[2014] Ten Below Zero

by Whitney Barbetti

  The man meandered down the sidewalk, away from us, and then I heard Mira’s phone ring. “Shit.” She fumbled to pull it out her clutch and looked at me. “One sec, Mouse.” I nodded as she answered the phone. “What, Six?”

  Mira walked down the sidewalk a few feet. I was so focused on her that I didn’t hear someone come up behind me until I felt breath, hot on my neck.

  Whirling around, I came face to face with the man who’d fallen against Mira. And, judging by the smell on his breath, he was drunk. He didn’t say anything, just stepped closer to me.

  Alarm set in then, a thousand dings in my head to run. Instead, I stood, immobilized, on the square of concrete. My mind was racing, but my limbs would not move. There was a definite disconnect between what my brain was telling me to do and what my legs were actually doing.

  Before I knew what was happening, the man had fallen on me, knocking me on the ground.

  I froze. His breath was hot on my neck, his hands groping. Wide-eyed, I could do nothing but stare up into the stars. I heard my name being called by a voice that soothed me and then all outside sound stopped with a whoosh; the only sound I could register was the thudding of my heart as he breathed all over my chest and my neck. My mind went to another place. A safe place. I didn’t feel fear anymore.

  But the voice that had soothed me called my name again, this time it was closer. “Parker!”

  Snapping back to reality, I registered the weight of the man being removed from on top of my body. My eyes searched the dark and found Everett’s bright eyes right before he threw a punch into the drunk man.

  I was still in shock, still paralyzed on the cool concrete. I stared at Everett throwing punches left and right into the other man, watched him hit Everett back. My mind was screaming at me to get up, but I couldn’t.

  A flash of blue filled my vision as Mira leaned over me. “Parker.” Hands touched my shoulders before I felt my upper body being lifted. “Are you okay?”

  I could only look at her, stunned. I felt as if I’d been underwater and needed to clear my ears.

  “Can you stand up?”

  I didn’t answer, instead I held her hands as she pulled me up to my feet and then backed me up against the building. “Wait here for a second.”

  She pulled Everett off the drunk man and roughly pushed him in one direction and the drunk man in another. “Get the fuck out of here,” she growled to the drunk man before whirling around and putting a fist on Everett’s chest. “Calm the hell down.”

  Everett turned to face me, chest heaving up and down.

  Stalking towards me with a hand around Everett’s upper arm, Mira thrust him towards me. “Get him out of here.” She grabbed my hand and wrapped it around Everett’s. “Now.”

  Walking down the sidewalk, Everett squeezed my hand. Something about the way he squeezed my hand grounded me. Looking down, I saw wetness on my chest. It only took a moment for me to register what it was: saliva. Not mine. Hastily, I wiped it away. Everett stopped walking for a minute and turned to me.

  “Here,” he said, his voice gruff. He reached out and used his sleeve to wipe away the rest of the saliva. When I met his eyes, I saw he was battling hard to keep cool. “Parker. You…” he hesitated. “You didn’t fight.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  He turned back to the direction of the hotel, the movement illuminating the blood on his face. “Back there. You didn’t fight. You didn’t push him off. You just laid there.”

  I closed my eyes a moment, remembering how I’d felt when the man had fallen on me. When I’d heard Everett’s voice calling my name. Swallowing, I opened my eyes. “I know.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, anger and frustration swirling in his eyes.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered.

  He squeezed my hand again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Sit here,” I said, dragging a chair from the table to the bathroom in our hotel room.

  Everett looked at me warily from by the window. We’d walked to a convenience store to get some bandages for his knuckles. Everett had received just one blow to the face, a cut on his eyebrow, before he got the rest of the hits in. His knuckles were red and swollen, and I worried he’d broken more than one of his fingers.

  We hadn’t spoken since leaning the drugstore and returning to the hotel. All I’d managed from Everett were affirmative grunts.

  When Everett still hadn’t moved from the window, I walked over to him and gripped his arm in my hand. “Don’t be a baby.”

