The Lost

by Cole McCade

  He glanced up over the book, silver eyes meeting hers. His brows rose, questioning, expectant, and she looked away with a scowl and rested her chin on her knees.

  Fine. She’d stay.

  But she still felt like she was in detention, waiting for the teacher to tell her she’d served her time and could go home.

  It was almost a relief when the rain broke, hitting the window with a sharp pellet-gun slap, droplets splattering against the glass and turning everything outside into fuzzy halos: traffic lights just blots of shifting red and gold and green, street lamps a haze of yellow, as if the jar of night had cracked open to let out bleeding drops of sunlight. She watched the droplets slither down the glass with thoughtless fascination, and let the rhythmic sound lull her until her shoulders relaxed and she leaned comfortably in the chair, her eyes lidded and her thoughts at rest.

  “Tina Turner,” she said softly. In the monochrome-flat reflection on the window, Hart glanced up from his book.

  “Hm?”

  “Her song. ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain.’”

  He tilted his head, before his low baritone rolled forth, low lilting notes lyrical and smooth and melodic, almost intimate in the quiet between them. “I can’t stand the rain against my window…”

  “Yeah. That one.” Her lips quirked. “You’re not half bad.”

  “Over ten years of singing the Marines’ Hymn whether I wanted to or not.”

  “I was expecting something a little more posh than that.” She looked from reflection-Hart to the real Hart, resting her chin on her shoulder. “Why do you talk the way you do, anyway? You sound like someone from a Johnny Depp movie.”

  “British mother. Arapaho father. Expensive education.” He shrugged. “Tends to come out in the inflections.”

  “Ah.”

  She looked away from him again, but she couldn’t help a touch of curiosity, impish and playful—and after a few moments of silence, she hummed a few bars almost under her breath, and watched in the window as his head came up, watching her again.

  “Garbage,” he said. “I’m only happy when it rains…”

  “Good ear.”

  “Are we playing music trivia, then?”

  She laughed. “It’s something to do. The silence was eating me alive.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Is ignoring each other like children any better?”

  “No. I suppose not.” He fingered the pages of his book, lingering on them. “My sister and I would do that. Wait each other out to see who’d break first.” A dry, raspy chuckle escaped his lips. “I always did.”

  “I’m not your sister,” Leigh reminded him softly.

  His head lifted sharply once more. In the reflection he was washed out in pale shades of gray with barely a hint of color, but his eyes were twin stars, points of silver fire, mercury set aflame. “I know.”

  The silence turned thick again, mired with words unsaid, weaving a tangled web between them. He just watched her in that way he had, that way that said he knew just how to reach down inside her and pull the strings that knotted her up—and he would, the moment the whim struck him. If she was a little mouse, he was a wildcat batting her around, toying with her before eating her, and she wished she didn’t want that thrill of never knowing when his jaws would come down.

  She thrust herself out of the chair and padded to the refrigerator. Inside, she dug until she found a six-pack of Bud Light hidden behind half-eaten takeout cartons that looked like they’d been piling up for a week. “You hungry?” she asked as she snapped a can out of the rings.

  “Stay with me again tonight.”

  Leigh stilled, her fingers curling tighter against the handle of the fridge, metal slicking against her sweaty palm. “Bit of a non sequitur,” she said with forced flippancy. “You know Gary already asked me to.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.” She closed her eyes. “Why?”

  “You have your pride, little mouse, but will not let me have mine?”

  She pressed her tongue to the inside of her teeth, then shrugged stiffly. “I guess it’s better than sleeping on someone’s futon.”

  No. No, it really wasn’t. Someone’s futon was anonymous. Maybe a little dangerous, when she didn’t know which guy would turn out to be a freak with a half-dozen girls chained up in his basement. Somehow that was still safer than spending another night in Hart’s arms.

  She closed the fridge, flung herself back into the chair, and fiddled with the tab on her beer. She didn’t want it anymore, her stomach souring at the very idea, but she’d look crazy if she got up just to put it back.

