Murder

by Ella James

  The kiss is deep and tender. Firm… His mouth is hot and smooth. His tongue strokes mine, surging a few times in a motion that makes me think of sex. Then his lips take charge, gently tasting mine, and his tongue is licking along the seam of my lips, teasing. I can’t seem to think. I just…react. The kiss deepens, his beard prickling my hot cheeks. His mouth roves up my jaw and to my temple, kissing lightly, till I feel a throb low in my belly and I grab his shoulder. I try to pull him down on me.

  And then he sucks the tender skin below my ear, making me writhe with need, and pulls away.

  I pull him back to me. I’m surprised when he lays his heavy body over mine, presses his cheek against mine.

  “Gwenna…” I can feel his chest pump with his heavy breaths.

  “Barrett.” I turn my head to kiss his mouth, and miss—because he’s lifting his head and shifting back onto his side. He trails a finger down my forearm.

  “How do you feel?” His eyes have that hawkish quality, as if he’s watching me closely to make sure he misses nothing. But there’s gentleness in his features, too. For someone so acquainted with violence, he really is a nice guy.

  “I’m good.” I flush, then laugh. “I can’t believe I did that.” I can’t stop the grin that spreads over my face.

  “Did what?” He smirks.

  I shove him. “You know what, you jerk.”

  His smirk takes its usual route to smile.

  “I’ve never done what I did with you.” I bring my hand to my burning cheek. “Put my ass up in the air like that.” I shake my head.

  He grins. “I’ve never seen anything that fucking hot.”

  I look down at the sheets, not sure if I should beam with pride or die of embarrassment.

  He smiles and strokes my jaw. “You look naughty, Gwenna.”

  “Apparently I am.” I lean up so I can kiss his neck. I expect him to pull away, but he doesn’t. His eyes are warm on mine, his arm around me steady as he holds me to him.

  This time, I’m the one who pulls away.

  “What time is it?” I whisper.

  I see him swallow. “Almost three.”

  “Have you slept?” I whisper breathlessly.

  “A little.”

  “Liar.” I cup his prickly cheek. “Maybe it would help if I wrap you up and be your human blanket.”

  His eyes shut. I kiss his jaw. I feel the goosebumps on his arm, which is pressed against my chest. His tired eyes open.

  “You’re not holding out for me, are you? Trying to keep from having a nightmare with me here? I don’t want to make things worse for you.”

  “Never,” he says quietly.

  I stroke a finger down his abs. He leans his head back.

  “You make me feel good,” I say, stroking his happy trail. “I want to make you feel good too.”

  I duck under the covers and, after a second with my heart in my throat, work up the nerve to grab his dick and wrap my tongue around the tip of it. I hear him groan and suck him into my mouth. I can feel him lengthen…harden…thicken. I’m not very experienced with blow jobs. I can’t even suck my left cheek in as tightly as my right one. But I try…and at the same time, I try to run my tongue under his head and all around the rim of him. I’m rewarded by a muttered curse, and then his hands cupping my head.

  I wonder how deep I can take him. I open wider and suck him into the back of my throat…so I can feel the pressure of his head there. I realize in a heartbeat that it’s either gag or swallow—so I swallow.

  “Oh fuck…” I hear and feel him take a heavy breath. His thick erection twitches in my throat. I inhale slowly, relaxing more so I can breathe around him. Then I swallow just a little more.

  His hips jerk so hard, I cough a little and my eyes water.

  “Oh God,” he moans. “Gwen.”

  His hands clench my shoulders and I feel his legs shake slightly. Another slow swallow, and he’s gritting out my name. His hips twitch, then his legs get very tense and still, as if he’s forcibly keeping himself from thrusting deeper. I realize as I swallow again that I forgot about the balls. And what a shame, because his are seriously stunning: big and beautiful, the very definition of well-hung. Who knew balls could be so hot?

  I drag my curved palm underneath them, tickling with the pads of my fingers, then gently cupping.

  I’m rewarded with his frenzied breathing, and the feeling of his heavy sac tightening in my hand.

  He’s so big, I don’t think I can take all of him into my throat, so with my other hand, I clutch the base of his dick. He seems to like it when I drag my thumb along the underside of his shaft, so I focus on doing that, swallowing and sucking, and rolling his balls.

