CHAPTER TWENTY
MASSACHUSETTS, PRESENT DAY
My old therapist, Dr. Sibilia, would have a field day if she knew that the first time I made out with a woman in years, I struggled to keep my brother from infiltrating my mind.
I just couldn’t stop thinking about that first night after Luke had bought the bike and we’d gone out to a local burger place. We played the part of each other’s wingman, pointing out girls who were both hot and interested. I got a kiss in the parking lot while Luke got a blow job in the restroom, and both of us went home feeling more confident and free than we had since Melanie had left.
But we were also sad. Because even though we’d allowed ourselves a couple of hours to forget that she was gone, we’d still had to go home to a house just as empty as we’d left it, and we’d had to remember all over again that we were orphaned bachelors.
I thought about that now as my hair knotted around Stormy girl’s fingers and our tongues coiled like snakes. I hadn’t felt this kind of good in who knew how long, and every inch of my body pulsed with an impossible, needy ache. But I had been aware since too young of an age that these moments were fleeting, and before I had a chance to commit them all to memory, they would already begin the process of fading.
God, at this point, I could barely remember the sound of my own mother’s voice. How the hell was I supposed to remember the sweetness of this rare woman’s tongue?
But she kissed so well and with so much passion, forcing a memory of Jersey to come to my mind, only to think that she—that cheating, home-wrecking bitch—paled in comparison to this . Stormy girl held me captive within her grasp, steering me toward the bed and pushing me down. Straddling my waist and letting those skirts of lace and tulle to spill over us. She took control, never giving me a chance to hold the reins, and, shit, I liked it— a lot .
I let my hands roam along her back to her bottom. My palms molded over the curved mass of fabric, and I dug my fingers into the flesh hidden beneath. Stormy girl groaned into my mouth, and I moaned back, our tongues never slowing in their battle for more.
“What's your name?” I asked in a breathy whisper, never pulling my lips from hers. Desperate to stop calling her by some silly nickname that wasn't mine to use.
She smiled against me. “That's the first real question you've asked me all night.”
I responded with a huffed chuckle, realizing she was right.
“Stormy.” Her fingers flitted down to the hem of my shirt, disappearing beneath the fabric to trace the faintly defined lines of my abs. “My name's Stormy.”
“Really?” I was taken aback. I hadn’t expected the nickname to be at all similar to her real name, and I opened my eyes to half-mast, only to find hers looking back.
She offered a silent nod, and my heart took off galloping as I remembered that old drawing scribbled on the back of my door.
The spider caught in the middle of the storm.
It had always been a metaphor to describe the shit show that was my life, the misunderstood creature forced to weather every bolt of lightning and crack of thunder.
I had always considered that storm to be full of bad and terrible things. Death, destruction, heartbreak, and pain. But now, looking into those wild green eyes, I wondered if maybe the storm could offer something good, just this once. And how could I deny that possibility when this woman had been given such a name?
The spider and the storm .
Me and her.
“You wanna know a secret?” she asked, her lips moving against mine.
“Hey, can I tell you a secret?”
I swallowed and closed my eyes to Luke's long-ago trembling voice. “Huh?”
“I’m scared, Charlie. I’m really fuckin’ scared .”
“I’ve been thinking about your body since the other day,” Stormy confessed, pushing her hands further upward to my chest. “Like, I had a feeling you’d look good, but this good … I wasn’t expecting that.”
I opened my eyes again to watch her sit up, straddling my hips and moving her hands over my chest and shoulders. I tried to focus only on her. Tried to see her breasts, straining against the confines of her corset. Tried to take in the crimson shade of her blushing cheeks and the fading hue of her lipstick. But while my body was here, on her hotel bed, my mind had one foot in the present and another in the past. I saw the flashing lights flooding the living room of my childhood home. I saw my brother break down in front of me before the cops knocked on the door to take him away.
He would never know this again. I wasn’t supposed to either, but there I was, and it felt so wrong and backward .
Stormy’s hands slowed in their movements as her head cocked slightly, her eyes pinned to mine. “You’re sad,” she said with a hint of wonderment and realization in her tone, like she’d finally figured something out after a long time of questioning. “I always thought you were angry or something, but … no. You’re sad .”
The image of Luke faded enough for her empathic eyes to come fully into view. I pressed my lips together for a moment, searching for my composure.
Then, I replied, “Deep down, we’re all sad about something.”
“I guess, yeah, but most of us can compartmentalize our emotions. You know, like, there’s a time to be happy, a time to be angry, sad, whatever. But you …” She shook her head and, to my horror, removed her hands from beneath my shirt. “I’m pretty sure you’re just sad .”
I furrowed my brow. “I’m pretty sure you don’t know me well enough to make that assessment.”
The words held a playful quality as my fingers roamed from her ass to her thighs, still stretched and spread over my lap, but I meant it. She didn’t know me. And for her to pretend that she did pushed me dangerously close to shutting down again, even if I didn't want to, and I was already starting to wish I had gotten onto that elevator.
Stormy smirked, clearly amused, but her eyes gave her away. “Here’s the thing though, Charlie. Misery doesn’t just love company; it knows it when it sees it. And like I said, I see you, and no amount of broody grumpiness is going to make you magically disappear now.”
I had known this woman for the equivalent of a few days, if that. I knew little about her, outside of what she’d already told me, and she knew even less about me. Yet here she was, making declarations like she did know me, and it was getting beneath my skin.
“You seem a little too confident for someone who doesn’t know a damn thing about me,” I countered.
