Today was Peggy’s birthday.
Growing up as the youngest Clarkson, a big deal had always been made over the day. Pink streamers? A new dress? A tiara? Bet your ass. Even the first three years of school, her squad had thrown her a bash, complete with a grand entrance on the back of whichever frat guy drew the longest straw. She’d primped, imbibed, danced…
Over the last few months, though, the time she’d spent with Elliott meant less time with her friends. And while there were definitely no rifts or open animosity, she’d heard no rumblings of party plans, either.
Peggy toed a rock out of her path as she walked back to her dorm from class. Someone she only vaguely recognized whizzed past on a bike calling hello, so she smiled in response, but there was no answering pleasure in her chest. She hadn’t told Elliott it was her birthday, or even that the date was approaching, so feeling let down was ridiculous. They’d gotten closer with each passing day—sometimes it felt like each passing moment—but she still sensed him holding back. When he didn’t think she was watching, there were shadows in his incredible eyes, thoughts deeper than the ones he shared. And still—still—being with Elliott was better than a birthday party with male belly dancers and a keg.
She’d fallen in love with him. Bad. No way out bad.
So sometimes it was hard. Sometimes they couldn’t see each other for a handful of days because of traveling for his coaching responsibilities. Or he couldn’t get a babysitter for Alice, the daughter he’d never offered to introduce Peggy to, although she still held out hope. Most difficult of all, they were a secret, which meant no going out in public together. No confiding in her friends that the legendary football coach they all went horny-faced over was her…
What?
Her boyfriend? Ha! Men like Elliott Brooks didn’t do boyfriendom. If Peggy asked him to define their relationship, he would give her that quizzical, narrow-eyed, Dirty Harry stare. And then he’d probably kiss her until she forgot the question.
Peggy stumbled on the walkway when licks of heat traveled up the insides of her thighs. About normal, since they hadn’t been together in three nights. Which probably accounted for her pointless, melancholy mood.
It started to rain.
Shit.
Holding her messenger bag over her head, she ran down the path to her dorm. There wasn’t another soul in sight, everyone else having noticed the gathering thunderheads while she’d been lost in an Elliott-induced daze. Only a hundred or so yards from her dorm, she cut through a parking lot, skidding to a halt when a car door opened to her right.
“Peggy.”
“Elliott,” she breathed, dropping the bag and letting herself get rained on. “What are you doing here?” Subtext: during the day. Although it could have been midnight, the sky was so ominously dark. Black.
“I wanted to be where you are.” His chest fell heavily and lifted as he looked her over, head to toe, settling on her eyes. Wow. The intensity kindling in his gaze knocked the breath straight out of her lungs. “Can’t stay away.”
Had he been trying? The idea made her stomach ache.
She nodded in the direction she’d been traveling. “Come on.”
It was risky. They both knew it. But after a curt nod, he followed Peggy, staying a good distance behind her until they reached the exit stairwell the students kept propped open to bypass the dorm’s notoriously slow elevator. His tread echoed in her belly as they climbed the steps, Elliott remaining in the stairwell until she’d unlocked her door.
She held her breath and waited once inside. Only a couple seconds passed until he blew through her doorway—sexual and intimidating—kicking the door shut, lifting her off the ground to attack her mouth. Peggy moaned into the kiss, her thoughts going fuzzy when Elliott’s tongue slipped past her lips, his free hand stroking down the side of her face, smoothing her hair in an affectionate gesture that made the last three lonely days worth every second. God. God. His huge presence combined with the passion of the kiss to rock the atmosphere. Thunder boomed outside, but she swore it was happening in her chest, between her legs. The smell of him and rain and…chocolate…was amazing.
“Shit,” Elliott rasped, pulling back. Rubbing a thumb against her lower lip, he dropped a kiss on her forehead, then reached into his jacket to remove a small, crushed bakery box. “This didn’t go according to plan,” he grumbled. “Nothing with you does.”
“What’s in there?”
“A cupcake. For your birthday.” He cleared his throat. “Happy birthday.”
Man oh man, he looked crazy uncomfortable. And she took exactly zero mercy on him, because jubilation was spinning inside her like syrup-soaked yarn. “How did you know it was my…you brought me a…Elliott.”
He opened the box and they both peered inside to inspect the damage. Pink sprinkles. “You left your wallet out on my coffee table a few weeks back and I looked at your license. Thought maybe having your age staring me in the face would knock some sense into me.”
She hated when he admitted to having doubts about the wisdom of their relationship. Every time they were together, he seemed to remind her at least once. “Since you’re here now, I guess it was an unsuccessful mission.”
