Behind Your Back (31 page)

S
aige and I make love all night. I know that’s what it is now. Sex between us has been this way for a while, but I was too pigheaded to see it. Our bodies are two instruments that play in perfect harmony with one another. She fits me, I fit her. I’ve never had a sexual encounter be so damn perfect.

I hold nothing back. I tell myself each time could be the last time and I need to give her everything because I’m never getting this back. I’ll never meet another woman like her. This is it for me. My one bright blaze of happiness and love in an otherwise grey life.

“I love you,” she says over and over. I get a thrill every time I hear it and I always say it back. I need to get it in as many times as I can. I need her to know that it’s true. That even if everything else I’ve told her about me is a lie, this is the one truth I can give her.

I wonder what her father will tell her about me after I go. If he’ll even mention me. Or if he’ll pretend I never existed. I don’t care about him, only about her.

That night I take her out to dinner, to the first restaurant where we danced. I order the same thing, we sit at the same table and we dance again to “Take Me to Church”.

“Remember the alley?” she says in my ear as we sway to the music. There are people watching, but let them stare.

“How could I forget?” I say, running my hand down her back. She laughs, a rich, lovely sound.

“I couldn’t believe you did it. I was half-teasing you, but then I saw the look in your eye and I wanted you so much I could barely stand.” The feeling was mutual. This time with Saige all feels… unreal. Like a dream. I didn’t think I could experience these emotions about someone.

Leaving her is going to hurt. Oh, it’s going to more than hurt. It’s going to rip me apart. I’ll try to stay together, but it will all be an act. Forcibly, I push those dark thoughts aside and hold onto her. I know my fingers are digging into her skin and I’m probably hurting her.

“Quinn?” she says, a question.

“I just want to hold onto you, Saige. Just let me hold you.” She nods against my chest and lets me. I close my eyes and absorb everything I can about this moment. Her warmth, her curves, her smell, the brush of her hair on my arms. The way she breathes. I
need
her and she’s right here with me.

The song ends and I have to make myself let go of her. I unhinge my fingers from her and step back.

“Don’t worry, be happy,” she says, reaching up and stroking the side of my face. I haven’t shaved today for her. Give her one last chance to have me the way she wants me.

“I am happy. I’m with you,” I say and we sit back down to have dessert.

She lets me have her in another alley, but this time it’s not fucking. The motions are the same, but the emotions behind it make all the difference. I worship her with my body and she does the same. Her dress gets ruined, of course, and I put my jacket over her shoulders to cover the shredded back. She leans on my shoulder and I have an insane idea.

“Will you come somewhere with me?”

“I’d go anywhere with you,” she answers.

I take her just down the street from my real apartment. I don’t tell her that I live here, I just park and help her out.

“What are we doing here?” she asks, looking around. This is a residential area, so there are no businesses.

“Let me show you,” I say, holding out my hand. She walks with me as we get toward the fence that keeps people like me out of the park.

“This is going to be a little tricky,” I say, looking at the fence. Normally it’s easy for me to scale, but I have the feeling it’s not going to be as easy for Saige, especially considering she’s wearing a dress.

“We crashing the park?” she says, her eyes glittering under the orange glow of the streetlights.

“We are indeed,” I say, leaning down and holding my hands out so she can put her foot on me as a brace.

“Psh, I got this,” she says, waving me off. After a moment of looking at the fence, she grabs hold of it and swings herself up, using the horizontal bars of the fence like steps to get herself over. She pauses at the top of the fence and then she drops down on the other side. With a smile, she straightens up and beckons me with one crooked finger.

“Come on.”

I follow her up and over and then we’re walking through the park.

“I come to this park a lot. I know it sounds creepy, but I like to look in the houses and imagine what the lives of the people are like who live in them.” We pass just outside of a square of light from someone’s kitchen window. There are white ruffled curtains that shield us from the scene inside.

“It doesn’t sound creepy. It sounds sweet. And a little sad.” She rubs my arm and leans in close.

“Sometimes I pretend to have conversations with people who talk too loudly on their cell phones. Like, if they ask a question, I answer it. Sometimes they catch me and it’s pretty embarrassing.” She laughs and it makes me smile.

“I just wanted to share this with you,” I say.

“Why is it that every time I’m with you, I feel like you’re trying to tell me goodbye?” My blood freezes in my veins and my feet stumble over one another.

“I’m not,” I say, but my voice is flat.

“Is everything okay, Quinn? You know you can talk to me about anything.”

I reach down into myself and pull out what I hope is a convincing smile.

“I know. I’m fine.” I lead her over to a bench and decide the best way to get her to stop asking me questions is to pull up her dress and bury my mouth between her legs. It works surprisingly well.

When I let her up, her eyes are hazy and she walks slowly beside me.

Two days. Not even two full days. Tomorrow and then the next day the file is set to hit her father’s email account at 2 pm. By that time I’ll be on the road with Lizzy.

“I can’t wait to get my tattoo done,” she says after I get her back over the fence and we’re walking toward the car.

“It’s going to look amazing,” I say. I won’t get to see it, but I know Crash will do good by her.

“I hope so. I have this fear that it’s going to turn out like shit and then I’ll have this awful tattoo on my back forever.”

“It’ll be fine,” I say, opening the passenger side door for her.

She’ll be fine. I hope.

Twenty-Eight

I
wish I could stay in bed with Saige the next day, but I need to go into work and scrub my computer. It’s good to have a list of things to do. It keeps my brain ordered, my thoughts occupied.

