Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Faye
My cheeks feel impossibly hot.
And I know they have to be bright red.
But I don’t back down from the curiosity in his eyes—
“Tell me,” he commands.
Or the order.
“I should refuse that, just on principle alone.”
He grins. “You know there’s no getting out of it now. You opened the can and the worms are escaping.”
“I’m not sure that’s how the idiom goes.”
“I’m sure you’d know,” he teases. “But quit trying to distract me.”
“Gray—”
He bends and kiss me, not stopping until I’m limp against him, my body flush against his rigidly muscled form. My lungs work in overdrive, but he’s steady, confident…
Overconfident, his eyes lazy and half-mast.
“What do you need to confess, Red?” he asks quietly, and even as I try to summon some outrage for his cockiness, the orders, he strokes his hand along my side, dipping his fingertips beneath the hem of my shirt.
I shiver, his roughened fingertips the sweetest abrasion.
Distracting me.
Especially when his next question is as silky as his caresses.
“Tell me,” he murmurs against my earlobe.
“I saw you and Courtney through the window,” I blurt.
Holy shit.
I did not just say that.
I push against his chest, but he just bands his arms around me and holds me tight.
“Uh, we should keep moving,” I say quickly. “Maybe I can find—”
He touches my cheek. “You saw Courtney and me doing what?”
Oh, dammit, there go my cheeks again.
I stare down at the ground, tap my foot on the charred blades of grass. “Hello? This is the time for you to open wide and swallow me up.”
He chuckles then cups my cheek, eyes coming to mine, “Tell me, Red?”
And…ugh. I started this.
So dumb. Why am I bringing up Courtney when he’s finally moving past her? And worse, doing it in a way that has me looking like a sick freak who peeps on people minding their own business.
“Um…”
“Red,” he says again, tugging lightly at a strand of my hair before tucking it behind my ear.
“I saw you two kissing in the kitchen.”
A pause, his eyebrows lifting. “You mentioned that in the hospital.”
“Oh.” Right. When I’d yelled at him.
“But it wasn’t just kissing, was it?” he asks silkily.
“Um. Well…” My cheeks flame. “It was…creative kissing.”
His brows fly up higher. “Creative how?”
“You and her…she—” I drop my head back and groan. “Okay. Look, I saw you go down on her. Well, less down and more lifting her up so you could lick her while you were standing and her legs were over your shoulders and her pussy—”
My throat dries up.
He’s still.
Quiet.
Totally thinks I’m a sicko.
And yup, the ground could seriously do me a favor right about now.
Sink hole, anyone?
Gray laughs huskily. “So, you have a voyeurism kink, Red?”
“I—”
He grins and it’s that’s he’s smiling—laughing—instead of being mad that undoes me the most.
“I’ve never done it like that before, okay?” I snap
“The stand-up oral sex or playing the Peeping Tom?”
“Gray!” I say, cheeks blazing. “It was hot—you two are gorgeous people. But it was seriously wrong!” I exclaim. “I should have turned away once I saw what you guys are doing. I mean, I did turn away. I just also turned back and—”
“First,” he says, slanting his mouth over mine for a short, blazing kiss. “I think this once again proves that I need to invest in some fucking curtains.”
Hysterical laughter bubbles up in my chest.
“Second, yeah it was wrong.”
My gut sinks.
“Not because you looked, baby,” he murmurs, rubbing his nose against mine.
“But because it was Courtney and me.” His mouth hitches up.
“It was consensual. It was manipulative. It was seriously fucked-up.” A sigh.
“But most of all, it was wrong because I wish it wasn’t with her, but rather with you. ”
My lungs hitch. “I was imagining it was me.”
He nips at the hinge of my jaw. “Then I think I’ve just accepted another challenge.”
I shiver.
“We’ll make that fantasy a reality…” Another nip, the tiny bite of pain quickly soothed by his lips, by a flick of his tongue.
But before I can ask when exactly that will be, he’s kissing me senseless.
“Red?” he asks when he pulls back, leaving me a limp, breathless mess.
“Y-yeah?”
“After curtains.”
