by Tracey Ward
“That’s okay. We’ll be up late. At least I will be. You should come by whenever.”
“Can’t make it. You guys have fun.” He was steps away from me, the girls falling behind him when he gave me huge Help me! hostage eyes. “Are you ready to get out of here?”
I smirked at him. “Are you sure you don’t want get her number? Go to that party?”
“You’re funny.”
“You already have her number, don’t you?” I asked, stepping out the door when he opened it for me.
“Had. Past tense.”
“What? Had her number or her?”
He looked at me sideways, his mouth tightly closed.
“Oh come on! We said us being us. This is us. You wouldn’t be shy about telling me. Phone number or her?”
“Both,” he admitted reluctantly.
“And the other girl?”
“That’s enough sharing for today.”
“You dog,” I teased, poking his side. He swatted halfheartedly at me. “What happened to ‘those aren’t the kind of girls I mess with. They’re the kind that want to see guys fight over them.’ rant you once gave me.”
“It was more of a credo.”
“Pretty long credo. A credo is usually confined to a few words. Live for love and honor. Fight the good fight. Drive it like you stole it.”
“Fuck her like you hate her.”
My eyes grew huge. “Whoa, okay, yeah. I mean, I’m not going to crochet it on a pillow for you, but if that’s how you live. Is that your next tattoo? ‘Cause I don’t know how I’m going to make that beautiful.”
“You’d find a way and no. Those were dark days. They’re past tense, like the girls.”
“Were they between Laney?”
He stopped, turning to look at me. His face was creepy serious. “What are you asking?”
“You know what I’m asking,” I said, refusing to chicken out despite that stare.
“You’re asking if I ever cheated on Laney?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Why would you ask that?”
I shrugged, looking down the street, away from him. “I wanted to know.”
“You already did know. If I had cheated on Laney, I would have told you. You’d be the only person I’d tell. This is about the kiss in the bathroom, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I admitted softly.
“I broke off the engagement within hours of that.”
“But I didn’t know that was going to happen and I still let the kiss happen.”
“I attacked you.”
I looked at him sharply. “Don’t make excuses for me.”
He nodded calmly. “Okay.”
I stood there in the warming sun staring at him and wondering what I was doing. Where was I going with all of this? Why couldn’t I let that alone? It had been one kiss that had felt like a longtime coming. Not even an extension of the moment when I was seventeen but like something new. Something far less physical but way more emotional. The way he’d touched me… I still wasn’t over it. I still wanted more. But I still ached with guilt.
“Jenna,” Kellen said, his voice firm but gentle. “Is it something you can’t handle?”
“What do you mean?”
“The timing of that kiss. Is it something you can’t get past?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
Kellen swore as he ran his hand over his hair and looked at the ground. He stood frozen that way for a long moment before cursing again and taking a step back.
“I fucked it up before it even started,” he growled angrily.
“Kel,”
“Here I thought I was doing this right,” he railed, beginning to pace the sidewalk. “We’ve been taking it slow, putting distance between us and the engagement, I’ve been getting my shit back together. I’m taking the firemen’s test next week—“
“You’re going to be a fireman?” I asked, shocked. Why hadn’t I heard about this?
“But it doesn’t matter because I couldn’t keep it together for two more hours. Four years I’d been thinking about what it’d be like to kiss you again and I couldn’t wait two more fucking hours.”
“Stop, wait. Talk to me about this.”
“I’m no good at that,” he said, sounding so frustrated.
“Look at me.”
He paused his pacing in front of me, his hands on his hips and his head down, staring at the pavement. Finally he looked up at me but his eyes were distant. He was gone.
Feeling frustrated myself, I reached up and put my hands over his eyes.
“What are you—“
“Shut up,” I told him sternly. “We’re backtracking. Talk about the firefighter thing.”
“Jenna, why are—“
“Nope, no questions. Jenna’s not here. Can you see her? No, because she’s not here. You’re alone. Now talk.”
“I’m not a toddler.”
“You take instructions like one. Talk,” I barked.
He stood silently for a good ten seconds. If he was waiting me out, he was dealing with the wrong person. Finally, reluctantly, he spoke.
“I’ve been looking into becoming a firefighter.”
I didn’t reply. I stood there with my hands blinding him and I waited silently.
He sighed. “I think it’s something I’d enjoy. Something I’d get satisfaction from.”
More silence. More patience.
“It’s physically challenging, which I like, but it’s also helping people. The nurses in New York, they told me the first responders to the accident were firefighters. They’re trained EMTs. If they hadn’t gotten there when they did, I’d be dead. They saved my life.”
I bit my lip, thinking of that night when Laney told me he was gone. I remembered how my body had seized up. How I’d felt like I was dead too.
“Can I have my eyes back now?”
“Not yet. Not until we talk about the kiss.”
He breathed out hard, his hot breath rushing over the thin skin of my wrists. I could feel his annoyance in the sting of the heat.
“I messed up. I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“We messed up,” I amended, “and I think we’re both sorry. But I can’t move past it. I think that’s why I was so willing to take things slow. It’s smart, yeah, and the right thing to do but it’s also because I’m worried. I don’t want to start us off on a lie.”
