Intrusion (15 page)

“Oh man, I can feel you doing that. I can feel you getting off around me.”

At which point, I maybe lose my mind a little bit. I can't fault myself for it though—he's the one who sets the challenge. He's the one who lets me know how much my excitement excites him. What else can I do but play to that? I'd be a fool not to take advantage just a little—just by doing it on purpose. Then that purposefulness gives way to frantic rocking and maybe a bit of back arching and possibly some feverish rubbing at my clit, until finally I end up almost completely out of control.

So much so that when he asks what he then does, I almost do it.

His cock just feels so good and I'm so close—not to mention how amazing it is to just do this. To see him enjoying it, actually enjoying it. Is it really a surprise that I want to go a little further? Push him a little harder? He's grabbing at the sheets and bucking his hips, sounds so much like moans coming out of him. A bit more of this and he'll come, I'm sure.

I'm more than sure. “Just like that—stay like that,” he tells me, which sounds almost exactly like what I would say if I was on the verge of orgasm. All I have to do is keep fucking him like this. He's gonna do it, and then he says the thing and my hands move forward. I'm so used to wanting to help or please him that I try without thinking. His teeth are gritted. He's clearly struggling.

Putting my hands on his throat doesn't seem like a big deal.

But the second I do it I know I shouldn't. I'm too far gone, and he's too far gone, and he's asking me for a terrible reason. “Just choke me a little,” he says, as though the
little
will make it less when even putting my hands there is too much. I don't want him to have to feel pain in order to feel pleasure. I don't want to hurt him so he can feel like I'm okay.

But that's what it comes down to. Almost the moment I touch him like that—like the one dishing out the punishment instead of the one taking it—his head goes back. His hands find mine, pushing me to tighten them rather than take them away. I don't even know if his gasp is one that comes from being throttled or one that means he's coming.

Only I do know. I can tell.

It's both. I can feel him coming in a way I've never felt any man do it—in great wrenching heaves that take over his whole body. He damn near grunts my name, and that odd pulse I can feel inside me. . .that's his cock jerking and throbbing as he spurts.

Or is it just me? I think it might be me. Because I can't for one second deny that when he does all this, I do it, too. Great waves of pleasure pour over me, so thick and good I can hardly keep breathing. My throat seems to seize up, and when I try to scream all that comes out is a thin hiss. No surprise though, really. My teeth are so gritted you'd probably need a crowbar to get them apart.

By the time it's done, I'm crying.

Though I've no idea why. For the unbelievable glorious intensity of it? Or for him and what he needs just to get through it? He looks dazed in the aftermath, like I might have to remind him of his own name. His eyes are unfocused, and those hands still cover mine over his throat, and in one way I'm glad. At least he's not ashamed, I think. At least he's not full of horror or revulsion.

He even tells me that was amazing, and for a little while I believe it.

I'm grateful for his kisses. I feel warmed by his thanks.

“No one has ever done for me what you do for me,” he says as he holds me to him. And he's right, that's true, I do some pretty interesting things for him. But whether that's good or not is completely debatable.

As I learn sometime later that night.

Chapter Nine

I
WAKE TO
the sound of thunder, and beneath it the whine of a dog. Trudy is at the bedroom door, and she doesn't look happy. Her tail and ears are down, in a way I've never seen previously. Why would I have? She has nothing to be afraid of. Her life is all happiness, and especially thanks to Noah and his inability to do anything but spoil her rotten.

So when I see her cowering in the doorway, I sit up immediately. Goose bumps break out all over my arms, and not just because of the fear my dog is obviously feeling. The fear could be explained by the storm. Animals usually get scared over things like this.

But the problem is: she doesn't come upstairs. She never comes upstairs.

Why has she now? Why is she just standing there like some ghostly sentinel? There's something so creepy about it—though I struggle to think of the reason why. Because she seems so still and near silent, staring and staring at me through shadows as dark and thick as molasses? Because her eyes are so black and so grave?

Partly, I think.

But something else occurs, as I peel back the covers and reach for the shirt I abandoned somewhere in the middle of all that earlier bliss. It occurs so hard that I kind of hold in that position, eyes widening just ever so lightly.

This is what happens in horror movies, when the killer is in the house. The family dog tries to warn them. The thunder rolls in the distance. Spine-tingling music trickles through the place, while the heroine prepares to meet her doom, oblivious. And downstairs someone creeps around, searching for something to sink his knife into.

Maybe the creeper has already
found
that someone.

After all, Noah is mysteriously absent from the bed. His side has even had a chance to cool completely, to the point where I draw my hand back on feeling it. The ice there sort of stings. It settles in my heart.

What if Ted is somehow not in prison anymore? He might have escaped. He could have gotten an early release that no one remembered to tell me about. Things like that happen all the time in Lifetime movies, and even if they didn't my mind would still conjure them all up. My mind is always conjuring them all up. It's why I sometimes go back seventeen times to check the door is actually locked. It's why I have a cupboard stocked with Mace.

The police can protect me from Ted.

But nothing can protect me from my own imagination. That thing is so ripe it's rotten, just ready to burst out all kinds of putrid horrors. And as though to prove it, something else occurs just as I get to the door. I put one hand on Trudy's trembling back, and there it is.

What if the imaginary person downstairs isn't Ted?

What if the imaginary person is the one who haunts
Noah
?

He tried to escape a few times before. I know he did, because in a weak moment I looked him up. I read to paragraph three in his Wikipedia entry, before my absolute disgust and horror got the better of me and I had to close my laptop. It was bad enough to unearth what he did. But to unearth it and know that Noah is poisoned by that stuff?