  Everett yanked his arm from my hand but still followed me to the chair. I held a hand out for his and looked up to his face. Blood from the cut on his eyebrow was slowly trickling down his face. I knew head wounds often bled more than wounds on other parts of the body, but it still unnerved me a bit to see blood trickling down with some dried blood plastered on the side of his face. That could wait, I’d decided. His hands needed to be looked at.

  I crouched in front of him and looked over his hands. All the self-defense training I’d done with Mira had given me a lot of bloody, bruised knuckles, so I knew a little bit about how to treat them. I looked closely at the knuckles on his middle fingers especially, as they’d taken the brunt of the beating.

  “Bend your fingers.”

  Everett didn’t. I looked up at him from my position crouched on the floor in front of him. “Bend them,” I said again, one eyebrow raised. I felt him bend them, though I could tell it was uncomfortable. “Good.” I flipped his hands over and set them, palms up, on the tops of his thighs. I ran my fingers over them, from tip to base, making sure they felt fine. Nothing seemed to be dislocated or broken. “I think you’re going to be okay, but you’ll need to ice them and take something for the swelling.”

  Holding his hands, I pulled him to standing and led him to the sink. “Let’s wash the dried blood off so I can bandage them.” He remained silent. I looked up in the mirror over the sink as I washed his hands, and met his eyes. He was looking at me with such intensity in his eyes that his silence spoke volumes. I swallowed and looked down at his hands again, carefully washing them.

  I gestured for him to sit in the chair again and then carefully patted his hands dry with a washcloth. “You probably don’t need this, but I don’t want to hear you whining because your hands hurt and are infected,” I said, opening up the package of bacitracin.

  His silence was getting to me. For someone who spent so much time in the silence, I was baffled why it bothered me so much now. But it did. So I kept making little comments, trying to get a rise out of him.

  He didn’t flinch as I applied the cream to his knuckles. Some of the knuckles had their skin ripped off from the repeated blows Everett had delivered to the other man. I applied band-aids to the knuckles that were especially torn up and then wet a washcloth. “Your knuckles don’t look too bad, but your face looks pretty rough.”

  Still silence. I gritted my teeth and warmed the washcloth with the water. As I wrung out the excess water, I looked at him in the mirror. He was still watching me, his eyes on mine. I couldn’t read what his body language was saying, but his eyes were smoldering. With anger, with lust? I wasn’t sure. I turned back to face him and applied the wash cloth to the dried blood on his cheek first. With one hand, I pushed back his hair to clean the blood along his hairline. My hand gripped a bit in his hair, my fingers feeling the silkiness of his strands.

  The room got smaller and the walls moved in while I cleaned his face. I tried to focus my thoughts away from my attraction to him. But I couldn’t. Lust was beginning to suffocate me as my fingers played with his hair and my other hand rubbed the washcloth on his skin. I purposefully avoided looking into his eyes and concentrated on cleaning the blood away.

  I was close enough that his breath was on my neck, blowing warmth right down to my chest. I swallowed and knew his eyes tracked the movement of my throat. My legs tingled and my blood rushed to the surface of my skin.

  I moved the washcloth up his
face, slowly rubbing circles into his skin to remove the dried blood. There shouldn’t have been anything erotic about that moment, but with his warm breath on my neck and my hand in his hair while I was inches from his face, I could feel desire all the way in my bones. I blew out a breath on his skin, right over the wetness left on his skin from the washcloth. That seemed to be his undoing, because before I knew it his arms wrapped around me and yanked me onto his lap so I was straddling him. We were face to face, his arms crushing me to him, our breathing mingling in the small space.

  But he didn’t kiss me. He didn’t do anything more than hold me tightly to him. So, after blowing out a shaky breath, I continued rubbing the wash cloth, up his temple and into his eyebrow. I was tender when I reached the actual cut and found it had stopped bleeding entirely.

  One of my hands went up into his hair that fell on his forehead and I pushed it out of the way, to give me better access to his skin. My eyes immediately found the scar on his forehead.

