Evil to the Max (28 page)

“This isn’t about sleeping with him.”

“I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to take his huge cock in my mouth, suck him, swallow him, then spread my legs and take him inside me, fu—”

“Stop it.” The walls seemed to shake with the vehemence of his shout.

“Why? You
are
jealous, aren’t you?” What demon had crawled inside her and taken over her soul?

“You’re demeaning yourself, Max.”

“I’m demeaning
you
.” It was the demon of guilt, and it had her firmly in its grip, forcing her to lash out.

“Think about what you’re doing.”

“I’m tired of thinking about it. I want to forget about everything for a little while. I want to take control of my life again.”

“Fucking some faceless cowboy isn’t going to put you back in control.”

“Maybe not, but it beats hanging around here.” And it sure beat lying alone in the dark with the haunting vision of Jules’s dead face.

“You’re acting out against what those men did to you the night I died.”

Max laughed harshly. “Oh, so now you think you were a psychiatrist in your former life.” She grabbed her black high heels from beneath the bed and slipped them on. “Well, it doesn’t work. Those bastards don’t mean a damn thing.”

She listened to the words as if someone else had said them, was horrified to find they’d come from her mouth. They’d killed Cameron. And that meant everything.

“We’re talking about the rape, not the murder,” he whispered, dismissing his own demise just that easily. “And they changed
everything
about you when they raped you. When they beat you. Left you for dead.”

She heard the tears clog his insubstantial throat. She said nothing. She couldn’t as chills raced across her flesh.
Not true, Cameron
. She’d been changed long before that ever happened. It was nothing more than another random bad act. She clamped her teeth together so the words wouldn’t slip out.

“Why do you refuse to admit that what they did drove you into your self-imposed isolation?”

Attack mode. Safety mode. Where she felt most comfortable. “Why do you always come back to that? I’m sick of hearing it.” And scared to death of it.

“Because you won’t talk about it,” his voice softened.

She smelled his peppermint breath against her cheek and swallowed past the lump in her throat.

“You can’t hide from it forever, Max.”

She grabbed her purse, rummaged through it, and after finding her keys and license, dumped it back on the floor next to the chair. She took several long, deep, fortifying breaths. Her anger grew as the oxygen filled her. Anger, so much better than fear. She turned on him almost gladly. “All right, you want to talk about it. Fine. You want the truth. Fine. But you won’t like it, Cameron.” She smiled what she hoped was a particularly nasty smile. “I haven’t been protecting
myself
. I’ve been protecting
you
.”

Choked-off laughter. “Right, Max. See if you can explain that one so a normal ghost can understand it.”

She pushed the lapels of her jacket back, fisted her hands her on her hips, the keys digging into her palm, and glared in his general direction. “We’ll see how much you can take. The truth is I didn’t feel a damn thing that night. They raped me. So what? I’d had sex with too many men and too many times.” The truth of it shamed her. She said it anyway, almost believing it hurt him more than it hurt her. “They were just three more. You were
dead
, and quite frankly, I didn’t give a damn what they did to me. I was sort of hoping they’d put me out of my misery.”

The pitiful truth had been locked away inside her all this time. If he’d really wanted to know, he’d have found it long ago. She advanced, backed him into the corner, his phosphorescence squashed into a dull red against the dirty, white walls.

“Max, don’t—”

She stabbed a finger. “Don’t you dare ‘Max’ me. You asked. I’m answering. Now shut up.” She took a deep breath, stiffened her spine, and wondered if he realized she didn’t want to hear it anymore than he did. But he’d pushed too hard for her to stop now.

“Do you know why they almost beat me to death?” She waited a heartbeat. “Because I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t scream or beg or plead. I just lay there. And they couldn’t stand it. They kept saying over and over, ‘scream, bitch, scream.’ But really,” she shrugged, splaying a hand in the air, “what was there to scream about? You were
dead
, and they only did what a hundred other guys have done.”

