Three Months Ago
I gave Heather the Gollum speech right after that night at McKinney’s. She’d threatened Autumn, tried to make sure she stayed clear of me. Stupid woman. After that, I wouldn’t even let her in my door.
“Look, Heather, I’m not interested in you.” She blinked three times and then her eye did this weird little narrow thing that left them twitching. I’d never seen anything like it.
“What do you mean you’re not interested in me? Like, not for something serious or, what?” That’s when her hands started shaking and her lip curled.
Barking mad.
“I don’t want to date you.”
Heather’s head tilted like a dog hearing something two rooms over. But then she smiled, a little too wide and I slipped onto the front porch so she wouldn’t be tempted to sneak inside.
“We can take it slow,” she said. “I’m in no rush.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face and sighed. She wasn’t going to make this easy. So I cleared my throat to make sure there wasn’t a waver and then took her shoulders between my hands to stare at her hard. “Heather. I don’t want to date you. Not today. Not tomorrow, not ten years from now. I don’t want to fuck you. I don’t want to hang out with you or flirt with you or anything remotely similar to any of those things. If you wouldn’t mind, kindly fuck off.”
She jerked out of my grip and went for my stomach, but I stepped back, got inside before she could damage me proper. All I heard after that was her raging on about some guy on the cricket team and how she hated rugby players.
It didn’t matter to me. I was thoroughly happy to be rid of her.
For a time at least.
I’d put thoughts of that insane girl out of my head. With her not tagging behind me wherever I went, I could focus on watching over Autumn, though I knew she probably didn’t appreciate it. I kept back, stayed away from Autumn after I lost control in the bathroom at McKinney’s. I even managed to sweet talk her godmother, Dr. Winchell, into securing a first edition copy of To Kill A Mockingbird signed by Harper Lee for McShane’s birthday. That earned a few tears from her and a hug I thought might not ever end, but then her da showed up and I walked away from her to enjoy her party without my shadow.
The thing about lurking, watching, guarding her without her need or want of it, is that I’ve discovered a few things more about Autumn. First and foremost, that she really is the strongest woman I’ve ever met. Take the Dirty Dash, for example, the marathon that she and her friends trained for over the past few months. She wanted to run it to prove to herself that she was recovered from the wreck that nearly crippled her. Morrison’s disgusting bet only fueled her further and when that slimy bollocks tripped her near the finish line, she stayed in control, composed. He couldn’t touch her, not really. She still won. He was out, disqualified, and she’d accomplished what she set out to do—on her own. He tried to stop her, hurt her, but she flew above him, rose beyond his hold. Rose beyond everyone’s.
That night, I couldn’t stay away. I wanted to watch over her. Morrison isn’t the type to let things lie and so I camped outside her building, soaked from the downpour that covered the town, on guard for that bollocks. She caught me, made me come out of the weather and before too long, I stopped holding back. I stopped denying what I wanted. I forgot about Joe’s secret, though I did try to tell her. But her lips felt too good on my neck. Her fingers burned too hot on my skin, her need too great to resist, not like I wanted to resist, and finally, finally we were together, like we were meant to be; and she wrapped her legs around me, touched me, milked my dick like she needed to drain me dry. The truth was forgotten somewhere between the sweat on our bodies and the cool satin of her sheets.
I slept in her bed, holding her, smiling in my sleep as the scent of her hair, her skin drugged me. She was my addiction.
The next morning, I heard her in the shower. I’d had a taste, but it wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. The silhouette of her body behind the curtain pulled me in. She looked glorious with the hot spray from the shower beating against her pale skin, marking it red. She felt better when I slipped inside with her, asked her if she was sorry what we’d gotten up to the night before.
“No. Are…are you?”
Was I sorry? Was she barmy? Touching her felt like coming home, it felt safe, warm. So I told her she was all I thought about, all I wanted. How full she made me feel, how real. But then she brushed against me, moved her clever fingers onto my arms and I buried what was bursting in my chest, what I wanted to scream to the world like a daft wanker. What I’d known for ages and couldn’t admit aloud.
I loved her.
Her back against the tiles, legs around my waist and I hit home again. Heaven. Freedom. I had it all in the palm of my hands, it surrounded me, threatened to burst forward, explode.
The room steamed, heavy with the fog of the hot water and our breaths meshing together but all I could feel was Autumn, all around me, taming me, consuming me, squeezing me until my knob ached so fecking good. “You fit me so well, Autumn,” I told her, but I didn’t just mean how her hips dipped perfectly to nestle my hands or how her tits thudded against my chest in perfect synch with my movements.
I licked the water from her skin, lapped over those beautiful pink nipples and she responded, snaking her hand up the tile behind her, bracing and opening even further to me, squeezing me so that I could barely keep upright.
She began to fall apart, eyes slamming closed, mouth working in a tremble, her nails digging into my shoulders as I moved my hips faster, but I had to see those gray eyes. I wanted to see the light shift, brighten in them when she came. “Look at me,” I whispered as though we weren’t completely alone. “I need to see you.”
“I…it’s too much.”
