Smother (3 page)

“Hey. Don’t be passing out on me now.” Gravel crunched under shoes as he walked away. Maybe he was leaving her out here. That would be okay with her. It was quiet. “Yeah. She’s here. Reese, right? You owe me big time. I just got a shirt full of vomit. Yes.” He sighed. “Why do you make me rat people out? Yes. They were. I’m not sure. First floor. Okay.”

At first she thought he was still talking to her, but then she realized he was on a cell phone.

The footsteps came back.

“Reese.” A hand shook her shoulder. “Let’s get you up. Come on.”

“Go away,” she moaned as oblivion tugged at her. She needed to rest, just for a little bit. The world was spinning as her stomach flip-flopped around and all she wanted was to go to sleep. She’d get up in a few hours.

“Which floor do you live on?”

She pointed toward the sky as she rolled onto her back. Raindrops smacked her face, washed the makeup from it. She wondered, if she stayed out here forever, would she eventually be washed clean of all her sins? It was a nice thought. Reese opened her mouth to catch the moisture on her tongue, hoping it would remove some of the nasty taste from her mouth.

“That really doesn’t help me out. Come on.” Arms fitted under hers and lifted her to her feet.

Reese swayed, fell back against a tall frame, and let her head rest against his shoulder. The fact that she was smashing her back into her own vomit didn’t register as quickly as it should, nor did it matter all that much. That was why alcohol was nice—it dulled everything.

“Who
are
you?” The rain came down harder, the sound of it millions of needles hitting glass. Reese’s clothes were soaked and clung to her. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the downpour.

“I’m Mick, remember?”

“Do you live here?”

“I do. Just moved in last week. I’m on the fourth floor.”

“I haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m not home much.”

“Why were you at that party?” Her limbs were too loose to get to work. Mick held her up more than she did.

“A friend asked me to stop on my way home.”

“Were you looking for me?” They were moving forward, but also side to side with her uncooperative weight throwing them off.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I owed someone a favor and he made me pay up.” They were at the door to the apartment complex. He managed to get the heavy door open while keeping her on her feet and maneuvering them both in.

“Must have been a big favor.” Her rain-logged shoes slipped on the linoleum floor and she caught herself against the stairwell railing. The white walls and bright lights of the interior made an ache form behind her eyeballs.

“You have no idea. What floor, Reese?”

She turned her head and blinked her eyes into focus. Reese noted black hair and kind brown eyes. That caring expression on his face abruptly shut up everything inside her. She stared at him as she pondered who he was and how he was connected to her.

Mick’s eyebrows lowered. “Reese?”

“Who were you talking to on the phone? Who asked you to see if I was at that party and made you babysit me?” There was really only one person to consider.

“I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

True, the unhealthy amount of booze she’d consumed had dulled her motor skills and thought process, but it hadn’t completely eradicated them. She jerked her arm from his grip and glared at him. There were two of him, so it took a lot of concentration to keep him within her gaze.

Leo Chavez. He had to be behind this.

“So, what, you’re his personal spy?”

“Whose?”

“Leo’s,” she bit out.

Mick raised an eyebrow at that. “Look, he asked me to see if you were okay and that if you weren’t, to help you home. That’s all. Clearly, you weren’t okay.”

“Clearly, you need to get the fuck away from me. If he wants to play babysitter to me, he can get his ass over here and do it himself.” What was she more pissed about? That he’d had someone check up on her, or that the person checking up on her wasn’t him?

She stomped up the stairs, and her breath came out in short gasps as she forced her body up to the third floor. Once there, Reese leaned against the door as she unlocked it, falling onto her knees as the door gave way beneath her weight. She kicked off her wet, vomit-laden clothes and threw them at the washer.

Reese stumbled through the living room and veered to the right. The lights of the bathroom blinded her, so she closed her eyes on them and found the shower through touch alone. She sat on the tub ledge and let her head rest against the shower stall as she turned on the water.

Body washed and teeth brushed, she moved to the couch in the dark, her cell phone in her hands. She’d taken pain pills and chugged three glasses of water, so whatever dehydration and ensuing headache felt the need to form could think again. The phone screen rested on the number of the tattoo shop, where all calls were forwarded to Leo’s cell phone after hours.

If she called him, she’d blow up at him. If she called him, she’d probably lose her job for real. If she called him, it meant she cared in some way about his actions tonight. If she called him, she couldn’t let the numbness descend and she desperately craved it right now.

She scrolled past his name and ended on another.

Twenty minutes later she was wrapped within the arms of a random man. Talking wasn’t wanted nor necessary. Any details of his life before this moment and after this moment made no difference to her. In the dark his mouth loved her while his body punished her, and then the reverse was done. She clenched her eyes shut when the fingers touching her morphed into another’s lean-boned and gifted ones. She bit his shoulder when she couldn’t evade the gray eyes with their reprimand. He growled low in his chest as his body formed to hers, taking and taking.

Tears trickled from her eyes when one pair of eyes changed to another, and the hands became another set entirely—the hands that hurt the most. The eyes she could never fully run away from. They were blue, and deceptive, because even though they held warmth, it was wrong and twisted. Her chest filled with pain, but her body overrode it with pleasure. She became wild, moved faster against him—anything to escape her mind where the bad memories lived. On and on it went, until she was lost in the sensations, until she lost herself.

When it was over, he left and she was once again alone. Bloodshot eyes greeted her when she finally forced herself to her feet and into the bathroom to shower and brush her teeth again. Reese pulled on a shirt and shorts and crawled out the living room window to smoke a cigarette. The roof was slippery and her butt was wet within seconds, but she barely noticed. She let the cold and rain seep into her until all of her trembled with it, and stared at the building across the street.

