Undertow

9. Razor To The Soul

9

RAZOR TO THE SOUL

I return to Julia’s house well after midnight. That’s how long it takes to clean up a bloody crime scene and put myself back together. None of it was new for me, but there are some things that break the subconscious no matter how numb you tune your controlled awareness.

Thankfully, that timeline is also plausible for a “bartender’s shift” and travel back to Undertow.

Julia straightens from the couch when I push through her front door. My chest tightens at the relief on her face. I don’t even remember the last time someone cared enough to wait up for me.

Her eyes skim my face in the silence, widening at the damage.

God, if she only knew the depth of the carnage she’s looking at.

“Shaw…”

“You’re still up,” I say with a crooked smile.

The sting of my lip reminds me how messed up I must look. I showered and put on a new uniform, but there’s not much you can do with the rest of an amateur ass-kicking. Exactly why rule number one in torture and physical reprimands is to stay away from the face.

I learned that before I learned how to read.

“What happened?” she breathes out, coming around the side of the couch.

“What, this?” I wave over myself. “There was this truck full of kittens and…”

She rolls her eyes, but I see the hint of a smile on her perfect lips. I force away thoughts of how soft they are. How they taste. How much I want them to soothe other parts of my body and fill just a sliver of my void with something good for one damn second.

To have someone touch me who isn’t trying to hurt me.

“Kittens, huh? Must have been quite the brawl.”

I shrug with a slight smile. “What can I say? They outnumbered me. Besides, who’s gonna fight back against those tiny ears and adorable paws?”

Her amusement fades as she moves toward me. After just a few steps, she stops abruptly, as if she also knows we can’t be near each other without giving in.

“What really happened? Did they do this to you?”

My humor dies too, and I avert my gaze in a telling response. I’ve spent the last hour trying to figure out how I was going to transition back to Undertow. I’m so drained mentally and physically, all I could come up with was playing on her sympathy to buy more time and emotional equity.

I’m just… tired. So fucking exhausted from it all.

Lifting my head again, I allow the fear to seep onto my face. “They found out I ran and wanted to know why…” I blink back emotion and stare at the floor. Real emotion? Do I even know how to cry anymore?

“Hey, it’s okay,” she says softly, closing the protective gap between us.

The air changes when our atmospheres collide. I feel her approach in the barometric pressure. When her hand rests on my arm, what was meant as a gesture of comfort becomes something else. Her fingers sink into my skin. She steps closer.

“I’m scared,” I say, searching tempting blue eyes now just inches away. “I want to help you, I just…”

“You’re shaking.”

I nod, blinking through my fake fear. Or real. Or… God, I don’t even know anymore.

I am shaking. I’m fucking trembling and I can’t stop it.

“I’m sorry,” I say, fighting the rebellion of my body. My mind is still on duty, but the rest of me… Something is cracking inside. I’m losing control.

“I thought I could do this.” I have to do this.

Get yourself together, Shaw. Get yourself together, you weak piece of…

My eyes clench shut when I can’t stop the memories.

“Oh, you’re gonna cry now? No one wants to see your pathetic tears.”

The click of a lock.

Darkness.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Small fists beating, pleading, bleeding against indifferent steel doors…

“I’m sorry!”

“Shaw?”

I force my eyes open again, jolted by the present. I’m shaking so hard now, I can barely stand. Is it cold in here? No, the chill is coming from inside me.

Julia frames my face, forcing me to look at her again. To confront her sympathy.

A deep ache punctures my chest. Her concern stings as it trickles over my crusted soul. I don’t even know how to absorb kindness anymore. Protective shells don’t distinguish cruelty from compassion.

“Hey. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure it out,” she says softly.

Before I know what’s happening, I’m enveloped in warmth. Drowning in something that doesn’t hurt when I breathe it in. Her arms tighten around me, and I can’t stop my own from clinging, grasping at a splinter of light. Another crack rips through my wall. Another foreign sensation.

