Chapter 26
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
STORM
“You can borrow my toothbrush.”
I stare at Sloane Stevens and marvel over her.
She is blond and beautiful and green-eyed and her lips are pink and her hips are small and her throat is too and she’s holding out an electric purple toothbrush that was just in her mouth, for me to put in mine.
Her face is shiny and clean and I watched her do some sort of skincare process that took a good half hour. The entire time I sat on the edge of her bed, my feet planted on the floor, my knee bouncing.
There’s an ache in the back of my throat.
I’m not entirely sure what it’s from.
All I know is that in this lilac-coated and strawberry-scented bedroom, I feel nothing like I felt in the hotel with my dad.
Nothing like I felt in the marina with Lydia, her body tense against mine.
Here is a bubble.
Calm.
Safety.
Away from the storm.
Pretty and gorgeous and a place I will never belong.
She’s in a lilac sleep set; a collared shirt, loose on her body, and boxer shorts complete with black buttons.
Her tanned legs are muscular and even her toes are cute, painted white, nails cut short.
She cocks her hip in the small bathroom as she waits for my answer.
There’s a lilac shower curtain pulled closed, a bathtub with all sorts of loofahs and sponges and bubble baths and bath bombs around the ledge.
There’s a book too, I already scoped it out when she gave me an official tour of her place.
Poetry. Something by some guy named Charles Baudelaire.
He must be French. I should tell her I am too. Well…not really. But half French Canadian has to count for something.
I take a breath and glance at the offering. No one has let me use their toothbrush before. Not that I’ve asked. Or needed it. But it’s still a first.
“Or not,” she says, rolling her eyes. But as she goes to put it on her counter, full of makeup and face products and a stack of soft white cloths she said she uses specifically for her face, I stand up and close the space between us.
I pull the toothbrush from her fingers and wrap one arm around her back.
She lifts her chin to look up at me, her eyes bouncing between mine. Her skin looks so good, soft and glowing and perfect.
I want to kiss her.
I need to kiss her.
What would she think of what I’ve done this past week? What would she think of what my parents do? What would she think if she had been Lydia, running away with me from the man who was no doubt set up to kill us? By whom, I still don’t know.
This is no world for Sloane.
This is no world for anyone close to me. Cortland is a hardass and he’s only afraid of losing Remi or Lyle, but I still can’t let him near any of this. I don’t know what to do. He won’t stay in West Virginia forever. Not yet, anyway. Remi wants to graduate, and she deserves to.
How do I keep juggling all these strange parts of my life and where does Sloane fit?
At the ocean. Running a marketing company. Smiling at rich people and selling their products and attending balls or galas or whatever the hell people like that do in their free time.
Not my life.
Not the man slipping drugs under those same rich people’s doormats before their kids wake up. Not the man supplying them with an addiction that will ruin their family’s lives. Not the man with blood on his hands and too many sins in his system to count.
Sloane’s palm comes to my chest, right over my heart.
She doesn’t stop staring up at me.
My baby, she called me.
No one has called me that before.
“What happened to you tonight?” She sounds nervous.
She should be.
But not because of me.
I’d never hurt her.
Which is the problem, though, isn’t it? If that’s true, I’ll let this go. I won’t take her to this fucking nineties concert tomorrow in another part of the state and I won’t stay with her at the Ritz-Carlton I booked us a suite at and I won’t do this to her.
I sniff, a bitter taste down the back of my throat.
Her light brows pull together. They’re thin, and I like them like this. They fit her face so well. I’ve seen them thicker, and she’s always stunning, but this suits her.
“Did you…” She takes a breath, exhales, her shoulders dropping. “Do cocaine?” She asks it like she’s never asked anyone that before, like she’s never even said the word, and she probably hasn’t.
How does she even know? Who the fuck is doing blow around her? Has she ever?
“What do you know about coke, huh?” I’m ignoring her question and the way she narrows those turquoise-green eyes into slits, she knows it.
Lydia knows all of this life, doesn’t she?
Lydia saw a dropped body on the stairs.
It hurt her, somehow. Not the death itself, but the vision. There was a memory, wasn’t there?
We have that in common.
In my mind, there is a closet, and there’s blood, and there’s a girl.
I don’t know why I cling to it.
Sloane, by contrast, is out of reach. Outerspace. Too high to touch.
Lydia is in the gutter, and there are other women like her I could belong to.
Not this one.
Too precious.
Honey, I called her the last time I was in her house. I’ve never said that before in my life. But…it fits.
