“I fucked up.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Grady says as he pulls his attention away from the preseason football game just long enough to glance at me in the kitchen.
“No. Seriously.” I look at my phone for what feels like the hundredth time and debate calling Emerson again. Her last text, the one from three days ago telling me she’s super busy with a week-long jump class, still doesn’t sit right with me. I didn’t ask her to do anything. I didn’t even text her. So her sending a random text to explain why she can’t see me for a few days feels hinky.
Especially after how she asked to be taken home from the lookout and then jogged up the stairs, saying she had a stomachache. I was left to stare at the shut door to her apartment with my apology getting lost in the night around me.
Something is definitely off. Maybe she just needs some space. Fuck if I know.
“Hey, Romeo? You gonna finish your sentence or are you interrupting my date with the 49ers for a reason?”
“Are you in my house drinking my beer, watching my television, and eating my pizza?” I ask, and he nods. “Then shut the fuck up because I seem to be the one footing the bill for your romantic evening.”
“Well, then get to the point and stop standing there like someone pissed in your Wheaties. What gives?”
“I don’t know.” I sip my beer as I cross the distance and take a seat across from him—my view of the backyard while his is of the game. “Watch those files, will you?” I say, pointing to the stack of cold case files I’m working on that are sitting on the opposite end of the couch as him.
“How can I watch them when they’re freaking everywhere? On the couch. Falling off the couch. On the floor. On the coffee table. On the desk. I mean, Jesus, do you take them in the bathroom with you, too?”
“You make fun, but when you’re sitting outside on my new patio with a built-in barbeque and flat screen television, you’ll be thanking me.”
“Doesn’t seeing this shit every day ever get to you? Don’t you need a break from it?”
“Sometimes.” I sigh. “Recently, a lot of the time.”
For being such a little shit, he’s smart.
“Something’s going on with her. She’s shutting me out.”
“I’d shut your ugly ass out, too.” I kick my foot out to knock his feet off my table, more to antagonize him than for any other reason. “But considering you just switched topics and left me in the dark, should I assume we’re talking about Emerson, again?”
“I’m serious.”
“Apparently you are,” he says as he smirks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This thing with Emerson. You’re supposed to be fuck buddies, right? Well, that was the plan anyway. Either you’re getting too deep into it or she is because this is way more complicated than your normal run-of-the-mill one nighter . . . so what gives?”
“It isn’t different.” But it is. “She’s not.” But she is. “We’re not.” But we are. “We’re just fucking.” But it feels like so much more than that.
“Yeah, you keep thinking that’s all there is, and I’ll start putting money down on the 49ers to win the Super Bowl with this shitty ass team they have this year.”
The game drones on, Grady groaning with every turnover—and there are a lot—while I stare out the windows to the backyard and watch the sky change colors as the sun sets. I’m supposed to be relaxing and preparing for my upcoming interview, but all I can think about is Emerson. Did I push her too far and get too personal when she is so obviously used to running away?
“Hey, Grant?”
“Yup,” I say distractedly.
“I think I’m gonna head out.”
“What?” I look at him, confused as to why he’s leaving at halftime when I know the cable is jacked at his house. “What about the second half?”
“I have shit to do.” I narrow my eyes at him at the same time he juts his chin toward the front door.
I turn around and find Emerson standing on the other side of the screen. Her face is expressionless and her hair is pulled back, but it’s her eyes that are shadowed and sad.
“Em? You okay?” I’m on my feet as Grady opens the screen and gives her a soft greeting before jogging down the path toward his car. “Emerson?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I just didn’t want to be alone.” Her voice is barely audible.
“No. Please. Come in.” I have my arm around her shoulders and am guiding her into the house. She seems so frail when I’ve never thought her to be anything but the opposite. We move to the couch, and she sits beside me as if she’s on autopilot. Concern rifles through every part of me.
Within seconds, I have the television off and the police scanner on the table beside me silenced. The overwhelming urge to hold her, touch her, soothe that look out of her eyes is too much, so I pull her into me—her head to my chest—and wrap my arms around her.
“What’s going on, Em?”
“My head’s messed up,” she says.
“We all have messed-up heads,” I murmur, my lips against the top of her hair, my fingers rubbing up and down her arms. It’s only when she hisses that I realize my fingertips have run over the ridge of scars, causing me to jerk my hand back in guilt over hurting her.
“Not like mine,” she eventually says.
“Want to talk about it?”
Her chuckle is despondent. “Do you know how many times in my life I’ve been asked that question? Therapist after therapist until I got so sick of being picked apart I just up and quit going.”
“I can imagine,” I say but know I have absolutely no fucking clue what she has been through. “Did something happen today?”