Her lips quirked into a smug smile as she slid from my lap.
I guessed the moment was over with little thanks to my brain and apparently sad eyes.
“I don’t need to know your favorite food or the name of your mom’s dog to feel like I know you,” she said.
“Sorry to break it to you,” I replied, sitting up and folding my arms across my knees, “but my mom’s dead.”
I didn’t know why I had said it. Not even Ivan—my only friend in the entire world—knew about my parents. It had never come up—I’d never had a reason to divulge the information. Yet I had said something to Stormy with little reason at all. In fact, it was almost as if I’d wanted her to know, to invite her to weather the torrential downpour with me, and that was terrifying the hell out of me.
The grin dropped from her face. “Oh shit. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged nonchalantly even though the familiar pain of a forever heartbreak was already searing through my chest. “It happened a long time ago.”
“How did she die?”
“Car accident.”
Stormy nodded somberly. “That sucks. What about your dad? Is he still—”
“He died with her,” I offered too easily.
Stormy watched me momentarily, chewing her bottom lip before replying, “Wow … I don’t even know what to say.”
“Most people don’t.”
“No wonder you’re sad.”
It was my turn to smirk as I waggled my brows. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and I could only imagine what inquisition she was about to throw at me. Because at that moment, I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, taking note of the time after being oblivious for too long.
“ Shit .” I got off the bed and walked past Stormy to the door while patting my pockets down to make sure I still had my keys.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, panic and concern in her tone.
“The gate. I have to unlock the gate.”
My heart hammered in my chest. I reached out to grab the doorknob, bothered by how the cool metal felt against the coating of fresh sweat on my palm.
God, what an idiot I was. I had been going to bed every night at the same time to unlock the gate in the morning. But the moment I allowed a woman to catch even just a glimpse of my life, I forgot all about my responsibilities.
I never should’ve kissed her.
“The gate?”
She sounded clueless, and for a second, I was irritated by it. That she could have such a total disregard for my career and the things I was trusted—not to mention paid —to do. I was ready to put her in her place, to snap and ensure she’d never bother me or get in the way of my regimented life again. But I stopped myself, reminding myself that it wasn’t her fault.
She hadn’t been the one to kiss me first.
“I have to unlock the gate in the morning,” I further explained, staring out into the empty hallway. “If I have any hope of waking up in the morning, I need to get to bed.”
Her silence was damning. The hallway, her room, the hotel surrounding us … it was all too damn quiet, and I was too damn aware of how fast and loud my heart was beating as I waited for her response.
“It’s not really that late,” she finally offered, unsure as she spoke.
“I'm on a schedule. If I don't go to bed at a certain time, I won't wake up. It's how I work; it's how it's always been.”
She uttered a thoughtful, “Hmm,” from behind me. “I guess you probably know better than I do.”
“About this? Yes, I do.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t know me well enough to make that assessment,” she mocked, throwing my words back at me in a playful tone that made me long to have her body back within my hands.
“Fair enough. Anyway, have a good—”
“Charlie, wait,” she interjected hurriedly, her footsteps matching her urgent tone.
I braved a glance over my shoulder to watch her approach. She had kicked off her heels at some point, and I was reminded of our height difference. With her, I liked it. Not that I’d never been with shorter girls before—at six foot three, it wasn’t exactly common to find women close to my height. But with the others, I’d always found our vertical differences to be awkward and more of a nuisance. For a short time, Jersey had felt like my ideal in every way imaginable, including our modest four-inch height difference. We had felt like puzzle pieces, perfectly complementary and proportionately balanced, until she went ahead and soured every characteristic she’d held in my mind, to the point where I found it difficult to even look at women with platinum hair without the phantom pains of heartache tearing through my chest.
But Stormy didn’t feel awkward. She didn’t call out old pains lingering in the shadows of my past.
Instead, she reminded me of every reason I always hated to be alone, and in the moment, that was so much worse than anything else.
Her cool hand lay over my shoulder, and her other reached up to my cheek. With little persuasion, she lured me in, like a siren at sea. My mouth was drawn to hers, and as her fingers danced lightly over my bearded jaw, her lips moved against mine in feathery, dreamlike touches.
The kiss ended, but her hands remained where they were, one cupping my jaw and the other on my shoulder, as she tipped her head back and stared through my eyes, straight into the soul I’d kept hidden and silenced for what now seemed like an eternity.
“I don’t know what it is about you, but for some reason, kissing you feels like a privilege,” she whispered in the open doorway of her hotel room. “Thank you for that and thank you for tonight. Even though you’re still sad, even though you might shut me out again tomorrow, I hope that, somewhere in your heart, it means something to know that this was the best night I’ve had in a really, really long time. Because, honestly, as lame as it sounds, for me, it means a lot. Probably more than it should.”
Her voice weakened in strength the longer she spoke as her eyes misted and gleamed in the hallway light.
It hurt me to know that I—a man she hardly knew—could inspire such emotion. That she’d been denied something as simple as a good night for so long that this—a night of mixed signals and a push and pull I couldn’t help—was enough for her to feel grateful when, from where I stood, she deserved perfection.
I wrapped my hands around hers, lowering them away from my face and shoulder, as our foreheads touched, and my gaze looked to her lips, all to avoid seeing the hope in hers.
“The privilege was mine,” I replied in a voice hoarse and unused to talking.
Then, before she could reply and distract me again, I released her hands and hurried out the door and down the hallway to the elevator.
This time, I didn’t turn around.