Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“ W hat are you doing, princess?” Fletcher’s voice is thick with sleep, and he doesn’t open his eyes as I straddle his hips, my weight resting on him completely. Wordlessly, I lean over him, my black hair falling like a curtain around us, though all Boone has to do is open his eyes to see what I’m doing. It’s not a private show, after all. Not with him right beside us and looking like a puppy twitching in his sleep.
“I don’t know,” I admit finally, running my fingers over his collarbones and the hollow of his throat. “Do you want me to stop?”
He shakes his head slowly from side to side, not opening his eyes. For a few minutes I just touch him, studying his body and appreciating it in the same way I did with Boone earlier this morning. From outside the door I hear Sitka snoring, and I’m willing to bet she’s on her back against the door, doing her best dead cockroach impression. She’s just waiting for one of us to stumble out, unexpectedly trip over her, then feel bad enough to give her belly rubs.
“I read on my phone this morning that some of the snow’s supposed to melt today, and the worst of the storms are over.” My words are soft. Conversational, if hesitant. I don’t even know what I’m asking, or trying to get at, if I’m being honest. “Flights are starting again today, and the roads are set to open up tonight.”
I’d expected it to take longer, but I also underestimated the collective might of northern New York road crews.
“I could leave.” I say the words and hate the bitter taste they leave on my tongue. Three days ago I would’ve jumped at the chance to get away from my stepbrothers as quickly as possible. But now…
Well, the bitter taste in my mouth is enough of a hint, even for me, as an indication of how I feel regarding that idea.
“You could leave,” Fletcher agrees, his hands coming up so he can press his palms to my thighs. Gently, he runs his hands up to my hips, then back down to my knees. But still he just lays there, on his back and naked under the blankets separating us. As I watch, he tilts his head back with a sigh, but it can’t be deliberate.
It’s too vulnerable . Too much like he’s baring his throat to me in some sign of submission that goes beyond spoken words. But the moment he does, it’s like there’s a magnet attached to me. I lean down, brushing my lips up his neck until I can lick at the line of his jaw. He shudders under me, shifting just enough so I can tell he’s not as unaffected by this as he might want me to think.
He’s easier to talk to when he’s still sort of pretending to be out of it, even though I’m sure he’s not as drowsy as he’s letting on. My hand comes up, fingers carefully and experimentally wrapping around the base of his throat. He swallows and I feel the movement against my palm, leaning back to look down at him.
“Icould leave,” I say again, unsure of how to feel about the words the second time around.
Fletcher opens his mouth to say something, looking like he’s trying to choose his words carefully, but then Boone rolls over, opening his eyes as he growls in irritation.
“Yeah, we get it, okay?” Without warning he tugs me down into the empty space between them, wrapping his arms around my waist and yanking my back to his chest so we’re pressed flush together. “You could leave, but you’re not going to.” With a gesture I’d call sweet if it came from anyone else, he buries his face against my shoulder, groaning once more. “So stop sitting there and having some dramatic standoff until he asks you to stay.”
“Hey, hey!” I slap at his arm around my waist, and he retaliates by biting my shoulder lightly, surprising a yelp out of me. “We were not having a dramatic standoff, and I wasn’t expecting him to tell me to stay!”
“You weren’t?” Fletcher rolls over to face us, his eyes open and glittering in the morning light. He looks us both over, reaching out to thread his fingers through Boone’s hair. “You’re pouty this morning,” he observes. “Are you trying to tell us you’re getting attention-starved? That you’d rather be the one bound up in Christmas lights?”
“If that’s an option, I totally volunteer to be the one tying him up. I promise I’ll try not to strangle him.” It’s so easy to be light and playful when Boone is around, I’ve come to find. But it’s also easy to just be this with both of them.
Though I don’t know exactly what this is.
“You will stay, right?” Boone’s voice is soft in my ear, and it sobers me up quickly, causing the smile to slide off my lips.
“Would you let me leave?” I find myself asking, a question for a question. His arm around my waist tenses, and when I glance at his face I see his dark eyes are open and on Fletcher’s, like he’s searching there for his answer.
“We can’t make you love us if it’s not what you want.” Fletcher reaches out to turn my face back to his. “We can’t change what we are though, either. Not even for you. We’ve done worse than kill your so-called friends who made you want to die. That’s just the only thing you know about.” The admission sends a shudder down my spine.
