Whatever Remains (22 page)

             
Jade didn’t come back at him like he’d hoped; her shoulders drooped and she slid into the chair across from his. “He’s worried about me is all.”

             
“Why?”

             
She propped her chin on the back of a hand and lifted her brows, almost smiling. “You don’t care, so don’t bother asking.”

             
“I might care.”

             
“Ben – ”

             
“What? I’m serious. He’s worried about you why?”

             
She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, mouth drawn up in an enigmatic bow. When she spoke, her voice was drenched with heavy, long-accustomed melancholy. “He thinks – and hell, maybe he’s right – that you coming back around isn’t good for me.”

             
He didn’t know what to do with that. He chewed in silence, stunned that Jade would admit such a thing. Showing weakness in his presence had become a sin in her mind; tonight, she’d done it twice.
It’s the case
, he told himself.
It’s getting to both of you
. “I won’t be around long,” he said. “Once this case is wrapped up…”

             
She blinked hard, eyes glittering, and her gaze fell to the table.

             
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he pressed.

             
She breathed a laugh. “What I want is to not be stuck inside my mother’s life.” She shook her head. “Sorry. Forget I said that. I’m just…” She didn’t finish.

             
He felt…It almost felt like hope, a speck of it, unfurling slowly in his chest like ivy unwinding along a wall. Hope was a nasty, invasive thing: tendrils clinging, breaking through stone and tapping at glass. He didn’t want it getting wild. “You know I bought Chris’s old house, right?” he asked, pushing a penne noodle around on his plate.

             
She nodded, but didn’t look at him. “Chris told me.”

             
“Right.” Because she talked to Chris in a way she’d never talked to him. “I was thinking,” he continued, “that now that I’ve got a real house, with spare bedrooms, Clara could come spend the night sometime. If she wants to, I mean.” He speared the noodle and popped it in his mouth. “She may not want to. I dunno.”

             
“She’d love to,” Jade said with a little sigh. “But when would you have the time for that?”

             
“I’ll make time.”

             
She smiled, a thin smile, and lifted her eyes again. Sometimes he wished Clara had her eyes; the blue of them could knock you out. She watched him a long, silent moment before she said, “You have such normal parents. Your mom’s so sweet. How’d you turn out so emotionally fucked up?”

             
Sometimes, he fancied it was because of Shelby, what she’d done to him; but in truth, there were no external factors to blame. Some people were just born fucked up, and he was one of them. He shrugged. “It’s not like I try to be.”

             
Her smile widened, became truer. “At least you’re honest, huh?”

             
He saluted her with his fork and reached for the wine, glad none of the Homicide boys were here to see him doing so.

             
Jade folded her arms over the table, took a deep breath, and shocked the hell out of him. She asked him an actual question. “So, what plans did I drag you away from tonight?”

             
She liked honesty, didn’t she? “Taco Bell in front of the tube. I bet there was some kinda zombie, biker, prison, drug-dealer shit on some critics somewhere are raving about.”

             
She made a noise that was almost a laugh. “That boring?”

             
“What were
you
gonna do?”

             
“Read, probably.” She made a face. “So boring too.”

             
Something – some errant, once-dead note of something shimmery and elusive – slipped in the air between them over the table. A mirage, shifting and unsteady, but an image all the same. “You don’t have a replacement-Asher lined up already?”

             
He thought she’d take it badly, but she just shook her head. That mirage was getting to her, too. “I hate dating. Expecting expectations gets exhausting.”

             
“So what’s the alternative?”

             
Her smile went wicked. “Your favorite: bimbos.”

             
Ben almost grinned. “If I’d known you liked bimbos a long time ago – ”

             
“Male bimbos,” she corrected. “There’s always a neckless guy out there somewhere looking for ten minutes in a bathroom stall.”

             
“You’re into casual hookups now?”

             
“Yep.” But she dissolved into laughter, the sound of it better than his pasta dinner, warmer than the light shining down over their heads. “God, no,” she said when she could.

             
“Good.” He pushed his empty plate away and sat back in his chair, getting comfortable.

             
“I don’t remember asking for your opinion,” she said, still smiling, kicking his pulse up a notch. “I’m not some prude, you know.”

             
He did grin this time, and the mirage became almost tangible. “I know.”

             
Her smile dimmed; she shrugged. “I have to be careful, now that I have Clara. I don’t want to expose her to anything.”

             
“She didn’t know Asher?”

             
“God, why do you keep bringing him up – no,” she said. “She knew his name and that was about it. I don’t go around telling her about my boyfriends.”

             
“Not ever?”

             
She wasn’t smiling anymore; the melancholy had returned. “She and I are still stuck on the whole why-doesn’t-Daddy-live-with-us conversation.”