“What’s that?” he asks a little while later, his eyes on the charred remains that I think are made up of my bedroom and the room that had been immediately below it—
My office.
“What do you mean?”
He releases my hand then moves toward the collapsed wall, stepping over the edge.
“Wait,” I tell him. “The engineer—”
“I’m not going far,” he murmurs. “I’m just—” He stops maybe two feet into the wreckage then crouches, shifting pieces of wood to the side as he searches for something.
Something that has my breath catching when he rises a moment later, his hands covered with soot, his expression unreadable.
Then I’m processing what’s in his hands.
And it all bursts forward again.
Over the last couple of weeks, the raw pain has faded, the tears burning constantly at the backs of my eyes lessening, and somehow as I met with the insurance agent and the engineer, talked through the next steps with the contractors, this hasn’t really felt like my house.
It was a project, a task list full of items to tick off, one after another.
Yes, there were moments it all welled up. Where I remembered.
But not like this.
My mother’s soft hands braiding my hair for a dance recital.
Kicking a soccer ball around the back yard, cheering in victory when I “scored” by slipping the ball past my dad and between the two pillars of the porch we’d designated as the goal.
So many rounds of UNO that the cards were tatty, the colors rubbed off on the edges, their corners dog-eared, their middles rounded from being shuffled time and again.
Gray settles the metal box in my hands, and though it’s not even remotely heavy, the weight of the memories inside have my knees buckling, my body collapsing to the charred ground.
He curses and drops down next to me, but I’m already wrestling with the partially burned and misshaped lid, nails scrabbling as I tear at it, seeking purchase. It’s so swollen, it doesn’t move, or maybe it’s that my moments are so jerky that I can’t make it move.
Either way, after a few more seconds of scrabbling, Gray slips the box from my now soot-covered hands and carefully removes the lid.
“Here,” he murmurs, settling it back into my lap.
My gaze is on his face, on his gentle eyes, the concern in the emerald-green depths intense.
It’s not until he nods slightly that I find the courage to look down.
The red cardboard of the UNO box is the first thing I see and a sob hitches up in my chest as I carefully trace my fingers around the worn edges. I feel a tear slip free, slide partially down my cheek before dropping down, settling on something metal and shiny below it.
I lift the cards out then feel more tears come as I unearth the photo of my parents and me in a silver frame, the three of us smiling like loons, though I’m doing it upside down, my hair spread out below my head as my dad holds me by my ankles.
“You look like your mom,” Gray says softly, shifting so he’s sitting behind me, his legs on either side of mine, his arms wrapping around me.
Steadying me.
Because I’m trembling.
“I know,” I whisper back. “Nana used to say that and I’d lie and say I didn’t believe it.”
“Why?” he murmurs, the word soft in my ear.
“Because then she’d pull out the family pictures, prove me wrong.” I close my eyes, remember sitting with her at the kitchen table, paging through the albums, memorizing each and every similarity I shared with them.
My mom’s hair and smile.
My dad’s eyes.
Nana’s nose.
Pieces of them in me…
And maybe I was never truly alone.
How can I be when they’re always a part of me?
He laughs softly. “Sweet, sneaky Faye.”
Smiling, I pull out the rest—my parents’ wedding rings, the necklace my mom picked out for my wedding day.
My first book that I wrote when I was in preschool, the tale about a misbehaving dolphin barely legible, and we’re both laughing at what Gray calls my “truly inspired” crayon drawings that are very not dolphin-like.
“I think,” he murmurs after we’ve both pulled it together, “that when you rebuild, this”—a finger gently tapping the cover I’d colored with un-ocean-like streaks of puke green and red and neon pink (so maybe I hadn’t fully grasped continuity at four…
or color theory)—“should get a place of honor on your bookshelves.”
I carefully settle it back into the box with the rest of the mementos then turn in the circle of his arms, cupping his face in my palms, streaking ash on his skin, not that he seems to mind.
“I love you,” I murmur, brushing my lips over his.
His mouth kicks up. “The real me or the fantasy me?”
I laugh, can’t help but kiss him as my amusement is still vibrating off my tongue.
Then I settle my forehead against his.
“The good thing for me is that they’re one and the same.”