CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
I exhaled irritably. “Analise—"
“How about you tell me a story?”
It was my turn to laugh then, before I winced as she made another stitch.
"A story?” I asked, my voice pulled taut by the pain.
“Yeah. Tell me a story.”
“About what?” I asked, exasperated.
"Anything. Something from your childhood."
"I had a fucking shitty childhood."
"So did I," she replied with a smile. "But not all of it was bad. I bet you have something good too."
I wanted to laugh at the thought that there could be anything good in a childhood filled with abandonment, abuse, neglect, and rape. Even my most precious memories were tainted with horrible stains time could never hope to remove.
“Come on,” she encouraged me, poking the needle again through my skin and pulling the thread tight. “Think. There has to be something.”
"I met my best friend," I muttered, grasping for anything to dull the pain in my leg. "He's like a brother to me now."
"Well, that's nice," she said, her tone bright. “What’s he like?”
With my eyes closed, I pictured Shawn. The scrawny blond-haired kid he’d once been.
The man he was now. We used to tell each other everything.
He still told me everything. But the distance I’d forced between us since my days as a contracted killer had begun weighed on me now, and I longed for the way things had once been.
“He’s, um …” I cleared my throat. “He’s smart. Honestly, he’s probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. He knows so much about computers, and he’s very interested in the medical field. The guy should’ve been a doctor. He could’ve been, if we hadn’t been—”
I’m saying too much.
Once again, I cleared my throat. “Anyway … he’s a good guy. One of the best I’ve ever known.”
“He sounds nice,” she whispered, her voice hushed.
I allowed myself to smile, despite the sadness in my soul. “He is.”
"I didn't keep in touch with anybody from the foster homes I was in.”
"Yeah," I murmured absent-mindedly as my vision focused again on that painting across the room, and with it came the phantom face of a little girl I wished I’d kept in touch with.
A little girl who had relied on me.
A little girl who had looked at me like I could protect her from the worst of this world … and I'd failed.
I thought about the two little girls I’d hopefully saved earlier that night, and I wished I could’ve done the same thing for Anna. I wished I could look back and know that, while I had suffered, she had turned out all right.
"What are you thinking about?" Analise asked after a few minutes of silence.
"One of the other kids I met," I replied, shutting my eyes again just to try, try, try and remember.
Her gap-toothed smile as I pushed her on the swing at the playground.
The way she huddled against me as I read her stories at the library.
How she tiptoed into the room I shared with Ike and Shawn to crawl into my bed when she was scared during thunderstorms.
I wished I could've taken her with us. I wished she could've been with us now.
"What happened to him … or her?"
"We were separated," I replied, my voice clipped with tension. “Something … really bad happened, and that was the last time we saw each other.”
Analise was quiet as she worked, sewing me up. She seemed deep in thought, her mouth set in a terse line, her brows tipped with melancholy.
"What happened to your parents?" she then asked.
I snorted at that. She had no idea that the man her mother had married was my biological father. I wasn't sure I ever wanted her—or anyone, apart from Dean—to know.
"My father ditched us," I said. "He'd come back every now and then, when he needed to get laid and couldn't find anyone else. My mother died when I was four."
"I'm sorry,” she replied, and I knew from the sorrow in her tone that she meant it.
"Yeah, me too."
"Do you remember your mom?"
I pulled in a deep breath and tried to force the memory of my mom to mind, but it was a struggle.
"Barely," I admitted, and a wave of melancholy washed over me.
"I remember tiny bits and pieces of things, but it's …
hazy. I have to try really hard to remember anything—her smile, her laugh, whatever—and then it's gone just as quickly. "
"I remember nothing about my biological parents," she replied easily with little emotion.
"Have you ever tried to find them?"
"I did actually,” she said, her tone growing cold.
“As it turns out, my father was a creepy old man who had raped my mother when she was fourteen.
Daddy dearest died peacefully in his bed ten years later at the ripe old age of eighty-two, and my mother slit her wrists a couple of years after I was born. "
"The world is a fucked-up place," I replied, watching the unreadable expression on her face.
"It certainly is," she agreed, holding the needle up and reaching for a pair of scissors in the bag. “My mother’s family couldn’t look at me without thinking about … everything she’d been through, I guess, so …”
The air left my lungs as I shook my head. “They blamed a baby for the sick actions of a disgusting man?”
