On Every Street (19 page)

I looked to the ceiling, looking for something to steel myself against him but there was nothing
but the fan and its steady whir. Round and round it went like me. Why did I have to love this man?

“Eden, angel
. Please. Please forgive me. Please give me another chance. Please give me a reason to keep fighting, to be a better man. Redeem me. Only you can.”

I sank to the floor and joined him, wrapping
my arms around him. We held on tight like we were trying to choke each other. He cried into my chest and I gave up trying to keep my head above water.

“I love you,” I managed to say. “I will redeem you if you can redeem me.”

“I promise,” he said, lifting his face. He buried one of his hands into my hair, cupping the back of my head. His cheeks were wet, his eyelashes black and glossy. My heart swelled, knowing I wasn’t giving him up. Knowing it didn’t have to make the choice. Knowing I didn’t have to brutalize it. It was still intact and beating, all for him.

“Do you really love me?” I asked.

He watched my lips, shaking his head in disbelief. “I really love you. I love you. I love you.” I closed my eyes, relieved, and he kissed my eyelids.

“How did you find me?”

He kissed my forehead and spoke into it. “You have a tracking device on your car. I put it there.”

My chest caved, just slightly. I swallowed. “You have a tracking…you tracked my car?”

“Yes, I can never be too careful with you,” he said, now kissing my temples. “I told you I’d follow you.”

Was that sweet? Or was that creepy? Or was that just Javier?

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because of this,” he said, stroking the tattoo on my arm.
“Because you belong to me. You’re my angel. You could change your hair color, your eye color, everything about you. But the tattoo will always remain. I will always remain. I am the ink in your blood.”

He pulled back and ran his finger along my lips. “You are all mine, even if you run. I will find you because a soul needs its other half to truly live.
”

He watched my lips with lust as he brought his thumb into my mouth. Instinctively, I let him in, sucking it, tasting him.

“And now,” he growled. “
I will reclaim you.”

Suddenly
he ripped his thumb out of my mouth and his lips were on mine, hot and wet and filled with fire. I was caught off guard and fumbled for a few moments before I could kiss him back. My hands couldn’t take his shirt off fast enough, while he just ripped my t-shirt down the middle, right in two.

He buried h
is face into my chest, biting my nipples until I cried out from the pain, squeezing my breasts, slapping them lightly. Whatever beast had been let loose last night was still in him, wanting to put all his fire in me. I wanted to let him. I wanted to tame him between my thighs.

I tugged down his pants, feeling his erection com
e free, holding him hard in my hands. Javier snarled in return, going for my neck. He sucked and bit until I was sure he had drawn blood, a wetness flowing down and pooling in my clavicle. I squeezed his cock, making him moan, feeding the fire, spurring him on.

He grabbed my hair and wrenched my head back, tugging at it repeatedly while he bit and licked his way down to my hips. His tongue swirled along the bones, soothing for a blessed moment, before he ripped my thong apart and shoved his face between my legs. He plunged his tongue inside me, groaning loudly, the vibrations moving my body to the brink. I raised my hips, trying to drive his tongue deeper, trying to get more, and he responded by giving me everything. He moved a wet finger through the soft crack of my ass
and fingered the rosebud for a second before thrusting it in me.

I stiffened at the sensation before losing myself to the feeling. I came instantly, my body convulsing around his finger and tongue. Before I had a chance to regain my thoughts, to recover, he got to his feet and pulled me up by my throat before spinning me around and slamming me against the wall.

His eyes bored into mine as I gasped for breath. He ground his teeth together and hissed, “You are mine and will always be mine. I am going to fuck you so deeply you won’t be able to look at me without thinking of this, of the way I own you, of the way I’ll keep you.”

He jammed my leg up and brought his cock to my entrance, where I was already wet and throbbing again. He pushed it in,
but only slightly.

“Tell me you want this, tell me you want me,” he growled.

My insides quivered, needing his fullness, craving him.

“I want you,”
I said. He jerked forward, my head bumping against the wall.

“Tell me you want me!” he yelled, his jaw clenching, the veins in his throat sticking out. “Tell me!”

“I want you!”

“Tell me you need me and that you’re just a big fucking hole without me.”

“For God’s sake, Javier, just fuck me!” I roared back.

He wasted no time in complying. With one upwards motion he impaled me on him, riding me so quick and so hard the room started shaking, the fan swinging overhead. He came with the fury of a tornado, of an animal, of a man whose only redemption was found somewhere inside of me.

When we were done, I could see that the beast went with him. He was my Javier again, perhaps not redeemed but at least loved. He sat on the corner of the bed in his clothes, looking elegant and refined despite everything I had just witnessed, everything to the contrary.

I went to the bathroom to clean up and was surprised to see the weary eyes of Ellie Watt looking back at me.
Judging me. I had been so close to becoming her again. So close to freeing her. She was disappointed, her body marred by bloody smears, bite marks and bruises, physical signs of our troubled love.

I gave her the finger. Then I got ready to go back home.

***

Javier loved me. That was the only thing that kept me going in the weeks and months after I ran away. He loved
me and he kept his business out of sight. I never saw Raul again, I never saw Alex. When he left, usually on the weeknights I was working, he never told me where he was going and I never asked. Our love grew in this oblivion, feasting on my blind eyes. I only knew the him that I saw and that was enough for me.