Autumn didn’t like losing control. She didn’t like being weak. I understood that, but that moment wasn’t a time to close herself up. I knew she wanted to let go. I knew there was no way I could stop touching her, bringing her closer and closer to the brink. So I gripped her tight, went deeper into her, smoothed my hands down her arse, squeezed, dipped my finger between her cheeks. “Look at me, love.” When my finger went lower, dipped further, her eyes flew open and a slow, lazy smile made the dimples in her face deepen. “There, that’s it.”
“How are you doing that?”
I didn’t answer, not at first, too caught up in the low moans working out of her throat. “Like that, McShane?”
“Ye…yes. Oh God—”
Her body loved how we moved together, how I touched her and when she came, clamped down harder, firmer, I wanted to climb inside her, stay locked with her in that moment, just the hot air of the room and weak whines of her voice keeping us grounded to the earth. I needed her, I knew that, like I never needed anything in my life. “I want you to say my name… like you mean it,” I said, steadying her face between my fingers. “I want you staring in my eyes, looking at me while I fill you up with nothing but my name coming off your lips.” Another pound into her, then two, each harder than the last and then I lowered my voice, latched my teeth onto her earlobe. “Do you mean it, McShane?”
“I…I do,” she said, her voice cracking when I pushed deeper.
“Then say it. Say it for me, love.”
“Declan.” She said my name like a promise and anything I felt before, any hope I ever had of never looking back, fell away completely.
Yep. Definitely in love with her.
The scent and taste of her, the feel of her around me, gripping me, touching me, was my undoing and I knew I’d explode soon. My eyelids lowered, then Autumn tightened her hold on me just a bit further when she touched my face. “I need to see you too.”
Completely, ruddy done for.
Autumn’s smile was genuine, honest, and I returned the stare she gave me as I came. My mind warred between the shatter of my body and the way her eyes moved over my face. I wanted to tell her everything; why I walked away, how I couldn’t stop thinking of her, how I belonged to her, but the only thing my mouth let me utter was muffled behind her lips when she kissed me.
“What did you say?”
I didn’t care that I was vulnerable, that she probably didn’t feel the same. She had to know. I had to tell her. My voice shook, whispered with the sigh I released. “I said, ‘I love you.’”
Her face gave nothing away. Her expression was shocked, taken aback, eyes wide, mouth rounded. “I…”
“Don’t, will ya? I don’t think I could bear to hear you reject me. Not yet. Don’t say anything until you know it.”
I wanted to stay there with her. Her wrapped around me, my confession floating around us, but I couldn’t take the shock on her face. What if she didn’t want me the way I wanted her? What if all of this was just a bit of fun for her? If she was thinking anything of the sort, I wasn’t prepared for the letdown. Not just then. So, I left her in the shower, left her later that morning when Joe called me saying that he didn’t feel right. By the time I got him to the hospital, it was almost too late.
Heart attack and then, chaos. Him rushed to surgery, me out of my mind with worry. Autumn and me that morning, the night before, got pushed to the back of my mind. So did Joe’s secret, which I never got around to telling her about. It all seemed so unimportant in the wake of what was happening to my stepdad.
And when she came to the hospital, when she watched Joe laying weakened, near death on that ICU room bed, everything flashed back. Everything. What Joe had left behind in Cavanagh all those years ago, surfaced in an ugly, ungraceful, hurtful way. And I had known about it. I had known and never told Autumn. Where was Joe’s protection now? Where was the benefit in keeping these secrets?
I had betrayed her.
And so she abandoned me.
I only wanted her to hold me, to tell me that this could not be the end of my world, that Joe would survive, that she would forgive me.
But she didn’t. This time, she was the one who left. She left me to face the mortality of the only father I’d ever known, alone. The shock, yes, the shock for her must have been devastating. I cringed to think of it. But after what we had shared, I was completely adrift. Scared. And shite, but I didn’t know what to do. The doctors wanted decisions made. They had questions, courses of action to follow, preparations to make. They needed more from me than I thought I could give, but there was no choice. I couldn’t pause my life and wait for it to make sense again.
So I sat there in the waiting room with the sting of Autumn’s rejection still sharp in my mind, clueless. And then Heather appeared, like fog on a sunny day. She was talking, saying things that didn’t register before I even noticed her sitting next to me.
“And you’ll have to make sure he doesn’t move unless the nurses are there. Don’t try to help him on your own. They have rules about that kind of stuff.”
“What?” I said, as though Heather’s face was just coming into focus. Everything else had gone blurry, like I was just waking from a nightmare.
Heather touched my hand and I didn’t swat it away. “It’s okay, Declan. I can help you. My Daddy, last year, he had a heart attack too.” She fixed my collar, pulled it straight. “Do you want me to help you figure this out?”
I would have said no, should have reminded her that I’d told her to fuck off, but I looked around the empty waiting room, then down at my hands. I had nothing to hold, nothing that would give me the strength I knew I needed. Autumn should have been there. It was her place, but her words came back to me, cut even deeper than they had when she first spoke them.
“I…I don’t love you, Declan. It’s over.”
“Declan?” Heather said, filling my empty hands with her small fingers.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I could use some help.”