  “Oh…oh. Oh God…Gwen!”

  I feel every noise he makes between my legs—and I imagine that the thickness in my throat is driving deep inside me.

  My jaw aches and my eyes water, but it’s worth it. When I think I might taste something salty down my throat, when his abs and thighs tighten, I feel a swell of heat between my legs and draw him slowly out of my mouth.

  As his body tenses and he makes a low sound off loss in his throat, I crawl up his body, rubbing up against him until my pussy glides over his dick.

  I get a flash of his dark eyes. Then Barrett flips me over on my back, positions his head at my wet entrance, and, with his eyes shut tightly, surges into me.

  I hold onto his forearms as he pounds me fast and hard and we both pant and moan, and he says, “You’re so…fucking perfect.”

  That’s it for me.

  He follows me a second later.

  Barrett cleans us up, then disappears into the bathroom. I watch his tall shadow move through the room, and feel him crawl back into bed. He lies on his back and folds his arms behind his head.

  “Thanks,” I whisper.

  He laughs, a low, smoky sound. I wait for words, and when none find me, I scoot over closer to him. I snuggle up against his chest and Barrett wraps his arm around me.

  I watch him until his eyes shut and his body twitches. At that cue, his eyes shoot open, wide and alarmed.

  I stroke his hair and hold him tighter. “It’s okay…”

  After a few minutes, his breathing has gone steady.

  BARRETT

  December 29, 2011

  Being back stateside is always fucking strange. The smell of soil and moisture in the air. The way every surface—floors, counters, walls—looks like it’s just been spit-shined. The roads are smooth and wide and quiet. The cars look pristine. Everyone wears pants, carries an iPhone, wears sunglasses.

  I catch a hop to Stewart, arriving at the base at 7:35 a.m. New York time. I grab the keys to a Chevy Suburban at the Enterprise desk and have to sit in it a minute before revving up. It smells new. Odometer says 10,000 miles. The car feels large and quiet with only me inside.

  My first stop is a gas station. The number of food options inside overwhelms me. I don’t recognize half the brands. Caramel apple bubble gum, blackberry-flavored water. The price of cigarettes is high. I buy some Marlboros, just to have them in my pocket.

  Stewart is a little west of Newburgh, only 19 miles north of the family cabin at Iona Island. The drive is lined with trees and packed with big cars filled with unassuming Americans fiddling with earbuds, reapplying lipstick, talking on their smart phones at red lights.

  I try to assess myself. And try to plan.

  I’m told Kelly has his phone, but the two times I’ve called, he hasn’t answered. I don’t even bother to call my father. Haven’t in years. The few times I did, after shipping out, he didn’t answer. I wouldn’t know where Kellan was were it not for my aunt. She told me Kellan bolted right after Lyon died. Ly was playing chess in Kellan’s room. He’d been discharged. They thought he was doing better than Kellan. Anyway, Kelly took New York public transport from Sloan-Kettering Memorial to some hotel and passed the fuck out. Poor kid. When I think about him by himself—just one blond, blue-eyed, dimpled kid—my stomach feels like it’s ful
l of Jell-O.

  I try to steel myself, but as the river weaves between the dense trees on my left and the roads narrow toward Iona, I feel sick. I have this bizarrely clear memory, which thereafter runs like a film reel in my mind. I’m in my parents’ room, in that awful pale peach wing-backed chair. It must be sometime in the afternoon because the curtains are half-shut the way I did them when the sun got very bright. I can see Mom’s hair in that braid over her left shoulder. The nurse, Odessa, showed me how to do it one day. I’m sitting there by Mom carving a squirrel. Just turned sixteen or about to. Regardless, spending all my days driving Mom to appointments. Except in this memory she’s not going anywhere. The bandages are still around her upper torso, and her skin is angel pale. I sit the squirrel and my knife down and lay my head there on her mattress, just beside her hip. I remember a sharp ache in my chest when her hand didn’t come to rest in my hair. Then Lyon and Kellan are coming through the doorway. A nurse—Charlene—is smiling when I lift my head. My stomach flips because they’ve never seen Mom this way. Until a day or two ago, she hadn’t been unconscious like this. Charlene shrugs and smiles. Lyon pulls a plastic dinosaur from his pocket.