  “You’re free to go, if that’s what you want.” Hart propped his elbow against the headboard and rested his temple against thick, curled knuckles. “I don’t like it. Other men touching you. But I won’t stop you.”

  “You don’t have the right to stop me. I don’t understand why you even want to.”

  “Because I do.” He inclined his head, watching her from beneath the dark thunderheads of his brows. “Since apparently I’m wrong…why do you do this, night after night?”

  “Because it feels good.” She shifted restlessly in her chair. How could she explain that feeling inside her? How could she make him understand when he’d likely never known that deep clawing emptiness in his life? “It’s not as if they mean anything to me. I don’t even know their names. I won’t even take off my clothes for them. It just…feels good, because I want it.”

  “Because you’re hungry,” he added, low and contemplative. Something about the way he said hungry ran wicked-rough fingers down her spine. “Do you need it so very much, then?”

  “…yes.” She licked her lips and set the beer can down on the table. Curling her fingers in the edge of her hoodie, she stared at it, picking at it, plucking threads and searching between the lint naps for the right words. She didn’t know why it was suddenly so important that he understood, but it was. “I don’t know…maybe I’m a nympho or something. Maybe I need a support group. But I get wound up so tight inside, until I can’t think about anything else. I can’t stand that feeling, of wanting to be full and not having it. It’s like starvation. I start clenching up inside needing it, and it just…takes me over.”

  Nothing. Just that expectant, waiting silence where she knew he was looking at her. If she looked up, she’d see herself reflected in his eyes. What would she see, if she dared? A goddess…or a filthy little piece of gutter trash?

  “Do you enjoy being controlled by your lusts, little mouse?” he rumbled.

  “Yes.” She knotted her fingers together and made herself look up, into those mercurial, sharp-edged mirrors. What she saw reflected was neither goddess nor trash but purely, wildly animal, that beast inside herself that roused to some primitive call and ran on pure, hot mating instinct. Her tongue darted over her lips, and she repeated on a rush of breath, “Yes.”

  “I find that fascinating.” His hands clenched slowly against the sheets, digging in, the strength rippling up his arm in a taut pull of tendons that felt as if they pulled on her with every flex and flow, trying to draw her closer. “I find you fascinating.”

  “Why me?” she asked, mouth dry.

  “Does it really matter? You’re running away.”

  Each precisely stated word fell like shell casings from shots fired hard into the pit of her stomach. The tight building tension suddenly became hollow, the silence empty.

  “So what if I am?” The words came brittle. “I’m not accountable to you, Hart.”

  “You most certainly are not.” His fingers relaxed in the sheets. He rested his head against the headboard, and closed his eyes. “But that means neither am I accountable to you.”

  “So I’m not allowed to ask why you’re fixated on me?”

  “No.” He opened one eye and stretched a hand toward her, the fine creases in his palm a map leading down a road she didn’t want to tread. “But I might be willing to answ
er if you’ll come here.”

  She stared at that hand. Why did he keep reaching for her, over and over? No matter what a bastard he could be, no matter how cruel she was to him, how horribly she might treat him. She cursed him and hated him and called him every name in the book. Yet still he reached out, offered that hand, and told her he found her fascinating.

  As fascinating as a damned train wreck, she thought, but her curiosity would eat her alive if she couldn’t figure out just why.

  She blew out an explosive breath. “God damn it, Hart,” she muttered, and tumbled out of the chair to plunk down on the bed. Disdaining his hand, she flopped to the sheets and propped herself against the headboard. His arm curled around her—a heavy stone-wrought weight, enveloping her in his heat and that scent: gunmetal and man and a hint of smoky cocoa from his Black Devils. He trapped her against his body, tucked against his side like she belonged there. Stiffly, she curled up in the crook of his arm and glared at the wall, wrapping her arms around herself. His chuckle rolled through her, blending with the thunder of the crashing and raging sky.