Elliott tilted his head, an eyebrow lifting over her tight tone. “I just walked into a student dormitory in the middle of the day to be with you, baby. Safe to say the mission bombed.”
Thrills raced up and down her arms. Was he being extra dreamy because it was her birthday or what? God, if he could just be like this all the time, instead of brooding at her so much. “Guess so, Coach.”
“You didn’t look happy out there. Before you saw me.” He dragged a finger through the icing and slipped the digit between her lips, his breath going shallow as she sucked off the decadent chocolate. “Something wrong?”
“Everything is fine,” she whispered. “Sometimes I get homesick on my birthday. Which I shouldn’t even tell you, because you’re already hung up on my age and it makes me sound like a whiny toddler.”
His eyes were full of concern, even though she’d pushed him out of his depth. “How do I make it better?”
“You brought me a cupcake.” She licked another offering of chocolate off his finger, watching his jaw tick. “That’s a great start.”
“I brought you nail polish, too.”
Peggy reared back. “What?”
She could hear his swallow. “You’re always painting over that black mark on your finger.” He looked away, his frown lines fierce. “I bought the clear kind, because I think you should just let me see it. The mark.”
Dumbstruck. That’s what she was. Maybe it was the rain or the dark sky afternoon, but there was none of the usual tension between them. Like they’d been given a reprieve, just for her birthday. Or maybe Elliott not shutting down was her real present. “Why?”
“I don’t like you holding back any part of yourself from me. I hate it.” He dropped his hand to the pocket of his jeans, brushing the rosary beads Peggy knew were inside. “It’s wrong to expect so much from you, when I can’t give the same.”
Wrong. That word was famous around these parts. She covered his mouth to stop the outpouring of regrets. “Please. Not today, okay?”
After a beat, he nodded and Peggy dropped her hand. Rain ticked on the windowsill, thunder rolling in the distance. Desperate to maintain the spell, she smiled. “Can I see the polish?”
Setting aside the cupcake, he reached into his pocket and removed the tiny bottle, clear with silver writing. It looked so out of place in his big, rough hands, a giggle broke free. But it cut right off when Elliott pulled out the chair from her desk, sat down, and patted his knee. In a trance, she went toward him and perched on his lap, holding her breath as he smoothed her right hand out on the desk’s surface. Lips pressed to her neck, he unscrewed the bottle. And with an expression of sheer concentration, the Kingmaker painted her nails. Clear.
It was the best birthday of her life.
* * *
Peggy didn’t do awkward. She could chat her way out of weird silences during phone conversations, running into an ex-fiancé in public, while on a movie date with the new one—ouch—or smile when a customer broke a zipper by force, instead of asking for the next size up. You name it, she had a way to put herself and the equally uncomfortable party at ease. When called upon to use her linguistic skills to combat social ickiness, however, she usually wasn’t fresh off a spanking for the ages.
It wasn’t necessarily her tender rump that forced her to keep shifting around while twirling spaghetti onto a fork, though. Her reaction to being punished was what continued to trap words in her mouth, like fireflies in a jar.
Okay, so she had a kink. One that had been unintentionally discovered and fostered by Elliott. She liked to be bossed around in the sack, except…she’d only ever enjoyed it with the coach. Technically, the only way she could have a satisfying orgasm was to have that discipline doled out by him. Just one man.
What happened in the office didn’t feel like it did before. At twenty-two, the spankings, Elliott’s domination, had been about sex. Right? About lust for one particular man? Just now, though, as she’d bent over the desk and taken those slaps to her bottom, she’d felt a click unlike anything she remembered. A registering in her mind that she was getting her due. Being punished for something, rather than being punished for pleasure. Yes, there had been the sticky hot bliss of orgasm shooting from her internal firearm, but something in her mind hadn’t allowed the bullet to strike.
Had she experienced the same foreboding at twenty-two, but her younger self hadn’t recognized it? Or perhaps, in the blinding bright white glow of infatuation, the invisible grip on her spine had been equated with something new and exciting. But in the office it had felt…wrong. All wrong.
Between her thighs, she was still damp. In fact, every time she caught a whiff of Elliott’s apples and mint scent, her vagina muscles seized. The way they do when your stomach lifts during a roller coaster and you can’t breathe, squeezing your legs together until it drops back into place. But there was a new layer, too. Like a thin red lining to her attraction, throbbing with light.