“I don’t know if it was blame or if they just couldn’t look at me without thinking about it,” she muttered with a shrug. “But sometimes, I wonder how things would’ve been different if they’d just … let me stay.”
There was longing in the way she said that word—stay—and it was in that moment that I truly understood how unhappy Analise was in this life.
Is she a prisoner too?
She released her breath and schooled her features as she snipped the thread, and with finality, she announced, "Well, Doctor, you’re all done."
I tipped my chin. "Thank you, Nurse."
My gratitude seemed to shock her as she turned abruptly to look up toward my face. I wondered if anyone had ever taken the time to thank her before as she swallowed, bit at her bottom lip, then dropped her gaze to the first aid kit.
"You're very welcome,” she replied, soft and shy.
I watched as she pulled out a roll of gauze and surgical tape. She laid out enough to cover the length of the cut, and as she smoothed the material over my bare, injured calf, her touch ginger and soothing, she seemed to disappear to somewhere I couldn’t reach.
"I'm sorry you're going to have a scar through your tattoos," she said quietly.
"There are worse things."
Her fingertips grazed the imagery, her featherlight touch a jolt of electricity that traveled straight to my groin.
This was not the time or place to get turned on.
I needed to get changed and leave this place, but, God, I was lying there, and she was so close.
Her hands were so soft, so gentle. I had never been touched like this, never wanted to be, and the last thing I wanted was to make her stop.
But she has to.
I closed my eyes, demanding my body to not respond, to not fantasize, to not want, but it had already started, and it wouldn't listen. I just hoped Analise wouldn't notice as she wrapped the surgical tape around my calf, securing the gauze in place.
"You're going to want to change this once a day. And make sure you clean …" Her words faded, and her hands slowly stilled.
I opened my eyes to look at her and became all too aware of what had stolen her ability to speak.
Her gaze was fixed on the tented crotch of my pants, and those same delicate fingertips that had pieced my body together now moved with another intention, sliding ever so slowly up my calf, over my knee, and toward my thigh.
"Don’t," I warned softly, catching her attention.
She looked up at me, her eyes hooded with desire and her lips parted. She didn’t listen to me as her hand smoothed over my inner thigh, reaching my groin, and when her firm touch lay over my aching erection, she gasped, the sound breathless, like a lightning bolt straight to my loins.
You told her to stop.
She’s just like everyone else.
But she wasn’t, was she? Nobody else had ever looked at me with such a burning desire, like she longed for this just as much as I did. Like her existence alone depended on the experience of her flesh against mine …
But oh God, if someone saw … if someone walked in …
"Analise," I said through a clenched jaw.
“Please,” she whispered, her hand beginning to move in slight, cautious strokes. “Let me touch you. I need to—”
“No,” I demanded, a direct contrast to everything I longed for. “You need to stop.”
God, I didn’t want her to though. I wanted to rip our clothes off, to lay her on this sofa, to spread her legs wide and feast on her body until the only coherent word left on her tongue was my name and my name alone.
But she doesn’t know my name.
She doesn’t even know who I am.
My chest ached at the thought as I tipped my head back, her palm squeezing and gripping, drawing my arousal closer and closer to the surface.
"You want me," she argued, desperate. “Please. Just tell me—"
“No,” I denied, grasping for my resolve as I attempted to shift away from the hold she had on me.
But she shook her head, her eyes full of anguish as she came closer, her hand now moving with more deliberation.
"I know you want me. I know you look at me. Don’t pretend like you don’t—I can feel it.
And I want you too. God, I want you so much.
I want this, and you have no idea what that means for me.
You have no idea how difficult it is for me to say this to you, to admit—"
"Fuck what we want, Analise," I snapped, not bothering to deny it anymore as I finally wrapped my hand around her wrist and pried it away from my painful erection as I sat up. "What I or you or anybody else wants doesn't fucking matter. Don’t you understand that?"
She wrestled her arm from my grip, pulling it back to her side. "And don’t you understand that I am sick of being told that what I want doesn't matter? Goddammit, I am so fucking sick of being told what to do."
I’d hoped she’d be rejected. I’d hoped she’d take the hint and keep her distance from me and never ever try something like this again because, next time, I wasn’t sure my resolve could be as strong.