Cameron cried in that darkened corner her room. She steeled herself against the sound. “I even felt like that with you sometimes. Alone. Voided. I never told you. I was ashamed. Because I loved you. I really did. But you were so right when you said I don’t know how to make love. I never have. Sex is about power and control and getting what you want. It isn’t about making love. There’s always someone on top and the other person’s on the bottom. That’s the irrevocable lesson I learned that night, Cameron. I’d really known it all along, but they beat it into me so I’d never forget.”

“Making love is so much more,” he whispered.

She longed for the solidness of his chest, the familiar scent of his skin. If he’d had arms to hold her, she knew he’d have crushed her to him.

And she’d have fallen short one more time.

“I really wanted to make that true, Cameron. For you. But it just wasn’t in me. It never has been.” She put her head back, gulped air, felt dizzy for just a moment, then dove in with the rest of it. “That wasn’t the first time I was raped.”

“Jesus,” he groaned.

His pain was a physical presence in the room, but she didn’t let it stop her. “I was thirteen.” Silence, except for the sound of a ghostly in-drawn breath. “Guess I must have missed telling you this one. Well, it wasn’t a big deal.” She waved a hand negligently in the air while her heart raced and the blood rushed in her ears. “You know, it didn’t even bother me. I just let them do it. There were two of them, eighth graders. It was at school. They caught me alone in the locker cage after the bell had rung. One of them held me down while the other one did it.” Even now, she could feel the chubby fists closing around her forearms. “Then they switched and the other one did it, too.”

She tipped her head to the side, as if she could see more than Cameron’s reddish glow. She almost expected him to say something, to interrupt her, but he didn’t. God, why had she ever started this? She swallowed, then continued, mostly to fill the dreadful silence she’d created.

“After ... it wasn’t like I was traumatized or anything. My grades didn’t drop. I could concentrate on my classes just fine. I guess I thought I should have felt bad about it. I even thought it should have hurt, physically, I mean, but it didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone, because I figured they’d find out I really didn’t care.” She’d lain awake nights utterly terrified someone would discover how she’d felt, discover her awful secret, that she wasn’t completely devastated the way a normal person should have been.

Now she’d told Cameron. It didn’t made her feel better.

“So that’s what happened to you, Max?” How did he get there? So close she could almost feel his lips at her temple.

“You mean is that what made me the way I am?” She shrugged off the question. “You could have read my mind long ago, and you’d have known it all.”

“But
you
wouldn’t have known it,” he murmured.

He caressed her nape with his breath, blew against her hair. “I’ve never forgotten it,” she whispered, closing her eyes and imagining he was alive.

“Remembering it and understanding it are two completely different things.” His whole being seemed to envelop her.

She heard him, felt him, and wanted him. But understand anything?

“You still don’t, my love. God help me, I’m very afraid you never will.” His breath sighed through her bones. “What else happened, Max? Before the boys. What made you feel nothing?”

Her mother died. She went to live in her uncle’s house. Cameron knew enough to ask the question, to push her. She didn’t have to answer. “Nothing happened.”

“Tell me,” he pleaded.

“Go fuck yourself.” Her tone was almost mild as she slipped into a gentle nothingness.

“Someday,” he whispered, “someday you’ll have to let that out, too.”

“Someday isn’t today.” Someday would never come.

“Let me hold you.”

She would have given anything if he could ... but it was too late. Too many men, two years, and a gravestone too late. “You’re dead, Cameron. You can’t hold me. I need a real man.”

And this time, she walked out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Max stood alone on the small deck outside her one-room apartment. Cameron hadn’t followed. In the dark, she wouldn’t have missed his faint phosphorescent glow. She sagged against the door and thanked God that for the moment she’d capped the festering memories like a natural gas leak. Before any other terrible secrets exploded out of her.

Her husband was a ghost and a mind reader, but some things were buried so deep, even he couldn’t bring them out. Though he desperately wanted to push
her
into dredging them up. Maybe that was the good deed that would get him in the pearly gates. Getting her to open up.