  I rubbed over it with my thumb. Everett’s arms tightened around me and his breathing picked up.

  My heart rate was climbing, blood was pounding in my veins. I wasn’t even concentrated on cleaning his wounds anymore, I was trying not to combust, just from his arms around my waist and his breath on my neck. I braved a glance at his eyes and finally, I was able to name what it was I saw there.

  Hunger.

  We stared at one another for a few moments. Me on his lap, one hand in his hair. His arms wrapped tightly around my waist so that I was straddling him. And then his hands slid from my waist to my neck and pulled my lips down to meet his.

  I closed my eyes upon impact. This kiss was different than every other kiss. It was like gulping that last breath of air before diving deep, as if it would be the last time you’d ever breathe again. I certainly felt like I was drowning.

  His lips were hard on mine, almost punishing, before his hands tugged the ponytail out of my hair, sending my hair falling around us. He wrapped his hand around my hair and pulled, forcing me to raise my chin and expose my neck.

  And then he was kissing down the column of my neck, from my jaw to my collarbone. Slowly, but torturously. My chest heaved with exertion and my eyes refused to open. While he kept one hand in my hair, the other moved around my waist to my ribcage, squeezing. My breathing was so ragged at this point that I wanted him to reach in and spread my ribcage apart, to free my lungs from their confines.

  “Stand up,” he said against my neck. I did, albeit on shaky legs. And then Everett lunged for me again, pushing me against the counter at my back as his lips met mine over and over.

  Clothes were being pulled off of us like the unwanted obstacles they were, thrown on the floor in a heap. Everett whipped me around so I was facing myself in the mirror as he yanked me free of my underwear. I could do nothing but stare at our reflection, see him staring at my back. He made a sound deep in his throat as I felt his hand touch the top of my shoulder blade. “Exquisite,” he said while running his hand down the center of my back, right over my spine. When he reached my tailbone, his hands grasped my hips and a second later he was inside of me.

  It happened so fast that I threw my head back in a moan. Everett stilled. “Look,” he said. “Look in the mirror.”

  I couldn’t. It was too much. But Everett was bossy.

  “Look. Look at yourself in the mirror, Parker.”

  With great struggle, I pulled my head down and opened one eye, my entire body overcome with the lust he brought out in me. The first thing I saw was our skin – moreover the difference in color. I was pale, he was deeply tanned. I ran my eyes up my body, which took center stage in the mirror, until I saw his face reflected back at me. His eyes were narrow, the ice blue of them lit up. Blue was suddenly the warmest color I’d ever known.

  “Keep looking,” he said as he thrust again. I had to fight my body’s instinct to close my eyes. “Look,” he said again, thrusting again. He kept up a rhythm, slowly increasing his speed, until my eyes involuntarily closed.

  “Open them, Parker. I want you to see this.” I moaned but did as he said. He started again, slower this time. Excruciatingly slow. “If you close them again, I’ll start over.”

  “Arrrgh,” I moaned from my throat, totally overcome with so many feelings. I couldn’t process them. The resounding one was desire-that was obvious. But there was more. It was in the way he was staring back at me, his eyes completely on my face in the mirror. It was how his hands were holding me, lifting me. He wasn’t just touching me. He was holding me. That was more. And most of all, it was the way I was looking at him, something I couldn’t, wouldn’t define. It was too much, frighteningly so.

  His pace picked up and I gripped onto the counter as my knuckles turned white, my shoulders hunched as my body started rapidly ascending.

  “Look, Parker. Look,” his voice demanded.

  I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes again, so I forced them open and watched, watched the moment we were both overtaken.

  I fell onto the counter then, completely, utterly spent. I felt Everett pick me up and then carry me to the bed. As I fell asleep, I heard him whisper something along my neck, but I was too far gone to know what he said.

  I awoke in the dark to the sound of moaning. It wasn’t a moan of desire, but rather of fear. I flipped over in the bed, seeing Everett writhing and soaked in sweat.