             
He ran a finger around the sticky rim of his glass. They’d entered uncharted, choppy waters, discussing things they’d never spoken aloud to one another. Considering the near-heart attack he’d suffered on the drive over here, he figured he owed her this: an admission, at least. “I always thought.” Across the table, she tensed all over. “That it would be easier for Clara if we didn’t put her through a divorce. There wouldn’t be a change that way. I would have always been…somewhere else, and that would have been normal to her.”

             
Jade’s eyes rolled to the ceiling and looked wet again. “And you assumed we would get divorced? Automatically?”

             
“We hate each other.”

             
In the time it took her to take a deep breath, Jade hovered between biting his head off and dissolving into tears. Her eyes glimmered and her fingers knotted together. He watched graceful, tensile strength curling beneath her skin as she dug deep and dredged up an admission of her own. “We don’t hate each other. I want you to
stop
using that word, because it’s not true.”

             
He hadn’t expected that. “Fair enough.”

             
“If we hated each other,” she continued, rolling her lips together, “then…” She stood and grabbed up his plate, socked feet soundless as she went to the sink and rinsed it clean.

             
“Jade.”

             
Her spine stiffened at the sound of her name; her shoulders locked at right angles. Her profile, half hidden by a curtain of dark hair, was all batting lashes and trembling lips.

             
Ben turned sideways in his chair so he could watch her. “Baby, don’t get all upset.”

             
“I’m not.” But her voice was choked with emotion and she dashed the back of her wrist at her eyes.

             
He stood, and her composure cracked; deep fissures went streaking through her layers of tension and if he pushed her at all, in either direction, he had a feeling she’d fall to pieces. He didn’t like it when women went to pieces…but Jade was entitled. Jade wasn’t “women;” she was a hell of a lot more important than that.
We don’t hate each other
…He’d never hated her, even when he’d been telling himself that he did; but he’d always thought she loathed him. If she didn’t…

             
“Jade. Sweetheart.”

             
The plate landed in the bottom of the sink and she turned off the tap. She stared out the black, rain-smeared window, and inhaled once, twice… “Why can’t we make it work?” she asked, almost to herself. “Why do I, like an idiot, keep wishing we could have been a family?”

             
He didn’t have the answers she wanted. But he reached and pushed her hair back behind her ear, and that was all it took. The silk brush of her hair was all the excuse he needed to wind his fingers in it, tip her head back, and kiss her.

It was hesitant at first, gentle. His fingers held tight at the base of her skull and she could feel the restraint in him, the leashed energy vibrating in the space between their bodies. He needed to shave and the stubble on his chin was prickly against hers. He smelled like he always had – aftershave, Calvin Klein cologne he bought at the grocery store, and something wild and frightening, like smoke; something that was unmistakably
Ben
to her – and it assaulted her brain, turning keys in padlocks and laying bare her self-control. The reason her temper always snapped, the reason they fought, the reason he’d accused her of hating him so many times: she was still devastatingly in love with him.

             
She opened her mouth and kissed him back.

15

              “
D
oes she get up in the middle of the night?” he asked right against her ear.

             
Jade shivered, reading every possible meaning into the question. He was behind her, back to chest and hips to hips, one hand up under her sweater smoothing back and forth along the waistband of her leggings. “Not usually,” she said, whispering too. Clara, all tucked into her bed, asleep by the light of her unicorn lamp, Oatmeal under one arm, didn’t stir as they lingered in her doorway. “Come on.” Jade laid her hand on her sweater, over his hand, and leaned back against him.

             
Oh, honey
, she could already hear Jeremy in her mind as Ben followed her into her own bedroom and eased the door shut. He wouldn’t pitch a fit – that wasn’t his style; he would let her make her mistake and be there with a cup of tea and a pat on the head afterward.
When are you going to learn
, he would tell her, like he’d told her all the times before,
that it can’t ever be any different? He’ll always hurt you.
And he’d always been so sure of himself on the issue, so mind-numbingly confident that he was right, her angry tears had always been useless. And how could she scold Remy for what she knew herself? How could she call him wrong when he’d been the one kneeling in front of her in the bathroom, his fingers callused and warm and sure around her hands, when he’d told her that they would be okay, the three of them. Because when the test had turned up positive, it had been Jeremy, and not Ben, offering home and heart to her baby. Jeremy had been the one in the hospital pictures, Clara pink-faced in his arms. Jeremy had given up a job in Florida and a boyfriend and a real life of his own for the two of them. Even if he did it for love, she owed him; she owed him so much.

