Promise (42 page)

My muscles turn to stone, and my hands lodge on her cheeks, holding her face and thrusting down into her throat until she gags. I’ve learned her limits even like this. She likes it a bit rough and sure thing when I look down at her face, a little smile is in her eyes as she stares up at me.

I let out all I have into her mouth until it mixes with the spit on her chin, and then I pull out, my cock glistening.

“Let me see, babe.”

She opens her mouth obediently, showing me where she holds my essence on her tongue, her lips curling up into a smile, and then she fucking winks at me.

“Swallow, you pain in my ass. Don’t waste any, swallow it all.” I curl a half-smile, looking down at her with a shake of my head.

She’s going to kill me.

“Yes, Sir.” She closes her lips and does as she’s told, putting another nail in my damn coffin when she gives me a playful salute.

I slump down and pull her into me. As soon as she takes a breath, I lay my lips on hers and slip my tongue in to find hers. I love kissing her after she takes my cum.

Beautiful is a word so insufficient. I don’t know why I use it anymore when I think of her.

“I’ll never leave you.” I direct the words into her ear, then set my teeth on the pale skin just below.

I tell her this every day. After each time she takes me inside her, each time we love each other like this.

“You promise?” I hear the smile in her voice, and my heart works against mother nature to burst from my chest.

“I promise. Never. You’re stuck with me.”

Her breathing is slowing, her body as soft as down against me. I love how she raises one leg and drapes it like a lazy branch over mine, pulling herself closer.

“I’ve always thought my mom named me Promise because of the saying.” Her languid words are throaty and sound as seductive as her sounds from moments ago.

“What saying, babe?” Her body is so perfect, folded into me, so warm and soft. I feel like I’m touching heaven as I trace my fingertips up and down her arm.

“ ‘Promises are made to be broken.’—That one.” She sighs as she says it. “She used to say that to me all the time. Over and over. I didn’t understand it when I was little. Then, when I got old enough, I did.”

The smile in her voice is gone, and I hold her tighter.

“You might have started out broken,” I press my lips to her forehead, holding them there for a few seconds, “but I’m here to help put you back together. Nothing will hurt you like that again, babe. No one can break you. I promise.”

“Mom said once she named me Promise because my Dad promised he would never leave her. He did. He left the day I was born. I never even met him.” Her voice is tired. I curl her into me, and we fall into calm, easy breaths next to each other.

I want to find and kill every one of the people in her life that hurt her. Anyone that tossed her away like she didn’t matter. I want to comfort her and take it all away, but I don’t know how besides just showing her that I will never leave.

I kiss the top of her head and hope she can feel everything I’m thinking.

My last thoughts as I fall into that place of semi-consciousness just before you tip over into sleep is that I need to make an excuse to go out later after dawn's had a chance to break. I have an appointment to pick up a small but very special package; then I’ll show her exactly what that fourth finger on her left hand is really for.

I’m playing over and over the scene, I hope for as sleep begins to take us both.

Just as consciousness meets unconsciousness, we are bolted upright. Something is slamming against the front door. The hard, metal banging is echoing all around the tall ceilings when we hear the first, loud voice.

“
Open up.
POLICE.”

Beckett

“
Beck
.” Her eyes are pleading, and I’m not sure I’m even still fucking alive.

“It’s okay, babe. We’ll figure it out.” The words fall flat from my lips. I can feel the darkness rising, a sinking, lifeless feeling I get just before I go lights out.

What the psychologist told me when I was fourteen was that the blackouts are a defense mechanism. Something developed when I was a kid when things happened that should never happen. Things you don’t want to know. Or remember.

The blackouts started when I was eleven—a year after I came to be in the kind and horrific care of the State of Ohio.

I woke up that morning in a house with my newest nine foster brothers and sisters.

Two of whom found it amusing the first day I was there to strip me naked and put me in a closet with a bucket of their steaming shit and lock the door.

The darkness is what I named it. It starts as this odd sense of detachment like I’m watching my life as a movie. Then, I see a black halo form around my field of vision. It narrows and narrows until I feel like I’m suffocating; then the curtain comes down. The world turns black, and then I wake up a few minutes later—or once, a few days later.

When they clamp the cuffs on her tiny wrists at the loft, I almost take them out right there. Luckily, somewhere in my fire-seared brain I know I can't help her if I’m locked up too.

So, instead of going all first-blood, I grab a shirt, throw myself into the Suburban and follow the police car with her frightened eyes looking out the back window to make sure I’m following. On the drive over, I call Louis. I’m not sure what the fuck is going on, but with his security and investigational resources and police contacts, I know I need him.

And I’m right.

Inside the station, my guts feel like they are rearranging themselves inside my body as I watch them take Promise to an interrogation room, her eyes darting over her shoulder at me. No way is this happening. No way it’s true.

An interminable hour later, Louis comes through the doors to the back room at the station. He gives me a tentative wave across the noisy room filled with desks. Cops are chatting with each other or sitting at their desks, tapping away on keyboards. Louis eyes me over the space between us with raised eyebrows as if to say,
stay put, I’m coming, I’ve got your back
.

