Hard (16 page)

“Is
that what you used to think?”

He reaches out his arm, plays with my hair. “I know that’s
what other people thought. And I guess I did, too, sometimes.”
He closes his eyes. “Sometimes it’s like that was a whole
other life. The training was nonstop. My body was always sore,
knuckles were always raw, taped up. I was exhausted all the time from
the schedule, too tired even to notice the chaos and betrayal going
on in my own house,” he says, and after the girls’
download yesterday I don’t even need to ask what he means by
betrayal
. “I got too busy to see what was right in
front of me,” he says. He opens his eyes. “I like looking
at what’s in front of me now, though.”

We doze in the sun, my head on his chest, his hand on my waist. I
wake up first—maybe because it’s so hot. I’m
actually sweating in my swimsuit. Sliding out from under Ryder’s
arm, I slink down the rock and sit in its shadow in the shallow part
of the shore, my bottom half submerged but visible under the water.

I run my hands through the grit of the silty lake bottom, thinking
about the irony that if Ryder hadn’t tried to stop that fight
in middle school, he probably wouldn’t have made a career
fighting. He wouldn’t be running a ring, he wouldn’t have
been loaning Jamie money, and we might never have met at all. “Thank
you, Marvin Lutwak, wherever you are,” I whisper.

I guess you could also argue if I hadn’t left England—if
I hadn’t had to leave England—I wouldn’t have met
Ryder either. But somehow, I don’t feel quite as appreciative
toward Sebastian as I do little Marvin Lutwak.

Ryder’s being so open made me want to open up, too, about
England, why I was there, what happened, what’s
still
happening, right up until this morning. But I couldn’t do it.
Or wouldn’t, I guess.

The truth is, I just want to put it all behind me—move ahead,
no looking back. And I don’t want to burden anyone else with
looking back at it either. Because in some ways, it might be harder
for another person to understand what they’d find out than it
is for me to remember it. We don’t often comprehend the choices
other people make in life, especially when they turn out to be bad
ones that turn worse.

The lake is still, serene, calming, and I lean my head against the
rock, closing my eyes for a few minutes, maybe even falling into a
light sleep, until I feel a familiar wet warmth on my naked nipple.
Ryder. I’d know that tongue anywhere.

I wrap one hand around his head as he locks those blue eyes onto
mine, and as he kisses my breasts, pushing my bikini top to the side,
I reach the other hand into the water for his throbbing cock. Taking
me around my ribcage, he lifts me out of the water and walks us to
the shore, settling me on a blanket in the shade.

Ryder’s hands are all over me now and he tugs down my bottoms
at the same time I push down his trunks, hungry for him, needing him
inside me.

“Ryder.”

He only groans in response, his cock straining against my hand.

Then he rolls onto his back and pulls me on top of him, and I
straddle his lap, that perfect hardness gliding into me, filling my
opening, my body, my whole world. I bend my head toward his as I move
back and forth, my clit rubbing against his skin as his cock presses
against my inner wall, setting my nerve endings on fire, and when I
kiss him, my mouth is so eager for his that our teeth bump as our
tongues find each other. He puts his hand on my shoulder and gently
pushes me back. “I want to watch you ride me,” he says.

I
arch my back and roll my hips, letting myself get lost in the
sensation of him inside me and the thrill of his eyes on me.

“Like
this?” I say.

“It’s
fucking perfect,” he says. “You’re fucking
perfect.” He sits forward, nuzzling his head into my breasts,
and the movement tilts his cock into just the right spot, the
friction building and cresting as he thrusts into me over and over
again.

“Yes,”
I breathe.

He holds me still above him as he continues his delicious assault,
pulling me down onto his cock, hitting that spot again, so deep, as I
grind harder into him.

“Cassie,” he calls my name. I lean over him. Our eyes
lock.

I’m gasping for breath in between kisses, moaning into his
mouth as softly as I can as he makes me come, so hard, an explosion
of wetness and heat and sound that seems like it will never, ever
end.