Comfort. Peace.

I bury my face in her hair, inhaling flowers and citrus until the air no longer crushes my lungs. Her fingers drift to the base of my neck and run in soothing patterns over my skin.

I feel like a child for the first time in my life.

“Your girlfriend is a lucky woman,” she whispers into the battered silence.

No, she’d be a cursed woman.

She’d be another chapter of blood spatter written on my fractured heart.

I can’t sleep.

Every time I close my eyes, I see more cold, dead eyes staring at me. Patrick, Kristen, others I didn’t even know. So many soulless stares peering back, each with a promise that one day it will be me locked in a forever-gaze at nothing.

What story will Patrick’s blood tell?

At 4 AM, I finally give up and try a shower. Hot water can cleanse more than a body, and I stand under the scalding spray for a long time. It stings my open cuts, exposing several I ignored until the burn brings them back to life.

But I like pain. It’s a badge; not of honor, but of surviving another day. If I didn’t hurt, I don’t know how I’d be able to tell I was alive. Pain is all that separates the living from a corpse.

I tried to be quiet, but Julia is waiting on the couch when I return from the bathroom. I already folded the sheet and blanket, making a neat pile on the backrest. She studies me in the soft glow of the floor lamp, her gaze running over my wet hair, down my chest, to the towel around my waist.

“You’re up early,” she says.

“Never slept.”

She nods, tracking me as I cross to my suitcase to pull out a change of clothes.

“I couldn’t either.”

“No?”

“No.”

I tug on my boxer briefs and let the towel drop. Her eyes are glued to me, flaring hot through the dim light. She pushes up from the couch, and I stiffen at her approach.

“They got your chest pretty good too,” she says, studying the ugly bruise on my ribs. I flinch when she runs her fingers over it. “It hurts?”

I shake my head. “That was an internal reaction.”

Her gaze lifts to mine, searching as her hand curves around my side, searing my skin wherever it touches. Neither of us speaks when her other hand pushes up my chest and hooks around my neck, forcing our bodies close.

I feel every inch of her. She grinds slowly in search of every hard inch of me.

“You don’t really have a girlfriend, do you. You wanted to keep me away. Why?”

My pulse pounds at the sultry tone of her challenge. I’m wired for the fight. The lie coats my tongue to deflect her. But would it work this time? The potent demand in her touch makes anything else seem irrelevant.

She searches my eyes with a silent warning. It’s going to happen, Shaw. You can’t fight it. Let it happen. Just give in.

“Julia,” I say in a cautioning tone. It’s all I can do. A Hail Mary to prevent what’s about to be a huge mistake. Because once our lips meet…

Explosion.

She grips my hair, moaning into the kiss as if she’s in pain. Maybe she is. Maybe I am too. Badges of pain come in all forms.

I back her toward the couch, matching her aggression with my mouth, my hands, my body that’s hardened into blatant need. She pulls me on top of her, locking her legs behind mine to fuse our hips together in a sharp rush of pleasure. I rock against her, loving her reflexive gasp, the way her eyes close and her hips instinctively seek more. Again and again and again we collide, violent and aching.

“Please tell me you have protection,” she breathes against my ear as I sample the soft skin of her neck.

I do, I just haven’t decided if I want her to know that. It might be the only remaining lie that can save us from each other and what I know is coming if we don’t put an end to this.

Regret.

Heartache.

Blood.

But I don’t stop it. I can’t this time.

Her heels tighten around the backs of my thighs, forcing me into her center. She arches her back with a groan, absorbing the pressure through thin fabric. Her needy response tells me she’s hungry for the rest. Desperate to consume me. Devour and own in a way no one has before.

Because it’s not her that’s different. It’s me. The sudden desire to let go. To be cherished instead of used. To be made whole by human connection, not stripped and tortured by it.

Is it possible? Is there a place where the sun doesn’t rise in Hell each morning? I know there is. An old man risked his life to prove it to me.

