Blazed (28 page)

"Your girl there has a 'one hit wonder' reputation. She has patterns
— she never sleeps with the same man twice. At least she never used to..." Esme shot a pointed look in my direction. "Occasionally, she gets a greedy nut job who wants a second whirl, whether she's conscious or not. Par for the course when you look like her and live her 'lifestyle'. It's not the first time and it won't be the last."

"Are you kidding me?" Blaze glared across the room with enough suppressed aggression to wipe the nonchalance from her face. "This isn't the first time?"

"I had a triage nurse tell me I should have built up an immunity by now," I smiled wryly up at him, then coiled up into the foetal position when a wave of nausea hit me. 

"If only you had a sexually exclusive boyfriend to protect you from incidents like this." The bitter sentiment trailed off into the kitchen with Esme, lingering only slightly in the room with us. She resented my liberal attitude to 'free love' and was annoyed that I'd carried on seeking out new lays during my first weeks with Blaze, and I understood that when it got me into situations like this. But what she wanted for us was the full couple package
— sharing a home, sleeping and waking up together every morning and being generally inseparable and that wasn't an option for either of us. 

Blaze had his own life and I had mine, that was why our 'thing' worked so much better than most other relationships. What we had was a mutual understanding to use each other when we needed to, not a
co-dependency or reliance. He couldn't be around to babysit me every night and I wouldn't sit around alone at home like the little woman during the week. In my defence, I hadn't slept with anyone else during Blaze's holiday and I was genuinely crazy about him, but as patient as he was, he wouldn't be able to take all my crazy if I designated him as an exclusive asset. 

And that crazy was roiling around now, like it did every time I had one of these 'mishaps'. It took something dramatic like getting my drink spiked for me to start seriously rethinking and regretting the more destructive choices I'd made since I moved to the city. Binge drinking was normal for a twenty-two year old. The level of my promiscuity wasn't and it was dangerous. It was a choice I made through insecurity, not believing that second, third or fourth encounters once would be the same after they saw the scars on my side. I didn't want their interest to linger through pity or a desire to 'save' me when that particular issue was almost ancient history, but I needed that initial allure and driving urge to fuck me stupid. In that way, I was conceited and arrogant.

Blaze had seen the scars before nailing me in that changing room— that was the loophole he'd unwittingly exploited. Like Esme, Daniel, Jonathan and Chris, he discovered the damage and didn't think twice about accepting it as a part of me. He thought I was beautiful even with them and didn't put out to make me feel better. That's how he earned his place on my list of repeat offenders, even if it would have been way easier to cut him off at the pass and avoid dealing with my ugly emotions.

What I couldn't help was the way I was going to handle the retrospect; the way I'd leap back into unhealthy vices to cope with the negative way I'd start looking at myself again. The times when I was forced to look back at my sexual history were the times I acknowledged that I was a slutty tramp and I was cursing my own life. Nobody wanted to love a whore and I certainly didn't want to love myself when I replayed all the moments I slept with a new man or dragged a friend home just to tick a box in my daily routine. I didn't even enjoy it; I did it automatically without any consideration or forethought. What did that say about the deeper reaches of my true nature? I was headed down a hot road into hell, and the less of that distance Blaze travelled with me, the better.

"You should go," I said, pushing out of his hold around me. From the pause and frown he gave me, I figured that it must have come out slurred and my bid for freedom about as effective as slamming a beach ball against a brick wall.

"Not a chance." He curled around me tighter. "Maybe she's right. "

"Don't. This was nobody's fault but my own. I shouldn't be so loose."

"How many other guys have you been with since we met?"
 

I shifted around the best I could to get further away from him. "Seriously?" Taking a deep breath, I sighed, "don't ask me that. You won't like the answer."

His voice hardened. "Tell me." Then softened. "We've not defined any rules and acceptable behaviours. I didn't demand exclusivity and I knew what you were doing, so I have no right to be offended." He couldn't possibly take any more on top of the massive pile on of my junk without batting an eyelid, but I knew he wouldn't give up until I told him. He just had that look of quiet determination about him.

