A Love So Deadly (15 page)

“Not so rough, tiger,” he says, hooking his thumbs into the sides of my panties and tugging them down.

I straighten my legs and curve my body to one side, helping him dispose of my underwear, trying to ignore the disappointment that flashes through my chest. I remind myself to make an effort to be the kind of lover Isaac wants me to be, but when I spread my legs again, sliding my slick center up and down his bare cock, I’m not as gentle as I know he would prefer.

I don’t want gentle tonight. I want to bruise him with my want. I want him to spread me wide and drive inside me until I cry out. I want him to fuck me hard, not like I’m made of glass, but like I am strong and wild and his equal in every way. Isaac has over a foot on me in height, but I could handle anything he could dish out. I crave the feel of him pounding into my core, taking me hard, banishing my awareness of everything but how good it feels to come together without either of us holding back.

But when Isaac’s hands circle my waist and he shifts my hips, he positions his cock at my entrance and lowers me with infinite care. He pushes into me, inch by careful inch, so slow and easy my body has plenty of time to accommodate him and it doesn’t hurt at all, even when he reaches the end of me and we have to shift back and forth until we find the angle that lets me accept his entire length.

Despite the difference in our heights, Gabe and I fit perfectly together, no matter what position we chose, but with Isaac, it’s difficult. Only one angle works, and in any position but one, I am smothered by his chest, or in need of dozens of pillows to prop up my knees. And so, I am on top.

I’m always on top, but I’m not calling the shots.

Isaac takes the lead when we’re in bed together, in a big-brotherly sort of way. He watches out for me, takes care of me, and makes sure I don’t get hurt, but he isn’t controlling my pleasure. He isn’t demanding I spread my body and finger myself while he watches; he doesn’t warn me not to come until he says I can, or he’ll punish me in a thousand wonderfully wicked ways. For all his immense size and strength, Isaac isn’t a dominant partner. He’s a gentle giant, a caregiver who doesn’t seem to mind that when lovemaking is this careful it takes at least twenty minutes, and endless teasing of my nipples with his fingers and tongue, to get me off.

He is patient and determined, and when I finally come—throwing back my head, squeezing my eyes shut, and trying my best not to see any face but Isaac’s in the darkness behind my lids—the sound he makes is pure satisfaction. Even before he comes, his cock jerking languidly inside of me, even his orgasm a hundred shades less violent than Gabe’s, he sounds fulfilled. My pleasure is his pleasure, the way it should be between a man and a woman, the way it was between me and Gabe.

I sag forward onto Isaac’s chest, catching my breath, wishing I felt the same way he feels. I wish I could love him the way he deserves to be loved. I wish he could be everything to me, but no matter how hard I try, the love I feel for him remains a warm, complacent thing.

This love doesn’t burn inside of me, threatening to consume me even as it builds me up, making me something stronger and better than I was before. This love doesn’t reach down deep and awaken the wild side of me, that part that will fight to the death to protect the things it holds dear, that part that is both beautiful and vicious, as terrifying as it is intoxicating. This love is a spark escaping from a bonfire, and Gabe and I were the sun, burning hot enough to light the world.

Suddenly, I can’t stand to be in Isaac’s arms another second. Tonight, making love isn’t enough. I need to get out. I roll to one side, sending Isaac’s limp cock sliding from my body, eager to wipe the stickiness from between my legs.

“Go back to sleep,” I whisper as I drop my feet to the cool hardwood floor beside the bed, and reach for tissues from the box on the bedside table. “I’m going for a run.”

“I’ll come with you,” Isaac says, sitting up.

“I’d rather go alone.” I toss the tissues in the trash and grab a sports bra from my top dresser door. I tug it on, shifting my tee shirt up around my neck to fit my arms through the bra straps before pulling it back on and reaching for a pair of gym shorts.

“That woman was abducted right off the highway not far from here,” Isaac says. “It’s not safe for you to go out by yourself in the middle of the night.”

“I’m careful. I stick to the back roads,” I say. “No one ever sees me.”