Ryder and I swim back to the campground just before sunset, the sky a
mix of purples and pinks and orange. By nightfall, beers are opened,
s’mores are melting, and tents are pitched. “I’d
offer to let you bunk with me,” Shelby says, “but it
looks like you’ve got your sleeping arrangements all figured
out. Well,” she says, her mouth stretching into a grin,
“probably not so much sleeping.”

I look over my shoulder at Ryder, who lounges on a blanket by the
bonfire, leaning back on his tatted arms. In the light of the flames,
he almost glows, like some kind of sexy, beautiful, otherworldly
being.

I smile at Shelby and nod. “Probably not so much sleeping,”
I say.

“You know, I haven’t seen Ryder this relaxed in a while,”
Shelby says. “Years, maybe.”

“Being in nature can have that effect, I guess.”

“No, you have that effect. We all think so,” Shelby says.
“So keep it up. We like happy Ryder.” Shelby leans into
me and whispers in my ear, “And he likes you.”

Eventually we all end up around the fire. Ryder and I sit on the
blanket, him behind me, his legs stretched out around mine. His chest
moves in and out on my back as he breathes, the regular rhythm of it
like the soothing, familiar beat of a favorite song.

Cash breaks out the guitar and regales us with his original songs,
mostly about how good-looking he is, how good-looking someone he
wants to have sex with is, or the Atlanta Braves. They’re
hilarious, and actually, musically pretty good. “Cash, I had no
idea you played guitar,” I say.

“These fingers have surprised a lot of women, Cass,” he
says, wiggling them at me.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ryder says, wrapping his arms around
me and pulling me into him. “Save your little finger talents
for someone else.”

“Finger talents,” Avery says. “There’s your
band name, Cash.”

The rest of the night, Ryder holds me like that, tight and close,
like I belong to him, like I belong here, around this fire, with
these people, in his arms that are strong enough to keep anything bad
out and everything good in. All my problems feel a million miles
away; I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as safe as I do
curled up in Ryder’s arms tonight. It’s a feeling that I
want to last.

CASSIE

Although
I spent much of the weekend not wearing clothes, by Tuesday night I
need to do laundry in a major way. I toss a load in the washer, and
head downstairs to tackle the dishes in the kitchen before going to
bed. I ended up staying with Ryder again Monday night after we came
home from the lake in the afternoon. “It’s late,”
he’d said, crawling up from where he’d been kneeling
between my bare legs to put his head on my naked chest. We were on
the long black couch in his den on the bottom floor of his condo.
Across from us, the evening sun shone brightly through the
floor-to-ceiling windows. “You don’t want to drive home
at this hour.”

I tufted his soft hair with my fingers, weak and happy from the
orgasm he’d just given me. “It’s only six o’clock,
Grandpa,” I said, chuckling. “And my car’s not even
here. You just don’t want to drive me back to my house at rush
hour.”

“I
do hate rush hour traffic,” he said. He kissed my ribcage. “And
I kind of like having you here.”

Me,
too
jumped into my throat but I swallowed it whole. It seemed
risky to say out loud. Mostly because it was true.

Now
at my house, I put on music as I load the dishwasher to break up the
silence of being here alone. When I lived here with Jamie before I
moved to England, it seemed like he always had friends over, and
growing up, the kitchen was the center of our family life, the one
place we would all be together at least once a day. Our dad would
cook dinner nearly every night after he got home from work while I
did my homework at the table, and our mom would “supervise,”
as she liked to say, with a glass of wine, the two of them chatting
about what seemed like such grown-up things to a kid: local politics,
neighborhood gossip, how best to cultivate the tomato plants they’d
planted in our backyard.

All that life and activity, the voices of people who love each other
blending together into this unique melody—it was something I
missed terribly living with Sebastian. Our apartment, actually, was
quite lovely, tall ceilings and lots of windows that filled the rooms
with natural light. But it so often felt dark there to me, like a
cave or a bottomless black pit where a raised voice would echo and a
soft, pleading one could barely be heard.

Aretha
Franklin is spelling out
Respect
as I scrub pots and pans when
I hear the loud groan of weight against wood, like someone pushing a
closed door.

Like someone trying to open it.

I
turn off the faucet and lower the volume on Aretha, trying to listen
again, though my pounding heart is making it difficult.

A
click, coming from the side door. Someone trying to turn the locked
knob. There was no knock. No bell rung. Whoever it is must not think
I’m here.

Or doesn’t think I’ll let him in.

The more I tell myself
It can’t be Sebastian
, the more I
become sure that it is. Sebastian grew up pheasant hunting with his
father and uncle in the English countryside. His eyesight and
reflexes are excellent, and his patience as he observes his prey is
unshakable. He knows how to track a moving target from a great
distance. How long he can let the pheasants think they’re
escaping by flying straight ahead to the next tree, the next county,
across the ocean, never looking behind them as a measure of strength,
not realizing it could be their fatal flaw, before he pulls the
trigger. Those poor birds.

I move back from the sink and the window above it, hunching down into
the shadows of the kitchen, trying to control my breathing. My
possibilities for fighting seem dim. All the sharp knives are in
their wood block on the counter, in perfect view of the window. Jamie
didn’t keep any bug spray under the sink that could double as
Mace. And I left my cell phone upstairs, helpfully.

The knob rotates again as he pushes against the door. With the new
deadbolt, at least I know he won’t be able to kick it down
easily, a little extra protection thanks to Ryder, not that I can say
thank you
without having to tell him Sebastian exists—a
fact I’m not ready to share. But now I wonder if Sebastian
knows about Ryder, if he saw me leave with him this weekend, hiding
outside somewhere I hadn’t even thought to think about after he
placed the flowers on the step where he now stands. Why, why, why
would I ever have assumed Sebastian would trust anyone as uninvested
as a delivery person with such a task? He has always believed if you
want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

And he’s not wrong, especially if you’re defending
yourself, your house, your life. You have no choice but to do it
right.

I crawl to a low cabinet to arm myself with the heaviest pot I can
swing. Even though the other doors are locked and help is just a
staircase away to my cell phone, I want to prepare for the worst. In
case those stairs end up being the only distance between him and me.

The clicking stops, and I pause, not knowing whether the silence
means he’s gone—or just gone to another door.

The kitchen is adjacent to the dining room, which overlooks the back
patio through French doors covered with diaphanous curtains. Lovely
for letting in daylight. Perfect for seeing shadows at nighttime.

Hunched on the kitchen floor and holding the pot, I peek around the
archway between the two rooms. A tall figure stands at the patio
doors, which, though locked, are almost entirely glass, beautiful and
vulnerable. Adrenaline courses through me.

I scurry into the darkness of the dining room and position myself
next to the door hinges, standing to my full height, gripping the pot
like a baseball bat. The knob turns and clicks, turns and clicks, and
I breathe in deeply, reflexes ready, eyes wide.

The door pushes open. He steps into the dining room, and I swing the
pot at his head like I’m hitting the game-winning homerun, the
metal making a dull, pounding noise as it collides with his
suddenly-raised forearms.

“Jesus Christ,” he yells. Except the accent isn’t
British. It’s southern American. And a voice I’ve known
his whole life.

“Jamie?” I say.

“Cassie, what the fuck?” He holds his arms folded in
front of his face. “You barely missed my fucking nose.”

“I thought you were someone else.” I lower the pot and
flip on the overhead light. He wears jeans and an old yellow t-shirt
that says “Do the Dew” under a black hoodie. His hair is
long and floppy, his face unshaven. In some weird way it’s
almost comforting that Jamie hasn’t changed since last I saw
him two years ago. For better or for worse. “What are you doing
here?”

“I live here,” he says. He shakes out his arms, rubs his
elbows. “God, good thing I’ve got jungle cat reflexes or
I’d be really pissed at you right now.”

“You’d be pissed at me?” I say, my even and
measured tone holding in my total disbelief. “You scared the
shit out of me. I thought someone was breaking into the house.”

“Yeah, did you change the side door lock?” he says,
walking through the dining room and into the kitchen. “My key
wouldn’t work.”