  “Wake up,” I said. When he didn’t, I tentatively put my hand on his chest and pushed. “Wake up, Everett,” I said louder this time.

  Everett thrashed harder, tangling the sheets all over the bed. I sat up.

  “Everett!” I yelled. “Wake up!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until his eyes opened and he was staring at me.

  “Everett,” I said, softer than before. “It was just a bad dream.”

  Everett coughed and rolled away, sitting on the side of the bed with his back to me. I watched him put his face in his hands and rub away the sweat. “Sorry,” he said gruffly before standing up and walking into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, leaving me in the darkness alone.

  I looked at the door, heard the shower turn on, and then looked at the clock beside the bed.

  3:00 a.m.

  3:00 a.m. was a terrible time of day. It was too late to go to sleep if you had to be awake at a reasonable hour and too early to stay awake for the rest of the day. Even then, I wasn’t sure that I could go to sleep.

  I lay back in the pillows. My hand reached over and felt the wetness of Everett’s pillowcase, so I grabbed it, intending to replace it with one of the spare pillows. Instead, I uncovered Everett’s journal.

  I looked at it for a minute, lit only barely by the light from the moon outside our window. And then I looked at the bathroom door.

  I told myself it was none of my business, to let Everett have his privacy. I told myself I’d be pissed if he invaded mine any more than he already had.

  But my hands ignored the reasoning in my brain and reached for it anyway.

  I kept my hand on the cover, running my fingers over the cloth-like material. And then I flipped it open to the first page.

  I knew right away it was a drawing of me. My head was thrown back, my neck was exposed and my arms were wrapped around myself. My lips were partially open but my eyes were closed. It was sensual, and very intimate.

  What stood out the most was the scar he’d drawn along my cheekbone. It was drawn exactly the same as my own scar. My fingers touched the drawing. Was this how he saw me? The girl he’d drawn looked sad. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t anything, except annoyed. But, I wasn’t annoyed at this photo. This photo made me feel the way the artist himself made me feel: confused. He’d written words around the drawing, but I was far too uncomfortable with the drawing to focus on them.

  Deciding not to continue looking at the journal, I closed the lid and pushed it back to its spot, replacing his pillow with a fresh one from the closet.

  The water turned off in the bathroom, so I roll
ed onto my side, my back to the bathroom door. I heard Everett come out and cough again. I made no move to acknowledge him, still processing my feelings.

  The bed dipped and I heard him slide in. And then there was silence. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to come to me, to cuddle me from behind, but I couldn’t deny the small ache I felt now that he’d put separation between us.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When I woke again, the room was dark except for the slight illumination of the light on the table. Everett was tying his shoelaces in the chair across from the bed. I noticed his hands were free of the bandages, the knuckles looking even worse than they had the night before.

  He looked up from tying his shoes, his freshly-washed hair falling over his forehead. “Are you going to be ready soon?” His voice was lacking its usual warm quality. Gone was his playfulness. Something had changed him in sleep.

  “Yeah,” I croaked, climbing out of bed. I was completely naked. Everett stood up and walked into the bathroom. “What time is it?”

  “Here,” he said as he tossed a pile of clothes at me. I caught them clumsily and then stared at the bundle in my arms. “It’s four,” he said, moving out of the bathroom and gesturing for me to go in. I was cold, but not because of the lack of clothing. Everett was a totally different person.

  “Four?” So early. Self-consciously, I grabbed my suitcase and wheeled it in the bathroom, shutting the door to change. I looked at my reflection. My hair was a wild mess, my eyes wide. Probably with shock. Everett had never treated me so coolly.

  I washed myself quickly in the shower, drying hastily with the too-small towel.

  As I was dressing, I noticed the small bag of cosmetics I’d brought with me. I bit my lip while I decided what to do.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, I was wearing shorts and a tank, both more revealing than I usually wore. I was wearing makeup, not a lot, but enough that it should be noticeable. I wore my hair down, shivering each time a wet strand made contact with my skin.