33
“I love how you cut the dress. It looks so much better now, Lenore,” said Kelly, my assistant. We were on the set of a music video for an all-female alternative rock group, Sugar Dip.
“Molly has incredible legs. They need to be shown off.”
“And that slouchy boot is sheer genius,” Kelly whispered in my ear as filming began. “The corset showing just right underneath? It’s perfect. I can’t believe you made it yourself. I need one.”
I bumped her hip with mine. “I’ll make you one,” I mouthed, winking at her.
The band performed on a set designed like an old playground where all the rides were broken. Jamming on her guitar, Molly belted out the first line of her new single as she wandered through the broken swing set. The new, improved dress floated perfectly over her knees as she swayed and jerked her hips to the music playing over the speakers.
Kelly took a few notes as we both watched the performances and the choreography carefully, studying how the clothing moved on the women, and how the patterns and colors were working with the set pieces. I smiled to myself. We’d done a good job.
Filming wrapped, and I slipped out the security doors, down the hall back to wardrobe. Kelly would collect the clothing from the band, and then we had outfits to review one last time for tomorrow’s shoot with another singer, and more clothes to choose and inventory for three assignments next week.
I pushed open the door as I checked my phone for messages. The door slammed shut behind me on its own. My head snapped up, and I froze before the reflection in the large vanity mirror, my eyes hooking on his.
Finger stood against the wall, a large, tanned hand splayed against the door. He was bigger, his shoulders and arms bulkier, his chest pronounced under a tight tee stretching across his upper body. His hair was shorter, barely touching his shoulders, his beard fuller. A faded red bandana at his neck. Dressed in black leather, coated with dust and dirt, probably from miles of riding, his thick boots splashed in mud.
He flipped the lock. “Hello, Lenore.”
My pulse screeched to a halt, my mouth dried.
Three years. Three years of him in jail, me on my own. Three, three, three years…
“Got nothing for me? No hello? No how’s it going? No, I missed you, so good to see you?”
I only stared at the vision before me, unable to move, to breathe, to think. But he was no vision. He was a man—rugged, virile, coarse, larger-than-life.
“Huh.” He cocked an eyebrow, slanting his head at a slight angle, the grooves on his face prominent. “That’s too bad.” He was amused.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“I’ll always find you.”
My stomach clenched at those words. I had tried to do the right thing, and it was a painful thing, but I’d done it. And instead of leaving a clean cut behind me, I had left a trail of blood, flesh, and bone.
And misery.
That’s what I saw in his big metal-brown eyes. Sheer misery repressed and now rising, steaming, mingling with mine.
“Nice new name, I like it,” he said.
“It was as close to my grandmother’s name as I could get.”
“Is that what you ratted out to Turo DeMarco for?” he spit out.
“You here to kill me for going against the bro code?”
“No.” His lips curved up slightly at the ends, and my heart squeezed. “No, I’m glad you did it. I’m here to take you home with me.”
“No.”
His chest rose and fell sharply, his eyes piercing mine.
A chaos of panic and emotion gripped me. Tentacles of wild feeling curled in my chest, pulling and twisting on my heart, bruising it. The tagged clothes hanging on the racks all around us listened, waiting. All the colors and textures in the dressing room faded, and there was only Finger. My Finger.
“I’m here to take you…”
I licked my lips. “I—”
He lunged at me, pulling me in his arms roughly, and crushed my mouth to his, smashing me up against the wall. Our bodies crashed together, and my breath jammed in my lungs. The scents of aged leather, dull metal, and the faded cinnamon of his taste took over, and I sucked them all in, wanting more. My hands dug into his hair, and I opened my mouth to his, knowing I’d be lost.
I was lost. I was damned.
Yet I was set free.
The two of us slid down the wall to the floor. The demand of his tongue, the sound of his hard breathing, the press of his body against mine, a stronger, harder, more developed body, made me greedy, satisfying the need I had put on ice so long ago. My soul cried out for him, for his touch with a sharp urgency that built and built. Memories clashed with sensation, with desperation. I ached.
My dress ripped, my underwear was yanked to the side. Fumbling, tugging, whimpers, groans. His grip tightened on my flesh, and he was inside me.
“Serena...” that husky, scratched voice filled my ear and uncoiled that intense rough desire that only he inspired in me. I clung to him.
His forehead slid to mine. “Baby.”
We both gasped, our skin damp. My body trembled.
I miss you.
I miss you.
The dam I had erected with the heavy stones of agony and necessity cracked and burst open with every fiery pulse of his powerful body inside mine, with every rasp of his jumbled words. Desperate words. I embraced them all, wrapped them around me, clutching him to me. I flew, charged on our hungry emotions, our hungry bodies. On the high that was us, on our absolute need to be together.
He throbbed against me, and a piece of me, that piece that was his, whisked away with him to somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and unfettered. Breathless, soaring. My fingers dug into the edges of his leather jacket, brushing over a stitched patch.
And I dropped back down to earth.
My heart filled with lead. My limbs stiffened. “We shouldn’t have done this. It’s not—”
“It’s been a long time. I know it has. But we’re so good together. Always will be, no matter what.” He nuzzled the side of my throat. “There’s never been a goodbye between you and me. Never will be. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
I pushed my hands against his chest, against those sweet hopes, and pulled back from him. His brow knit together as he slid out of me on a grunt. A chill raced up the base of my spine at the sudden hollowness inside me. At what I’d done.
I’d opened my Pandora’s box. How would I ever shut it closed again?
Finger adjusted himself. I sat up straight against the wall, my knees bent and pulled into my chest, pressing my shaking legs together.
Before Finger I’d never believed I was strong, not enough, not enough for the real world. And now he’d torn through any lines of defense I thought I’d built around myself these past three years alone. Crossed the moat, scaled the wall, battered down the gate.
I shoved my tattered armor back on.
He spoke. The sounds muffled in my head.
“Baby, none of that matters,” he said. “I get it, I don’t get it, I don’t give two fucks. I’m out, you’re free, you’re coming with me and we’re gonna be together.”
His words clattered to the floor at my feet.
“Finger.”
His eyes were full, shiny. “Yeah?”
I braced. “I’m getting married next month.”
His jaw stiffened, his eyes flashed. “Married?”
Yes, yes, fling your flaming arrows in our grey sky. I deserve every single one.
“Married?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“To who?” The most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
“To someone else,” slid out of my mouth.
“Someone normal?”
“He’s not in the life. Has no idea.”
“Marry me,” he said.
“I can’t.”
His head fell back against the wall, his body sagging. An inhuman, savage wail escaped his lips. “You’re my heaven and my hell, you know that?” came his hoarse voice prickling the dull air.
“You’re mine too.”
The silence between us was thick and thorny.
His broad chest heaved. “You doing this on purpose? To get out from under me?”
“It has nothing to do with you,” I lied.
Eric and I had been together for a year now, and he was everything Finger wasn’t. He was incredibly easygoing, never had much of a strong opinion about anything except his music. The mood between us was light; he didn’t demand deep from me and I didn’t offer. The daily cares were dealt with and met with a smile every time. Eric was a ride in a convertible on a Sunday afternoon, top down, sun in your eyes, a song on the radio blaring that you both sing along to.
Finger was a hard ride on a loud motorcycle, a hundred miles an hour through a tunnel of fire. Heart pounding, holding on tight for your life, yet you knew you wouldn’t fall off.
You’d never felt more alive.
“What was this just now, then?” Finger snapped at me. “Your last little fling with dirty?”
“No, I just—”
“Thing is, I don’t want to get out from under you,” he said, his voice low, unsteady. “I’ve been enduring this all these years because you and me....you and me...”
His mouth, the mouth I knew so well, the mouth I’d retraced over and over on my own lips in the hellish quiet of the night all these years, would still feel on my flesh like the visitation of a ghost, pressed into a firm line. His shimmering dark metallic eyes sunk their fangs in my soul, drawing blood from the artery in my neck. The fierce sting shuddered through me. There would be no healing from this gash. I would bear the mark forever, like so many other marks.
Now so would he.
“I was pregnant,” I blurted.
“What?”
“I found out just before you got arrested. I thought I had some virus or it was stress. I got tested, and it was positive.”
He stilled, his stony eyes on me, his face pale, hard. “That was years ago. What—did you have an ab—”
“I lost it.” I stretched my dress further down my legs.
“A miscarriage?”
“I went to Turo for a reason. It wasn’t just for a new identity. Motormouth found me. He broke into my apartment and told me he was bringing me back to Med.”
“I know. Turo told me.”
“Motormouth saw photos of you and me. He was going to tell Med that you had gotten me out. I couldn’t let him take me back or ruin you. I couldn’t let them hurt you again.”
“Serena—”
“Guess murder affected me more than I expected, now that I live among civilized, normal society.”
His eyes shifted over me. Could he see the blood? Could he smell the agony that still clung to me?
“I killed Motormouth to protect myself, you, us, our baby. But I lost the baby a few weeks after. And that’s when I thought, is that how we’re going to start a life together, by killing? By kicking more of this horrible shit under the rug? It was just the beginning of his tiny life. Probably no bigger than a bean inside me, but—”
“Stop!” His eyes glimmered with water.
“So I left Chicago.”
“We can have another kid. Miscarriages happen to people all the time.”
“Do they happen because the mother kills over and over again? Because the mother is on the run, hiding from killers?”
“Mothers kill to protect their families!”
“Yes, yes, families. But we—”
“We already are a family. We always will be.”
“A family that can’t ever be together!” I bit out. “Can’t you see that, after everything that’s happened? After all this time?”
He winced as if I’d hit him, his eyes narrowing.
“I was going to tell you about Motor, about…” I took in a deep breath, but the knots inside me kept on knotting and twisting. “You didn’t come that day, that night. Tania came over and told me about you being in jail, and she gave me your message. I knew then that I couldn’t keep clinging to this dream we both had, a dream that would never come true for us. We’d always just have pieces of each other, once in a while fragments. That’s all.”
He shook his head at me. “You didn’t tell Tania?”
“About killing a Smoking Gun in my apartment with his own knife? No, I left that out. I refused to put her in any more danger.”
“Jesus.” His jaw hardened.
“I can’t go back with you.” I slid up higher against the wall. “You need to get yourself an old lady who can be by your side in every way.”
He stared at me as if I was suddenly speaking in an exotic foreign language.
Incredulity…
Impatience…
Irritation.
His eyes blazed. “I’ve been in jail for three years, and I just got out a couple of weeks ago. I jerk off, I’m thinking of you. I watch porn, I see a stripper, a pretty girl on the street, I’m thinking of you. There’s only you. Only you inside me and out.”
My heartbeat kicked up in my chest, and I pulled tighter on the garrote I’d wrapped around it three years ago. “How was jail?”
He let out a huff of air. “Jail turned out to be a set up. They needed me inside.”
A hard, bitter laugh escaped me. “Yeah, they needed you.”
He dug a hand in his hair. “You’re tired now. You’ve been on your own through all this heavy shit. You were lonely, I get it. Take some time. You...” He gulped for air, for reality to go away and come again another day. “Rethink this. Don’t just—”
“I’ve had nothing but time to think about this, to live with it,” I said. “We kept waiting for things to get better, Finger, but they didn’t. There is no spectacular holy glimmer of light that’s going to appear over the cave we’ve been burrowed in and announce, “It’s all good now! Come out, come out wherever you are!”
“You said you’d keep what we had safe. You said—”
“I did, I did keep it safe.” I swallowed hard. “But we’re not some fairy tale.”
“We’re my fairy tale!” his voice broke.
A tear slid down my face, and I quickly wiped it away. “Well, this one doesn’t get a happily ever after.”
“In jail, I felt you on me, inside me, under my skin, and I kept that fire burning, fed it, fed myself on it. Even though right this very second, right here, I’m hating you, I can’t cut you off. I don’t know how.”
I pressed my back into the hard wall. Finger penetrated deep, over and over again. And it hurt. But you needed that kind of hurt to keep you aware. Keep you fired up. You needed the clawing, the teeth cutting skin. Traces of blood. The sting. That was where he and I knew where we stood. That was our truth. That was how we functioned.
Finger crackled. Everything with him was raw and seething with blood and boiling oil.
He took in a deep breath. “You’re all up in your head right now because of losing the baby, being on your own all this time. And I’m real sorry about that. But I know this, what you’re doing—getting married to somebody else—is about you being upset, you willing to sacrifice us for something safe, for your idea of normal.”
He rose to his feet, adjusting his leathers, fastening his pants, sealing himself up. “I’m going to leave now, because if I don’t I’m going to say and do shit I’m going to regret later. You’re freaked out, I get that. But being apart doesn’t solve anything. Doesn’t cure anything. Being apart is nothing but hopeless for us. How can you not fucking see that?”
“Stop it!” I crossed my arms and stepped back from him, from the great swell of emotion raging from him, sucking me into its heaving, hot waves.
“You can’t look me in the eyes, can you? Even now that you’re gutting me.” His hand cuffed my throat as he leaned in closer, forcing my gaze to meet his.
Raw.
My hand clutched his wrist. “Let go of me.”
“Don’t make me the villain in this story. You are. You took this away from us. You did this.” His voice seethed like a blade sliding in between my ribs, slow and steady, absolute. A noise rose from the back of his throat as his hand left my neck and trailed along my jaw, the edge of my face, his breath hot on my skin. My veins flooded with sour wine, searing acid.
“I’ll let go.” Finger’s voice was low, lifeless. He released his hold on me.
He threw open the door and stalked out of the dressing room. The door slammed behind him, and I flinched.
My tattered heart, along with any self-respect I’d managed to patch together these three years, shuddered like a wooden house in the line of a rushing raging river.
Overflow. Buckle. Collapse.
A cold sweat raced over my skin. The tagged clothes hanging on the door swung back and forth. The silence was stifling. The air smelled differently without him here. Stale. The colors in the room, dull. I gulped for oxygen, but none came.
My legs gave way. I caught myself, clinging to my worktable. Pens and bobbins of thread, safety pins, Post-its, notepads, phone chargers, empty coffee cups cascaded over the edge.
I wanted to pull on the brakes of the locomotive hurtling down the tracks even though I was the one who’d fed it coal.
Justin. Justin.
I knocked my head against the table. Once. Twice. A low howl ripped from me.
This was the end of the fairy tale, and I’d pushed the hero over the cliff. I’d torn the last page of the story from the binding of the book and shredded it, tossing the pieces in the air. Those pieces of paper scattered around me, and I knew that on that final page, there was no “...and they lived happily ever after.”
Smeared in our blood and entrails, there was only, “The Brutal, Ugly, Fucked Up End.”