She curls her fingers into my shirt. I draped my jacket and the holster on the desk chair at my back, across from her bed. I saw her glance at the holster but she said nothing, and I haven’t gotten the gun out of the drawer she put it in. Not yet.
“Where were you, before this?” she counters, not answering me, and I want to squeeze her for it. But I just grip the toothbrush tighter and don’t let my hold on her go, either.
“I would ask you the same but it looked like you were fucking Dax on the couch or something.” I try to say it indifferently, but the image of her skirt messed up and her top unbuttoned, it makes me clench my teeth and splay my fingers deeper against her spine.
“I told you to come in the morning.”
My temper rises. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. Always. But it doesn’t stop me from saying, “Then I’ll leave.”
Yet I don’t move.
Her nose wrinkles up in what looks like a feline snarl. “Why’d you come at all?” she challenges.
“Why’d you let him touch you?” I reach out and slam the toothbrush on the counter.
It wobbles over and clatters to its side but I don’t give a fuck.
I grab Sloane’s face with both hands, tilting her chin up higher, my thumbs over her lips.
I roll the bottom one down and see her pretty, perfect teeth and I want to fucking devour her.
Actually, I want her her to devour me. Her fingers around my throat, squeezing hard, letting me know she’s mine.
I’m delusional. “Why’d you let him put his hand up your skirt?
Did he finger you, Princess? Did you let him dirty you up?
What did his cock taste like in this pretty little mouth?
” I drag her lip down further with my thumbs and her cheeks flush pink, her freckles stark on her face.
She pushes against my chest, like she wants me off her, but I don’t let her go.
“Is that the kind of boy you want? Golf shirts and daddy’s money and in twenty years, an affair with someone half your age that he hides and you ignore because at least you have your dream house and your yacht vacations and designer bags to cry into?”
“Says the boy in Gucci sweatpants.” Her lips move around my thumbs.
I’m secretly pleased she noticed but I don’t dare say it.
“Yeah, but I didn’t get these from day trading or business deals.
I got them from the same shit that’s in my system right now.
” I smile as her eyes become slits. “Go ahead and tell me you want a guy like him, tell me you want a high tea, vacations overseas life. Tell me I’m too beneath you, Sloane. ”
She swallows, her slender throat bobbing.
Her nails curl into my shirt again, hurting me. I want them on my bare skin. I want to fuck her out of my system. I want her to break my heart tonight. I want all of this to end.
I want that hotel room with Dad out of my head, and the body on the stairs of my friend out of my mind, and the way his girlfriend’s corpse felt so light when I dropped her into the lake and I want all of this blood off my hands and I want to make someone like Sloane proud to be with someone like me, but I know I never will.
Break my heart so I can forget yours.
“I told you before,” she says, and her voice is ice cold. My mom speaks like that sometimes. Wicked. Frozen enough to send chills down your spine. “You don’t know anything about what I want.”
I pull her close to me by my fingers wrapped at the top of her throat.
She grabs my shirt with both hands and I lean down so my lips are over hers.
“Show me, Sloane.” Then I tilt my head and I kiss her, hard. I bite her bottom lip and roll it out and she moans against my mouth, and it’s like she melts into me.
She’s opening for me and her tongue twirls around mine and her body arches into my own and she’s digging her nails in so deep I think—hope—she’ll rip my shirt.
I run my hands down her body, around to her ass, and I squeeze her close to me, my cock rock hard and pressed against her tummy.
She moans again and it’s like my blood catches fire.
Fuck, I want this.
I want it so bad.
I want you so much.
But I know what I’m allowed, and this is as far as it’ll go.
She nips at my top lip, then licks where she bit me, and I wonder if she can taste the coke on my tongue, if she can feel all the blood I’ve seen. I think of Dax doing this with her and I think maybe now I’ve gotten a taste for murder because I wouldn’t mind dumping his body in a lake, either.
Our mouths devour one another, heat coursing through me as she stands on her tiptoes and arches even closer, only our clothes between us.
I want to crawl inside her skin. I want every inch of me in her.
I want to break her apart from the inside out.
I want to keep her safe.
I want to fucking worship her.
But… Your heaven doesn’t belong in my hell.
When we can’t breathe anymore, we both pull back, temples together, breath mingling, eyes glassy.
She doesn’t let go of me, and I know I’m squeezing her ass so hard there’ll be bruises, and my dick grows even harder, imagining it.
Mine, mine, mine. It’s impossible, but it won’t leave my head.
Yet the woman from over the summer, with the latex, and the stench of decay in my nose, and the blood on my hands, and the way I fucked her so hard I nearly broke her? Yeah. I can’t do that to Sloane. I won’t.