by Artemis Hunt
From the look on his face, Sam can tell that they are not moving in the same thought lines. She’s suspicious for different reasons. This whole scenario seems premeditated. But Brian is distracted by something else.
Something a whole lot deeper and darker.
A strange frisson slides down her spine. Oh, Brian. She hates to see him like this – all cut up and confused and damaged. He seems to have lost his trademark confidence, and that pains her more than anything. A subdued Brian is cause for alarm.
Caleb says, “I’ve got to go pick up my Mom from the clinic.”
The Mom whose home you helped to save from being repossessed, he doesn’t add, but Sam knows the whole story. It was the night she rekindled their friendship after all, only they both didn’t know it yet.
“Thanks.” Brian thumps his best friend on the back.
Sam watches them, a little envious. Brian and Caleb are so good together. It would be criminal of Cassie to want to destroy those years of camaraderie. Not that she could, of course. Sam suspects that if push comes to shove and Cassie made Caleb choose between her and Brian, Caleb would drop her like a hot sack of guano.
Caleb leaves, and they are all alone in Brian’s apartment. Correction: not apartment, but palace. She has never really been comfortable in this place. It’s too big. Too cavernous. Too modern. They have made love in it many times, but the place still spooks her a little. As if the walls had eyes.
Maybe it had been premonition.
“You want me to stay with you tonight?” she says softly.
“No. I’ll be all right alone.” He stares at the ruins of his lounge’s seating area. She can sense he wants to desperately remember.
“But I want to stay with you,” she repeats.
He looks up. His eyes are weary and turbulent. He closes them momentarily and then opens them again. Even in his state, he’s beautiful. What sort of woman would claim that he would rape her? Of course, she knows that isn’t intellectually the case. Beautiful, successful men are perfectly capable of raping women. But she just can’t believe it of Brian.
She just can’t. And won’t.
She hears the sharp intake of his breath.
“Sam, you don’t have to stay with me if you don’t really want to,” he says guardedly. “You should be . . . more careful.”
“You mean I should be frightened of you now that someone has accused you of raping her?”
He flinches at the word.
“Yes, maybe you should.”
She can tell that his self-doubt is beginning to creep in once again.
She positions herself in front of him. “Brian, we have fucked on that very couch. On that very carpet. Or have you forgotten? Why should I be afraid of you now?”
He turns away, his expression filled with a pain he’s trying to mask. And failing miserably.
“I’m tired,” he says. “I’m going to bed. Alone.”
“I’m coming.”
“I want to be alone, Sam.”
“No, you don’t.”
He straightens his tall, lean body, and a fraction of the Brian Morton she knows comes back to the proud carriage of his shoulders.
“I do. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, Sam, but don’t test me. Not now. Not today.” The determination in the line of his mouth is grim.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Get out,” he says with finality.
She winces. “No.”
“This is my house and I’m telling you to go. So go.”
He strides over to her and grabs her arm.
She shrugs off his grip, and he lets go, clenching his own fist as though he isn’t sure what he will do with it. Then he takes a step back. His entire body is trembling with something he can barely contain.
He says in a low voice, “Please, Samantha, leave before I do something both of us may regret.”
She wonders why she is standing her ground. Why is she so sure of him when he doesn’t seem to be as certain of himself? But her heart is beating fast and ponderously against her ribs, and all that is coursing through her now is her absolute conviction in this man – the man she loves.
Oh yes.
She knows what he has done for her in regards to Henry Moody, though he would never admit it. She knows all his faults. Everything that Cassie has mentioned is true. Brian can be self-absorbed, egoistical, snarky, vainglorious, irreverent, manipulative.
But he is also generous – in a way that he doesn’t want you to know he can be. And caring. And loving. And giving. And honest to the point of brutality, because he tells you what you need to hear . . . not what you want to hear. And everything else that he tries to hide under that veneer of sarcasm and fuck-them-all attitude.
Brian Morton is a complex man. So complex that she knows she hasn’t begun to scratch the tip of the iceberg. But she wants to. If he is willing to let her try.
And she is on to him now. She knows what he is like underneath all that barbed wire.
She says, “I know why you want me to leave. You’ve always been honest with me and I’ll be honest with you now. After what happened, you don’t quite trust yourself around me. Around anyone. You genuinely don’t remember what happened, but deep down inside you, you think you’re capable of doing things you have never done before. Especially during a blackout.”
Brian remains silent, even though he is still a tense wire in his two day old grimy clothes.
She continues, “So I’m going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear from me, you stubborn twat.”
She marvels that she can say all this with such a clear conscience.
She goes on, “I’m not afraid of you. I’m going to stay with you tonight whether you like it or not. And you’re going to talk to me. Really, really talk to me, not brush me off with one of your stupid remarks. We’re going to fix this together. I don’t know how, but we’re going to prove to everyone that you are still the person you thought you were. And I can’t help you if you keep shoving me out of the door, dammit!”