I shifted around onto my knees and nestled my hands in my lap, fiddling nervously with my own fingers. "I can't give you a number because I don't know. Since I moved here, I haven't gone a single day without some kind of sexual contact." His eyebrow quirked and I could see him doing the mental arithmetic to tot up some kind of four year estimate. It didn't make for a pretty number. "Sometimes once a day isn't enough, not even twice. If there are no new faces in the bar, Esme or Chris sort me out. Believe me I'm not proud of myself
—"

Before I knew it, I was on Blaze's lap and his lips on mine, hands in my hair holding me still. There was something new about his kiss, something almost possessive.
 

"We need to hang out more, you sex maniac." I almost laughed, but failed with an unenthusiastic half-cough and woeful sideways slump back to a relatively safe horizontal position. Sickness was impending, and the last place I wanted to void my stomach was over his lap.
 

He leaned over me, fingers stroking my pallid face. "Tell me what I can do to make you feel better right now."

Looking up at him guiltily, I rolled my eyes before I closed them. "Nothing unless you're just going to hold me like a pathetic child." There was a shift of fabric and the sound of denim pockets full of loose change hitting the floor before I was pulled over into the crook of a fully reclined Blaze's arm. "Are you going to be here when I wake up?"

"I'm going to be here as long as you want me to be, Emmeline."
 

I craned my neck up to look at him and frowned. "I warned you what would happen if I woke up next to you." The offer was still open, but considering the circumstances, I felt he needed an additional caveat. If I was him, I wouldn't want to wake up as the possession of a woman who'd shagged a fair chunk of the population of
London with a few rapists and psychopaths in the mix.

"Yeah," he nodded and lifted his free shoulder in a shrug, "and you said yesterday that I had the standing offer of allowing you to do so. Besides, I haven't been inside you today, and in about an hour you're going to wake up needing someone to hold the bucket I'm going to tell Esme to get." At least he wasn't disillusioned and he seemed to have a pretty good grip on my strange cognitions. He could friend zone himself by not having sex with me between the arbitrarily set hours of the day starting and ending. He cared. He'd paid that much attention and taken time to process it all.

"Touché." Squirming down, I felt the tears burn the backs of my eyes as I said, "but if I had my way, you'd never leave." 

I was sure I heard him mutter 'okay' as I drifted into a troubled sleep.

I STOOD THERE, pillow in hand, looming over the lifeless body of a faceless corpse I didn't know. Her glassy eyes stared up at me, blank and still shining with tears, hand hung over the side of an extravagant four-poster bed decorated in filigree and royal blue velvet fabric. Not a scene I knew now, but somehow I knew that I would some day. It felt too familiar. Too charged. 

And as I stared over her, I smiled. I was proud of myself, sickeningly so. I hated that woman deeply and one day I would kill her for no reason other than the fact she had somehow been an obstacle, a nuisance.
 

I just didn't know who she was yet.

"EMMY!" ESME'S VOICE jerked me awake just in time for me to fall face first out of my bed and scramble uselessly towards the bathroom. Those eyes were still staring at me, wide and afraid, and nothing could tune them out of my memory. I couldn't understand how any part of me could have been happy about taking a life, and then I thought of Hunter's fiancée, Siobhan, the woman who pushed me to a suicide attempt. Yeah, I probably would have killed her.

Esme stuck a bucket underneath my face and rubbed my back through my heaves, brushing my hair back from my forehead across the sheen of sweat across my skin. "My god, what were you dreaming about? You were thrashing around like a crazy person."

"I 
am 
a crazy person." I shivered through the image imposed on my mind's eye, shaking my head in a weak denial. "I don't remember. Where's Blaze?"

"He ran out about ten minutes to pick up some lunch et al. He thought he'd be back before you woke up."