She’d bent over for that spanking because something in her psyche craved Elliott’s anger. His disapproval. Not just the façade of it, though. The real thing. That click she’d heard, clear as day, had been like shaking hands with a villain and recognizing her foe. Some part of her she’d grown to despise since sitting down at the table…enjoyed Elliott making her feel bad. Believed he was right.
And that. That was not okay.
Peggy glanced up from her meal to find Elliott observing her over the rim of his glass. Milk. He’d exchanged the beer she’d brought him for the wholesome white stuff, and she suddenly wanted to slap it out of his hands. She’d come back to Cincinnati to jar him into realizing what he’d lost. To make him pine and lust, so she could ride into the sunset knowing she’d had the last laugh, after years of misery. She would have broken Elliott’s hold on her. The control would be in her hands, instead of the other way around.
But in that moment, even with her soaked panties clinging to her flesh, she wondered if this Ohio detour was a huge waste of her time. Perhaps three years had earned her some perspective or taught her about human nature. Because the curtains were lifting to reveal what her heart should have been telling her all along, instead of mourning the loss of her first love. Elliott didn’t deserve her.
All those times during their relationship when she’d stumbled her way through pulling him from black moments…and he’d never done the same for her. She’d been stuck in a perpetual one for three years and he hadn’t come. Hadn’t appreciated her enough. He’d made her feel like a weakness, a transgression unfit for anyone else, but all this time he’d been unfit. Not her. A man who took her love and made it something ugly. Maybe her crusade to make him miserable was overkill. Elliott already was miserable…and perhaps she should simply leave him to it.
Until that moment, moving on had seemed like a distant goal, but now…now it was close enough to grasp.
She would explore this more later, but right now, she had a dinner to get through. Alice sat to her left, staring down glumly at her own food, probably lamenting her impulsiveness at inviting someone over for dinner who’d turned out to be lamer than dry wheat toast.
“Alice,” Peggy started, coughing into her fist when it sounded like she’d just guzzled ice chips. “How did rehearsal go after I left?”
“Fine.” She sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Mostly the girls were asking about Belmont, so that was good. He distracted them from my social suicide.”
Peggy chuckled. “I won’t tell him he caused a stir. He wouldn’t know how to react and we’d get trapped under a frown avalanche.”
“Huh. I think that’s why I liked him,” Alice said, stabbing at her spaghetti. “He’s different. Like me.”
“Yeah,” Peggy responded softly, kind of shaken up over having Alice echo her words from earlier. The ones she’d lobbed through the bathroom door in the auditorium, praying they found their mark. Had she actually made some kind of difference? She hoped so, because there was something about Elliott’s daughter that was so authentically beautiful, Peggy hated the idea of her spirit being nicked by the cruelty of others. And even though she knew it shouldn’t, even though the thought bubble trying to float into her consciousness was the kind that could burst too easily, it entered anyway.
Alice needs a mother.
Not Peggy, obviously. Hell to the no. Someone else. Someone without obsessive hang-ups on unavailable men or the newfound realization that she thinks herself in need of chastisement. No, Alice needed a woman with the warmth and steadfastness Peggy didn’t have. All she had was a great fashion sense, the ability to recite entire episodes of Golden Girls, and apparently a knack for impersonating a theater coach.
Knowing she could never be the kind of woman who would bring stubborn Elliott and Alice together, right on the heels of the realization she’d developed something unhealthy inside of her, had Peggy wanting to make a breezy excuse to leave. Talk about being clobbered. She couldn’t even get a bite of food down her gullet and it didn’t help that the perfect amount of spice and garlic reminded her of Miriam. Oh God, what would her mother think if she could see her? Breaking bread with the man who’d shattered her heart just as soundly. Punishing herself on purpose.
“Peggy,” Elliott’s rasping voice broke into her thoughts. “You’ve barely eaten.”
“I—yeah. Look at that.” She tapped the fork against her plate, sending a tinny sound winging through the room. “I think I tested the sauce a few too many times and filled up.”
Elliott’s own eating utensil was paused on the table, held tightly between two thick fingers. “You should try.”
“Stop,” she whispered.
When silence seemed to boom loudly from her left, Peggy looked over at Alice, who was transferring a narrow-eyed glance between her and Elliott. “Um.” The preteen took a long sip of her soda. “Dad said you were a professor at the university, Peggy?”
The air in the dining room went very brittle, stagnant, but Peggy didn’t pause before answering because she didn’t need to think about telling the truth. Not this time. You didn’t attempt to build someone’s confidence and get to know a private part of them—the way she’d done that afternoon with Alice—and then lie to them. Or lie more, rather. “No, I’m not.” She took the napkin from her lap and laid it down carefully on the table, noticing Elliott did the same. “I’m here for alumni weekend. I was a student, back in the diz-ay.” Her attempt at levity smashed to pieces on the ground. “Just here to see old friends.”
