The Beginning of Always (48 page)

I gave a shuddering moan.

I felt it all. I was suffocating with how much I was feeling.

I pushed my hips up to speed up the rhythm; this wasn’t enough.

“Harder,” I begged desperately. “Harder, Alistair.”

Alistair obliged. His right hand shot up and gripped the wooden planks of the headboard and he stiffened his other arm to seize me around my waist. He pushed in roughly and I cried out in pleasure. An agonizingly slow withdrawal and then slamming in again. And again. And again.

We weren’t making love, but this wasn’t just physical either. It wasn’t the drunken vulnerability of last night, but we were both truly stripped down to the bare foundation of our hearts.

I knew I needed him and always had, perhaps always would.

Alistair knew he needed me and that no one else in his life would ever do.

The flood of lust, the dampness between my legs and the hard grind of his excitement that pressed into me weren’t as simple as they had been—as they were with other men, and for him, other women. It wasn’t a carnal physical satisfaction. I didn’t just want him, now, in the moment.

My body wasn’t complete without him. I was just never complete without him.

My soul wept in relief.

Alistair breathed heavily and clutched me tighter in his arms. “I’ve missed you,” he panted. “God, I’ve missed you so much.”

With those simple words, the orgasm tore through me and I gave a low cry as I came. The pleasure hit me with such intensity that my mind blanked. All I could process was this pure unadulterated lust, the unfiltered relief, the collapse of it all—reservation, fear, sadness, mistrust, guilt, the past, the present, the future. This connection, the one that we’d always carried together, it flared free, reinforced and assured.

Alistair continued to thrust into me. “Open your eyes.”

I clutched Alistair tighter as I rode the descent of my climax and opened my eyes to look at him. Those irises of cool hazel gazed back at me and within this moment, the world stopped. Time froze. Alistair wasn’t Blair and I wasn’t twenty-nine and empty on the inside.

We were just us, no details to our beings. Simply him and simply me.

As the last threads of my orgasm slipped away, Alistair picked up speed, going rougher and faster. His grip on my hair tightened, not to the point of pain but with that sharp edge of pleasure. I instinctively bucked my hips up to meet him and he was there, coming into me as he moaned my name over and over again.

Alistair held me. He gathered me into his arms and I pressed my damp cheek against his still-heaving chest. I stared blankly at the darkness, at the slight shadows and curves the edge of his arm made. The moonlight, stingy and weak, leaked in through the cracks of the curtains and cast a silhouette over his shoulder.

A whisper of fear needled the edge of my consciousness, but I knew I’d deal with it in the morning. I attempted to anchor myself into this moment, to treasure it. I needed to savor everything because who knew what the morning would bring?

Alistair’s breath slowed and soon his body came down from the high we had shared. His rough palms caressed me, tracing my curves from hip to shoulder and back again. His fingers tangled in my hair, combing the tresses out, massaging my shoulders and neck.

Alistair was gazing down at me almost in disbelief. He wanted to say something; I could see it desperately waiting to break from his lips.

“Alistair,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

A flicker of pain flashed across his expression before he furrowed his brow. I reached over and pressed a finger in between his eyebrows to smooth out the skin, to chase away the agony. Then I splayed out my fingers to stroke his face. I wanted to learn it, to know it in its entirely.

My thumb traced his dark brows and trailed down across his right temple, over those sharp cheekbones that threw harsh angles against his expression, not producing an ounce of give. His cheek was rough with a day’s growth and just to the edge of his face, where his jawline and neck met below his ear, I found it.

“I remember this scar,” I murmured. It was small and so faint that it was pretty much unnoticeable to the naked eye, but I knew it was there. I traced the slight groove with the corner of my thumb.

“It bled a lot.” I readjusted myself to pull my face right in front of Alistair’s. His eyes ran deep with emotions and I gazed back at him. Those eyes, they hadn’t changed. They still read me, they still knew me, they still made me feel things. I leaned to the side and pressed my lips against the scar, the new skin of where Kevin had busted his jaw against the bicycle rack at school.

Alistair swallowed at my contact.

I threw one leg over his lap so I was straddling him. I slid downwards so I just barely rested before his groin, our hot centers just inches away from each other. His cock began hardening right between my cheeks.

“There’s another one here,” I said quietly against his ear, remaining in the same position but tracing my left index finger right above his left eyebrow along his hairline. There was a textured patch of skin where Alistair had scraped his scalp along the asphalt until it had split and dripped blood. Just like all his other scars, it had long since healed and blended away. No one was any the wiser.

“Funny how these things fade with time.” I looped both arms around his neck and pressed my cheek against his. Soft to rough. Cool to hot. Light to dark.

I wanted to say something, say anything. There were so many thoughts in my head and feelings in my heart that I couldn’t verbalize. I had no idea how to put them into words and it seemed nearly impossible to commit them to something as inconsequential as sound. How could I possibly communicate them all?

“It’s strange. It’s so strange how these surface wounds heal, yet I still feel like I’m bleeding on the inside,” I said, almost to myself. Tears threatened once more and I inhaled a shaky shudder of a gasp. “Every time I breathe around you, it’s as if a wound splits open.”

I pulled back from our embrace and his fingers drifted to rest at my waist. I sat up, exposing myself to him fully. Alistair’s gaze flickered over my face and body, starved to take it in. My fingers traced the edges of his biceps, the muscles unyielding under the skin. His fingers tightened and dug into my flesh.

“Don’t you love me, Florence?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I kissed him, refusing to say the words yet unable to lie. I knew I loved him, in my own sick, twisted, distant, loathsome way. I knew he loved me in equal measure. We would never love anyone else as we loved each other, and I was truly convinced I couldn’t love anyone at all. Not anymore, not after him.