She’d had a momentary lapse in there, revealed too much, that was true, but it wouldn’t happen again. She meant to keep her secrets to herself, though
from
herself was more like it. As a girl, hiding things deep down inside had been work. Now it was as natural as breathing, as natural as lying about her true feelings. She hadn’t lied about the boys. She hadn’t lied about the men and why they’d beaten her. She’d lied about the profound nothingness she’d felt. More than a lack of emotion, it was a dark void that sucked in all her feelings, turned her into a blank wall, into ... nothing.

She hadn’t thought she’d ever admit that she’d simply lain there and let them do it. Not when she was thirteen and not when she was thirty. And the most terrifying question of all, was how many other things had she simply lain down for? God, the thought ... one chink in the armor that surrounded her and she’d lose control of her finely knit web of ... lies she told herself?

Well, tonight she’d put one helluva big chink in that armor herself.

But she damn well intended to shore it all back up, to fill her blank wall with a man’s touch.

She’d dressed for the Round Up, she fully intended to go, and she certainly planned on getting laid. Properly. For more years than she could remember, she’d striven to connect emotionally. In the end, she’d only connected on a power level. She’d come to accept that. She wanted control, wanted power, but most of all she wanted something beyond that dark void sucking her down. It didn’t matter one bit if later it all turned to shit.

Because in the morning, Jules would still be dead, and he’d died because of her obsession with Bud Traynor.

She reached in her blazer pocket, pulled out her keys, crunched across the drive in her high heeled shoes, and shrieked when Witt appeared out of the shadow of a tree just by the street.

Witt. Shit. She didn’t need this, not now. “I gotta run. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She tried to breeze by him, but he caught her arm. “Hey, wait just a minute.”

She allowed herself to be pulled to a stop, but stood on the sidewalk tapping her foot and looking deliberately at his hand until he dropped her arm. She pulled her jacket around her. The night was suddenly cold.

“Had a case,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked.

His rumpled brown suit looked almost black in the night. He must have gone home to change after he’d left her that morning. He smelled of talcum powder and ... something else. She knew that odor. It clung to his clothes, to his hair, and to the depth of his eyes. She stared at his hands. The powder was embedded in the cuticles of his nails and the fine lines of his fingers. Latex gloves had powder in them. He’d been at a crime scene. A homicide. He saw faces like Jules every day. Every single day. And the scent that festered in his clothes was the scent of death. She wondered if it festered in his soul.

Can you really close the front door on it, Witt, really?

“Only just heard about Jules,” he went on as if they hadn’t stood silent for several seconds. “I’m sorry.”

A car passed. She watched the fading taillights. “What for?”

“I should have been there for you.”

Shades of Cameron. She couldn’t deal with any of that. She spread her hands and shrugged. “Like I said, what for?”

He regarded her a moment, then tipped his head to the side. “You’re pissed I wasn’t there, aren’t you?”

She went for flippant. Maybe he’d eventually get the hint. “I handled your cop buddies quite well on my own.”

“Max. I would have been there if I’d known—if I could have been.”

God, she wanted him to leave her alone. Wanted him to stop being so damn solicitous—before she made the unthinkable mistake of throwing herself at him. She lifted her hands in a who-cares gesture. “Why are you explaining? It doesn’t bother me.”

He scraped a big paw down his face. “I don’t feel much like fighting tonight, okay? Why don’t I simply tell you what I learned?”

Her heart picked up its pace. “You found Nadine?”

He shook his head, sadly, she thought. “No, Max. Maybe you oughta try looking in a few more dumpsters.”

She stepped back as if he’d slapped her, and her ears buzzed like she’d taken it across the side of the head.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Bad day.”

And he
was
sorry. She could see it in the wariness of his blue eyes.

She took a deep breath and tried not to hold it against him. “Did those cop friends of yours find Snake? I couldn’t very well ask them under the circumstances.”

He shifted his feet. “Yeah, they did.”

She waited. He forced her to ask. “Yeah, and?”

“He didn’t have a license number, and Jake Lloyd said the locket wasn’t the one his wife always wore.”

Whammo. She felt his words like a blow. That couldn’t be. He had to be wrong. “But it was a heart, just like the one she wore that night—”