and finally, at his hands. God, those hands. Even now, with their fresh scars—and the memory of the awful night he put them there—his lithe, strong hands do something to me.
I reach down and touch the left one, resting on his knee. When he turns his hand over and curls his fingers around mine, I grin.
“It’s okay!”
He smiles a little. “Yeah.”
“Great. That’s so great. I thought of you.” What does that mean? I rub my forehead. “Good thoughts. Healing ones, and stuff.”
His mouth quirks up on one side, almost imperceptible, except I’m watching so closely. “Thank you.”
I suck in a deep breath, becoming slowly more aware that while I’m tripping all over myself, he seems unusually calm. His eyes are clear; there’s something different in his face: a kind of peace.
Dear God, he’s handsome. I look him up and down and promptly want to die.
“What’s in there?” I nod at the pink box in his hand.
“This?” He flips the top open, and I spy food porn.
“Donuts. Ahhhh.”
He nods. “Voodoo Donuts. Fucking good.” He nods at the colorful assortment. “Would you like one?”
“You don’t have to.” I feel shy, for some reason. Nervous about reaching out and picking up one of the donuts. “They’re for you, so you should eat them.”
“They’re not for me.” He lifts out one that’s covered in powdered sugar. “Try this.”
I take it from him, and I can’t help noticing his face is tight and troubled now. I hold my hands up. “It’s okay. I’m fine. I don’t want to eat your donuts. I’m not even hungry.”
I’m on my feet the next second, gripping my duffel bag and reeling at the rush of heat that’s burning through my cheeks. “It was nice to see you,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re healing.”
I whirl on my heels, not even looking at him as I turn to go, and I collide with something cool and hard. I blink and wobble back, and then his hands are on me.
