Liam's List (16 page)

Slowly, I traced a finger along her neckline,
skimming to the tops of her breasts, memorizing the silky texture
of her skin.

Her breath hitched as my finger trailed
downward, smoothing over her dark areolas set against the whiteness
of the cotton shirt.

“
Vivian. Oh,
Viv.
” I heard her moan as I gently
squeezed the rose-tipped nipple. “Still
so
hard
.”

She swallowed a gasp as I squeezed harder,
watching her turgid nipple protrude against my thumb.

Trembling, she pivoted around, her movements
jerky. “Let me grab a towel,” she said nervously. “I need to wipe
the floor.”

“
No need.” I yanked her
hips back so her ass rested against my raging erection. “It’s just
gonna get soaked again.”

“
Again?” she breathed,
bracing her hands on the counter.

“
Again.” The word was a
deep groan as my hands roamed possessively along her curves. “I
want to see you come again.” I licked the sensitive skin beneath
her ear, raked the flesh with my teeth. “Look straight ahead,
Viv.”

There, in the large bay windows, our
reflected gazes locked.

I kissed the slope of her neck, my hands
coming around to cup her breasts. “I want to come inside you.”

In answer, she made a small noise in the back
of her throat and nudged her ass against my erection, urging me
on.

With expert hands, I undid my jeans and
rolled on a condom.

I knew better. As addicted as I was to Viv, I
always carried a condom in my pocket.

Let me amend that. I
carried
several
.

Leaning over the edge of the counter, she was
spread wide to accommodate me, her clit brazenly bared for my
touch.

Unable to help myself, I stroked my middle
finger over her clit and down the slit of her sex, just a teasing
graze of my fingertip.

I groaned when I found her hot and wet.

Thick rivulets of cream trickled down her
thighs.

Fuck,
yes
. She was already so ready for
me.

I bent down and pressed a kiss to the base of
her spine before I entered her in one smooth stroke.

My cock slipped easily inside her sopping wet
pussy.

God. She felt so good. So hot, so tight, her
arousal coating my cock in slick desire as I drove into her with
short, hard digs.

In the large bay window, the reflection of
her breasts bounced in time to my thrusts.

Straightening my spine, I pistoned my hips,
taking her harder and faster, setting a ruthless rhythm in pursuit
of my own pleasure, watching her breasts jounce wildly as I
increased the tempo.

She rolled her hips to take me deeper.
“Liam,” she whimpered, gripping the edge of the counter so tightly
her knuckles turned white.

Her release was right there. Right on the
verge.

“
Yes,” I growled. “Come
for me, Viv.”

I stared down the line of her body. Ass
jiggling, breasts bouncing, every inch of her body quivering, her
sweet responsive body urging me on as I drove into her rough and
hard until she came apart, her release gushing out like a river,
filling her pussy, flowing out to the sides.

Her
thighs,
my
thighs glistened with her honey.

Intoxicated by the sight of her come all over
her pretty skin, I plunged inside her again, my movements growing
frenzied, desperate, loving the sharp clapping sounds of my balls
slapping against her moist flesh.

I heard her breathless moans and let those
noises guide me as I ground into her with deep, feral digs until it
numbed all my pain, all my grief, all my guilt.

My muscles tightened and tensed right before
I exploded inside her.

Something like a strangled groan escaped me
as I collapsed with my face against her neck. My body created a
cocoon over hers, and we remained that way for a while, too tired
to move, too tired to exist.

Chapter Nineteen

Vivian

Liam moved up against the pillow, noticed me
studying him and paused. “Are you bruised?” he asked.

“
A little.” My lips parted
to release a soft sigh as his hand came up to caress my cheek, his
fingers gentle and reverent over my skin.

“
Viv
…” He breathed my name, then cupped my face in his hands and
kissed me, long and slow and deep. “I’m so sorry. I can’t seem to
stop wanting you.”

“
It’s okay.” I smiled
against his lips. “
I’m
okay. How’s
your
knee doing?” My leg slid along the inner slope of his muscled
thighs and down to his strong calves. “Still hurts?”

“
It’s fine,” he said
simply.

Curling a hand into his hair, I gazed into
his eyes, into his soul. His knee might have fully recovered, but
his soul had not.

His fractured soul still walked with a limp.
A giant limp.

In a gesture that was becoming familiar to
me, Liam started to pull away. But this time, I brought my body
close to his. Snaking my arms around his smooth torso, I nestled
into his back, crossing that divide.

He wasn’t retreating to his side of the bed
again, all gathered into himself and curled up in a fetal
position.

Not tonight. Not anymore. Not if I had any
say in it.

I refused to let that space between us turn
into a gap. I wasn’t going to let his ghosts and demons sleep
between us, like they had been every night since he returned from
Iraq.

My leg hooked itself around his thighs,
locking him to me. I firmed my resolve. The more he retreated, the
more I’d invade his space.

“
Liam,” I whispered, my
low breath stirring the small hairs on the back of his neck. “Will
you promise me one thing?”

“
It depends on what it
is.” His voice was strained and he addressed his words to the
wall.

“
Liam, look at
me.”

In time, he shifted his weight and turned
around. His eyes flicked to mine, narrowed and uneasy.

Slowly, I stretched a hand toward his face.
With a light, tentative motion, I traced the shape of his jawline.
“Will you call the VA office and make an appointment so you can be
assessed for PTSD.”

Seconds passed. I saw the indecision in his
eyes. But it gave me hope, for the discernable emotion was better
than the usual blankness I got from him.

“
Be brave, my soldier.”
Leaning forward, I pressed a soft, unhurried kiss to his lips. “Be
brave enough to admit you need help. There’s no harm in admitting
you saw and did horrible things.”