“Shaw?”

I blink down to soft blue eyes engulfed in passion—and something else. Something far more dangerous for a predator who only breathes poison.

I can’t look anymore.

“I want you,” she says quietly, tracing my cheek. “All of you.”

I wince before I can stop it.

She doesn’t want me. She wants a ghost. An idea. She wants the thing I fucking made her want because that’s what I do. Make people desperate for lies that will destroy them.

There is no me.

I lean in anyway.

“I want you too,” I say against her lips, sealing it with the kiss I’ve already logged as her favorite. I dip my hand beneath her shirt, molding it over her breast until she bucks into the friction. Her hand covers mine to urge harsher contact.

You can still stop this. You need to stop this.

I do. I will. I just…

Can’t.

She’s an anesthetic. Compassionate lips that numb the pain.

For ten damn seconds I feel like more than an imminent corpse. Like I’m a living, breathing being filled with red hot blood that’s telling a completely different story.

When she fully surrenders with a moan, I realize it’s because I have also.

We’ve melted into one.

She pulls me into her again with a hard gasp. Her hips lift for the rest, and I don’t even try to stop my body from responding this time. It’s no use. Deep down I know I’ve already broken my hard, steadfast rule: Do not expose your heart.

That heart is now a mangled mess in her hands.

“So, do you?” she breathes out.

Her face is a mask of agony, pleading for my poison.

“Do I what?”

“Have a condom?”

The cancer says yes.

Julia’s sheets are deep violet. They also wrinkle with each furious movement. Just like blood, they tell a story with their shifting formations.

Right now, her sheets are being dragged over a firm mattress, absorbing sweat and heat and gasps of pleasure.

“Shaw,” she moans, digging her heels into my ass.

I’ve been here before. My name cried from so many lips in countless orgasms, faked and real, given and received. But never have I chased one the way I do for her. Desperate to see her come undone and give herself over in an explosive flash of ecstasy. Never have I gotten pleasure from someone else’s.

Because as she writhes and moans with every glorious inch of her body on display, it’s her face that’s captured me. With each thrust, I lose myself in imploring eyes, begging for more than a fleeting burst of pleasure.

She wants me . Not sex. Not gratification. Me . A connection beyond this moment.

“Yes, right there. Don’t stop,” she breathes out, her voice hoarse with her imminent eruption. I want her to have that, to have everything.

Even the things you can’t give.

Yes, but in this moment, I can give a lot.

Stars flicker in my void, ignited by wave after wave of heat spreading throughout my body with each collision. Faster, stronger, harder. We drive together, her fingers raking my skin, clawing for relief until?—

“Shaw!”

Her euphoric cry deserves its own composition book. An artistic symphony I’m already craving to hear again and again. I could too, whatever she wants, but when I sense her satisfied collapse into the silky sheets, I let myself release as well.

She wants something else right now. And for a person whose survival depends on reading these situations, I come down from my high realizing I have no fucking clue what that is.

I’ve never been here before.

A foreign ache lingers in my chest as she smiles up at me. Her gaze is saturated with the sated lethargy I’ve seen so many times. This, right here, is the moment I get what I came for, awash in the relief that it’s almost over. Except this time…

I don’t want it to be over.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” she says softly, her voice a mixture of awe and confusion.

I roll off to catch my breath and ease the ache behind my ribs. I can’t look at her as she props up on her elbow beside me. She traces intricate patterns over my chest, outlining my tattoos, wondering about each one. Questions I’ll never answer because, like my words, my art is restricted access. I began the visual transformation when I turned seventeen, telling the real story I was never allowed to express.

My words are all the things I can’t say. My tattoos are all the things I can’t be. That’s why my real soul is clawing its way out of my hand, begging to be seen.

“ I see you, son. I know you.”

Gramps tried. He thought he could rescue me. Maybe he did in a way. Preserved the part of me no one knows, not even him. The part no one can ever know.