“Do you want to start us off at all?” he asked gruffly, his voice going low and deep.
“Yes,” I said with absolute certainty, “but we have to come clean first.”
He reached up and gently pulled my hands from his eyes. He blinked in the bright sunlight but then he focused on me and I could see the reluctance written plainly on his face.
“This will not go well,” he warned me.
“I know.”
“She was never going to like us being together, but knowing there was even a second of overlap…”
“She’ll go insane, yeah. I know. But just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s right.”
He nodded in agreement though his eyes were still tense. This was so far out of his comfort zone it wasn’t even funny.
“Tell her together or alone?” he asked.
“Together,” I said adamantly. “I think it’s important there are witnesses. Less chance we’ll end up a Lifetime Original Movie that way.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I thought you said I’d never have to see him again,” Laney said angrily, crossing her arms over her chest.
It had been a month since Kellen and I decided to tell her the truth. I was the one who had stalled. I was scared, plain and simple.
But now there she sat at the opposite end of my couch from me while Kellen was across from us in a chair, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. His hands were noticeably clenched together. We both knew this was happening and we both knew it would be horrible
.
“I never promised that. I said you wouldn’t see him any more than you see Sam.”
“Still too much,” she muttered.
“Trust me,” Kellen told her dryly, “I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. Probably less.”
“That’s impossible. And why are we here anyway? You said you had something important to tell me. Does Kellen have a VD, ‘cause that doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“Nice.”
“Stop talking,” she snapped at him.
“Both of you stop talking,” I said tiredly. I had a killer headache and the nightmare hadn’t even begun. “At least to each other. Laney,”
I didn’t know how to say this. How did a person say this?
I kissed your fiancé.
I made out with your fiancé.
I’m in love with your fiancé, I always have been.
I am so so sorry.
“What, Jenna?” she barked. “The sooner you say it the sooner I can get away from him.”
“I kissed him,” I blurted out, my heart racing up into my throat until I thought I would vomit on the words.
Laney’s face pinched. “Why?”
“No,” Kellen said decisively, “I kissed her.”
“What do you mean why?” I asked.
“That doesn’t matter, Jen. It matters that we told her that it happened.”
Laney glared at him. “When did it happen?”
Oh shit.
I knew this was coming, this was the entire point, but it still wrenched my gut to hear her ask. But I knew I had to answer if I was ever going to feel right about myself again. Or right about Kellen and I. It was the thing holding me back with him, making me hesitant and afraid. The way I’d felt about him had always been illicit, no matter how persistent, genuine and even reciprocated those feelings may have been. I was ready so for that to stop.
But getting there, that was going to be a bitch.
“Four months ago,” I said quietly.
Her eyes looked up into the distance. She was doing the math.
“The night you two ended your engagement.”
Her eyes snapped to mine and she stared at me. Hard. Laney’s eyes were two shards of crystal burning fire that stared at me and tried to kill me with their hate and heat. But I bore it because I deserved it. Also because I knew it wasn’t over. It was about to get worse.
“So what?” she asked quietly. Too quietly. “You too hooked up minutes after he ended it with me? We were talking about it until two in the morning. Did he go running to you immediately after that? He couldn’t wait to move on to the next girl? To my own sister?”
“It was before,” Kellen said calmly, his knuckles going white. “I kissed her at your parent’s house before we split. It was right after we fought.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Laney exploded. She leapt off the couch and backed away from me until she hit the wall like I was a plague carrier she was afraid to be near. I watched her silently. I didn’t try to calm her down. I didn’t try to explain. It was what it was and now that the bomb had dropped, Laney was going to do what she was going to do.
Flip the fuck out.
“You son of a bitch!”
She took two quick strides toward Kellen. He looked up at her where she towered over him, waiting.
She slapped him hard across the face.
I jumped at the crack of skin on skin, my adrenaline spiking hard in my heart. I fought every instinct to stand up and put her on her ass. I held my place on the couch, my own hands going clammy and clenched as I watched the left side of his face explode in red. He barely moved, though. His head had snapped slightly to the side with the blow but he brought it back and stared up at her impassively. His eyes were dead and gone. He was in the ring now. He was taking hits, absorbing blows and waiting for the storm to pass but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t connecting.
So she hit him again.
“Laney,” I said, unable to keep quiet.
“Nothing?” she asked him harshly, her voice going quiet again. “No reaction? You don’t want to hit me back? You don’t want to defend yourself? You don’t want to tell me ‘Stop, listen, we can explain?’”
“No,” he replied evenly.
“Of course not. Because that’s not who Kellen Coulter is, is it? Do you know who he is, Jenna? Do you know what you’re getting yourself into? I’m sure you think you do but you have no clue what being with him is like. Do you want to know? Because I’ll gladly warn you.”
“No,” I said, my voice similar to Kellen’s.