“Today? No. The other night? Yes.” She lets out a deep breath. Her vulnerability transparent and haunting since I’ve never seen this side of her. “I can’t stop thinking about Keely. I can’t stop obsessing over whether her dad is doing to her what mine did to me. I can’t stop wondering about what other horrible things he has done to her mother that she’s been a witness to. It’s messing me up, Grant, and that’s really hard for me to admit.”
“Sh. Sh. Sh,” I say, guilt riding me hard over being the one to bring this all upon her. This is on me. The little girl I see as her, she does, too, and there’s nothing I can do to reassure her that Keely will be okay. So, I just hold her a little tighter and press my lips to the top of her head while we both process the turn of events.
Her needing me, and my wanting her to need me.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to save her, Em, but without her mom pressing charges or the little girl admitting anything, I have zero legal rights. My hands are tied.”
“And that’s why you were talking to her about the rocks.”
My hand stills halfway down her back. This is the first time she’s reacted to any mention of the rocks. For a while, I thought maybe it was a fake memory I had created to deal with her leaving even though I know for a fact it was real.
“What do you mean?” I fish.
“The rocks. You were kneeling, talking to her, picking up rocks that I couldn’t see but that I knew had color on them.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I didn’t remember, Grant. I didn’t remember the rocks until I had a dream about them the other night.” I can sense the hysterical confusion in her voice despite how muted it is. “You’ve mentioned them a few times, and I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought, but I just kind of let it go because it didn’t make sense. Then I saw you with Keely and then that night I dreamed of the rocks. Of our rocks. The zombie rocks. And the ones you’d leave there for me to find when I’d come out to escape from my house and—” She loses a huge, heaving sob of a sound, her fingers grip into the fabric of my T-shirt, and her body shakes as she fights with every part of her to keep from breaking down.
“Don’t be sad. It’s a good memory. It was the only way I knew how to let you know I was there for you. It seems cheesy now, but we were eight.”
“Not cheesy,” she murmurs. “I looked forward to seeing if there was a new one every day.”
“I didn’t know what was going on inside your house, Em, but I knew it made you sad.” I smooth my hand over the back of her hair and just pull her tighter against me, hating myself for doing this to her. “I’m sorry I brought you to the call. I didn’t mean for it to upset you.”
“You don’t understand.” She pulls away, her eyes red but not a single tear has fallen.
“Then make me understand.” The confusion in her expression kills me. The vulnerability in it even more so.
“If I didn’t remember that, then what else do I not remember?”
“It was rocks, Em. That’s it. I’m sure there are a million things you remember about what we did or where we played that I don’t. It’s no big deal.”
“It’s not—you don’t—you’re here and I can’t stop them,” she says, flustered and visibly anxious.
“You can’t stop what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” The first tear finally slips over as she runs a hand over her hair, and the chaos of her emotions hit her.
I just stare at her like a deer in the headlights. I can handle hysterical victims, I can manage crazy suspects, but give me Emerson’s big green eyes full of tears and have her plead for me to give her answers I can’t give her, and I’m a guy fucked in so many ways I’ve lost count.
“Talk to me.”
“I’m so confused,” she says. “It’s you.”
“Me?” What did I do?
“No. That’s not what I mean.” She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment and shakes her head. “I just—I don’t want to know anything else.”
“What are you talking about?”
She heaves in a breath that hitches as I reach out—needing to touch her—and use my thumb to wipe a tear off her cheek. The simple touch is nowhere near enough, the connection not strong enough, so I lean forward and brush my lips against hers, my hand on the back of her neck, our foreheads touching.
I stay like that for a few moments, caught between the push and pull of needing her to stay and never wanting her to feel pain again. Crushed by the realization that somehow I’m the one causing the discord in her life.
“I don’t trust myself, Grant. I don’t trust my memory. I don’t trust that what I thought happened actually happened—”
“You didn’t make it up, Em,” I say, hating the defeat reflected in everything about her—eyes, posture, tone. I don’t understand why she’s so upset over this. “They were silly rocks.”
“It’s not just the rocks. It’s everything else.” The desperation in the way she says the words twists my heart.
I’d give anything to take her pain away, and for the briefest of moments, I consider telling her I have proof that her abuse happened. That I have the evidence to erase the doubt from her mind. Maybe if she had the choice to know the details, it would be helpful to her and make her feel more in control.
My eyes flash over the table stacked with blue and green file folders and know hers is somewhere in there. I’ve yet to open it, but I know it holds the detailed history of her abuse.
And as soon as I have the thought, I reject the horrible idea.
“I still don’t trust myself,” she whispers, the heat of her words warming my lips.
“I trust you,” I say, scrambling for anything to take the pain from her voice. I’m far from qualified to give her the answers she needs, but hell, I’d walk through fucking fire if it meant I could make this right by her . . . whatever right is.
“It isn’t the same.”
“People trust you with their lives every day. Every damn day, they jump out of airplanes and put their lives in your hands, trusting that you’ll get them back to the ground safely. How can you say they don’t trust you?”
“They trust the name on the building. They trust the certificates lining the wall. They trust the reputation that’s been around for fifty years. They don’t know a damn thing about the woman behind the desk in the flight suit.”
She looks lost, eyes wild, body language unreadable besides anything other than scattered, and I hate seeing her like this.
“It’s going to be okay, Em. We’ll figure it out. It’ll be okay.”
She pushes up off the couch, agitated and restless. “It isn’t going to be okay, Grant. It will never be okay, and it will never go away. Fucking hell, I’ve gone twelve years without doing this, and now I have and what does that say about me? That I’m not strong anymore? That I’m no longer coping? That I’m just as fucked up as everyone would expect me to be?” She screams leaving me completely lost in regards to what she is referring to.
“Twelve years?”
“This!” She shouts throwing her arms out so the angry red marks on the inside of her right arm scream out to me. “This, Grant. I spent years cutting myself to cope. Years hurting myself because the pain I caused myself overshadowed the pain he caused me. It made me feel in control of something. I was the one responsible. I was the one who knew the ugly on the outside matched the ugly on the inside.” Her voice breaks again, breaking my heart right along with it.
I’m out of my seat in an instant and by her side. “Em.” I don’t even recognize the grief in my own voice.
“You once asked me how I coped. This, Grant. This was how I coped.”
“Emerson.” My God. How did I not see this? I expect her to fight when I slip my arms around her, I assume she will resist, but she does everything but. Her arms are around my waist, and her head is buried in my chest as we hold on to each other and weather the torrent of emotion that is raging inside both of us.
“Emerson.” I say her name again, needing to see her eyes, to know she is okay, maybe to know that I’m going to be okay knowing this, too. Fuck if I know. She tilts her chin and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes full of shame and sorrow before leaning forward and pressing her lips to mine. It’s the last thing I expect, but the kiss is slow and hesitant—a woman trying to find her way through the power of the storm swirling around her.
I kiss her back. Gentle and tender. Giving her whatever she needs from me and promising that I’m going to do everything in my power to help her.
Salt from her tears is on our lips.
Her desperate need to lose herself palpable.
There’s definitely pleasure in our kiss, but there is also so much more. Her well-being. My sanity. Our belief that we can see our way through to the other side of this.
My normally assured Emerson is anything but. She’s timid, hesitant. She may have initiated this, but I know it’s because she’s trying to lose herself in the physicality like I now see she always has. She’s trying to forget the ugly in her.
And that fucking kills me.
For a man who prides himself on being able to handle every situation—womanly or otherwise—I’m at a loss as to what to do.
God yes, I want her. Especially when she scrapes her nails against my abs under my shirt before lifting it over my head. The taste on her tongue. The smell of her skin. The knowledge of how goddamn good she feels when I bury myself in her. They all collide, vying for my focus.
And I may typically be a let’s jump right in when it comes to sex, but something is stopping me from ripping her clothes off and giving her the exertion she craves.
If I do that, I’ll be giving her exactly what she needs to run away from me again. I’d be giving her the tools to close off, when what she really needs is to know what I see when I look at her.
She needs to see the beauty in her ugly.
The thoughts are clouded with lust, lost in its haze, but when she reaches for the buttons on my jeans, I grip my fingers around her wrists.
“Em,” I say, my breath coming in pants as my dick begs me to let her hands stroke it.
“No.” She fights my hold, and I just keep my hands cuffed over her wrists as I lead her into my bedroom. “I don’t . . . just please . . . I need—” she murmurs between kisses, her lips meeting mine over and over, each time more urgent than the last.
I push her back onto the bed, her mile-long legs working her body closer to the headboard as I crawl over her. She looks up at me with eyes so intense they steal my reasoning. My words. My breath.
Her lip quivers.
Her eyes well again.
When I reach down and pull her arms up so that they rest beside her head, palms up, her breath hitches. With my eyes locked on hers, I lower my lips ever so slowly and press them softly against the fresh and angry red mark on the inside of her bicep. She freezes, and I know it’s taking everything she has not to pull her arm away from me. I know if she tries, I’ll let her. But if she doesn’t, then I’ll know she trusts me, if only just a little bit, and a little bit is enough for now.
While I wait for her decision, I can see the shame in her eyes, the discomfort in my knowing, the struggle to let me in. Her inhale is shaky, but she doesn’t move.
She puts her trust in me.
I lace a row of kisses across the scars on her right arm, my heart breaking and temper firing as my lips ghost over the ridges that mark her pain. There are so many, and all I can think of is how many times she’s felt the need to cut herself to cope with what that fucking bastard did to her.