But I was unsure of so many things, least of all him and me.

My past was his, and my future refused to capitulate to the same. Call it pride, call it fear, but I refused to accept the inevitability of that fate.

I parted my lips to breathe him in. God, he tasted good.

“I just want to touch you.” I rocked my hips against his hard abs, his erection pressing impatiently against me. “Can’t I just touch you?”

Alistair’s tongue traced my bottom lip and he bit down lightly, sucking greedily. I laid my body on him to angle us together. Slowly and with no sense of urgency, Alistair pressed me down, forcing me over his cock. As each inch slipped deeper and deeper, my breath hitched up and I clung to him in desperation, needing to breathe, wanting to drown in us.

“Yes,” he whispered in between my parted lips. “Yes, you can.”

The next morning, as Alistair slept dead to the world, I slipped out of the warm cocoon of the previous night. I dressed quietly, then made my way into his garage. As I padded quietly across the floor, I noticed a small object discarded on the hardwood. I moved closer to examine it.

It was a wooden beaded rosary with a single smoothly carved cross at the end. The red string was faded with age and the edges of some beads were dull with patina.

I stared at it silently for several minutes, then turned around and continued my trip to the garage.

I chose the most inconspicuous car available and then drove it to the nearest drugstore.

When I was younger, I would have known a tingling of shame crawling up my cheeks, but now, my only reaction was the numbing emptiness of my chest and the hollow sound of my voice. I walked up to the pharmacy counter and stated, “I need a dosage of the morning-after pill.”

Chapter 25

T
he car hadn’t even stopped when I threw open the door and fell out. Bill’s raspy voice called out to me, but I didn’t hear. I barely noticed anything. Nothing was real to me beyond the icy terror in my blood and the sick pain twisting my chest.

I wanted to throw up.

Three hours earlier, I had been asleep, sweating in the sticky summer heat, when a loud pounding had woken me up with a start. As my heart thundered in my ears from the shock and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I heard it.

Bill, yelling at the top of his lungs, a quality to his voice I had never heard before.

Fear.

Fear that was so potent, it reduced his characteristic roar to a hoarse strangle.

He had driven all the way to Ann Arbor to get me, and when I threw open the door, the look on his face told me everything.

Florence.

The drive to Holland was tense and silent. Bill had told me bare details while I rushed to get dressed, but he didn’t even really know what was going on himself.

As soon as Bill screeched into the hospital parking lot, I jumped out before he even rolled to a full stop. I pitched forward and crashed into the ground, my outstretched hands and knees hitting dirt and gravel. I steadied myself with my hands against the concrete and pushed up quickly. The rocks scraped the undersides of my palms, tearing skin and bringing pain, but I didn’t notice.

I ran through sliding glass doors, a torrent of thoughts bursting across my brain, screaming in hopeless prayer.

Please be okay. Please make sure Florence is okay.

Please let her live.

Please.

Please.

Please.

The bland hospital hallways blurred at my sides. I whipped my head back and forth, searching for signs, needing clues to where to go.

I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t stop the nausea climbing up my throat or that yelling in my head.

I couldn’t freeze time, couldn’t change reality.

I couldn’t wake up from this nightmare.

Emergency room. I hurdled down to my right, dodging gurneys and pushing past gasping nursing who started to voice their disapproval. But by the time their words had space to come out, I was gone.

I stopped with a lurch into the emergency room waiting room. My eyes combed over the teal plastic seats and the white walls, searching for someone. Anyone. An answer. A sign.

“Alistair.” A voice. Small. Scared.

I whipped my body in the direction of the sound and lurched forward, then skidded to a shocked stop.

Nicolas stood up to my far right. He was hiding in the darkest corner of the room, away from all the other patients and their families. His face was ghostly pale and his eyes were wide and fearful.

I noticed it, then.

Now, I noticed everything.

Nicolas had tried to cover it up with a jacket, but he had done a poor job. I saw it, and now the nausea came out, full blown.

All along the front of Nicolas’s shirt and pants was the distinctive copper color of dried blood. There was so much blood … on his shoes, dusty red splatters had soaked into the laces. There was dried blood caked underneath Nicolas’s fingernails, with streaks of it in his blond hair.

It was now that I crashed to my knees onto the cold linoleum ground and allowed the nausea to completely take over. I heaved out my dinner, and the screaming in my head reached a fever pitch.

I splashed my face with cold water, my reflection swimming in the mirror before me. The sterile yellow fluorescent lights flickered behind me in the empty bathroom.

My sallow face blinked back. My hair was disheveled and my shirt was inside out, tag sticking up. I was too exhausted to try to fix it. My eyes were red and my stubble had grown out after a couple days of cramming for exams. How pathetic and useless all of that seemed now.

I scrubbed my face with my palms, the small pebbles in my flesh suddenly cutting into my cheeks.

I pulled my hands back and stared.

Small bubbles of blood were pushing up from my skin, pooling and dribbling slowly down the palm lines. The blood settled in the grooves and tracked downwards.

I had fallen outside onto the gravel and scraped my palms raw, but only now did my body actually register the damage.

I pressed the faucet knob down and high-powered water squirted out. I quickly jammed my hands underneath the stream, trying to scrub off the rocks, the blood, the memory of all things dirty and wrong. I rubbed my torn skin with the end of my thumb, digging into the pockets, fighting to clean the wounds. But there were too many, they were too small and the more I forced the stones out of my flesh, the more I tore into my skin, until the water ran red with streaks of blood mingling and mixing within the drain.