She seizes his face and kisses him roughly.
She feels him pulling away, putting up his hands to stop her, to push her from him. But she resists and clings to him like a rudder in a sea of immoralities.
His muscles slacken, as though he is too fatigued to fight her anymore.
They finally come up for air. He wears a look of defeat. The Adam’s apple in his throat moves like a running mouse. She has never seen Brian Morton like this before. She’s frightened for him, and yet determined.
He whispers, “I’m scared.”
“I know,” she whispers back. She strokes his face lovingly.
15
They lie in his bed together, naked. His bedroom is masculine, done in simple tones with mood lighting from cleverly designed alcoves in the ceiling. The bed is set upon a raised platform. Everything else is designer spartan and sleek. Like him.
She is kissing him with surety. Softly. Then passionately. Voracious mouths mingling. So certain that everything will be the same as it was again. So certain he wouldn’t hurt her.
Because he can hurt her. He knows that now. He’s a big, strong, athletic man. He can overpower her and whatever she does to combat him will be futile.
Only he doesn’t want to hurt her. He has been rough in sex before. But that was always because the woman wanted it that way. Some women desire the aggression and helpless abandon of being taken and claimed. He has read that somewhere before.
She is lying on top of him, and his erection is only semi-hard. He can’t get himself in the mood tonight, no matter what she does. And she’s tried plenty. She has tried playing with his nipples – tweaking them and rubbing them in the way that she knows he likes. She has tried sucking them – five minutes on each, and then gently taking his penis into her mouth and pulling at it with all the strength she has in her cheeks.
She sucks him and sucks him, applying greater and greater pressure on his partially swollen cock. It sti
ffens for a while, but fails to maintain any form of harder turgidity. He breathes harshly through his mouth. His fingers dig into her hair and pulls at her tendrils, willing himself to concentrate so that he wouldn’t disappoint her.
But all he can think about is Delilah. Her red, red hair. The curl of her lips.
None of it in a good way.
And the missing time that has engulfed his memory.
It’s no use. He’s not going to maintain any semblance of an erection. At least, not one hard enough to penetrate anything.
After a while, he gently pushes Sam away.
“I don’t think I’m up for it tonight,” he confesses.
“That’s a first. It’s usually the opposite – me having to fend you off because we have already screwed four times that day and I was sore.”
He gives her a wry smile. “Am I really that bad?”
“Sometimes. For a man your age, your stamina is amazing, come to think of it.”
“If you’re trying to cheer me up, it’s not working. I’m doomed to be morose for all eternity and be baggage to my friends.” He’s trying to recover his old sarcasm, but even that is deflated tonight.
She creeps up to rest her head on his chest.
“I believe you,” she says.
“About being baggage?”
“No. About when you said you didn’t do it.”
“Guilty until proven otherwise.”
“Tell me what happened.”
He tells her in hesitant bits and pieces, leaving nothing out. Theirs has always been an honest, no-holds-barred relationship. If she wants details on another woman, he’d tell her. He has nothing to hide, even from her.
“And here I thought you were coming back to the Galois,” she says, a little pensively. “I was hoping we’d go back to my place to screw.”
He laughs. “And here I thought you had met some dishy phantom and you were screwing him in an abandoned section of the opera house.”
“I don’t do things like that.”
“You should.” He strokes her hair. “I do.”
“Screw phantoms?”
He sighs. “I knew there was a comeuppance in there somewhere.”
“Brian, why are you scared? You didn’t do it.”
“I blanked out.”
“Did your blood results come back?”
“Not yet.”
“If you blanked out, then you should be technically passed out. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”
“I don’t know,” he says guardedly. “I just don’t know.”
She stays silent for a long while. She strokes his chest, taking care to avoid his vicious scratch marks. She likes cuddling up to him, he knows. Staying in bed with him in the afterglow of their lovemaking. Talking to him. Skin to skin. Body warmth to body warmth.
After a spell, she says, “Why do you say that, Brian?”
He hesitates. He wonders if he should tell her. But maybe that’s why it happened. Because he never told anyone. Shit happens when you keep it all quashed up inside of you like a big bug.
He swallows.
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That I would just be like . . . my father.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because . . . ” He pauses. This is so hard. So very hard. Harder than he thought it would be.
“Brian, did something . . . happen to you?”
She is treading very cautiously here. She is still stroking his chest, but her gestures have slowed down, as if she’s afraid to snap him out of his current pensiveness.
“When I was ten, my father came home one night. Drunk. My mother wasn’t around. I was acting out again. Refusing to do something he told me to do. I don’t know why I did those things then. Maybe some part of me wanted his attention, and it was the only attention I got from him those days. So he took out his belt, as he always does. He made me bend over the kitchen table and push down my pants.”
Brian pauses, the familiar twitch of pain that he has tried so hard to block out returning at full force, like a thundering gale.