He moves slowly and comfortably around the station. Shaking familiar hands and greasing the way before he settles in next to me in the little glass-walled room where my world just blew up all over the damn walls.

“
Fuck. What the fuck
?” I can barely form the words. I need info now.

Louis holds his hand up mid-chest and gives me the signal to keep calm. “Okay, I made some calls.” He raises that hand with a smile out the windows in casual greeting as a few plain clothes officers pass by. “They have evidence that the fire and the gas leak in the loft were deliberate. Right now, they’re investigating as a possible arson.
But
—” He stops short and looks at me to make sure I’m with him. I can see something in his eyes I don’t like already. “If they prove that someone set the fire and rigged the gas leak, that’s a murder charge.” I’m surprised when his voice cracks, but I’m too enraged to think about it. “They’re questioning Promise. They think it’s her, man. I’m fucking sorry.” I see something flicker in his eyes like he needs to say something else, but it’s too late.

The darkness slams shut and everything goes quiet.

“You okay?” Louis’s voice sounds far away.

“Yeah.” I shake my head and try to focus. Everything has a white haze around it for a second before I remember where I am.

“You went dark there, man. You gotta hold on.” His voice lowers to a hissing whisper. “You can’t go all Rambo in here.” His head swivels around, looking out the windows of the small room.

I turn my focus to the room’s insides. Both chairs and the table are now in various states of disassembly. They were fine when I walked in.

I know I did it, and I don’t give a shit. I look at my hands. My knuckles are split on my left hand, but I don’t feel anything. “What the fuck is going on? Why her? Why do they think it was her?”

“Man, they can’t tell me everything. But, I got some intel when I called Detective Prestwick. He moonlights with me on security stuff, so I pressed him as much as I could. Promise was the last one in the apartment?”

“What the fuck does that matter?” My fists tighten. I hate that I think about the moment she went back in the apartment that night to get her backpack. She was messing around in Dad’s little kitchen by the stove. “I could have been the last one there, too.
Jesus
Louis, this it complete bullshit. They have no reason to suspect—”

The way he blinks and rubs the scruff of his salt and pepper beard tells me there’s more.

“You gotta maintain, you hear me?” Louis sets a hand on my shoulder, and I can feel the heat coming up, threatening to ignite.

I bite down on my lower lip. The twitches take over. My head begins jerking and twisting until stars dot my vision.

“She’s got a
history,
Beck,” Louis says quietly.

I try to process those five words.

“We all have a
history
, Louis.
Fuck that
, I have a history.”

“No man,
listen
to me.” He swallows hard, his eyes wide. He hates whatever it is he’s about to tell me. “She’s a firebug. Three for sure when she was younger. I don’t know the specifics, but I pulled all the records I could get my hands on, then called Prestwick because there were some juvenile markers there without details. She’s got a
history,
man. You hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?” Louis locks eyes with me, and I want to punch him.

“But, fuck. Louis . . .” I run my hands over my head, back and forth, trying to get the pounding to stop. Trying to get everything to stop.

“There’s more.” Louis lowers his voice.

I roll my eyes and give my friend a dead stare.

“Fuck you, Louis.” I know it’s not his fault, but I hate him right now.

“The detectives been calling her the last two days. Trying to get her to come in on her own. Left her five messages. I take it she didn’t tell you?”

“No. She didn’t.”

I think about when she came out of the bathroom with her phone last night, her eyes as wide as moons. I asked her if she was okay, but she broke into a huge grin and ran over and jumped on me, and I forgot about everything else as her lips attached to mine.

I’m on my feet. I’m sick. As sick as I’ve ever been, and I can feel flames wrapping around me with every step I take out of the room.

Louis is saying my name from somewhere behind me, but I’m halfway down the hall. I hear people talking and the soft clicking of keyboards, the chuckles of folks clearly not here for the same reason I am.

How could she do this? I’m not talking about the fire. How could she hide this from me? Everything we’ve talked about.

Just when I thought I knew every kind of pain, Promise is taking me deeper. Showing me new levels of pain from which I will never recover.

It’s like I gave her a map to the places inside of me where she could hurt me the most, then handed her the razor and told her to start cutting.

People around me are going on with their day as I try to find my way out. I can’t be here. That black halo is forming, and this time, I know it won’t end with just a couple of broken chairs.

As I turn the corner and see the red EXIT letters, a voice slams into me from a room on my right, and I wonder if God is having fun.

“I
know
.” Jeremy fucking laughs. His sick, self-righteous voice has fire coming up around me. “I hated to have to do it, but it’s for her own good.”

“What the fuck is for her own good?” My voice is as dead as I feel. I wonder if he can feel all the ways I want to cause him pain right now.

Two officers, leaning against the wall listening to this piece of human shit spout off, jerk their heads around from Jeremy to me, then quickly back.

He flinches as I take over the doorway. I swallow the spit gathering in the back of my throat and feel like I’m going to combust.

“
You don’t know her like I do
!” Jeremy’s squeaks like a hamster and tries to look me in the eye but fails. He looks at the two confused uniforms glancing back and forth between us.

“Who’s this?” The uniform closest to the door points at me.