He started to speak, but I silenced him with
another kiss. “Holding it in will not only destroy you, Liam. It
will destroy us.” When his body tensed and he started to pull away
again, I felt I had no other choice but to add, “It will destroy
me.”

I felt him flinch at my last words.

Moments passed before he spoke. “Am I worse
than him?”

My breathing slowed. Liam didn’t have to
spell out his name. I knew what he was asking… if being with him
was worse than being in a relationship with my abusive ex,
Brody.

For a long moment, I seemed incapable of a
reply.

As he waited for my answer, I caught the
barest shift in his eyes.

I opened my mouth. Closed
it. At long last, I took a deep breath and chose my words
carefully. “When you ignore me and push me away, when my words are
not heard, when my laughter is met by silence, when you talk more
lovingly to Atticus than you do to me, when it seems like I no
longer exist to you, and when I feel like I don’t even matter to
you anymore, sometimes…” I swallowed hard. “Sometimes it
can
be.”

The detachment, the emotional numbness, the
deafening silence, it was almost worse than the yelling. Brody’s
yelling and screaming had come from anger and jealousy, but Liam’s
silence spoke louder than anything else.

His gaze turned inward and he recoiled
slightly.

My throat ached with
unshed tears, but I managed to keep my voice from shaking. “At
times I feel so alone. Emotionally, you’re not there for me. When
I’m upset or happy, angry or sad, I have to deal with my emotions
on my own. It hurts because I feel like you don’t love me anymore.”
I reached for his hand and clasped it in both of mine, trying to
squeeze some emotion from him with the force of my grip.
“But
I love you
,
Liam.” I offered him my heart, knowing full well he could rip it
apart and stomp it to pieces.

Whatever he wanted from me, he was going to
have.

And I realized I no longer cared about my own
heart anymore.

I didn’t care if he broke it.

I only wanted
his
heart to be whole
again.

“
And I’m here for you. I’m
not going anywhere. I’ll
always
be here for you. Always.” I pressed my lips to
his brows, his eyelids, his face, and finally to his lips. “Come
back to me, Liam.”

He went perfectly still. I could feel my
pounding heart, the press of his hand against my own, his warm
breath against my skin.

A heartbeat passed.

Then another.

The moment stretched and stretched,
swallowing up all the moments that came before it.

At last, I released the breath I’d been
holding when he said the words I’d been longing to hear. “I never
left.”

To hear those words, it gave me a fragile
flame of hope. Hope I had been aching so desperately for.

Chapter Twenty

Vivian

“
In my lecture today, we
will be discussing psychiatry and mental healthcare through an
analysis of some of its fundamental concepts.” Professor Marquez
turned his back to the class and began writing on the
board.

Neurotics build castles in the air.
Psychotics live in them. And psychiatrists collect the rent. ~
Jerome Lawrence

Sanity and happiness are an impossible
combination. ~ Mark Twain

Then the professor turned
to face the class, pacing the floor with the same measured pace of
his speech. “There seems to be a meme in place that’s based on
getting people with ‘mental problems’ functional fast so they can
keep their jobs and carry on living in their square peg world.
Hence, the idea that brain dysfunctions and chemical imbalances are
the root causes of mental problems, which in turn comes with a slew
of diagnoses, along with a cocktail of drugs designed to treat
those diagnoses.
We slap a label on
everything in this culture. We think anything that ails us must be
a medical condition that can be treated.
The
DSM
—and
for those of you who don’t know the term, it’s the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders
—has now grown so thick and so
large that if you threw a boomerang around it, it’d never come
back.
It’s expanded to include every human
tic as an aberration. Pharmaceutical companies are free to exploit
the glut of diagnoses and profit from the sale of these specialized
drugs. And now for treatment we have the quick fix because the
system that pays the money is not interested in cure and
prevention. The system is interested in illness not
health.

“
People seem to have
forgotten that we live in a social and economic nexus. One that is
oppressive and requires a good deal of conditioning in order to
make us adaptable to it. Perhaps
normalcy
is just another term for social obedience to conditioned or coerced
expectations.
Perhaps the ‘sane’ ones are
those who have been able to adapt and become hardcore sociopaths to
a good degree, while the ‘insane’ ones are those who have not been
able to adapt to a very insane system.
”

This topic seemed to have awakened me from my
reverie.

I put my hand up and waited until the
professor called on me. “Um…” I cleared my throat. “If I have a gut
feeling that we do not live in a so-called ‘sane’ society, doesn’t
that feeling suggest that I know what sanity is?”

The look the professor gave me was long and
considering. “So tell me,” he said at last. “What gives you that
gut feeling that we live in an insane world?”

“
Well…” I hedged. “Isn’t
love a shared mental illness?”

“
And what does sanity mean
to you, Miss Sorenson?”

“
To
not
self-destruct.” I paused for a
moment before adding, “I know someone. Someone close to me. And his
mind is in a state that makes him want to harm himself, isolate
himself, withdraw from others. In his case, wouldn’t the chemical
fix prove somewhat effective?”

The professor regarded me impassively. “It
depends. It might treat the symptoms, or it might not. True healing
takes time and resource.” After a moment’s hesitation, he asked,
“And this someone you know, what has he been diagnosed with?”

“
Well…” I began tapping my
pen against my notebook. “He has mild TBI. And he hasn’t exactly
been diagnosed
yet,
but I’m pretty sure he has PTSD, too.”

“
Post
traumatic
stress disorder,” said the
professor, placing huge emphasis on the word
traumatic
. “The word ‘trauma’ is
derived from the Greek word for ‘wound.’ Unfortunately, some of the
wounds from trauma can have severe and long-lasting
effects.”