" 'Et al' ?" She winked, setting me further on edge. Shoving my hands into my hair, I sighed and pushed the bucket away. "Can you please run me a bath? I feel... dirty." In every possible negative way.

BLAZE found me in the bath half an hour later, submerged to the shoulders with my eyes closed, listening to the music piping out from the smartphone perched on the lip of the tub. The track was like nothing I'd ever heard, playing on almost every sense in a way that took over the body completely and almost projected it's essence outwards like an outer-body experience.

"What is this?"

"I have no idea," I moaned drowsily, "and I have no idea if I'm still a little doped up, but I'm not moving until it finishes."

"Want some company? I'm good at washing hair."

My eyes instantly flipped open. "Seriously?" Blaze began to strip in reply, forcing me upright from my lazy lounge little by little as more of his bronze skin became exposed. By the time he was down to his underwear, I was on my knees, elbows propping me up against the side of the bath and unashamedly ogling him.

"Well then," he crossed his arms across his firm torso and gave a look rife with promise, "don't you look just superb like that
— flush faced with those little rivulets of water creeping down your divine body." 

Glancing down, I smiled sweetly, feigning innocence. "This body?" I cocked my head, teeth clamping down on my lower lip. "Did you miss it yesterday? You made me go a whole day without you inside me." A whole day full of dread that I'd obviously misplaced. The residual unease from all sources of stress the day before hit me in full force, breaking the seductive guise I recovered quickly. But he obviously caught that momentary lapse and held out a hand to pull me up out of the bath.

"About yesterday." He held up a hand to hush me and pulled a large fluffy towel from the rail, using it to pat the water from my legs before he wrapped it around my shoulders. "Come with me." 

Intrigued by his tone, I let him lead me back through into the bedroom and found myself hit by the aroma of fresh coffee curling off the two mugs that stood on the table next to my bed. Urging me by the small of my back, Blaze guided me down to sit on the fresh linens and crouched to dry me from the toes up.

"Your silence is deafening," I tugged him up gently by the hair until our faces were level, "finish the thought you started in the bathroom or take advantage of me being naked."

"You and your options," he admonished softly, leaning forward until our lips met. The slight force behind his kiss coaxed me backwards to spread across the sheets, allowing him to crawl over me and settle with his hips pinning mine. "Let me keep you awake afterwards."

"You make that sound easy."

"You've done it before," his right hand slipped down to hitch my thigh up against him, "the first time. I don't want to waste a single minute I have with you."

I wrenched away, perturbed by the sentiment. "That was awfully ominous. You make it sound like our time is limited." The nagging feeling of dread knotted in my chest and I rubbed at it, twisting out from underneath Blaze when it didn't go away. "You were distracted yesterday. Something is wrong."

"There's nothing wrong." He caught me by the ankle and trapped me back underneath his hot, solid frame. The warmth from his skin heated me, reminding me how right it felt to be there. Without stopping to really think about it, I lifted my head to nuzzle into his neck, drawing in as much of his natural scent as possible in one breath and falling back drunk from it.

"God, you're too much sometimes. Too male." 

"Alright, now you've done it." Jumping up quickly and leaving me bereft, Blaze crossed the room to the duffel bag that seemed to live in my flat a lot of late. He rifled through it quickly, pausing for a moment before he stood again and prowled back towards me, privately smirking about the very proud erection straining against the fabric of his underwear.

Sprawling back across the linen, he sat cross-legged opposite me and gestured for me to surrender a hand. "About yesterday. And about what Esme said earlier—"

"Ignore Esme. She doesn't know what she's
—"

He silenced me with a look and held my hand in both of his.
 "I want to give you something. But I'll be clear and say that it's not a commitment, just a promise." He stuffed a small velvet covered box into my palm and closed my fingers around it, cool as anything. Morbidly curious, I snapped the lid open to a needlessly large emerald set into white gold, flanked on either side by three diamonds arranged into a triangle. Almost too much without being pretentious, like the man himself. Just the sight of it made me wince— if this was just a promise, what the hell did the proposal look like?