How much pain was she in that she needed to mar herself? Permanently scar herself to cope? With my lips against her skin and her perfume in my nose, I can picture her huddled in a corner, drawing a knife across her arm. Over and over. Tears falling like the drips of blood were. Alone and isolated from everyone and their help.
And then I realize it’s not past tense. It’s not how much pain she was in, because she just cut herself again. The pain is still there. Still prevalent. Still haunting this incredible woman.
My need to show her she isn’t alone, that she’s beautiful inside and out takes hold.
So I continue to worship her scars with reverent kisses. And when I’m done with the right side, the need to calm my ire leads me to kiss her lips again. To sip and take and soothe and know she’s okay before leaning back, looking in her eyes to let her know my next intention, and then pressing my lips to the ridges on her left arm.
Call it my hero complex. Call it her being the first girl I’ve ever loved letting me love her now. Call it me being a fucking sap. I don’t care . . . because put any man in my situation—with a woman who doesn’t trust putting one hundred percent of her trust in him when she’s at her most vulnerable, and for fuck’s sake, it will change him.
Change him in ways he never knew possible.
As I slide my lips down the rest of her arm before pulling her tank up to expose toned flesh and pressing heated kisses across her abdomen, I know I’m changed. I know the taste of her, the sound of her, the feel of her will forever be seared in my goddamn memory.
I told her we should chase moments and not memories.
Enjoy the moment.
So I do just that. I take the trust that Emerson has bestowed upon me and slide my hand up her inner thigh, her flimsy skirt bunching up with it as I go. I lick over the cotton of her panties, prompting her legs to spread apart for me. I suck on her clit, the muted sensation of the fabric and the heat causing her hand to grip the sheets beside me and her hips to buck against my face.
I tug her panties aside with one finger and lick the length of her pussy, circling my tongue on her clit and sliding it back all the way down until I dart into her. She gasps, and her hands move from gripping the sheets to sinking into my hair.
My god. She tastes like heaven, like everything I want and need and desire. My lips are coated with her. My nose is buried in her slit as I lick and lap and pleasure and tease her nerves into a riot of sensations.
As I let her lose herself. As I make her feel. As I help her forget.
I kissed all of her pain away, now I want her to know I desire her, too. All of her. The scars. The beauty. The pain. The past. The future.
And goddamn, the mewl in her throat, the groan of my name, the desperate pleas for more as my tongue and fingers work her into a frenzy are an aural seduction all by themselves. When she gasps as I push her over that cusp where desire burns into bliss, I’m left reeling for her to come so I can push into her and join her.
“Grant.” She pants as her body jerks and writhes under the pressure of her orgasm slamming into her. Her pussy pulses around my fingers and against my tongue. I suck ever so gently on her clit, pulling every last ounce of pleasure out of her . . . and fuck me if I don’t want to get off the bed, yank her legs open, and fuck her into oblivion.
I just can’t.
Not knowing how she came to me.
Not knowing that I’m the one who messed her head up.
Not knowing that she trusts me when it seems as if trust is something she never allows herself to give.
So, as much as my dick is begging to slide into her pussy, I keep my pants on. Fuck yes, my dick aches with the need to take her, and my balls burn for release, but I know this isn’t about me. I’ll be cursing myself later when I grab the lube and take to my hand, but this is the right thing to do.
With her addictive taste still on my tongue, I press a kiss to each side of her inner thighs then move up to circle my tongue around the rim of her belly button. Inch by torturous inch, I work my way back up her body. Every time my dick even remotely rubs against the mattress or her leg, I want to come like a sixteen-year-old boy.
“So beautiful,” I murmur, raining praise between each kiss.
Up the side of her rib cage. Over the peaks of her nipples. Then I bring my lips back to the scars on her arms to let her know even those parts of her are beautiful.
I continue up to her shoulder and then follow the line to the underside of her jaw. It’s her sighs that fuel me. Her sudden tensing as she guesses where my lips will land next followed by how she sinks into the mattress when she remembers that she trusts me.
It’s when I find her lips again that I know she’s calmed some. Her kisses, which were tentative before, are now laced with tenderness and satisfaction. They’re still not one hundred percent the Emerson I’ve come to know, but they’re enough for now—they’re progress.
“Grant.” She murmurs my name against my lips, and when I lean back and look down at her, a tear has slipped out of the corner of her eye and is making its way down to her ear and the pillow beneath.
“Sh,” I say as I rest my forehead against hers.
“No one has ever treated me that way,” she finally murmurs as she lifts a hand to rest against my heart.
It’s only much later when she falls asleep in my arms that I really hear her words. I take pride in knowing I gave her that feeling.
Because while she’s never been treated this way, I don’t think I’ve ever paid that kind of attention to a woman before.
But then again, none of them have been Emerson.