  “Look Barrett! I got a dinosaur for you!”

  “Cool. Where’d you get that, buddy?”

  He comes over to me. Kellan too. “Lisa took us to Target!”

  Kellan looks from me to Mom as Ly hands me the dinosaur. Lyon blinks his blue eyes. “I have one too.” He pulls his own brown dinosaur from another pocket. “Mine is triceratops.” His little eyes peer up at me. “Barrett, are you sad?”

  My heart misses a beat. “No. Why?” My jaw tightens and I want to look at Lisa, though I don’t. What has she told them?

  “Mommy told me if you’re sad that we should cheer you up.”

  “When did she say that?”

  Kellan tilts his face up to me. “A couple days ago.”

  As I drive, I hear their voices. Nine, ten, and eleven. The year Mom died. The two that followed, when I watched them half as much as Lisa did. I used to make them breakfast. Dinner. I could never drive them places. After I nearly failed tenth grade for missing class with Mom, I was on Dad’s shit list. I don’t think he wanted me around the boys. Of course, he worked all day and night, so what could he do?

  I remember that big, leather couch. We would all three sit up there and play Playstation and I’d wrestle them and tousle their blond hair and help them with division.

  I know I shouldn’t, but I think about them then and can’t believe Lyon is dead. My little brother only lived to be eighteen years old. I didn’t even see him buried. Tears blur the road ahead of me. I pull over on the shoulder, find a napkin in the glove box.

  “I’m sorry, buddy. I’m so sorry.”

  My hands feel hot and shaky on the wheel as I hurry to Forward Street. I’ve got five days. It’s a long fucking time. Instead of going out to Breck’s with Dove and Blue and him, I can spend all of it here at the cabin with my brother. I remember how they used to cry after she died. It will feel so good to hug him. My throat thickens just thinking about it.

  The shoulders that run along the back roads leading to Forward Street are caked with the last snow. It’s hard and slightly brown. I drive slowly, looking for our family’s cabin. When I spot it, I park in front of the garage and step out onto the cold ground. My throat burns and tightens. I swallow and look around. This is the last lot on the road. If I recall, it’s got about a dozen acres.

  I walk slowly up the steps onto the small porch and knock. Three times. Then, a minute later, four. I hear footfall right behind the door. My stomach flips, my throat knots up. My whole head feels infused with heat.

  I think frantically about what I’ll say, but all I have is I’m sorry. That I wasn’t here. That I didn’t come while they were sick and missed Lyon’s funeral. That instead of coming after the funeral, I went to Syria, and then Iraq. When did I get so fucking selfish, I wonder as I press my finger to the doorbell.

  We spent the last six weeks orbiting Maliki: an important mission but non-urgent. I waited until after Christmas to fly home.

  I hear more footsteps, then nothing.

  “Kelly?” I shout at the door. “It’s Barrett.”

  It feels strange to say my name when I’m so used to being Bear. I knock some more. And then I hear it. Faintly. “Go away!”

  “K?”

  I press myself against the screen door, wrap my hand around the locked door handle. I could break through it with ease—but I won’t. “Kell, it’s me! It’s Barrett.”

  “No shit! Go away!”

  The tightness in my chest loosens, and I can feel the blood rush through my heart. So he’s pissed. Of course he is.

  I swallow. “Please? I want to talk.”

  The thick, wood door behind the screened one opens slightly and I smell old house and…some sort of food.

  “Kellan—hey…” I press my forehead against the screen door. “Please.” My voice cracks there. “I need to see you.”

  He laughs richly. “Oh—I bet.”

  The door opens so slowly I don’t notice until I can see him standing maybe a foot back, in shadows.

  I blink twice, quickly, and my eyes adjust. I blink again. I just…don’t believe that’s him. I don’t believe that’s Kellan. He looks…tall. So tall and pale and thin. Goddamn, he’s thin under that shirt that’s hanging off him. I’ve seen better-looking POWs. The pants he’s wearing lead to socked feet. He’s got on a beanie. A few more blinks and I can see his face. His fragile, bony, unfamiliar face. And hollow eyes.

