18. Slade
SLADE
“So darn lucky.”
The unknown voice filters through my consciousness, trying to pull me out of the darkness where the sounds of her cries swirl around like a haunting melody.
But they follow me, clutching at my ankles, trying to drag me back down.
“It meant nothing, Slade,” she says. “I love you. All of you.”
Pleading, begging. Wanting me to believe her.
I don’t.
I should stay here. This is where I belong now. In the place where I’ll hear her cries for eternity. Subjected to endless torment.
All deserved.
The voice mumbles something and coolness sweeps over my brow. It’s there, always there, tugging at the edge of that fine line that I’m suspended across. One side reality, the other… purgatory.
“Saints were watching over you,” the voice says, winning out this time, and breaking me free.
Only whichever side of the line I’m on I’ll never know freedom again.
I crack my lids open, squinting in the light. Everything’s blurry. Everything hurts.
“There you are.”
Her face is out of focus, but her voice is clearer now.
She starts talking again, telling me I’m lucky.
Familiarity niggles inside my aching skull as something damp is removed from my forehead and replaced with something colder.
“I know you,” I say.
My voice comes out as little more than a hoarse whisper.
“Ssh. You need to rest.”
She holds something to my mouth and water passes my lips.
I swallow, wincing. My throat feels like a dry desert that’s finally received its first drop of rain. Only the rain burns like acid.
“Saw you at the marina,” I croak. “Crying.”
“You don’t have amnesia, then. That’s a good sign,” she says kindly.
I struggle to focus on her face, but my eyes are bleary and stinging.
“Not your fault,” I whisper.
She doesn’t speak for a while. I lie in silence as she mops my brow, memories of running into her filling in the blanks about what she looks like. How her eyes were filled with sadness as she sat weeping, her feet dangling off the boards at the end of one of the walkways.
I’ve always hated seeing women cry. My mom. My sister. Nothing gets to me more.
I’d asked her if she was okay. And she told me she would be. That she was just remembering.
“What happened to her… you’re not to blame,” I say.
My vision finally clears and the sad smile on her face is waiting for me.
“Neither are you,” she says softly.
I manage to hold her eyes for a heartbeat before my lids close and I’m pulled back under, my words slipping out in a broken confession.
“Not true. It happened because of me.”
I wake with a start, my brow clammy with sweat.
The sky is a deep orange, and Jude’s lying, curled into my side, stroking my chest.
Shit.
I reach up and crush a finger and thumb into my eye sockets, rubbing away the memories that haunt me whenever I close my eyes.
I fell asleep beside her. Something I should never have allowed to happen. Sleep can’t be trusted. Secrets that are hidden so deep that it takes everything in you to keep them locked firmly away are safe when you’re awake, when you’re in control.
But when you’re asleep your body is the one in control, not your mind.
People talk in their sleep.
I’m a reckless idiot. A Risk Taker.
The taste of memories is thick on my tongue as I glance down my body. The sheet’s covering me to my waist, but my T-shirt has ridden up, and the source of Jude’s fascination becomes clear.
She’s tracing the B at the center of the tattoo that brands the skin above my heart.
Each stroke of her fingertip is like a hot poker searing my skin.
Her eyes flick up to mine and she watches me watching her. She holds my gaze in a silent question as she continues stroking my skin.
But she doesn’t understand the enormity of what she’s asking.
I pull my T-shirt down, then reach beneath the sheets, locating my pants, which are still halfway down my thighs, dragging them up. Jude catches my hand in hers and shakes her head.
“Don’t,” she breathes.
She leans forward, pressing a lingering kiss to my lips, then sits up and peels her dress over her head. I haven’t seen her breasts bare, only felt them in my hands, and against my tongue in the dark, and hell, they’re magnificent.
A second ticks by where we just look at one another. She’s here, asking a question without words. Offering me something I can never give her in return.
But fuck, if the last three years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m a selfish bastard. And that life can end in the blink of an eye, and everything you thought you had time for can be gone. Just like that.
If I’m about to walk out of here, then I’m doing it with some memories that will make the journey to my grave a bit more bearable. Purgatory is a lonely, soul-destroying place when all your mind can focus on is what put you there in the first place.
Jude is once again offering me a sliver of peace that I’ve only ever gotten from seeing pleasure bloom in her eyes. Put there by me. Something beautiful and pure that wants and needs me in order to exist.
I reach for her, cupping the weight of her breasts in my palms so I can serve each nipple up to my greedy mouth and suck and bite on it.