“He whipped me, like he always did. But that night, there was something more. Maybe he was more drunk than usual. Maybe something happened to him at the bar. Maybe he wasn’t even conscious that he did it. But he took a . . . a . . . ”
He falters, unable to continue. Sam is very still on his chest. She has stopped stroking him. Her right hand tightens around his forearm. She is willing him to continue. Or maybe not. It may be something she wants to hear . . . and not hear.
He breathes. “It was a . . . ”
He’s too ashamed. He can’t go on.
“It’s OK, Brian,” she whispers. “You don’t have to say it. D-did he rape you?”
“Not with his dick. No.”
He’s relieved he has gotten most of it out.
“Did you tell your Mom?”
“No. I was too embarrassed. And part of me blocked it out, so for years, I wasn’t sure it really happened.” He takes a deep breath. “But I made sure I grew up quickly. I ate and ate and started taking self-defense classes. I grew tall and huge, so that he would think twice about touching me again.”
“Did you ever confront him about it?”
He senses the strain in her voice, the way she holds her muscles all taut on top of his body.
“Yes. I did. Ten years later, when I came home from college. It never happened again, of course.”
“And?”
He can taste the bile in his throat. “He doesn’t remember. He fucking doesn’t remember anything. Not even the beatings. Anything. He claimed I made the whole thing up. And some part of me wondered that too . . . if I’d dreamt the whole thing. If I’d hallucinated it. I was a very messed up kid.”
His breath is hot within his chest.
“Now I’m afraid I’m turning into him. Maybe that blackout is the start of everything. Maybe it’s all genetic. I thought I could hold my drink, and for a long time, I did. But I’m not getting younger.”
“Brian.” Her tone is urgent. She raises herself on her elbows to gaze into his eyes. “You are not your father. You didn’t do it.”
She is so beautiful with her hair mussed up like that. He wants to stroke her face, but his arm is all bunched up.
He says, “How sure are you? My father wasn’t always this way. I was told . . . a long time ago . . . that he was a very benign man. Then he got into drink, and it all went downhill from there.”
“You are not an alcoholic.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
It’s true. This entire incident has jarred him. Shaken him more than he can ever imagine. Everything he thought he had known about himself has now been turned upside down and inside out. He feels as if he has been laundered.
“You did not rape that woman.” Her eyes are shining with some indefinable emotion. She squeezes his forearm hard. So hard that he can feel her grip on his bone.
“They think I did.”
“We’ll prove them wrong.”
“How? The evidence seems to allude that I did it. It doesn’t look good.”
“I don’t know right now,” she declares, “but we’ll find a way.”
He hugs her to his chest.
“I’m not in the right mind to think about anything,” he admits.
“You’re tired. Get some sleep.” She kisses his chest, and then she raises herself up to kiss his mouth.
A strange sensation suffuses his chest, spreading all the way around and about in fragments. He can’t describe it, but it’s as if his heart has decided to melt into a puddle which is now seeping everywhere else. His gut tightens. A choke enters his throat.
He hasn’t felt this way with anyone in, like . . . well . . . forever.
He swallows and wills it to go away.
“How did it go with Henry Moody?” he says lightly.
“I called his PA today and I have an appointment with him Friday
.”
“Great.” He means it.
“Thanks to you.”
“I didn’t do anything. He just happened to be there.”
“And you just happened to suddenly be partial to opera. You’re such a bad liar.”
“I wish I was,” he says pensively, and she falls silent.
16
It is early morning. Sam knows that she has to haul her ass to the office, and she doesn’t have a clean change of clothes right now in Brian’s penthouse. But she’s glad she stayed. He needed her, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. She hates to see him like this – a pale shell of himself.
He’s sleeping in his bed. After tossing and turning half the night, he finally drifted to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. She didn’t wake him when she crept out of his arms.
What he told her disturbed her more than she thought it would. Beautiful, brilliant, successful and sophisticated Brian. A sexually abused child. It didn’t matter if it only happened once. Brian had been physically abused for most of his childhood. And the worst scars that he retained had not been made on his beautiful body.
Over the years, he developed a caustic veneer – icy and impenetrable. He built a barbed wire fence around his own heart. He is unable to love and unable to be loved – pushing people away before they can get too close, unless he is really comfortable with them, like with Caleb.
Only he has the last part down wrong.
She loves him. More than any man she has ever loved.
She knows that now.
She watches him sleep for a while. Even in sleep, he is not at rest. His closed eyelids flit with the sleep of dreams, though in his case, they will more likely be nightmares.
Her heart wrenches.
She pads downstairs in his bathrobe before she can become fixated on watching him.
Downstairs, she surveys the carnage. The crime scene. The police have already combed the place, photographed whatever they needed to photograph, collected whatever evidence they needed to collect. She examines the broken table, trying to envision what happened. Was there a struggle? How badly were both parties hurt? Brian has the claw marks on his chest, but what happened here had to be more than just a catfight.