“We’ll tell you the rest, though,” Boone promises almost eagerly. “All you have to do is?—”
“Ask another day. Not today,” Fletcher interrupts. He tugs on Boone’s hair briefly, before tangling his fingers in mine. “Like I said, Conor. We can lock you up, we can wrap you in Christmas lights. I could even let Boone drive off with you and not let you see civilization for months.” It’s a threat that has me shuddering, but not in the right way.
Not in what most people would consider the normal way, at least.
“But we can’t force you to love us. So you can’t ask if we’ll let you leave, since it’s not just your physical presence we want.”
His words send my stomach twisting into origami knots, and I twine my fingers around Boone’s on my hip, holding him there like he might leave.
Or rather, like I might leave.
“You want me to love you.” It’s not a question. It can’t be now, with what they’ve said and, more importantly, what they’ve done. They’ve killed for me, lied for me, and done everything they can to show me how they feel in their own fucked up way.
“What if I can’t give you an answer to that yet? What if I tell you I need time to figure it out?” I’m not sure that’s my final answer, and when the words come out, I realize quickly that it’s not. But I still want to hear their response, anyway.
“This is going to be where I tell you that I’ll fuck you until you can’t even think straight, let alone walk away from me.” Boone chuckles. “And then comes the part where Fletcher gives me that look, you smack me, and we don’t get anything accomplished in this conversation.” He bites my shoulder lightly to make his point and I reach up to tangle my fingers in his hair almost like Fletch had.
“Then you can’t, and then comes the point where I ask if you want me to drive you to the airport today.” Fletcher’s words are slow. Careful. I can feel Boone tense behind me, and even behind his always-guarded expression, I think I see something in Fletcher’s eyes that I don’t expect.
Vulnerability.
Before I can answer, there’s loud knocking on the door and our impressive doorbell rings, waking Sitka and sending her into a fit of howls and yodels that sound like a very confused ambulance. I sit up as Boone rolls away, glancing down at them in confusion.
“Surely that’s not Dad and Cheryl, right?” I ask, scrambling to my feet. I yank on my sweatpants and a t-shirt I find on the floor, making my way down the stairs before the other two are up or dressed. With excuses ready on my tongue, I grab Sitka and open the front door, prepared to see either my dad or Cheryl standing there with their arms full of things they picked up at flea markets and gift shops on their drive here.
Instead, Detective Ramirez and Detective Harper stand on our doorstep, again in their slick coats and aviators.
“Gosh you’re loud,” Ramirez chuckles to the husky, holding his hands out for Sitka to sniff. “Sorry to bother you this morning, Miss Maxwell.” He smiles brightly at me but I just tilt my head, studying him.
“You woke me up,” I admit, letting go of Sitka now that she has no reason to sound the alarm. Apparently the two detectives aren’t her idea of interesting, and I hear her thump back up the stairs seconds later. “I was sort of panicking and thought my dad was here already.” I have no reason to lie, after all. And the truth makes for a better story anyway.
Except for the part about being woken up by them, of course.
“We’re headed back to Albany,” Detective Harper tells me after a brief hesitation. She removes her glasses, revealing dark, unfriendly eyes set over her flat, unfriendly mouth. “But we thought we’d stop by. You know. Just to see if there’s anything you thought of that you wanted to tell us.”
Now I get why they think I might know something about the murders last year, and it makes irritation spike through me. How dare they use my own prior ignorance of the victims’ identities against me? They’d clearly read about what happened back at SIU. They know what those three did to me.
Yet they’d elected to keep me in the dark to maintain the upper hand.
“I’m really sorry officers.” I shrug, a hapless smile curling over my lips just as Ramirez corrects me, the word detectives rolling off his tongue with practiced ease. “Right, gosh, I’m so sorry. It’s early as hell and I am just really out of it.”
Ramirez looks at me, studying my face like he’s looking for the right thing to say, but I just smile brightly at him and don’t give him the chance.
“I don’t have anything for you, so I just hate that you came all the way up here. I’ll be honest, the roads up here suck and I literally panic anytime I have to drive in or out of town.” Folding my arms, I lean against the doorframe, refusing to look away from them or give them any cause to think I’m hiding anything. “But I really don’t know anything. The last year or so was pretty hard for me.” My voice turns a bit cool around the edges, because I know they’re aware of this story.