That was too much—and even more so now. He liked to turn the murdered girls into puppets. He made them watch the terrible things he did. What if I get down there and he's hollowed out Noah's eyes, in retribution for all the information Noah gave the FBI?

It sounds ludicrous, impossible, insane, and yet a sound breaks out of me at the thought. I go out into the hall thinking of Floyd Humphries slowly lumbering up the stairs to meet me, and my heart tries to eat itself. An enormous shadow makes me start and step back, and not even the knowledge of what it really is helps.

It's just a machine of Noah's. Part of a car engine attached to a pair of wings on stilts. The creepy angel I call it—much to his amusement. Only it's not so amusing now. Now the fact that it could have been anything in the darkness is just one more layer of nightmare, and even when it turns out to be something else, I still fumble and stumble my way to the stairs.

Most of me wants to lie down before I get there. Just lie down and let the phantom Humphries bash my skull in, because quite frankly anything would be better than this. Anything would be better than fear like this, over the slightest thing. I thought I was getting strong again—I thought I
was
strong again.

Yet here I am almost crying over a frightened dog and a storm and the sudden empty space in the bed beside me. I need to get a hold of myself, and not just because I feel like a pathetic fool. I need to do it because what if something
has
happened to Noah?

Trudy sure seems to think that's the case. I take one of the steps down but she's still whining away. A glance back and I see her skittering in the opposite direction, then when I take another step she goes one farther. She barks—and that's when I hear it and realize the problem is not downstairs.

Something is clattering in the attic. Something that sounds like a pair of shutters in the wind or a screen door banging back and forth. And though I want to still be wary at the idea of both of those things, somehow I can feel my dread shifting. A number of threads in my head start to come together, and none of them say anything about a murderer being in the house. That idea just wasn't plausible.

This one is.

I run to the little door at the end of the hall with it pounding through me, half praying that no one is waiting on the other side. Half praying that someone is. If Noah is there, then everything is possibly okay.

But of course he isn't. He isn't even standing by the window I knew would be open, getting wet and cold but really nothing much more than that. No, no, no—that would be too simple. I could just stay with him then, until he wakes up. I could close the window and put a blanket around him and wait out another bout of sleepwalking.

I can't wait out this.

How can I, when he could plummet to his death at any moment? I look out and there he is,
standing on the fucking guttering around the house
. That buckling, busted old bunch of bullshit, in his goddamn underwear with the rain pouring down and the lightning cracking like a motherfucker and Trudy barking and barking at me to do something.

I was wrong about an intruder being my absolute nightmare.

This
is my absolute nightmare.

If he falls, I will fall with him. I know it—any fool could see it. The whole thing is suddenly there in front of me, as brilliant and blazing as anything I've ever felt. I love him too madly, too deeply. I love him so much I was willing to go downstairs and face a psychopath to save him. I love him so much I slide out onto the sill without even thinking about it.

And I shout his name so loud the thunder seems silent by comparison.

“Noah,” I scream, and when he doesn't react, I try to think how I can get out there to him. I try to imagine how he got out there in the first place. The window is one of those arched affairs that stands proud of the house, and the guttering seems like miles away. He must have somehow climbed on top of the frame then slid over there, even though that seems like total fucking insanity.

How do you manage that while asleep?

Then it occurs to me, in a black rush.

What if he isn't asleep? What if this is a suicide attempt, brought on by me pushing him into things he doesn't want to do? I thought I was letting him decide, but now that I think about it, I kind of want to stop. My requests were too much, and the throat thing was so insane, and now here we are.

Right at me murdering him with sex.

“Noah, if you can hear me—please don't do this, okay? Just let me talk to you, or you can talk to me, or we can never see each other again. I swear to God, if you just come back inside, or just, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, but I'm coming out there to you, all right?” I say, but saying is really not the same as doing. Everything is just so slippery, and the rain is in my eyes, and, God, the drop is enormous.

I have to sink my teeth into my bottom lip—so deep I taste blood—just to stand up on the window ledge. And once I do, I have no idea if I can really climb up onto the arch. I'm not even sure if I have the physical strength to do the hauling necessary—God only knows how strong he is. Or how fast and graceful and good.

And he might have done it all while
sleeping
.

If we get out of this, I swear I'm going to enter him into the Olympics. What he was doing teaching I have absolutely no clue, because this is some next-level shit. I manage to get a hold of a slightly loose board and pull myself up an inch or two, and that's pretty much my limit. Though to my credit, this has nothing to do with my physical fitness.

And everything to do with the board giving way.

It snaps right off in my hand like it's made of paper, at which point I know I'm fucked. My feet are barely on the ledge. There's literally nothing else to hold on to. The thing goes and I jerk back and the only thing that's there to catch me is empty air. I even see the headline: Woman Dies Trying to Save Her Sleepwalking Boyfriend.

About a second before Noah snatches me back from the brink.

Though maybe
snatches
is the wrong word. It's much more like the fist of an angry god reaches down and
hauls
me back. His grip is so strong, and so fierce, that for a second I somehow imagine it isn't him at all. He was all the way over there a second ago, anyway. It can't be him. It has to be Humphries, come to get me after all.

And then I look up through strands of wet hair and the rain beating down and down on us and I see his face. I see his expression, as torn up as my own, that hand fisting in my nightdress and the other tight around me. Body half-sprawled and half-contorted over that arch just to reach me in time.

At which point I know—he loves me too deeply, too.

So deep, I think, that we're both about to drown.

H
E DOESN'T SPEAK
for a long, long time after that. And when he finally does, it's only because I dare to ask the question I would really rather avoid. I wait until we're wrapped in towels in the bathroom, puddles forming beneath our feet and the silence like a stranglehold between us, and then I just have to say something.

“Did you do that because of me? Am I pushing you to it?”