He loved
me because he kept his word and he never stopped showing me what I was to him. Whether he felt he had something more to prove or he was trying to make up for everything he’d ever done wrong, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. We became closer, opening up to each other, appreciating each moment. I’d never imagined that I could love him more than I already did, but each morning, each smile from his beautiful lips made my heart swell. Its volume was surprising, taking so much in and giving so much back.

Some days we’d just lie in bed together, taking our time with each other’s bod
ies. He had a habit of pinching the end of my nose and asking me to make a wish.

“What do you wish for?” he’d ask.

And I’d tell him, “Just this.”

Javier had always wanted to put my broken pieces together and I wanted to show him that he had.

Everything was so blissfully happy that I had no idea how precarious it all was. How quickly it could change. It could go up. Or it could go down.

One morning
I woke up feeling sick to my stomach and immediately hurled in the sink, not even making it to the toilet.

“Angel?”
Javier asked, alarmed, as I slammed the bathroom door in his face. He knocked gently on it while I heaved and heaved, disgusted at what was coming out.

Finally, after I rinsed my mouth out for the millionth time with mouthwash, I emerged, trembling.

He took me into his arms. “Are you okay?”

“It might be the seafood from last night,” I told him, though in the pit of my stomach I knew that wasn’t it. My period was ten days late now. I’d been ignoring it long enough.

“Stupid Rod, trying to poison us,” he muttered, holding me.

No, not stupid Rod
, I thought.
Stupid me.
I’d been lazy with the pill lately, forgetting to take it on more than one occasion. But being in love gives you some kind of insurance against the world and I believed that after all we’d been through, surely we wouldn’t be handed this.

But it looked like that’s exactly what we got. Later I went to the pharmacy and bought one of the
generic kits. I felt too nervous to use it at home so I used a gas station restroom instead. I felt like genuine trailer trash and remembered that’s exactly what I had been at some point in my life.
Remember Ellie Watt
? the voice whispered on the breeze.

I ignored it. I saw the test and it was positive.

Fuck.

Naturally, that was my first thought. I was twenty-one and didn’t have a maternal bone in my body. I had so much of my life left to live. I had the world as my oyster.

And I was making excuses. Because deep down, I imagined a life springing from my lie, and I imagined that lie becoming real. I imagined Javier as a father and knew he’d be an excellent one, giving and protective as hell. I knew our child would grow up never needing anything and he’d have all our love, since our hearts together were bigger than the moon.

A new life would help to bury my old one. Perhaps even both of ours.

But Javier. What would he say? What would he want? That’s why I had done the deed in the stinky restroom, double-checking the package and the stick a million times until I knew it was real, then wrapping it up in toilet paper and throwing it in the garbage. I didn’t know how he would react. Despite the way I loved him, the way he felt about me, this was a whole new angle to our lives together, spinning our relationship around.

I steadied my nerves and drove back home, waiting in the truck for a few moments before I decided to head out onto the beach. I walked across the soft sand, wrapping my cardigan around my shoulders and plunked myself down. I watched the waves roll in
; a dog ran past me after a renegade Frisbee. I sat there for hours, watching the sky fade with the dusk, until Javier came out beside me, the white sand flying off his feet like salt from a shaker.

“Eden?” he asked delicately, taking a seat
next to me. He was dressed all in black again: long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black linen pants, bare feet. The sand stuck to him like snowflakes.

I took in a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

There really was no other way to say it.

I heard his breath hitch. I slowly turned my head to face him. His mouth was agape, eyes wide, brows raised to the heavens.

“You…you are?” he said.

I nodded.
“Yup. I’ll have to go to the doctor to take a blood test to make sure, but yeah. Ten days late on my period. Threw up today. Drugstore test ran positive.”

He sucked on his full lower lip, blinking hard. It was rare that I saw him bewildered.

“I don’t know what to say…” he started, then frowned. “Ten days late? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of facing the truth.”

He studied my face for a moment before exhaling sharply. “So. What do you want to do?”

I shrugged.
“I don’t know, I honestly don’t.”

His head cocked to the side like a beautiful bird. “You honestly don’t know? Eden, Angel…we’re having a baby.”

I gave him an odd look. Maybe I didn’t hear that right. “What?”

He grinned in pure joy. “We’re having a baby!”

He leaped up onto his feet and pulled me up with him. He hugged me, tightly, dancing around and laughing, then let go and clapped his hands together. “Oh, my angel, another beautiful angel is on the way.”

I smiled back. It was infectious. “You want this?”

“Oh, my love,” he rushed forward, cupping my face in his hands. “I want you. I love you. And I want the product of our life. It’s a new life, don’t you see?”

I did see. I
saw that very well. I let out the whoop of joy that had been sneaking up on me, allowing myself to feel it, feel everything, my heart running over butterflies soaring from head to toe. Happiness popped like fizzing champagne, saturating us as we held each other on the beach, laughing and crying tears of bliss. New lives, for both of us. Another new start and this one was for keeps.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A few days later, the day before my doctor’s appointment, I saw something that made me die inside. My underwear was stained; just a drop of blood, but enough for me to know that this was it. It wasn’t for keeps at all. It was over, and over before we were really allowed to believe it.

I trundled out of the bathroom, trying to deal with the new pain.
The crushing disappointment. I kept it to myself, holding the truth back, holding back the tears. I held on under false hope until I used the toilet again later. The blood was in full-force, my regular period, just two weeks late.