“But how do you know my dad?” Daughter scrutinized father. “As long as we’ve lived in this house, no one has been inside of it besides us and a couple repairmen and my aunt. You’ve been in it twice. So you have to know him…somehow. I just…” She shook her head and Peggy saw a resemblance to Elliott in her frustration. “When did you graduate?”
Oh now. Now they were on shaky ground. Elliott seemed to realize it, too, but like Peggy, he seemed disinclined to fabricate a story. There was no pretense in his gaze, only resignation. “Peggy graduated three years ago.”
A puff of air left Alice’s mouth. “That’s the year after Mom died. Or the year we took her off life support anyway.” She laid her right hand flat on the table. “Did you two…have a relationship?”
A buzz of silence met Alice’s question and then the twelve-year-old was pushing away from the table, knocking her chair onto the ground. “Oh my God.” She leveled her next question at Elliott with the kind of brutality only a preteen can muster. “You probably wanted Mom to die, didn’t you?”
“Alice.” Elliott’s voice was steady, even though his eyes were turbulent. “Sit down and we’ll talk about this calmly.”
“No. No. Everything we do is calm and I don’t always feel calm. Actually, I never, ever feel that way.”
It felt as though a manacle were cinching tighter and tighter around Peggy’s throat, but she managed to speak past the pressure. “Alice…what happened. It was after. Not during. And—”
“I thought you were here for me.” Alice broke off with an awful keening noise that had Peggy shoving to her feet, but she froze on a dime with the girl’s next words. “Stop. You’re just some mistress, or a…whore.”
“Alice.”
Elliott’s voice boomed the way it only did on the sidelines, sending his daughter falling back three steps, hand flying up to cover her mouth. For Peggy’s part, she didn’t move. Couldn’t move. A tremor started in her midsection and grew more intense until she swore she had to breathe in and out through her nose or risk vomiting.
Elliott slammed his fist into the table, clattering the plates. “Apologize, Alice.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Peggy forced out between numb lips, refusing to break the furious gaze Elliott turned on her. “I’m going to just…”
Peggy eased out of the scene, as if she were the only component that hadn’t been paused in some gruesome family portrait. Regret pushed down on her lungs. Being called a vile word by someone she liked caused a thick ripple of pain. An invisible sword made entirely of shame tried to prod her, too, but she forced armor to close around herself, welding it shut so nothing else could hitch a ride. As soon as she reached the hallway leading to the front door, she heard running feet and a slammed door behind her, presumably Alice locking herself in her room for all eternity.
Feeling like a stone statue walking for the very first time, Peggy moved through the door, into the night, unfamiliarity bombarding her from all sides. Houses she’d never seen, cars full of people she didn’t know, a sky that looked so different from San Diego’s sky, it seemed to be projected from a television screen.
She had no idea how long she’d been walking when Elliott pulled his truck up alongside her, parking at the curb and getting out. Following her.
“Peggy.”
“You should be home with Alice. She needs you.”
“You need me.”
Peggy halted and turned slowly, eyebrows somewhere near the clouds. “Huh?”
“You need me to drive you back to the hotel,” Elliott clarified. When Peggy made no move to climb into the truck or even respond—and honestly, she wasn’t sure if she could respond to anything every again—Elliott tapped a closed fist on the hood. “I need to take you back, too. It would drive me crazy knowing you were walking around in the dark under normal circumstances. But after that…after that, I won’t have you alone in the dark. Thinking about it.”
“And you’re going to distract me, are you?” She heard the invitation dripping from her voice and hated herself for going there, like it was some kind of unavoidable default. “Forget I said that, okay? Just forget everything I’ve said since I got here.”
“I’ll try and fake it, if you get in the truck.”
That spun a laugh around in her throat. “Wait. Let me say one more thing before we start faking.” She started toward the truck, moving past him and resting one hand on the door. “I came here to make you miserable, just for old times’ sake. Okay? You were right about all of it. I thought I could get you out of my system if I was the one to end things this time around. But it turns out, I might have already accomplished that.” She yanked on the door handle, heaving a sigh when she found it locked. The impediment, however, spurred the rest of her confession. “We’re bad for each other. I finally believe what you’ve always told me. So I’m done now. Maybe we can just be…nice to one another until I leave.”
Appearing to be in a daze, Elliott lifted his keys and pressed a button to unlock the door, allowing Peggy to climb inside and click her seatbelt closed.