“Shaw?”

I direct my stare back to her face, watching concern displace her contentment.

“I…” She stops and looks away, her face flushing. “Crap, I don’t know how to say this. Um…”

Her focus lands on the purpling bruise on my side, and I see the guilt there. She blames herself for causing my pain. If this were a different life and I were a different person, I’d correct her and put her mind at ease. Tell her I was born this way. That these aren’t bruises, just fresh birthmarks.

“What is it?” I ask, mostly to fill the dangerous silence. I can’t be alone with my thoughts right now.

She pulls in a deep breath and brushes the damage on the side of my face. “This is all my fault,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.” She leans in and skims my wounds with a kiss.

“It’s not,” I say. “I agreed to it. I took the money.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean. All of… this.” She waves between us. “I only pretended to be into you in the beginning. I was manipulating you so we could use you. But…”

Her teeth sink into her lip as she studies my face.

“But?”

“I didn’t know.”

“That I’d get hurt?” Of course she did.

“That it might become real.”

I absorb the sting of her confession without a flinch, even projecting a good amount of sympathy and surprise.

“I hope it’s real,” I say with a smile. “I mean…” I lift the sheet to expose our naked bodies.

She laughs softly, then sinks to my chest with a groan. With her cheek tucked against my chin and her other arm draped over my stomach, she settles into me like this moment is also real. My arms loop around her, tightening her to me as I press a kiss to her hair. What if it was? What if for one fraction of a second I wasn’t so fucking alone?

But it’s not. Her truth has no bearing on mine.

“I swear, I don’t do stuff like this,” she says absently. “I haven’t even seriously dated a guy in eight months.” Her fingers skim along my side in a gentle caress. “I still don’t understand what’s happening right now.”

“You don’t have to justify anything. I get it.”

“Do you?” She angles up to see my face, and I lift my head enough to meet her gaze. “Is this weird for you too?”

“So weird,” I say with a grin.

She smiles back and relaxes again. “I just didn’t want you to think… I don’t know. I never would have let it get this far if it wasn’t real. I’m not that much of a monster.”

I hold steady through the blow. My lips don’t even budge from their convincing arc. She’ll never know the chokehold on my conscience right now, the razor to my soul.

“I don’t think you should go back,” she continues. “It’s a miracle they let you go in the first place.”

Her fingers graze my side in gentle strokes. I focus on a small crack in the bright yellow ceiling to center myself.

“I have to go back,” I whisper.

She tenses, her arm cinching around me. “We can find another way in. I can’t stand the thought of you getting hurt again.”

“They bought my story that I spent the night in Undertow to be with you. If I don’t go back, they’ll know I lied.”

“So? If you’re gone?—”

“They might go after you.”

“Shaw…”

“I’m going back. I told your mother I would do this, and I keep my word.”

My jaw clenches at her resigned sigh, the way she burrows into me like I’m something worth saving. How can she actually care about me? She doesn’t even know me.

You know why she cares.

I close my eyes.

You know.

But she doesn’t. She’ll never know how many hearts I’ve stolen and broken in less time than I’ve spent in her arms. That I will crush her just like all the others no matter how much it might crush me too.

“At least let me make you breakfast first,” she says, lifting her head to blast me with an adorable smile. I can’t help but return it and draw her in for another kiss.

“How about I make you breakfast?”

“You’re really sweet, you know that?” Her smile stings when it lands on me, and I struggle to force one back.

It’s the least I can do for destroying her.

Lies drip from your tongue like blood drips from a wound,

Unknowingly and without contemplation.

Of course you don’t know the damage they’ll do just as the blood has no understanding of the stain it’ll leave behind.

You’ll soon become the trace remains of a knife too deep to remove,

my heart and mind the victim at the wrong place, wrong time.

Scar tissue in the shape of poetry, the way a strong grip bruises the throat enough to tell a story without any need for words.

-JD August 14