“I’m coming with you,” Isaac says in his stubborn voice. “I spent half of last week filing reports on the guys they think might have taken the girl. I’ve got a better idea of what kind of scum live around here than you do.”

I doubt it,
I think, but I don’t say the words aloud.

A few months ago, Isaac applied to join the Maui P.D. and was accepted into the police academy. Just last week, he started work full time at the station in Kahului. He’s already making friends and impressing his superiors, but he’s still new on the job. He hasn’t had time to do his research, to look into our community’s dark corners and take notes on what the bad guys have been up to.

I, however, have three binders full of material on possible targets. Information I’ve cobbled together from the mothers at the school, the ladies who gossip down at the local pool during open swim, and the bits and pieces I overhear on Isaac’s police scanner. I’ve got intimate details on a shipping mogul who’s helping smuggle underage mail order brides into the country for his buddies. I have the names and addresses of fathers who are delinquent on their child support, spending their money on motorcycles and beer, while their children walk around in Salvation Army flip flops two sizes too big. I even have an inch-thick file on a sexual predator in Makawao, who attacked a girl last month, only a few weeks after he was released from prison.

Late at night, when I can’t sleep, I fantasize about the jobs I could pull here if Gabe and I were still partners in crime. I think about the people we could help, and the rush of moving silently through the darkness dressed in my blacks, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

If Isaac knew the things I daydream about, he would be horrified. Isaac doesn’t believe in vigilantism and would never support anyone breaking the law. He wouldn’t have been okay with me taking the law into my own hands before he was a cop, and he certainly wouldn’t be okay with it now. He would throw my lock picking set into the sea, burn my blacks, and forbid me from even thinking about indulging that side of myself ever again. Hell, he might even leave. I know Isaac loves me, but I’m not sure how long his love would last if he ever opened up his eyes and looked at the big picture.

Isaac loves the Caitlin he’s created. He loves the palatable pieces he’s pasted together, not the complete person, and that’s why our relationship will never be as real as what I had with Gabe. I’m keeping too many secrets, secrets that keep me isolated, sad, and longing for something I’ll never have again.

I will never meet another man like Gabe, a man who is ruthless, but kind, lawless, but true to his own code. A man who can kill a monster without remorse, and still spend an hour in a petting zoo with a two-year-old girl on a hundred degree day, dripping sweat until his shirt’s soaked through because he refuses to force her away from the baby bunnies. A man who will admire my love for my family, and my taste for breaking the law, and love me better because both of those things exist inside the same person.

I know some people find true love more than once, but I think they must be better than I am. They must be people with soft edges, who can easily shift and slide and reshape themselves until they fit with someone new. I am not soft. I am hard and my edges are chiseled in stone, hammered out in a craggy shoreline only one ship could ever sail through without getting smashed against the rocks.

Hard. Hard. Hard. Made to slice or shatter.

The mantra drums through my head as Isaac and I slip out of the house and hit the darkened streets, jogging down our gravel country lane before turning onto the narrow road that leads toward the town grocery store, the community center, and the school, where the kids are doing so well.

Sean has dozens of new friends, Ray is the top reader in his class—and the librarian’s pet—and Danny has been keeping out of trouble and getting decent grades for the first time in his life. He even has a girlfriend, a sweetheart named Sam with a raunchy sense of humor who loves skateboarding as much as Danny, and is teaching him how to surf. My family is thriving, and I’m well on my way to getting a college degree. I have a boyfriend who loves me, an adorable house, and no worries about making rent, or paying my bills.
And
I live on a tropical island where it’s warm enough to go jogging in the middle of the night three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

I should be melting into a puddle of contentment, but I’m not.

I am hard, and I prove it by pushing Isaac to the limit during our run. After the police academy, he’s in better shape than back when he played football in high school, but despite his longer legs, he has a hard time keeping up with me. Since I lost the baby, I’ve run almost every day, and I’ve gotten fast. Fast enough to join the college track team if I wanted, fast enough that Isaac has to struggle to keep pace when I’m going full out.