The structure was the color of sand and rectangular in shape. There was nothing overly noteworthy about it, although the old, antiquated look to it was pretty cool. It had history, it had a place in this town. It belonged. She felt like she watched it from a greater distance than she truly did—that it was some mirage of security that she could never reach. Rain pelted its top and slid down its walls, making it glisten in the dark, alight in the night as though even dusk could not fully extinguish its bright beacon. She didn’t get her fascination with it. It was a building.

There was no life to it, no heartbeat, no words, nothing to make it appealing in any way.

A lone light shone in the apartment above the shop. She’d never been in his living quarters, but she imagined that was the room where Leo slept each night. She wondered if he was awake. She wondered if Mick had told him what a bitch she was and that Leo owed him for hauling her drunk ass out of that party. She wondered if, at this exact moment, he watched her.

Leo didn’t know it, but the reason she was out here so much wasn’t to smoke her cigarettes. It wasn’t to irritate him by blatantly disregarding his wishes. It was because looking at the stone structure centered Reese. It kept a piece of her grounded when she feared all of her was drifting away like leaves in the wind.

The cigarette turned soggy between her fingers. She inhaled a final puff and listened to it sizzle as she touched it to the wet roof. Once she was back inside the apartment, Reese threw the butt in the kitchen wastebasket and grabbed a blanket from the closet near the bathroom. Her bed smelled like the man she’d let into it and she couldn’t sleep there until she’d washed the sheets and blankets.

I am not a good man.

I don’t know if I’m a bad one, but I know I’m not a good one.

She looks at me like I am, though, and because of that, I want to be. ~ Leo

Her life was hers. It wasn’t happy. It wasn’t full of rainbow dreams and inspiration and smiles. It was riddled with holes of blackness. It was sick and warped. Cold. It was about survival in the only way she knew how, even if that way was destructive to her.

But it was hers. It was hers and the fact that Leo had violated the security of it burned her like no fire ever could. He’d infiltrated her world, taken it over, become a million eyes when all she wanted was solitude. He supplied her home, her job, which in turn meant he supplied her food and everything else she owned as well.

None of it was really hers.

It was his.

And now he had stepped into her personal space and she refused to allow that. Leo didn’t own her. Regardless of what he thought, she wasn’t his charity case. He couldn’t act like he had any place in telling her what she could or couldn’t do—only, actually, he could. She ignored that sensible voice that said if she said too much, if she crossed a line, there was a point where Leo would fight back, where he would wash his hands of her. It happened all the time.

Everyone had a line, and once it was crossed, it couldn’t be crossed again.

She yanked a pink stretchy top over her head, tugged on gray leggings and her Converses, and flew out of the apartment door and into the cold. She didn’t need anyone. She especially didn’t need Leo.

Fury put a quake to her body and a hurried pace to her steps as she unlocked the tattoo shop and stormed inside. A tendril of peacefulness tried to weave its way into her being and she shoved it aside. Though she tried to deny it, this place was her hideaway from reality. It was easy to forget all she was and wasn’t, all she’d done and hadn’t done, within the safety of its walls. A tattoo shop, no less. Why couldn’t it have been a library? Or even a park, maybe a coffee shop?

There was no way to get into Leo’s apartment from the outside except for directly through the shop or a rickety stairwell outside the building that scared her. Yeah, she sat on rooftops she could fall off, but wouldn’t chance climbing a narrow metal stairwell. She was warped in ways even she didn’t understand.

When she reached the door at the back of the shop, Reese tried the doorknob, not really sure if she would find it locked or unlocked because she’d never tried it before. It wasn’t locked. She blinked, surprised that her confrontation wouldn’t be delayed. Then she pounded up the steep carpet of stairs and stared at the white door at the top of them.

Out of breath and heart pounding so hard she felt it through her chest, she raised a fist to the door and went to town, banging all of her frustration into the woodwork. It flew open and the air was knocked from her lungs for another reason entirely. Her mouth went dry and she swayed backward, Leo’s quick grab saving her from a fall down the stairs.

He yanked her into the apartment by the front of her shirt and kicked the door shut behind her. Then he crossed his arms and stared. She was staring as well. Reese had never seen him without his shirt on. She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a notable sight, or that her body didn’t respond to it. His shoulder muscles alone were impressive, but then there were the cuts to his biceps, the chiseled pecs and abs, all covered in black ink.

Reese tried to swallow and couldn’t. She stared intently at the artwork, wanting to decipher it. She decided she’d need her brain functioning better than it presently was to attempt such a thing. Big muscles were not her thing—she was prone to go for lanky, lean frames. That tidbit was forgotten as her eyes went up and down the tattooed body before her. It was impossible not to appreciate the beauty of it.

Leo was the equivalent of a dark warrior on an unending, unknown quest, regardless that other than the ink that stained his upper body, there was nothing dark about his looks. From his light brown hair to his gray eyes to his pale skin, he should be forgettable, but there was more to him, something that made him stand out. It was an inconsistency, like all of him, and all of her. And the two of them.

“Better be good,” he growled. “Not even eight in the morning.”

“Funny, I pictured you as a person who got up at the first sign of dawn to not be wasteful of any second of daylight.”

“Thought wrong.”

She forced her eyes from his body and up to his light gray eyes instead—the eyes that judged her from the recesses of her mind when she least wanted. She went on the defensive as she remembered why she was here. “I don’t appreciate you having people check up on me. It’s none of your business what I do or don’t do.”