  I feel a tremble move through my shoulders. “Let me in. Please let me in, man. I’m your brother. I just want to hug you.”

  I grip the screen door’s handle, feeling like the world is tilting under me.

  “I don’t want to see you.”

  My throat swells, until I feel like I can’t breathe. “Please?”

  Kellan looks down at his feet.

  I could break the door down. Easily.

  Then his pale blue eyes bore into mine. In a low voice—in a man’s voice—he says, “I don’t want to see you, asshole. I don’t even know you. You’re just some military robot. You’re not my brother.”

  I swallow—try to. “I’m sorry.” I want to tell him what happened that day—about the liver shot. How badly I wanted to be here. But there are no excuses. I inhale and exhale, filled with icy-cold regret.

  His face twists. “Lyon wondered why you didn’t come. I didn’t, but he did. Chew on that.”

  The door slams in my face, shaking snow loose from the roof.

  THIRTEEN

  GWENNA

  November 6, 2015

  “Don’t be a quitter, motherfucker!”

  I push my face into my pillow, distantly troubled, eager to sink back into dreamland. Something claws at the door of my mind. I should know…or do something important. Too tired…

  Later.

  For now, I curl into a ball and pull the blankets up, and as I shut my eyes, I feel the bed shake slightly. Hmm? Somewhere nearby, I hear panting, and that pulls me upward into consciousness. I blink a few times, feeling…off. There’s something cold and heavy in my belly: dread. Alarm nips at its heels.

  What’s wrong? I roll from my side onto my back, and as my senses come online, I hear the panting clearly. Male. The sound is low and raspy, unmistakably a man… For half a second, I feel frozen in the center of the sound. Struggling. Winded. Someone running.

  …In my room?

  I roll onto my side and— Barrett.

  I blink, but I don’t see him. The only thing that stands out in the darkness is the gray light seeping around the blockade of the curtains on the other side of his bed.

  Then his weight rocks the mattress. I realize the shape blotting the bottom of the curtain is the wide plane of his back; the triangle at the top of the blob: one of his elbows. He’s lying on his side, facing away from me. He’s got his arm over his head.

  I hear a moan, t
he kind that people make when something’s hurting them. Then his breath catches.

  “Fuck you, Breck! FUCK YOU!” His voice breaks. Then he’s breathing hard again, like he’s been running for a long time.

  I scoot toward him, agonized by empathy. My hand freezes as his back shakes, and I hear a soft sob.

  Oh my God.

  I can’t move, can’t even seem to breathe as I watch one of his hands clutch the back of his head, and another low, strangled cry breaks from his throat.

  His big back jerks once more, and then he’s sobbing: low bellows that punch out of him like drum beats. Then his throat tightens, his body coils, and the dam breaks on his grief. It’s loud and unhinged, frantic in the way that anguish always is. He holds his head and tugs his hair and sobs so hard and uncontrollably, the headboard bumps the wall. He sobs like a child, overwhelmed and helpless, desperate in his pain.

  And I just lie beside him, frozen though my every atom urges me to go to him, to hold him. This is Barrett. I think for a moment, I just can’t believe it.

  Slowly—maybe seconds, though it feels like years—my mind regroups; my pulse steadies; the empathetic horror that’s gripping me lessens just enough to let me feel a heady swell of need—to comfort him.

  Cold sweat sweeps me as I reach for him again. My hand touches his shoulder, and his body stills for just a second. Then he’s sobbing brokenly again. He holds his head and shudders—I hear “Breck”—and something changes; I guess he starts shaking harder, less like crying, more like shivering. His sobs soften and run longer: wracking sobs that fade off into low whimpers. And every few seconds, I hear his breath catch on an inhalation, quivering a few times as if he’s almost hyperventilating.

  I rub his damp back. “Barrett?”

  I think he feels me, and I feel him try to get control—his shoulders clench, his body stills—but I know how it is: he’s on auto-pilot, somewhere else, someplace where a part of him remains. Still wracked with soft, pained sobs, he reaches out and fumbles with a pillow, pulls it to his face, wrapping both arms around it like he’s trying to anchor himself.