I know he’s suffering by the end of the first mile, but I don’t slow down. I push and push, until sweat is dripping down my forehead into my eyes, and Isaac is pulling in hoarse, labored breaths beside me, and still, I don’t ease up.

I keep running like my future depends on it, even though I know I will never be able to run far enough, or fast enough, to escape the ghost of the love I lost.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gabe
“Tis in my memory lock’d…shall keep…”

“Wider, I want to see every inch.” I stare down at the nude girl on the bed angled into the corner of her cramped studio apartment, watching as she spreads her tanned thighs wide, baring the slick pink flesh between her legs.

“Touch yourself,” I say, reaching down to stroke my cock with one hand, keeping myself hard. “Show me how you make yourself come.”

“But I…don’t do that,” the girl says, blushing.

“Now you do,” I say, seriously doubting that a twenty-five year old cocktail waitress who agreed to take me home without much more than a crook of my finger has never masturbated. “Touch yourself. I want you to come on your hand before I fuck you with my mouth.”

The girl’s breath shudders out and her nipples tighten as she dips her fingers between her legs. Her eyes slide closed as she begins to stroke herself with a confidence that confirms my theory that she was only playing innocent.

Her lie makes me even less inclined to remember her name.

Her name doesn’t matter. She is what she is.

She’s Wednesday night’s girl, another blonde, but different than the blonde I was fucking last week, or the week before. I don’t keep any of them around for long. None of them hold my interest, because none of them are Caitlin, the girl I loved, the one who has vanished without a trace. When the memories first started coming back, I thought maybe I’d actually seen her that day at the airport, but once I learned more about her history, I realized that must have been wishful thinking, my damaged brain projecting the image of a girl I didn’t yet know I was searching for.

Since then, I’ve broken the Internet looking for her, but I can’t find a phone number, an address, or a social media page. Not even an abandoned Facebook page from high school. There is a link to an article in the local paper from years ago, naming Caitlin as one of the scholarship winners receiving a full ride to Christoph Academy, and nothing else. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth the day she dropped out of school to raise her sister’s baby, and so far, none of the memories I’ve recaptured give me any clue where she might have gone.

But I’m going to find her. My memories are fuzzy and full of holes, but I am painting a more complete picture of last summer with every passing day. Fragments of memory flash on my mental screen, like scraps of film plucked from the cutting room floor. Piece by piece, they are filling in the blanks, confirming I am an even worse person than I suspected in the early days after the surgery.

I didn’t just fuck around and lie to everyone who loved me, I made a hobby out of breaking and entering. I stole thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise that I put through a fence in Charleston, even though I have a trust fund worth millions and more money coming the day my aging grandmother passes away. I robbed people for fun, I suppose. I don’t know for sure.

I don’t know who I used to be, or why I did the things I did, I only know that this helps. Fucking takes me closer to the memories. When I’m rock hard, and balls deep, riding this week’s blonde like this night is the last I’ll ever have, the lid on my memories creaks open and the past comes buzzing out. The rush of sweat and heated blood and orgasm sends me swinging out over the edge of the chasm left behind by the surgery, showing me some of what is waiting on the other side.

Two nights ago, I recaptured thirty seconds of Caitlin standing in the shadows across from a farmhouse. I was walking softly through the trees behind her. She didn’t know I was watching as she pulled on her black leather gloves and smoothed a knit mask over her head. She didn’t know I tracked her fingers as she tucked her hair beneath the mask with graceful movements that made me certain she was going to be an elegant thief.

I’ve seen Caitlin in my memories enough to know that we committed crimes together, even if I don’t know why, or where she’s gone. When the memories started trickling in last January, I convinced Olia to drive me by Caitlin’s house, wheedling at my nurse until she consented to violate my mother’s “no going into town without a parent” rule for something other than a trip to the pizza parlor. Back then, I was still using a cane, but I left it in the van, forcing myself to stand tall as I climbed the steps to Caitlin’s front door, my heart slamming in my chest as I realized I might be seconds away from seeing her again.