             
But for all the times he’d protected her heart, Jeremy couldn’t make it leap. All his lectures paled in the face of sensation. Ben tasted like wine; felt animal beneath her hands; chased away the shadows until her room was only darkness, only them, nothing wicked.

             
It was never dispassionate fervor that brought them together like this. It wasn’t spur of the moment. Jade had known, on some level, that the night would end here; she’d known it the moment he’d pulled up in front of the barn. She’d wanted it to; she’d wanted it for days, now. With Ben, walls didn’t crumble: the two of them knocked the bricks down themselves and forgot, for a little while, that they were kidding themselves.

             
The door shut with a click and he looked taller when they were closed in together like this. Tall and lined and worn and more beautiful for the weathering. Jade pulled her sweater off over her head and sealed the gap between them. Ben’s fingers tunneled through her hair; taking the back of her head in both hands, he kissed her.

             
It was deep, hungry; she stood up on her toes and pressed herself to him as his mouth slanted over hers, stroking. She’d had kisses – sloppy molestations from lovers past – and then there was
this
: his direct, artful attack. It left her wondering if there was such a thing as “the one.” His tongue slid between her lips and it was like drowning. Before Ben, she hadn’t known the risk of a kiss; she hadn’t understood how igniting it could be. It had been a kiss like this that had snared her that first night on her front steps. It had led to Clara; to a shredded heart.

             
She splayed her fingers across his chest, the muscle wall hard under the worn cotton of his t-shirt. His hands traveled down her neck, lightly, and over her shoulders, down her sides, settling at her hips and pulling her in tighter. His heart galloped under her hand, erratic and out of sync with her own fluttering pulse. She had a familiar buzzing in her ears, a dizzy warmth circulating in her head and spreading elsewhere. The kiss went feral and dissatisfied; his hands wandered up her back, across bare skin, leaving gooseflesh down her spine. The clasp of her bra came open with a
click
and he smoothed the straps down her arms. She pulled her hands through and let it fall to the floor between them.

Their lips came apart when his hands closed over her breasts. She shivered. His hands were rough, warm, and big; but there was something graceful about them when he touched her. He molded her breasts in his palms; his fingers worked her nipples till they were tight and straining. And his face hovered over hers in the semi-darkness, his eyes black, mouth only flirting with hers.

One hand went to her back and smoothed down the dip of her spine. He shoved at her leggings and slipped his hand inside them, curving around her ass and squeezing. “You’re such a girl,” he said, and she knew it was a compliment.

“Ben.” She curled her hands in the collar of his t-shirt, the front of it damp from rain that had leaked into his jacket. “I have a bed, remember?”

“Impatient?” He ducked his head and nipped at her throat while he continued to work her leggings, clumsily, down her hips. He was using both hands now, and one slipped between her legs.

“
Yes
. And you have too many clothes on.”

He kissed her neck – a wet, open-mouthed kiss right over her leaping pulse – and stepped back. He peeled his shirt off over his head – she had a fast glimpse of shadows gliding between solid muscles; the sharp points of his hips at the waistband of his jeans where he had, in fact, lost weight – and she stepped out of her leggings and thick wool socks, standing up naked in front of him.

She laid a hand against his stomach, light on the ridges of his abs, and tipped a questioning look up to him, chest swelling with a sudden sadness. “You’re getting thin.”

He took her hand in his and lifted it, settling it around his neck. “No I’m not,” he said, but there was a flicker of self-consciousness in the way his eyes dropped to her mouth. “And don’t you worry about it anyway.”

“If you don’t eat, you’ll pass out during a high speed chase or something. You’ll – ”

He cut her off with a kiss, hands finding her hips again. “I thought you were the impatient one,” he said when he pulled back, smiling.

“And I thought you were getting undressed.”

He lifted her up and her arms went around his neck, legs around his waist. He turned and put her back against the door; she felt the cool smooth wood on her skin and thought of the bedroom wall of his old apartment, of another night like this. She’d never wanted wine and roses, but she’d wanted something substantial; she guessed she had to settle for whatever this was instead, because it was better than the alternative.

Jade reached between them and unfastened his jeans, thumbed down his boxers and took him in her hand. They’d never been careful about condoms – obviously – but she’d been on the pill since Clara was born and he knew it. It had been one of those painful admissions, a concession to the truth that she wasn’t ever going to wake up one morning and be done with him. He leaned into her, bringing their hips together, and she guided him into her; he entered on a fast inhale, and went deep without pretense. Jade threaded her fingers through the short hair at the back of his head, held tight with her thighs until she knew there’d be bruises, and let him take her up against the door, like he was afraid to venture all the way inside the room; like he was afraid he had to hold the door shut to keep the rest of the world out. She’d learned long ago that it wasn’t about kink for him. Even with her breasts to his chest and his deep thrusts pinning her to the door, the sharp rasp of his breath against her neck and all the delicious Surround Sound friction, there was an intensity shivering under his skin that had nothing to do with the two of them and the door.

Afterward, his forehead against her shoulder, panting, she stroked his hair. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He let her feet ease down to the carpet, holding her until her legs were strong enough, and leaned back, still breathing hard. “Nothing,” he said, but wouldn’t make eye contact.

“Liar. You only kiss me when something’s wrong.”

“Not true.” He kissed her; it was slow and lingering with post-coital warmth.

Just shut up
, a voice in the back of her head cautioned.
Just let him be sweet to you and be grateful
. But when he kissed her forehead and sniffed her hair like a dog, she put her hands on his chest and eased him back. “I didn’t mean to scare you tonight,” she said, and he didn’t deny that he had been.

He reached up and curled a lock of her hair around one finger, watching her with a focus that was as dog-like as the sniffing. His face was still all angles and proud angry nose
, but there was a softening now, a look as close to gentle as he was capable. “Why’d you call me?” he asked, voice low and thoughtful. “When Jeremy was right here.”

Lie
, the voice told her again. But she hated lying, especially to him; she had more pride than that. “I was afraid,” she said, “and I wanted to hear your voice.”

His eyes finally came to her face, glittering in the shadows with things she couldn’t decipher. His finger was still wound in her hair and he gave it a little tug. “Can I spend the night?” he asked.

She smiled. “Of course.”

Ben woke sometime in the shapeless dark to howling. His eyes snapped open in the black and searched in vain for something familiar; his ears strained against the sound. Then it hit him that he was with Jade, in her room, her bed, her back pressed up against his side, warm and smooth and satiny. The howling had become short, staccato barks, and it was coming from downstairs. Jeremy’s dog.

             
Jade stirred with a soft sound.

             
“What’s it barking about?” he asked.

             
“Hmm…? Oh, Keely. Dunno.” She yawned. The sheets rustled and he felt her heel against his calf. “She does that sometimes.” Then silence lapsed and he thought she might have drifted off again.

             
Ben stared sightlessly at the ceiling a long moment, listening to her breathe. They’d wound up here too many times now for it to feel like a mistake anymore. But it always complicated things. Jade was incapable of coldness; she was passionate in all things, and when he rejected her love, her animosity was fueled by that same passion.

             
She didn’t wake when he slipped out of bed and fumbled across the floor for his clothes. He found boxers and t-shirt and decided that was good enough for the moment. He’d left his gun on her dresser and he found it by feel, the textured grip in his palm as familiar as his own skin.

             
There was a nightlight plugged in out in the hall and it silhouetted the top of the stairs. He went down them barefoot, missing the creaky spots. By the time he reached the bottom, the dog was growling – deep-throated and angry – somewhere in the kitchen. Ben slipped in from the back hall; a punched tin lamp with a white shade had been left lit on the counter, and by its light, he could see Keely, hackles raised, standing at the patio door, snarling at whatever she imagined lie on the other side. She tossed a fleeting look at Ben, then whipped back to the door, letting out a howl worthy of the Baskervilles.

             
A sound behind him – brush of bare feet on the hardwood – caught him off guard. He spun, his .45 finding its way into both hands, ready for an attack. Jeremy stood in the threshold; his hands came up in a defenseless pose, but he didn’t jump. His pajama bottoms were some sort of complicated-looking fabric; his t-shirt may have been ironed at some point given the sharp creases in his sleeves.

             
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that the dog would have known if Freddy Krueger were already in the house?”

             
“Don’t you think it’s a bad idea to sneak up on a guy with a gun?”

             
Jeremy twitched a half-smile and reached into his pants pocket, coming back out with a stainless snub-nose .38. Ben let his own arms drop with shock.

             
“You keep that locked up? Out of reach of Clara?”

             
“Listen to you.” Jeremy stepped past him and went to the window, peering through the vertical blinds and patting the dog on the head. She snuffled her master’s leg and whined. “Acting like a responsible daddy. ‘Do you keep that locked up?’ Who do you think I am?
You
?” Ben started to retort, but Jeremy said, “Sorry. Low blow.” He pulled a key down off the top of a picture frame, unlocked the back door, and let the dog out; she leaped through the opening, disappearing into the night. He locked them in again and turned around with a sigh. “Come on.”

             
He headed back toward the hall and Ben didn’t follow. “What about your dog?”

             
“She can take care of herself. If it’s your kiddie murderer out there, I hope she bites his cock off.”

             
Ben didn’t like to leave safety in the hands of canines. He frowned.

             
“Come on,” Jeremy repeated. “I want to show you something.”