By the end of the day my computer is wiped of everything that might incriminate me. My client files (the legitimate ones) have been sent to the cloud and everything else is gone. My desk is absent of anything that could be traced back to me. I’ve wiped down every surface and the cleaning crew will be here tonight to do the rest. Lizzy’s transfer paperwork has gone through, after I used some money to move the process along. I’m set to pick her up tomorrow morning at ten.

Row has joined Hardy, and the rest of the guys will be driving the two moving trucks and cars left. I have the BMW to take Lizzy. I’m going to leave most of my apartment behind, with the exception of Leo, my safe and the coffee table, which will fit in the back and trunk of the car. If it hadn’t, I’d tie it on the roof and call it good.

There’s only one thing left to do. Say goodbye to Saige. Only she can’t know I’m saying goodbye to her.

I come home from work at the usual time and she’s deep in study mode, her books spread out around her, hair up in a messy bun on top of her head. She’s wearing a baggy shirt, no bra and shorts with her college logo on the side.

She’s breathtaking.

“Welcome home, dear,” she says, putting down her pen and skipping over to throw her arms around my neck. She pops up on her tiptoes and smiles brilliantly at me.

“How was your day? Shall I fetch your slippers?” She laughs and I kiss her hard enough that I almost bite her lip.

“My day was fine. How are you?”

“Good. Just swamped. But if I get enough done, then we can totally watch a movie and I was thinking pizza tonight. I’m craving melted cheese.” Her eyes widen when she mentions the cheese. My redhead loves her cheese.

“That sounds perfect. I have some work to do anyway, so go back to what you were doing. I’ll make you some coffee.”

“You’re the best,” she says, going back to the table and sitting down with her work again.

I put a new filter in the coffee maker and go to change into something more comfortable. I don’t have too many things here, but I’m going to have to come back when she’s at school tomorrow to scrub myself out of her apartment. I wish I could leave something of me behind for her, but that’s not possible. I wonder what she’s going to think when she comes home and all of my things are gone. Or she texts me and I don’t respond. Or she shows up at my office with lunch and my desk is empty. I don’t want to picture it, but I can’t stop.

The rest of the night is tinged in melancholy for me. I can’t let myself just enjoy this time because I know how soon it’s going to be over.

She cuddles up against me and I let her pick the movie. Instead of watching it, I watch her. How the light from the flickering screen crosses her face. How her expression changes as she watches. How her eyes crinkle as she laughs.

When the movie’s over, I take her to bed and make love to her as if it’s the last time, which it is. I make her climax over and over and over until she has to beg me to stop. Afterward she falls into an exhausted sleep on my chest, but I can’t close my eyes. I’m wide awake and wired. I count down the hours, minutes, seconds until her alarm goes off. I haven’t closed my eyes longer than a blink the whole night.

She stretches sleepily beside me.

“You were good last night. If I’m walking funny today, I know who to blame.” She gets up and winces, but gives me a smile.

After we shower separately, I give the appearance of getting ready for work. She doesn’t have class until nine, so I’m leaving over an hour before her.

She’s lazing around in bed, her hair wet and tangled when I come to tell her goodbye. I take a breath and then lean down, putting my lips to hers. I wish she were wearing her lipstick so some of it would be left on my face.

But her lips are bare and sweet and she blinks up at me and touches my face as I break the kiss and smile brokenly at her.

“See you tonight,” she says.

“See you tonight,” I say and lay a kiss on the tip of her nose. In the doorway, I pause and look back at her.

“I love you,” I say. She rolls on her stomach and I trace her body with my eyes. Memorizing.

“I love you, too.”

With every step, little bits of my heart break off and drop behind me. I’m leaving a lot of pieces of me behind here. I don’t think I’m ever going to get them back.

I
drive around for a while in the BMW, just thinking and burning through gas. I sit outside her apartment and wait for her to leave. I watch her as she tosses her hair over her shoulder and hops into her candy red car. After she drives off, I wait for twenty minutes and then break into her place for the second time. I don’t want to be here too long, so I move as fast and as efficiently as I can. Once I’ve scoured every single bit of the apartment, I’m ready to go.

I look back again and make an impulsive decision. I go to the bathroom and find her lipstick. I uncap it and draw a heart on her mirror before slipping the tube in my pocket and locking the door behind me.

I
’m getting into my car when I feel something cold against the back of my head.

The barrel of a gun.

Someone is waiting for me in the backseat of my car.

“Drive,” the voice says and I flick my eyes in the rearview, but the person is covered head-to-toe in black, including a ski mask. The eyes are brown and non-descript. I don’t know who it is.

My heart pounds a little, but I do what he says. There’s not really a whole lot of choice when you have a gun pointed to your head.

He directs me just down the street from Saige’s and then has me pull into an open garage next to a housing unit.

I pull in and wait.

Silence.

The gun digs into the back of my skull and the only sound is my breath and that of my… kidnapper?

“Get out,” he says and I slowly do as he says. I’m hoping once I can get the barrel of the gun away from my brain, I can attack him and take control.

But the second I’m out of the car, I’m hit with thousands of volts of electricity. A fucking Taser.

As my body seizes and falls to the concrete floor, I think that I should have crashed the car because then at least I might have gotten away.

T
he next time I open my eyes, I’m tied to a chair with rope. There’s a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of what is clearly a small concrete room. It’s so typical that I want to laugh. My head is still a little fuzzy, so they must have drugged me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out.

I test the ropes and they’re tied pretty damn tight. Whoever tied them was probably a Boy Scout or a sailor. Who knows, it’s not important.

Lizzy is waiting for me and I’m stuck in this fucking room and there’s no way to contact the guys and I’m stuck in this fucking room.

There’s a door across from me and it opens. Someone walks through and I nearly bite my tongue in half with shock.

“Hello, Sylas,” Saige says with a smile on her face. “Fancy meeting you here.”