  “I’ve never seen someone so surly over a moment’s affection.”

  “It’s part of my charm.” She wriggled until her back pressed against his side, so she could at least look away from him. “Well? I’m here. Tell me.”

  “I said might be willing to answer.”

  Leigh stiffened. “You fucker.” She twisted in his grip, squirming about to shove at his shoulder. With a cunning quirk of his lips, he tightened his hold. His other arm slid around her in a fierce lock to crush her close, forcing every softness of her body to yield and mold against the unforgiving planes of his chest. Snarling under her breath, she pounded her fists against him, but he didn’t budge, immovable as a wall of steel. She opened her mouth to curse—only to freeze when he leaned in close and sharp as a striking snake, filling her vision with nothing but him: the quicksilver glitter of his eyes, the warmth of his breath on her skin, the heat radiating off his flesh.

  “Ah—ah,” he breathed. “Be still, little mouse.”

  Her pulse thumped hard in her throat. She pressed her hands against his chest and leaned away, turning her face from his.

  “You’re feeling better, then,” she said tightly.

  “Relatively.” He leaned after her. His breaths slithered against her neck; her skin prickled…until he leaned back and settled against the headboard again. His grip relaxed, yet still there was no escaping. He thunked his head against the wood with a sigh. “I feel as if I haven’t slept in years, when all I’ve done is sleep.”

  She peered at him warily, but he remained motionless. She felt like she’d wandered into a lion’s territory in the wild, and was only hoping she could skirt the edges while the lion wasn’t hungry enough to give chase. With a mutter, she wiggled down into the pillows and tried to ignore the possessive weight of his arm around her, just another bar that could become a cage if she’d let it.

  “Your body thinks it’s missing something it needs to survive,” she said. Focus on practical things. Like the hard line of straining tension turning the tendons in his neck into pointing arrows; like the silent scream of pain tattooed on his flesh. “How long have you been on the Vicodin?”

  “Five years.” Dark lashes lifted; faint diamond glimmers fixed on the ceiling. “Only after the PT failed.”

  “What happened?”

  “Crow City’s VA isn’t exactly state of the art.” She didn’t think he was aware of how his hand fell to his thigh and pressed over the scar, kneading reflexively. She wondered how many nights he had lain awake working the heel of his palm against his leg as if he could massage the pain from his flesh. “It helped. Some. But the quadriceps muscle and tendon were both completely severed, along with the rectus femoris—then left to heal poorly in a filthy environment. I was told it was a miracle I could even walk.”

  “So you’ll have to live with pain for the rest of your life?”

  “Or a drug addiction.” His hand stilled, fingers clutching and wrinkling the denim. “Which I do not find to be a viable alternative.”

  “Good,” she said, almost under her breath. “That’s good.”

  His head tilted toward her; his breaths curled licking airy tongues over her ear. “Do I detect a note of approval?”

  “I just…” Look down. Look away. Don’t look into his eyes, or he would see that when she spoke in safe, generic terms what she really meant was you. I’m worried, I’m hurting for you. “I don’t like that anyone has to live with that kind of pain. But I’ve seen what addiction can do to people, and it just…hollows you out inside.”

  “We’re all one form of addict or another.” He tucked her hair behind her ear, rough fingers grazing the baby-soft down at her hairline, and she trembled. Such intimacy in such a simple touch. “You, for instance. Though I can’t tell if you’re more addicted to sex, or to nihilism.”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “I need…something. There’s a hole in me, and I don’t know what belongs there even if I try to keep filling it with one warm body after another. And maybe that hole will never be filled, but I feel like if I don’t try, I’ll die inside long before I ever stop breathing.” She clenched her hands until her fingers dug into her calves. “Maybe what I want can’t ever be found. Maybe I’m addicted to dissatisfaction and no matter how good I have it, I’ll never be happy.” The bitter truth of it burned her tongue. “But if that’s true, maybe I don’t deserve to have anything.”