“Too bad. Being with him is like being alone. Look at his face right now. This is what you get when things get hard. You get nothing. Nothing!” she shouted, bending down to get in his face. He didn’t flinch. “See? He’ll bail on you every time. You think you’re different because you’ve been his friend but it won’t matter. He doesn’t know how to love people. He’ll do to you exactly what he did to me and you won’t have my shoulder to cry on. Someday you’ll beg him for more than the nothing he’s giving you and he’ll give you the best sex of your life until you forget your own name, but a few days later you’ll be crying, remembering what you really wanted and you’ll realize you never got it. Not even close. He’s a hollowed out, cold, heartless bastard and if you think anything different then you don’t know him half as well as you think you do.” She reached down and jerked her purse up off the table. “But you’re welcome to find out, bitch.”
When the door slammed behind Laney, I closed my eyes. I breathed slowly and evenly as I listened to the familiar sounds of my apartment. The traffic outside. The click of my air conditioning turning on. The faint hum given off by my weird little lamp pointed at my easel.
I told myself not to cry. She’d forgive me someday. That’s what sisters did. They were honest with each other and they hurt each other but they always came back to one another because they were family. Blood. Bound to each other for their entire lives. I hurt her today but she’d hurt me before and we were still alive. We were all still here.
I opened my eyes to find Kellen still sitting there. He hadn’t moved since she left. His face was a painful shade of red on the side where she’d slapped him but he didn’t seem to notice. He stared straight ahead, his eyes black as midnight. Dark as death.
I rose from the couch slowly and went to the kitchen. In the freezer I grabbed a bag of frozen corn and a damp towel which I brought back to the living room, not surprised to find him still sitting exactly as he had been when I left. After wrapping the bag in the wet towel, I knelt in front of him. I avoided his eyes.
He winced slightly when I pressed the compress to his face but then he stilled and so did I.
I could hear my blood rushing in my veins.
We sat like that for a good five minutes. Me on my knees in front of him, the cold against his skin, him with his eyes on the far away, infinite horizon in his mind where he despised himself and the limitations he faced, ones placed on him by people long dead and gone. Or people who were never there to begin with. Laney may have known what he lacked, but I knew very well what he was. I knew him through and through, so as he sat there inside himself where she thought he was hollow and heartless, I understood he was fuller than any man had any right to be.
He was full of hate. It didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else.
When my knees began to ache and my palm was frozen, I started to stand. His hand clamped down on my wrist. I looked up in surprise to find him staring down at me intently, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
He pulled me forward slowly until I knelt between his knees and his face hovered over mine. Then he kissed me slowly. His hands gripped my face as he pulled me toward him and he traced my lips with his tongue. Before I could react he was moving lower. His hands went to my shoulders, arching my body back until he was holding me up. His lips brushed across my cheek to my ear where he placed a series of kisses along the edge then back behind near my hair. I was struggl
ing to breathe as his breath poured over my skin leaving me flushed and unsteady.
“Kel?” I whispered shakily.
“I have to know,” he murmured, his lips still moving along my skin. Skimming down the column of my neck to my collar bone.
“You have to know what?”
His tongue slid wet and hot along my collar until he reached the soft tissue of my shoulder. I inhaled sharply, nervously, as I felt his teeth graze my skin then sink in gently. His hands tightened on my arms.
“If I can survive you,” he hoarsely whispered.
He moved fast as lightening, like a blur in the ring in the lights and the ropes. He lifted me off the ground as though I weighed nothing and threw me beneath him on the couch. He hovered over me, staring down at me with such a mix of heavy and hollow that I felt my stomach drop out with fear.
I didn’t know him like this. I don’t think he did either. It was something different, something strange. A mixing of his worlds of love and want and hate and loss. He was the man I knew, the one I loved, but he was also in the ring, in the zone and the empty. He was Jekyll and Hyde warring for the same space in the same moment in time and I was suddenly shaking scared of who would win and who would walk away forever.
I was also damn ready to find out.
I spread my legs and pulled down on his hips, settling him against me. He lowered himself gently, his eyes always on mine and I sighed when his incredible weight was crushing me from top to bottom. He pushed the air out of my lungs and I let everything else go with it. I stopped worrying and wondering. I stopped wanting and I started taking.
I moved my hands, fingers trembling, up his sides, taking his shirt with me. He watched me with a blank stare until my palms skimmed up under his arms then over his shoulder blades. He reached back with one hand, grabbed his shirt and yanked it quickly over his head. It disappeared somewhere in the room as his mouth found mine again and his hands began to roam. Wherever they went they found flesh, pulling and gripping, nearly tearing any clothing that dared to be in his way. He was fast, so fast, and when I lay naked and burning with chills beneath him, he went slow. So slow.
He kissed me once more, long and deep, then he buried his face in my neck. He took a shuddering breath. Then he surged forward. I gasped at the sudden fullness. At the incredible weight of him on top of me and inside of me. He was everywhere. He was everything. He was the only thing holding me down, keeping me from lifting from the world out into the stars and the frozen black above us. He was saving me, he was killing me. He was guiding me, grounding me and sending me so far out of myself I could see forever.
