Intrusion (18 page)

He cannot be to blame.

He just always thinks he is.

“You can say that forever. I'll probably never internalize it.”

“Do you have to? Do you have to do that?”

“It might help in my quest to have a normal relationship with the woman I love.”

“If you love me, then nothing has to be internalized. You don't have to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're not responsible. You just have to let me be there for you when you think ridiculous things like that, just like you would want to be there if I ever thought that I was to blame for what happened to me. Wouldn't you want to be?”

“Of course I would. I even know what I would say.”

“Tell me then. Tell me every word.”

“That there should be no punishment for kindness. No toll to pay because you wanted to reach out or wear a nice dress or see if the guy across the street is really sleepwalking and maybe help him out of it.”

“Then don't make me pay it. And don't you pay it either.”

“That's easy enough to say until it all ends with you having to blow someone's head off,” he says, but for the first time, I can see the cracks in his conviction. I can hear the wavering in his voice and see the desperation in his eyes, as he does his best to make this airtight. The only problem is—it can never be, now.

“And how often do you think that's going to happen, considering it probably has never happened to any other person in the history of the world?”

“That isn't the point. None of this is the point. I didn't want to end things because I was afraid a serial killer might escape from prison and track me down and try to hurt you—the way he actually
did
. I wanted to end them because you don't deserve to be afraid or troubled or poisoned by
anything
, least of all my delightfully undisclosed relationship with a homicidal maniac,” he says, but I see the angle he's working. I see him going for that third-act faux drama. Everything must always be the truth—that's what he's going for. As though lying about trauma actually fits into that category.

“Do you think a nightmarish event you neglected to tell me about is going to make me more sure that we should stay apart? Maybe throw a big hissy fit about how I can never trust you for not telling me about the most awful thing I can ever imagine happening to another person, let alone the person I love?”

“That wouldn't be quite how I would put it.”

“It's not exactly bigamy, Noah,” I say, and that's when I know I have him. That's when everything shifts. He tries one last time, but his gaze says it won't be good enough.

“My name isn't really Noah. The FBI helped me change it, when he wouldn't stop sending me letters and gifts and other. . .things. Though even after I became Noah I still couldn't work or do anything even remotely public. He was so good at finding me. Almost supernaturally good.”

He intends to shock me, I think, with the idea that I don't even know his real name.

But nothing could ever shock me now.

“The point still stands. You changed your identity to protect yourself and anyone around you from things like this. Not to be a cruel asshole who secretly wants your girlfriend to get her head blown off.”

“And yet you did almost get your head blown off. Maybe because I omitted—” he starts, but he doesn't get very far. Mostly because I take his hand, I think. He really starts to crumble when I take his hand. I feel him squeeze it so tight I can make out my heart beating there beneath his grip.

Not that I mind.

I squeeze him just as hard in return.

And then I slowly, oh so slowly, pull him back to me. He's so far out and on the verge of drowning, but I can do it. I have all the time in the world to try, at least.

“You told me everything I needed to know. You told me more than was comfortable for you. Nothing you did put me in danger—Floyd Humphries put me in danger. Though let's for one second say that you did. Let's say that this is your fault and you were right to try to keep me from harm. . .shouldn't all of that be my choice? Don't you think I should get to choose how much risk to take?”

“You wouldn't have made an informed choice.”

“But I'm making one now. And I want you to let me. I think you will let me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I haven't told you everything, either.”

I pause then, partly because I need to gather my strength.

Partly because my strength is like a hurricane, a tidal wave, a storm in the middle of the sea, and I want it to come out softly, so softly. I wait for him to sit, and then I speak. I say what I only ever told the police. I say what even I can hardly believe.

“I never told you how I got away from Ted. Why I came away from that almost unscathed—physically at least. I think if he'd had time he would have done terrible things to me, but I never gave him that. I never gave him a chance to harm me any further than he did with the kidnapping. It's funny you know, I always thought I was afraid of pain. I imagined that I was a fearful person. But when the choice came to stay free of any agony or get out of a pair of handcuffs, I chose agony. I chose to dislocate my own thumb to get out of them.”

I hear the snap and crackle when I say it. I feel the fire of it, terrible and glorious all at the same time. He has to know that sometimes, burning is better than not.

“There was a door, between me and freedom. A wooden door three inches thick, with a bolt on the outside. The only way to escape it was to punch through, and so I made a fist, and I struck it and struck it and struck it until my knuckles were a bloody pulp. I broke a bone in my hand and split three nails down to the root, but I kept going. Do you know why?”

“I think I do, but God, I want to hear it all the same.”

“Because I wanted to live, Noah. More than anything, I wanted to live. And when I got free, I thought that was what I was doing. I bought my home, and I got a little dog, and I did all the things that made me alive and normal. Yet somehow, I still didn't fully realize what living actually is until I started living it with you. And now I want to fight for that, too,” I say, and he closes his eyes at the sound of it. Not like someone hearing something bad, though. Like someone hearing the rising end of a piece of music, more stirring to the person's soul than anything in the world. His hand is shaking around mine.

His brow is furrowed, waiting for the crescendo.

And it comes, it comes. It bursts out of me, with all the force of everything I feel.

“I want to come down the basement stairs, in the pitch-black with no backup. My gun in my shaking hands. And when you try to scream my name and nothing comes out but silence I hear it all the same. I call to you, you're safe now, Noah. I'm going to get you out of there. Just sit tight, everything is okay,” I say, my voice trembling on the very edge of going over, but never quite breaking. I will never break now—and this is the reason why.

