11. Thorn
Chapter eleven
Thorn
I know I should be at the office right now, asleep in that custom-made Murphy bed, but I couldn’t go back. I drove around for a few hours until it was dark, and then I pulled over and checked the cameras at the house. I don’t have one in the guest room where Ephemeral is, but she must be in there because she’s not anywhere else. The house is still. Silent. The way it always is when I’m not there.
Peach Lips undoubtedly sleeps on her bed, so she’s not on any of the cameras either. The cat posts sit empty and unused like they’ll be after Ephemeral goes back to her life. I’ll donate them to an animal rescue. I did my part. I fixed what I broke. It took longer to get this job done than most, and it wasn’t the way I wanted, but client satisfaction matters to me one hundred percent.
I should be happily sleeping, all thoughts of this strange and wild ride of a client put long behind me. Fuck-ups fixed. Check. Hands washed. Check. Loose ends knotted and tied up as tight as they could ever be. Check.
That’s all Ephemeral and Peach Lips should be—clients scratched off the list, another job accomplished. Something broken that ended up turned around. Yes, it cost more money than it should have, but I have lots to spare. You can’t put a price on client safety and satisfaction.
I should be getting Warren on the line immediately and making this merger happen.
I should be doing a lot of things.
But I’m not.
I’m sitting under a large tree in my backyard and watching the waves crash against the small cliffs. Quite violently, I’ll add, because it’s a windy night, but I find the turbulent water soothing. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about the house or the neighborhood. It’s the water I enjoy so much.
Forty minutes later, my peace is disturbed by the back door sliding open. It’s quiet, the sound tentative, but my phone buzzes in my pocket, the camera giving me an alert to the movement in my backyard.
I ignore it, my gaze firmly fixed on the apparition across the yard.
She’s wearing an old baggy T-shirt and shorts. With her galaxy hair flowing in the wind and the moonlight painted all over her pale, flawless skin, she’s a wonder. She captivates me entirely. Body, mind, and soul enchantment. What did she call it? Soul telepathy? But I don’t think it’s working because she doesn’t look my way. She walks across the grass, all the way past the pool and the sheds at the side of the sprawling yard, and past bushes and the row of trees, including the one I’m sitting under.
I should say something, but I just…can’t. I stay quiet and still, hardly breathing, watching as she walks to the railing and wraps her hands around it. She looks so small, her hair blowing forlornly in the wind.
She sighs, and the breeze steals it and takes it directly to my ears. It also brings the scent of her, delicate and soft. Flowers and cat breath. I’m kidding. I think.
What is she contemplating? She seems transfixed by the crashing waves. I guess an unspoken love of the water is one thing we have in common. It can be communicated without the need for language.
I wanted to ask Ephemeral a thousand things in the kitchen, but I realized they’d all be misconstrued after I paid her debt. That was part of a professional fix what you broke, asswad package. Asking for anything personal would have come out completely wrong. You don’t mix personal and professional. It’s better if the personal side never gets involved because personal can cost you everything. I haven’t done anything personal with anyone in years. It’s been the job, the job, the job, with room for nothing else. And I like it that way. I’ve made it that way.
I shift subtly, edging my curled leg out straight. Fuck! The pins and needles hit so hard that I bite down on the sudden burst of pain. It’s not even my hip this time. Just a straight-up dead limb. I must make some kind of noise because Ephemeral gasps. She surges forward at the damn metal safety railing that was installed when the house was built so no one plunged over the sharp cliffs to their death.
Thankfully, she grasps the railing harder. It’s shoulder height, so there’s no risk that she’ll go over with a scare. Still, I’m up and hobbling toward her like I have to save her from going over.
Her lips part when she sees me coming, and her vibrant green eyes narrow in a glare. I one hundred million percent deserve it. I’m out here being an imbecile of a stalker. What was I thinking?
I’m still hobbling since the feeling hasn’t returned to my foot yet, and it’s like a dead limb that I have to drag if I don’t hop. The closer I get, the more weight I can bear on it. Ephemeral’s lips purse, and she voices my thoughts verbatim.
“What were you thinking?” Her lips purse further. “And what on earth are you doing out here?”
I’m embarrassed, so I do what I’ve been doing lately whenever I’m in her presence. I clam up, which is, if you think about it, quite hilarious—that is, my mouth going all clamshell instead of duck-lipped.
Her eyes search my face as if she can see right through me. Is she doing the soul telepathy? I feel a pull on the inside of my chest.
Instead of blasting me or waiting for an answer to her previous question that’s obviously not coming, she goes for something not entirely unexpected, given that I’m sitting all alone out here. “Are you really going to be alright?” Because if I was, why would I be out here? It might be my own yard, but leaving and then not leaving is just plain not alright behavior. I still can’t say anything, so she goes even further. “Who are your people? Where do you come from? Do you have friends and family?”
I stare. It’s easier to be a clam than to try to evade. Because that would only result in stammering.
She keeps looking at me, trying to take my measure. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
I know what way I’m looking at her. I’m looking at her like she’s an ethereal apparition, too beautiful for this earthly plane.
“Alright, well, if you’re not going to answer that, then tell me just one thing from your past.”
I don’t know why we’re talking about this. Do I owe her answers? Can I even tell her anything and still keep her safe? She looks at me hungrily, like she truly wants to know the answers.
“My body count really is zero. I wasn’t kidding about that.” Oh, words. A minor miracle.
I shuffle over to her. She turns away, but not because she wants me to leave. She’s giving me her back because she feels safe enough with me to let me guard her exposed flank. I step into her space and hover there, not touching her. She looks out at the crashing waves and the bright moon glistening on the unruly velvet surface.
She’s so close that I can feel the heat coming off her body. I wonder if she’s cold. The wind has a chill to it, especially when it is this close to the water. I step just a little bit closer, shielding her with my huge chest and casting my shadow over hers.
“You know the facts about me, but you don’t really know me,” she whispers, her voice nearly drowned out by the crashing roar. “You can’t possibly know what it’s like to watch someone you love, the only person in your life, die. It didn’t matter that I was already an adult. It was horrible. My mom was a single mom. I do know my dad, but we don’t really have a relationship. Just like my mom with her parents. They’re not close. I know it had a lot to do with her being a teenage mom. She was tough, though. The brightest light.
“She made up with them in the end, my grandparents. She told them she forgave them when she found out about her heart. No one in the family, as far as she knew, had a history of heart disease, but then she got diagnosed, and so young too. Even after knowing she was not in good shape, they didn’t want to have a relationship with her or with me. How is it even just her fault that she got pregnant when she was seventeen and wanted to keep and raise me? I was already an adult by that point. You’d think twenty years would soften some people, but it didn’t. My mom has two brothers, and even though she called to forgive them, too, they sided with their parents. They’re like…this family unit that just banished her and moved on without her and me. They exist, and I do have people, but it feels like I don’t. My mom made me promise I wouldn’t hate them and that I’d forgive them for being hard and keep on living my life the way she wanted me to, in love and kindness, but that was probably the worst thing I ever did. Not holding it against them.”
She turns to me, and I blank out, hollowing my emotions into a huge, empty space so she can’t read me. My emotions have no place here. This is her story. For her.
“Even though her health was failing, she kept up all this hope,” she continues. “She kept telling me to take things a day at a time. Surgery wasn’t an option because her heart was so far gone. They only realized how bad it was when she had a series of small heart attacks and then finally went to the hospital one night because she was in so much pain. People wait years and years for heart transplants, and she couldn’t get one.”
“I’m so sorry.” The most inadequate words to ever be spoken. My own heart is going to explode, half with sorrow and half with anger. I know it would be far, far overstepping, and it’s the last thing Ephemeral or her mom would want, but part of me wants to find her grandparents and her uncles and—and—
And I don’t even fucking know. That’s how angry I am.
Why does life throw you things like this? The knowledge that if I had just met Ephemeral sooner, I could have helped. I could have bought her mother a heart, paid for better medicines, or taken her somewhere for something experimental. But then, if her mom were still alive, we never would have met. That’s the way life, fate, whatever the hell you want to call it, works.
“My mom wanted me to get tested, and I knew that even though I wouldn’t be able to get insurance in the future if I did have something wrong with me, I did it anyway. I just couldn’t live without knowing, and a lot of the time, it is genetic. Thankfully, there’s nothing wrong with me. Do you know how amazing parents are? My mom cried with me when we got the results. She laughed, and she wanted to celebrate. All the while knowing she was in bad shape.”
“I can understand that. You were her greatest treasure.”
I once had a mother who would have done anything for us. As soon as I was old enough, I did anything for her and my brothers. Anything and everything I could. And when I was literally done with that, I was chewed up and spat out. They didn’t want the person I was.
The bitter memories attack me, but this isn’t my story. This isn’t my time. I keep my face neutral. I keep the rage and sadness, bitterness and betrayal from twisting my features.
“My mom didn’t want the house to go toward paying the bills and debts, or the car, or her small savings, but I was adamant. I had a home nurse at the end because she was scared of hospitals. I thought, fuck the cost. I’ll spend the rest of my life paying it off if I have to.”
She sniffles but doesn’t start crying. It feels like my chest is a giant, overripe fruit that is about to bust wide open. I’ve seen a lot of shit most people shouldn’t have to see, but watching Ephemeral struggle for control and seeing her eyes shine in the moonlight, both with love and so much pain, is almost more than I can handle.
“I just…out of all the emotions I’ve gone through over the past years, I just miss her so much.” Her hands ball up, and she turns her face away from me, looking over my shoulder at the moon, the galaxy, and all the unknown. “I know people talk to the ones they’ve lost like they’re here, but I can’t do that. I know she’s gone. Maybe she’s out there, but I can’t feel her the way I did. It’s different now, and I hate that. I hate that I’ll never feel close to her again. At least I can talk to Peach Lips. Not the way I talked to my mom, but I can talk to Peach Lips about her. I can tell her stories. I can laugh, or I can cry. I can also just do nothing and say nothing.”
She brushes at her eyes, which makes my insides turn into a storm far more ferocious than the water out there. It's all I can do not to take her into my arms and hold her. I don’t have permission, and right now isn’t the time to ask. I would feel like I’m taking advantage of someone else’s vulnerability. Or… maybe this is how people do it. Connect with another person. It’s ridiculous that I can run through fire or have bullets raining down all around me and feel safer. At least then, I’ll act. It’s not the adrenaline. I have plenty of that coursing through me.
“I guess I’m still kind of haunted, but do you ever get over something like that?” She shrugs, brushes at her eyes again, and sniffles loudly. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this. It’s not like you’re that easy to talk to, and you’re certainly not torturing it out of me.”
I’ve never felt as though I owed anyone anything, or maybe it’s more apt to say I haven’t really cared. The last time I cared was the time it broke me, and I haven’t gone back to that. It’s not like I made a vow against it. The opportunity just hasn’t arisen. It’s hard to get close to people when you surround yourself with a growing legend of a reputation. It serves like a fifty-foot wall, barricading the world out.
Well, I’m about to step outside of that wall. I’m not scared, but I am nervous.
“My people are…back in Tennessee, where I grew up. I was also raised by a single mother. And I’m the oldest of three boys. My mom was always looking for love, and she found it, or what she thought it was, in all the wrong places. We all have different fathers, and it made people look at her like she was trash. It made me so angry my whole life. We could never get ahead. She took care to always keep us safe, no matter where we were living. She made sure the guys she thought she was in love with never looked at us wrong or abused us in any way. In that respect, I can at least say they were half-decent. It was more like they were the type of men who wanted one thing from a beautiful woman—and my mom was and is beautiful—and when they got it, they didn’t stick around for long after. They weren’t father material, and they had no interest in raising kids. Apparently, my father split as soon as she told him she was pregnant, but at least my younger brothers’ fathers paid her some child support on and off from a distance that they wanted to maintain.”
It would be easier if I could tell this to her back, but of course, Ephemeral gives me all her attention, her tear-stained, extra luminous eyes fixed raptly on my face. She’s so close, but she still maintains a distance, her face open like she knows how hard this is.
I’m with her on the I don’t know why I’m telling you this front.
“We never had much money, and when I was sixteen, the payments just stopped. My mom was already working two jobs. My little brothers were ten and eight. Markus has dyslexia, but everyone likes to call him stupid. He was struggling especially and getting bullied, not just by kids but by teachers. We lived in a small town, and once you’re labeled trash, it sticks with you for life. There’s this odor about you that…lingers.”
Her nose wrinkles as if she can smell it, but then her eyes narrow and harden, flashing at the injustice. Ephemeral isn’t the kind of person who would have seen something like that going on and let it stand. Even as a kid, I bet she stood up for justice and tried to make the world a kinder, better place.
I didn’t give a shit about the world. I just wanted to get my family out of that town. I thought if we could go to the city, if we could just leave and start over, maybe things would be easier. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have to work herself to death, and my little brother could get the help he needed.
“I was sixteen, but I was a huge kid. I was popular because I was a jock. Football, especially, is the golden ticket. I probably could have gotten a scholarship, but college and a real job were too far away. My family couldn’t wait years.”
“You dropped out and went to work.”
“I dropped out and paid someone to get me a pretty ironclad fake ID. Some small towns are just that way. There’s enough squirrely shit going on that someone knows someone who knows someone who can do something like that. You can legally join different branches when you’re seventeen, but even that was a year away, so fake ID it was. It cost everything I’d saved from working odd jobs over the years, which wasn’t much. I didn’t tell my mom I was going to do it. She never would have let me. To her, it was so important that we all finish school and go to college if we could and get a good job. She didn’t want us to take the route she’d taken, even though none of us would have called her wrong for it. How could we? All she ever did was work herself half to death to keep us together.”
She studies me intently, seeing into me and reading between the lines that I’ve done my best to obliterate. I don’t want people to see, and I don’t want them to know. I’m not ashamed, but my life? It’s private. It’s off-limits. I’ve never had the slightest urge to let anyone in, but here we are, in my backyard with the trees and the water and the moonlight. Ephemeral bites her bottom lip, waiting without demanding that I tell her anything else, just letting it come, and it keeps coming and coming like a tide I can’t hold back any longer.
“The rest is obvious history. I worked hard, found some hidden talents, and ended up working in special ops. And just like so many others before me, when that was over, I was lost. By then, my mom and brothers were living in the city. I’d been sending home pretty much everything I was making. They had a good apartment—a two-bedroom. Mom was down to working just one full-time job, and my brothers went to a good school. They both excelled at sports, and Marcus got the help he needed. Sean was set to graduate in a few months, and he was going to a state college on a full scholarship for wrestling. I was so proud and so, so happy they were living this life without me. But coming back was a mistake. Like so many others, I found it nearly impossible to integrate back into regular society. The issue was never violence. There was never a scary moment where I wasn’t in control of myself. It was the opposite. I was so shut inside myself.
“Finally, my mom took a day off work. She was there when I woke up, set for another day of ghosting around the apartment. She told me I had to leave. That I had to find something else to fill the rest of my life with. And that I needed to talk to someone.”
Ephemeral rubs her arms together, and I notice the goosebumps along them. The wind has picked up even more, and she’s obviously cold. I slip out of my black hoodie and hand it to her. She hesitates but eventually slips it on over her T-shirt.
I’m not a feral beast of a man. Before Ephemeral, there was no woman who affected me. I appreciate the beauty in people like an artist or a sculptor, and then I move past. I’m unprepared for the jarring chain reaction that happens when I see this tiny woman dwarfed by my massive sweater. It’s so big that it goes down to her knees, covering her shorts as well. My cock swells, punching against my zipper until I’m hard as lead.
Over a sweater.
My sweater.
Could it get any more caveman?
Never ask if something could get more of something. Because the answer is always yes. When she smiles softly at me, I imagine kissing her sweet mouth and kissing her until she begs me to strip her out of her clothes and taste her sweet body.
I almost reach out. Almost. But then she speaks, and her tender voice, devoid of pity and rich in understanding, digs under my skin and swells inside me. “It must have been hard to hear someone you loved and trusted telling you that you had to leave. Even if she meant well, it would have felt like a betrayal after your sacrifice.”
It’s been so many years now that I have almost no reaction. “I didn’t take it well. I didn’t think of what I was doing as a sacrifice, but I was angry. There was no way I was in the right frame of mind. I felt like I was getting kicked out. As though my family took what I was offering, but they didn’t really want me. Like they didn’t care. For years, when my mom and brothers tried to reach out, I refused to answer. They didn’t want me. They wanted the money, which I continued to send.
“Because of my past, I was an ideal candidate for security. I got hired and excelled. Long story short is that the boss there was a good guy. Ex-service himself. He gave me the name of someone he’d talked to, and she sorted me right out. By then, the anger was completely gone. I just didn’t know how to fix what was broken. She helped me work on myself. With the contacts I’d made, I started my own security firm. I knew people and met others, and in short order, we’d created a good thing. It kept rising and rising and getting bigger, fast. With just a few high-profile jobs, I had the money to expand, to take on more of those same jobs, and hire more people.”
My heart does something horrible every time I think about my family. It contracts with regret, but right now, it squeezes at the look on Ephemeral’s face. She doesn’t care about the company right now or about the money. That’s not what’s important. I watch her lips work around the words, her eyes boring into me to judge if it’s safe to ask.
“Do you talk to your mom and brothers? Do you have a relationship with them?”
My throat closes painfully, and I shake my head. She looks like she wants to reach out to me, to touch me in comfort. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to want to pull back, but at the same time, blood, adrenaline, and desire go careening through my veins.
I want to have her touch me. I want her to pull me close. To be the first one to dare to do it because I don’t think I’m brave enough to make the first move.
“You haven’t talked to them since the day you left?”
“Not in any meaningful way.” It makes me sound like a supreme asshole to say that out loud, but Ephemeral sees right through that.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how hard that is. Did you not…that therapist you were seeing—did you talk about any of that with her?”
Another shake of my head. It was easy to discuss my professional life, the shit that was bothering me, the ghosts that lingered, my future, and all the shit related to me, but my family? I don’t know why I couldn’t go there.
“I think maybe you should try again. Misunderstandings, even the trivial ones, can do real, lasting damage. No one is an island. No one can go through life alone. You love your family so much, and it’s such a tragedy that you haven’t truly spoken to them for years.”
“A tragedy of my own making.”
The wind kicks up, whipping her hair wildly around her face. It carries her scent, mixed with mine, straight to me. It makes me feel strangely lightheaded. My breath ratchets up a notch, so different from my normal controlled state.
“That’s not entirely true, but I bet they miss you. A lot. You probably seem untouchable now. Unreachable. Maybe they think you don’t want to see them or that if they tried, they won’t be able to reach you anyway.”
“Undoubtedly,” I murmur.
“I think you should call them.”
“I’ve never really cared what other people think.” It’s an asshole thing to say, and I’m only snappy because things are real and close, and that means painful . It means vulnerable, exposed, and raw.
She snorts. Snorts. She’s having none of it. “Call,” she whispers. “You’ve heard the term before it’s too late all your life, but I’ve lived it. It might be hard and awkward, but you’re a tenacious man. Anything you want, you’ve made into a reality. So do it for this. Money is the easy part, but—”
“There are some things you can’t buy,” I finish for her as the water crashes a little bit harder against the rocky cliffs, buffeting and softening my words by drowning them out.
She finally does it. Her hands move, and they grasp my forearms. I’m still wearing the professional clothing I had on earlier. I slipped on the hoodie before I came out here because it was cold, and it happened to be in the backseat of the car.
“Yeah,” she breathes, looking up at me with an expression I can’t decode. “But that’s not what I was going to say.”
She’s past my defenses, and now she’s touching me. I don’t know what the expectations are with this. With the way she’s looking up at me, her eyes heavy-lidded, her pupils blown, and her lips parted in expectation, she’s begging to be kissed.
And then what?
She has her life. I have mine. Neither of us is looking for that meet-in-the-middle moment. If she did want a significant anything, I know I’d be the last person in the world who would be a suitable candidate.
Right now, I can’t listen to my brain. I’m hearing the wind and the water and my heart slamming in my ribs so much more violently. I feel the breeze buffeting me, her hands burning through my shirt, and a wild storm of butterflies fluttering in my stomach.
Yes. Me. Butterflies.
I need to pull away now before either of us gets hurt, but instead, I find myself taking her chin in my hand and leaning in. She tilts her face up, inviting my thumb to stroke along her soft, velvet skin. I run it along her lower lip but jerk away when she shivers in obvious pleasure. Her eyes glaze over, burning bright with a question. This is the exact moment where I pull away, or at least when I should pull away, but I don’t. I bring my thumb to my own lips and paint them with the feel of her.
It's weird, and I know that, but her eyes widen, and not in a way that says she’s turned off. She’s so much shorter, but she’s the one who grabs the back of my neck and locks eyes with me. She’s the one who exchanges a thousand unspoken words with just that single look.
Soul telepathy.
I might have remained frozen for eternity, lost between indecision, between wrong and right, regret and fear and longing. Suspended in time, moving on with my life while she moves on with hers. I might have spent hours debating with myself over the capacity of my heart or whether it’s just an alleged organ that went wrong somewhere for me. The moment might not have even happened if she hadn’t been the one to surge up and kiss me.
She slams her mouth to mine and grinds her body—a body that makes me crazy fucking hard and hot and lost —against me.
And the moment happens .