She tips her head back, arching into my touch. Her hair cascades over her shoulders and she sinks her hands into my hair, tugging it and moaning softly before she slips her fingertips down my rib cage, easing them back up and bringing my T-shirt with them.
A stronger man would be able to resist her. But the moment I lift my chin and she brings her mouth to mine, coaxing my lips open with a sweet little press of her tongue, I’m gone.
I help her pull my T-shirt over my head, then hold her face with a gentle grip on her neck as I bring my mouth back to meet hers. I kiss her with growing heat, unable to break away.
Taking everything I can, I devour her, spurred on by her wriggling against me and pressing her soft, beautiful body against mine, the heat from her skin seeping toward my dead heart like it can save it.
It can’t.
But I still take all she’ll give me. Kissing her deeper, before turning my attention to her neck and biting and sucking it with growing urgency.
I squeeze her breast, thumbing her nipple and groaning at the way she pushes it into my hand.
We explore each other without speaking. Just sucks, kisses, and bites.
A mewl leaves her lips as I flip her onto her stomach, then climb to my knees behind her and pull her onto all fours with my fingers pressing into her hips.
“Condom,” I murmur, pausing, even though I’ve already fucked her bare and come inside her.
“I’m on the pill. It’s fine, as long as you’re—?”
“I’ve not got anything, if that’s what you’re asking?”
“Okay. Me either,” she breathes.
We fall silent as she reaches back and guides me inside her. I stare at my dick disappearing in her body, all four metal bars happily accepted and sucked in deep.
We fuck without words. Just the sounds of her breathy pants and my deep groans as I drive in deep like I could actually stuff myself inside her and live there.
I reach around and touch her clit, rubbing a fast orgasm from her before spilling inside her with a rough grunt that makes my lungs feel like they’re on fire.
She whimpers in my grip, and I circle my hips until every drop of cum leaves my cock and is wedged deep inside her.
Then I pull out and stand abruptly.
“You’re leaving?” she asks, straightening up and staring at me as I pull on my clothes in a rush.
I hate the disappointment in her eyes, so I look away, zipping up my pants, then reaching for my T-shirt.
“I can’t stay.”
“Why?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. Nothing I say will make sense. It’s taken three years for something to happen that’s allowed me to feel peace again.
Jude is that something. Kissing her, touching her, feeling her come apart beneath me.
Looking into her eyes as she gazes at me like she sees someone worth looking at.
But with peace comes hope. Hope for more. Hope for the future. And hope is a useless emotion for a man like me.
“You don’t have to leave,” she says, pulling the sheet over her chest and covering her beautiful breasts that were in my hands and mouth only minutes ago.
I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand. What happened?”
When I say nothing, she sighs. “Did someone do something to you? Did you do something?”
My jaw clenches, and she homes in on it like it’s an admission of something.
“What? What did you do?” she whispers.
“This is over.” I pull my T-shirt over my head, using it to shield her eyes from me as I deliver the words flatly without emotion.
“What?”
“You and me. Fucking,” I deliver harshly.
She doesn’t react, doesn’t even flinch. It’s like she knew I was going to say it. It’s like she already knows me. But she’ll never know everything. If she did, she wouldn’t be looking at me the way she does anymore. Like I’m worthy of her. Like I’m redeemable.
She’d only be able to look at me with pure hate.
“Right… because I think your rules about being nothing to each other are shit? Because I want to know a little more about the guy I’m sleeping with? A guy who acts like he has a billion regrets, and they all lead back to an identity he’s turned his back on?”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you fuck like you’re angry at the world, then kiss like you dream about not having to be anymore.
I know you’re talented and make money from your art but wear the same three old T-shirts like you never spend any.
And I know there’s a sweet old lady from the hotel who comes to leave money for you that she says is yours and talks about you like you hung the moon.
Yet you act like a grade A asshole to me most of the time.
Like you’re purposefully trying to make me hate you. ”
“Leave it,” I hiss.
“Fine.” She shrugs. “I’ll leave it. Because you’re right. This should end between us. Right now.”
I jerk my head at the finality in her voice.
“I’d rather have nothing than be nothing,” she says, looking at me in pity.
I walk to the door and pause.
I look back for far longer than I should, tracing over her eyes, so full of her fire, over her little upturned nose, and her full pouty lips. And over her hair, flowing in wild waves around her shoulders.
She’s fucking beautiful.
Exactly the kind of woman I’d have loved to call mine once.
In a past life.
My chest burns, and I utter the confession quietly before the door closes behind me.
But I know she hears.
“Both feel like shit, Jude. Believe me.”