  “Little mouse.”

  Before she could stop him, he pulled her into his lap—dragging her close, settling her in a prison made of his arms and thighs and powerfully hardened chest. Only this prison didn’t trap her inside. It shut out the world, shut out the darklings, wrapped her up safe in the kind of warmth she couldn’t remember ever having save for, perhaps, long ago. One dim memory, over twenty years old. The last cold tendrils of that memory snared her, held her, until she couldn’t fight him if she tried. She could only look up at him, as he cupped her cheek and leaned so very painfully, achingly close.

  “Happiness is impossible,” he murmured. “We’ve just been conditioned to seek it. Pop culture and television promise it’s out there, some ideal if we just play our cards right. But it’s not real. It’s not true. Happiness isn’t something we’re genetically programmed for. We’re programmed to want—and the more we want, the farther we go.”

  She shook her head fiercely. She couldn’t accept that—because accepting it meant admitting that maybe underneath her wandering, underneath her nothingness, maybe she’d been looking for happiness, and that search…that search had all been wasted. All this time, all these years, wasted. Not just on her happiness, but on his.

  On Elijah’s.

  She couldn’t accept that she’d given up everything to make him happy, only for happiness to not even exist.

  “I think you’re confusing dissatisfaction with motivation,” she said.

  “They’re often the same thing.”

  “I don’t think they are. I don’t think happiness is impossible, either. If we can’t be happy…then what’s it all for?”

  “For those quiet moments of joy that never last.” His hold tightened on her. This close, she couldn’t escape his searching gaze. “We aren’t meant to be happy, as a single state of being. Not always. Not in every waking breath. We feel too much pain for that. Too much loss. Too much misery. But those are the things that carry us forward to seek something better—so when those moments of joy come, they feel like touching the sun.”

  Leigh faltered, licking her lips. “I don’t know what that feels like.”

  “I think you do. You’ve just confused it with something else.” Rough fingers stroked over her back, drawing her in, enfolding her against his chest. “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

  “I did. I told you I want…I want sex. Or something to fill that hole inside me. I told you.”

  “No. You d
idn’t.” With a sigh, he rested his chin to the top of her head. “You told me what you feel. You told me everything you’re doing to stave off that ache for the one thing you truly, deeply want.” His contemplative rumble rolled through her, shaking through her bones. “But you haven’t told me what that one thing is.”

  “Maybe it’s not your business.”

  Don’t touch me, she thought, but he did—slipping his fingers into her hair and stroking in sweet comfort, and somehow she found herself with her head on his shoulder and his pulse pressing in soft rhythmic thumps against the tip of her nose, while the solid steady heat of him rose and fell with every breath under her palm.

  “Are you saying that because that’s what you believe…or because you don’t know what you want, yourself?” he asked. “It’s all right not to know what you want, little mouse. Some of the most interesting lives are led while trying to figure out just that.”

  “I don’t think this is what the Chinese meant by ‘may you live in interesting times.’”

  “Leigh. Stop deflecting.”

  After he’d touched her so gently, his sudden cruel grasp against her chin felt like a stab in the back, a knife plunging between her shoulder blades just as painfully as his fingers dug into her jaw. He jerked her face up to meet his eyes, so sharply that the tendons in her neck cried out in lieu of her absent voice, sucked out from her by pure shock.

  “What,” he said, measured and paced and far too calm for the grip pushing points of burning pain into her skin, “Do. You. Want?”

  She could have screamed. She could have hit him, could have murdered him right here, right now. She slammed her palms against his chest and twisted and bit at his fingers, fire boiling up her throat and coming out in a shriek of licking flames:

  “I want my son back, you fucker!”

  Breathing hard, nearly choking, she glared at him with her eyes hot and burning and the raw sharp edges of her tongue cutting the inside of her mouth with the words she wanted to scream: