Monday morning, I found myself on the other side of the Reed’s front door, not moving a muscle.
One of two things would happen once I walked through that door.
The first would be the obvious—a swift boot right back out. The dreaded pink slip delivery. The always good ‘We’re going in another direction, and that direction isn’t you.’
Worst part was that I’d have no one to blame but myself if I was fired. I wouldn’t even have a right to be mad if Dominic fired me. I mean, I still would be mad and probably throw a bitch fit, but only because anger was my clutch, and I’d been known to shove it into first gear without really thinking.
Honestly, I’d been expecting a call or text message all weekend telling me not to come in today or ever again, but nada. So, here I was, squaring off with a giant door, expecting option one but hoping for option two.
Total denial.
Both of us would pretend like nothing ever happened in that garage and happily ignore each other for the rest of my employment. We wouldn’t have to talk about the kiss. We wouldn’t have to talk about why I ran.
We could ignore the chemistry and the stupid feelings that came with it, and the less attention we gave them, the quicker they would die off, and I’d be cured of them altogether.
Fingers. Fucking. Crossed.
With a shaking breath and flimsy expectations, I put on my big girl thong and pushed open the door, making my way inside. The expansive foyer and empty staircase were silent for about three seconds before—
“Ms. Kat is here!”
Maya’s enthusiastic announcement of my arrival exploded the fragile silence, sending shrapnel of its wreckage straight through my chest. I tensed, instantly missing when I first started working here, and Maya was still shy around me.
Oh God. Kid, love me less.
She bounded around the corner, a flash of dark curls and bright white teeth. I tried to force a smile of my own, but it felt as lame as it probably looked. Mid-run, Maya slipped on her socks on the hardwood floors, falling to her side with flailing arms. I would have ran to her if she hadn’t popped right back up like a jack in the box, giggling up a storm at herself.
Suddenly, my smile wasn’t so forced.
“Hey, Kiddo.”
“Ms. Kat, I made a play-doh mansion yesterday that Daddy let me keep up so I could show you when you got here today!”
“Oh…” Well, that play-doh is hard as shit now. “Is there a room for me in said mansion?”
She wrapped her hand around mine, dragging me into the belly of the beast where the beast himself could be waiting around any corner. “Yup! There’s a living room, ballroom, and four bedrooms. One for me, you, Mommy, and Daddy.”
Separate rooms for Mommy and Daddy? Ouch.
“What about bathrooms?”
She huffed, running a hand back through her fly-aways. “We can go outside.”
I swallowed a laugh as she pulled me around the corner leading into the living room where it was surprisingly empty. A sigh of relief deflated my lungs and my shoulders slouched over.
Then in the exact next second, every relaxing physicality went in reverse.
“Daddy, Ms. Kat says we need bathrooms in our mansion, but there’re no rooms left.” She angled herself towards the kitchen directly behind me. “Can you and Ms. Kat share a room so I can make yours a bathroom?”
If I could have left my body, floated above the house and screamed until the sound barrier broke, I absolutely would have. Kids, man.
Dominic couldn’t have been much better. How uncomfortable he was with his daughter putting me and him in a bedroom together in this play-doh house reeked through his dismissive tone.
“That’s fine.”
Not even on his most fatigued days did I hear Dominic disregard anything Maya said. Her words were gems, and he collected them all with a smile. Well, usually.
She didn’t really seem to notice though, scrunching her sweet face together while staring down at her pink and orange oblong creation. I looked down at it too, wondering with a twisting stomach what made Maya choose me as a bunk buddy with her father instead of Heather.
Kids were perceptive as hell, sure, but that would make Maya a freaking mind reader.
Eventually, she abandoned her work of art and trotted behind me. My gaze followed her around as she climbed to her knees on one of the high-rise kitchen table chairs and forked a giant, syrupy bite of pancake in her mouth. She munched happily, staring out the bayside windows at whatever caught her creative attention.
With Maya choosing to kick it with the window over me or Dominic, there was an acute silence left in the air. One that put a guiding finger beneath my chin and turned my head in his direction.
God, he looked good today. It actually hurt how handsome he was. For the amount of agonizing I’d done all weekend that earned me these puffy bags under my eyes that no amount of concealer could hide, he could at least have the courtesy to look just a little worse for wear.
I wasn’t asking for much. Messy hair. A wrinkle in his shirt. Mismatched socks maybe? I could still hold out hope for that one, but the chances were sucky.
Dominic’s focus was down, long fingers clasping sleeve buttons on his crisp white shirt. Swarthy brows were furrowed in fixed concentration, his mouth curved in the most exquisite frown. I couldn’t believe I kissed that mouth. Even frowning, it was such a perfect mouth, lips like curved candies I wanted to suck on and get a sugar high from.
His sweet mint taste lingered on my tongue, still as potent even days later. It wouldn’t let me forget what I’d done to acquire the taste and what I thought about doing again and again despite how sick it made me.
Feelings were such a strange addiction.
I was too entrapped in my staring, my mind-fuckery feelings, to be at all prepared when Dominic flashed his eyes up and caught me in his. A burst of electricity shocked my heart to skip about fifty beats in a row, stuttering my brain to a freeze. Dominic locked me into his gaze, sharing memories between us like an exchange of oxygen. Except the air we were sharing was suffocating, pouring guilt down my lungs as he showed me his memories.
Bright and vivid. Sensual and passionate. Devastating and furious.
Dominic was livid, and within only a few seconds of drowning in his eyes, I was breathless. Breathless and so fucking sad because they were back to cold.
His eyes were back to the coldest winter’s night, and it was my fault.
Shame thrashed up my throat, an apology trapped in its grip and ready to toss out. Anything to smooth out the edges of that razored glare. I didn’t have to get into specifics with it.
Just a quick ‘I’m sorry’, and the rest would be implied.
I’m sorry for pushing you to tell me your weakness. I’m sorry your weakness is me. I’m sorry I bent you until I broke you into giving in and kissing me. I’m sorry that I ran out without an explanation after you said all those nice things.
Everything I was sorry for proved what I was trying to tell Dominic back on Friday. I was bad. I had a lot of broken parts that had sat and withered over the years, growing more calloused and mucked over. The more those dirty parts acted in blind pursuit, the less control I had over them.
Eventually, I realized those parts were what kept me safe, and ever since then, I handed the reins over to them and let them work. And it had worked up until now. My bad parts had never hurt anyone good before this.
Only people who deserved it.
Dominic didn’t deserve it, and with our eyes still locked, I opened my lips to tell him just that.
“I’m late for work,” Dominic cut me off, snipping our connection dead.
He tore through the kitchen, grabbing everything he needed for work off the counter in a quick sweep. My gaze trailed after him, sitting wide with shock.
He ping-ponged from the counter to the island in the middle of the kitchen to palm his keys over to Maya to drop a swift kiss on her head. He avoided me completely. That, and acknowledging the fact that I totally knew he wasn’t really late for work. I knew what time he had to leave in the mornings to get there on time, and we still had a few minutes to go.
Dominic ignored the lie and how bold-faced it was and kept moving until he was out of sight and out of the house. I gawked at where he just stood and followed the trail of smoke he left gunning it for the front door.
Well…
Now at least we were even.
Four hours, three peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and two games of hide and seek later, Maya and I were conked out on the couch for a duel afternoon nap.
Chores could wait.
Beauty rest was a must.
I wasn’t sure how long I slept before stirring awake. The couch was warm beneath my back and my muscles felt all jello-like and relaxed. Maya’s even breathing was a gentle push and pull down the dip of my cleavage. She’d fallen asleep on my right tit, and I couldn’t even blame her.
Tits were comfy as fuck.
Eyelids still slacked by sleep, I rolled my head against the plush pillow that probably wasn’t designed to be slept on, but looked at. My neck cracked something delicious, muscles stretching as I lulled my head to the side with fluttering eyes.
Every lazy muscle in my body seized, eyes jumping wide as I realized we weren’t alone. Dominic was a strong presence sitting on the small sofa parallel to us. His long legs were set wide, elbows resting on his knees while his chin rested on his folded hands.
He watched me go through the motions of realizing he was there, trying to hold in my freak out, and settle on a shaky exhale to relax from the subdued panic. His gaze was wholly unashamed on me, his concentration tight and thoughtful.
What he was thinking, I didn’t know because of the chill in them I’d brought back. It froze out any vulnerability he’d shown me on Friday, and that was probably for the best. Before Friday, an inscrutable glance from Dominic had the potential to overwhelm me. Being given his full range of expressive emotions and thoughts sent me into a freaking panic attack on Friday.
I couldn’t take more than the basics from those eyes.
It was definitely past lunchtime, so I couldn’t even say why he was home. His forefinger covered his top lip with how he had his hands pressed to his mouth. Slowly, he lifted his lips over the bridge of his fingers, the velvet timbre of his voice flowing out.
“You two are cute together.”
A cloud of sour smoke filled my chest, or at least that’s what it felt like. The smoke constricted everything, eating up every bit of oxygen in my lungs so all I could do was smile at him, and even that was weak.
Dominic’s phone buzzed on the arm of the chair, his eyes rolling down to it like a ton of bricks were sitting on his eyelids. One look at the screen, and those eyes fell shut.
“Work still crazy?” I asked softly, finding my voice.
With a languid inhale that lifted his whole chest, he nodded.
“Any luck with the nurse’s case?”
He slid his whole hand over his mouth this time, joints moving slowly. He took a steady beat before shaking his head. A quiet settled over us, somber and heavy.
Dominic may have been upset about our kiss or how I ran away from him this morning, but his sadness was about more than that now. I wasn’t selfish enough to believe that this degree of blanketed stress was about me and our little kiss. This was a palpable upset, the drawn lines on his face enough to illustrate an entire despairing novel.
His stare was still lowered to his phone even though the screen had gone black. He curled his fingers back into a loose fist over his mouth, gliding a knuckle back and forth over the seam of his lips.
Dominic was so lost in thought that he dragged my mind off course too, making me lose all concept of time and awareness while I watched him. My thoughts floated in fragments all dedicated to Dominic. I wondered what he was thinking, why he was home, what was bothering him so much, if he’d dreamt about me this weekend like I dreamt about him.
I could force my brain to steer towards other topics when I was awake.
My subconscious was the treacherous bitch.
She liked to dream about him pressing me up against a wall—any wall, really. My subconscious wasn’t particular, just horny—and bruising my lips with kisses so filthy sweet, it made my stomach ache. In the dream, he said all those kind words again, and this time, I would cry. There was no shame in the tears like there would have been in real life, and in dreamland, Dominic kissed each one away until my sobs turned over to moans. Then I woke up.
Pissed off and super horny.
All my floating, angsty, silver-eyed thoughts went poof as Dominic spoke out of nowhere.
“She was the sixth woman taken in the last year.” My eyes were wide and waiting on his when he brought them up to clarify. “The nurse. She’s victim number six, and we only found the first one last month.”
My eyebrows shot up, and I did my best to keep my enthusiasm to a whisper.
“You found someone? That’s great.” Except nothing in Dominic’s expression said it was. Confusion folded with dread as my eyebrows lowered with my expectations. “Isn’t it?”
His stare was half-hooded by lids too exhausted to stay upright.
“She was found in Florida, dead in a swamp on the side of a highway.”
A gruesome picture painted itself to life behind my eyes before I could stop it. My heart felt punctured by his words, by the image, by such an unfair death. Saliva crawled down my throat, slow and bitter tasting.
“How did she…?”
For just a moment, his ice melted to reveal a regarding sadness.
“Overdose. Heroin.”
Panic with teeth clamped down on my windpipe. It didn’t let go, burying its fangs in deep until it scraped bone. A shiver drew goosebumps all over my skin, Dominic’s sorrowed stare watching them grow. He knew heroin was my mother’s favorite from her arrest report. His sadness was for me.
Because someday that might be my mom on the side of the road, except she would have gotten there all on her own.
“Her name was Jessica Serrano.” I inhaled her name deeply, using it as a vice to ease off the panics biting grip. It felt nice to be able to give her a name. “We initially concluded her as a runaway. She had all the signs. Problems in school and at home. Her parents waited four days before even reporting her missing because she’d run away before.”
I wanted to ask him why he was telling me all of this, but I didn’t want him to stop, so I kept my mouth shut. Even as his words got more grim, his eyes dimming to a muted, dreary gray.
“It wasn’t until two sisters were taken on their walk to school a couple months later that we even considered Jessica might be a victim.”
My heart stilled. “Two sisters?”
Dominic forced a slow nod. “Twins. Both 16. Jessica was 17.”
Oh holy fuck, that was young. Anguish ate away the gray edges of Dominic’s eyes, his pupils narrowing and the whites expanding as he lost himself in his head again. The torment of these girls pulled him down to places that had to be so dark, it was a wonder he ever found his way back out without a lifeline.
“What do you think is happening to these girls?”
Dominic pulled back a breath, but didn’t let it go. It held his chest full and wide, and for a second, I worried the thoughts that carried his focus away were too constricting to remind him to breathe.
His loose fist still hovering in front of his mouth wound tight, thumb pressing down until his forefinger made a pop. The more he tried to fight out an answer, the more his stare turned to a frenzy. One dark possibility jumped over another and another, skipping past his eyes with razored feet, each one leaving an open gash. Nightmares bled through him, smearing with every shade of gray his eyes had ever been into a mural of morbid colorings that made my heart fucking ache.
He shook his head once and then stopped. He still hadn’t let out that breath of air either, and now it looked like he couldn’t. He looked stuck. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak past the horrors of what he thought was happening to these women.
He jumped a quick glance up at me, brows diving together as he struggled.
“It’s okay.” I shook my head as much as I could, fingers itching to reach out and lay on his forearm. “You don’t have to say.”
He didn’t acknowledge with anything more than a bone crushing clench of his jaw, the backs of his cheeks pulsating. He flicked his stare down and back up to me, leaning forward to rest his elbows back on his knees.
He leveled several calming breaths, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“I apologize for unloading. It’s been a difficult day.”
Guilt flared a heat wave up my front, reminding me that I was a part of what made his day difficult. “It’s okay. You’ve been there when some of my messier shit spilled out.” Thanks, Mom. “Plus, this will all be over once you catch the guy.”
He shook his head, eyes still closed. “We have almost no leads. Any time we get anything, a pattern, a witness—anything—it disappears. We thought we had a pattern with the ages since most of the women taken were under or around twenty, but then there was the nurse. Thirty-four years old… and we’re back to zero.”
Just like that, dots connected, puzzle pieces fell into place, and Dominic’s outburst about me walking home by myself at night after he picked me up from that party made a lot more sense.
“Is that why you wanted me to learn self-defense?” I asked carefully.
His brows were a severe line all the way across, mouth just as flat and serious.
“With the exception of the nurse, you fit the age profile.”
My heart twisted forward, backwards, and around itself, tangling into a tight knot at the dead center of my chest.
This man. This poor, thoughtful, protective, stupidly beautiful man. His hero complex was going to send me to the friggin’ ER if he didn’t stop. He’d had this huge burden of knowledge this whole time, the weight of each missing girl crushing him from the inside out. He wasn’t able to save them, so he was trying to do what he could with me despite how difficult I made it for him. He just wanted me to be safe. Actually safe.
He actually cared about what happened to me.
Fuck.
Eyes locked together, my voice dipped into unfamiliar territory, all soft and beholden. “I’ll be more careful.”
He didn’t nod or anything. Just kept his concentrated gaze on me. As the seconds piled on, those reflective shards of gray burned with a different intensity.
An acknowledgement rearing its head.
My stomach buckled, terror flaming up my throat as he looked at me like he did this morning. Intrusive. Accusing. So fucking intimate. Reminding me that he knew how my tongue tasted, how my lips felt, how I sounded when he made me moan and whimper for more of him.
More, more, more until I’d consumed too much and ran away sick.
With Maya still knocked out hard on my chest, there was no fleeing this time. She was Dominic’s secret weapon, making it so I had to talk to him. I was pinned under her tiny body and her father’s intensive stare, peeking beneath sullen eyebrows as his bass voice rolled out, quieted by a heavy heart.
“Why did you run?”
Because it was selfish to kiss you, and it was selfish to run away from you, and I’m a selfish person and don’t know any other way to be.
Instead, I chickened out. “You first. You were pretty quick yourself this morning.”
His eyes ducked, hidden in admission that he was a fast-footed hypocrite. He carefully held the silence, rolling his dusty pink lips together to press them a darker shade of rouge. A flash of them swollen and ravished a sinful red passed behind my eyes.
He thumbed the edge of his shaded jawline. “I didn’t want to hear whatever you were going to say.”
“Even if it was an apology?”
The ice in his eyes sharpened. “Especially if it was an apology.”
Now that took me back with what was probably some ill-placed frustration. I did a bad thing and now he needed to let me apologize for the bad thing. Isn’t that how this shit worked?
“So you don’t want me to say sorry?”
Dominic collected my angry confusion with shrewd eyes. His jaw ticked. “No, I don’t. I want to know why you ran.”
Guilt dropped my stare to the floor, and not a single other emotion. Not fear for what I’d experienced during our kiss: the wildfire lightning and neon-colored stars blinding my world of anything but him. Not humiliation that I’d let myself fall down that trap of fairy-tale feelings that I knew better against.
No, if I lied to myself enough times, then all I’d remember was the guilt, and guilt I could work with. Guilt was an easy color to own.
“I just had to,” I admitted, my heart pounding between each word.
He waited for more, but I was done talking. The less I talked about why I ran, the more the why would fade away until the sickness was gone completely. I just had to breathe through it.
Breathe…
Through the jitters, through the feelings for him, through the panic they caused. I just had to breathe, and ignore it was all there on an inhale and filter out everything I was ignoring on an exhale.
I called it Denial Meditation for Beginners.
Seriously, so much cheaper than therapy.
Dominic needed to take a few sessions himself so he didn’t go blurting out crazy ideas like he did next.
“We need to talk about it.”
I quickly countered. “Or we can pretend it didn’t happen.”
Dominic blinked, absorbing my proposal. That stupid organ in my chest coughed through its sickness, terrified for his reaction. Would he be mad or relieved? Finally fire me or refuse to let me off the hook so easily?
The thickest shade I’d seen yet cast over his eyes, blocking out any single thought or reaction. Visible tension struck a chord in his neck, straining beneath his golden skin. The dark gray around his pupils was sucked dry, becoming as dull as his gruff voice.
“Is that what you want?”
Truthfully? “Yes.”
Breathe it in, breathe it out.
Denial. Denial. Denial.
I kept my eyes on his, no matter how anxious they made me, so he could see how sincerely I meant it. I knew with every pass of my face those dissecting eyes did, he was trying to dig up lies.
But I wasn’t lying this time, and there was a strange, almost solemn flicker in his gaze as he realized it. He nodded just once, taking in a generous sweep of my face.
Like he was trying to memorize it.
“Okay,” he spoke, his timbre even. Heavy but professional.
“Then it never happened.”