Which makes this all seem a bit predatory.
“I wasn’t in any condition to come up here last winter. And I was trying to stay away from things that might umm…trigger me, you know?” It’s true enough that I can make it sound vulnerable, and I look down as if it’s too hard to really talk about. “So no, I really don’t have anything for you. I’m so sorry, though. I feel really bad that you came up here?—”
“It’s fine.” Ramirez doesn’t sound so friendly anymore. Instead he sounds frustrated and exasperated. I can’t help but wonder if I was his last lead. His only lead.
And then it makes me wonder just how good my stepbrothers are at hiding their tracks.
Just how practiced .
I miss the first part of whatever Ramirez says next, but I do catch the end of it so I’m not caught off guard when he reaches out with his card pinched between two fingers. Taking it, I nod my head sympathetically.
“Yeah, absolutely,” I agree. “If I think of anything or hear anything I’ll call you, no problem. Have a safe trip back. Do you want anything? I may or may not have a lifetime supply of chocolate milk here…” My offer is declined, just like I’d expected it to be, but I stay leaning on the doorframe with my bare feet getting cold as they backtrack to their SUV, only narrowly avoid hitting Fletcher’s truck on their way down the long driveway.
Closing the door at last, I turn to face the living room, where Boone sits on the couch playing with Sitka. From the kitchen I can hear Fletcher’s voice, and it sounds like he’s on the phone.
“They’ll never know it was us. We were really good with this one.” Boone doesn’t look up when he says it, and I cross the room to sit down beside him, a bit of unease prickling up my spine. Cautiously I turn to look at him, a surge of affection and trepidation crawling along my insides.
“Did you guys really mean it?” I ask, reaching out to comb my fingers through his addictively soft hair. It prompts him to look at me, and he tilts his head, wordlessly asking me to clarify.
“Did we mean what, princess?” Fletcher sits down on my other side, leaning in close so he can throw an arm over my shoulders, his thigh a solid line against my own.
“All of it,” I reply. “That you love me in a…not so sibling-like way?”
“Yeah,” Boone promises, answering before Fletcher can. He reaches out, twining his fingers with mine. “We definitely mean that.”
“What about the other part?” I swallow my nerves, knowing I have to ask. “That you can’t change. That you’ll kill again?” I want to know more. I want to know the who , the why , the when , and the where. At the same time, I don’t think I do.
“Yes.” Fletcher reaches up to grip my throat, pressing me back into the back of the couch. “We are what we are. And we can’t change that.”
“Did you mean what you said about letting me leave? If I really wanted to?” I almost don’t ask, but really I have to. The words won’t stay bottled up as my heart races in my chest.
They look at each other, a silent conversation passing between them. “Do you actually want to leave?” Boone asks at last, and I squirm in my seat with both of their eyes on mine.
“No.” The word is barely audible. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Fletcher’s fingers stroke over my throat and he studies my face while Boone leans in to rest his chin on my shoulder. They’re warm and safe, but more than that, they’re dangerous .
Their warmth is both a promise and a cage, though I can’t decide if it’s one I want to get out of or close the door and throw away the key to make sure I can never leave.
“We’d…try,” Fletcher admits with a wry grin. “I’d make sure we tried.”
“But we might not succeed,” Boone growls in my ear, reaching out to wrap his fingers over my thigh. “So we’d have to keep trying, I guess. Over and over.”
“Until you never want to leave again,” Fletcher finishes.
Somehow it’s the answer I expect, and my heart speeds up a little to remind me this is a bad idea. But I take a breath, refusing to let this freak me out.
“It’s a good thing I’m willing to stay then. To try . But…” I bite my lip and reach up to grip Fletcher’s wrist and tangle my fingers in Boone’s hair. “You’re welcome to work on convincing me to stay. You both probably need the practice, and I probably need the reassurance.” I barely get to finish my words before Fletcher’s mouth is on mine, and Boone is nipping at my throat, their hands finding every bit of skin they can and already searching for more.
Like they need to show me, again, that I’m theirs.
Until I really do want to stay wherever they are, no matter what it is they do.