“Because I'm not the girl in the well who you need to save from the horror you think is you. I'm Clarice Starling, here to help you out of the dark,” I tell him.

And then he takes me in his arms. He holds me to him so tight, so tight I know he will never now let me go. “I love you, my Beth,” he says, but he doesn't have to. I hear it in his hand clutching at my back and his face against the side of mine and in the salt-sweet relief of his tears, finally shed for himself after all this time.

I feel it when I pull away and look into those eyes, more beautiful than the evening sky and so full of everything that is good about the world. He is what is good about the world, my Noah. He makes me believe that the world can be good.

“More than anything,” I say, “I love you, too.”

Epilogue

H
IS BODY IS
starting to soften now. Not in a big way—I don't think he'll ever stop metaphorically climbing mountains altogether. But the change is noticeable, when the lines and curves used to be so hard. It used to be that I could feel his hipbones, like swollen knuckles beneath the thinnest layer of sinew and muscle. It used to be that he would twist beneath me in bed, and I would see everything flex and stretch almost painfully.

But after we move to this place on the beach, things shift. Slowly at first, oh so slowly, but there all the same. He eats with less precision and more gusto, and never runs until his body is wrung out. When I see him coming across the sand toward me it is at a leisurely pace, as though he knows nothing is after him.

And everything is before him.

Long mornings spent writing papers again—made much in demand by the experiences he finds he can share. Afternoons in the sun or the sea, fooling around as though we're normal people. Most days it even feels like we are. And when we don't, when he doesn't, we talk about it until dawn in fevered bursts. We spill our secrets and share our fears and find comfort in how it always ends.

In the kind of lovemaking I never thought I'd have.

And that he certainly didn't believe in.

One night after an intense conversation about blame and doubt and fear—no boundaries, no calls for quiet, no hurt that the hurt should still be there—he tells me in a shaking voice to come to him. And then he adds in a tone that takes me apart:

“But take your clothes off first.”

So I do. I peel everything off as slowly as if he were the sort of man to enjoy a striptease and I was the sort of girl to feel comfortable giving one, so deep in the pretense that it stops being one at all. It becomes real. This is how we really are now. I can stand naked in front of him, and he can look his fill.

He can reach out and touch me without having to ask.

He never has to ask anymore. He knows enough; he sees me clearly; he just does. He strokes the back of his hand down over my hip and thigh, and never falters in the shadow of my silence. If anything, my quiet spurs him on. It makes him bolder now, as he strives toward something so much sweeter:

The idea of
winning
my words, rather than needing them.

He kisses my cunt just to make me cry out, pushing on until I crack enough to let one tiny word escape. “Yes,” I tell him, “yes,” and he follows that single syllable down into deeper pleasures. He spreads me out on my back on the bed—the one we bought together in a greedy grasp at all the things couples do—and puts a hand between my legs, stroking me so firmly I can't help letting out a little more.

I say his name, his real name, the name he hides so he can feel safe. In the daylight he's always Noah. But at night in our bed with his hand between my legs, he can be Harrison. Lighter and darker at the same time, lying heavy over me without caring about it, uttering guttural commands without wondering what their implications are. “Spread your legs,” he tells me, and I do. “Guide me into you,” he tells me.

And I do that, too.

I let him fuck me the way he really wants to fuck, hard and fast and full of all that pent-up enthusiasm for sex he thought he had lost. And he lets me fuck him back, hips rocking up to meet his eager thrusts, one hand tight on his ass and the other in his hair. Filthy words always on the tip of my tongue.

“Use my cunt,” I tell him, and instead of freezing up at the sound of something so brutal, he forges on. He turns me over and takes me from behind, one hand on my hip and the other over my breast, working and working at me until we're both glossy with sweat and flushed from head to toe and trembling, God, just trembling on the point of orgasm.

Only now we hold off because it feels good to. We drag each moment out because we're unwilling to have it all end, not because I'm afraid or he can't or something else is needed. No other thing is needed but this bliss, this glorious bliss. Him panting in my ear that he loves me and me calling it out into the silence of our lovely home.

The home that finally feels safe, for both of us.

Can't wait for more from Charlotte Stein?

Keep reading for a sneak peek from

FORBIDDEN

Coming soon from Avon Red Impulse.

And be on the lookout for

TAKEN

Coming from Avon Red Impulse in spring 2015.

An Excerpt from

Killian is on the verge of making his final vows to the priesthood when he saves Dorothy from a puritanical and oppressive home. The attraction between them is swift and undeniable, but every touch, every glance, every moment of connection between them is completely forbidden. . .

W
E GET OUT
of the car at this swanky-looking place called Marriott, with a big promise next to the door about constant breakfasts and Internet and other stuff I've never had in my whole life, all these nice cars in the parking lot gleaming in the dimming light and a dozen windows lit up like some Christmas card and then oh then it just happens. My excitement suddenly bursts out of my chest, and before I can haul it back it runs right down the length of my arm and all the way to my hand.

Which grabs hold of his, so tight it could never be mistaken for anything else.

'Course I
want
it to be mistaken for anything else, as soon as he looks at me. His eyes snap to my face like I poked him in the ribs with a rattler snake, and just in case I'm in any doubt, he glances down at the thing I'm doing. He sees me touching him as though he's not a nearly priest and I'm not under his care, and instead we're just two people having some kind of happy honeymoon.

In a second we're going inside to have all the sex.

That's what it seems like—like a sex thing.

I can't even explain it away as just being friendly, because somehow it doesn't feel friendly at all. My palm has been laced with electricity, and it just shot ten thousand volts into him. His whole body has gone tense and so my body goes tense, but the worst part about it is: