Unbound: (InterMix) (24 page)

The hike back would be about twenty miles, and challenging ones at that, but he could
conceivably do it in one long day. And if he couldn’t, his sleeping bag was warm.
He could survive a cold autumn night wrapped in that alone, under the stars, meditating
on missing Merry.

She’d gone outside to fill her water bottles, and he found her checking her pack’s
many compartments and zippers.

“All set?”

“Just about. Oh—before we go.” Her hand went to her back pocket. She pulled out a
slim digital camera, and with the push of a button its lens unfurled with a foreign,
electric hum.

“Where would you like me?” Rob asked.

“By your wood-chopping stump, I think. With the mountains behind you.”

“As you wish.”

He stood as she directed, smiling, squinting in the morning sun with his arms crossed.
Merry snapped her picture and checked the screen. “Perfect.”

“Ready then?”

“Get one of me, first.”

He obliged, taking a few—Merry at the stump, Merry before the garden, Merry posing
with a cheesy grin and thumbs-up beside the outhouse, and finally Merry loaded with
all her hiking gear.

“Now we’re ready,” she said, taking back the camera.

Once he locked up, they were off.

He let her lead, seeing the way she’d snapped back into capable-hiker-mode, checking
her marked-up map and the compass fob clipped to one of her bag’s countless straps.

“This is like a cloud now,” she said, bouncing her still-quite-heavy pack on her shoulders.
They’d split her supplies between them.

“I’m feeling rather out-manned on this trip.”

“And you are,” she said, brimming with false cockiness. “I’m going to hike you hard
until your feet fall off, then drink you under the next available bar.”

He felt his eyes widen at this threat, toothless or not, but Merry had already moved
on.

“Though you should have seen me on my fourth or fifth morning, when the blisters were
at their height. I seriously broke down and cried, positive I’d made the worst mistake
of my life.”

“I’m sure,” Rob muttered, barely listening.
You have to tell her. Before she drags you into a pub and makes good on that joke.

“Thank goodness for moleskin,” she was saying. Before Rob could grasp his chance to
confess, she pointed into the distance behind them. “Look! It’s Old Nameless.”

The dog watched them from the hilltop, stock-still.

She bit her lip. “I hope he’ll be okay.”

“He goes off on his own for days at a time. He’ll be fine.” Just from the way Rob’s
throat loosened at the change of subject, he knew his chance had passed.
It’s fine. You’ve got two days to tell her. It’ll come up. And if it doesn’t, you’ll
bring it up.

***

They stopped for lunch at the six-mile mark. Merry dropped her pack with a grateful
groan, revising her earlier assessment.
Cloud my ass.

She looked to Rob, sitting on the grass and taking a deep drink of water. He was so
unspeakably handsome, with those gray hairs silvery in the sunshine, blue eyes bright
and restless.

“Yes?” he asked, smiling at her scrutiny.

She tossed him a bag of cashews. “Oh, it just makes me sad, to imagine you all alone
out here.”

“That’s kind . . . but it’s what I want for myself. It’s what I need in my life, more
than company. I don’t know how to explain it, but I know it’s true.”

“I believe you. But it still makes me sad. There must be some perfect woman for you
out there somewhere.”

He scooted close, setting aside the cashews to reach for her hands. He covered them
with his own, atop her knees, and spoke quietly. “I don’t want to talk about any other
women, Merry.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“If there is a perfect one for me, I’m sitting with her now.”

She looked down, overcome by flattery and joy and sadness. She swallowed, throat aching.

“I wish I could claim to be her, but my real life’s thousands of miles away.”
But I could cash in my dual citizenship. Moved away from everything I know and everyone
I love, away from the bustle and warmth of California to make a new, strange life
in these cold hills. Give all that up for one man’s company.
Christ, what would her mother make of that?

“You’re still perfect,” he said. “These few days with you have meant more to me than
years with any other woman ever could.”

She blinked, thrown by his words. How long had she waited for a man to voice something
so loaded and grand and romantic to her? Half a lifetime, surely. She repeated them
to herself, never wanting to forget.

“No one’s ever said anything like that to me.”

He held her gaze with shifting, cautious eyes. “That’s a shame.”

“I don’t think I was ever ready to hear it before. I was too bundled up in my own
insecurities, probably.”

“Well, I’ve never been the type of man to say that sort of thing. Perhaps we make
each other naked enough to manage such feats of earnestness,” he said grandly.

She nodded. “Feels that way.”
Do you love me?
She could never ask it. She couldn’t say it, either. She felt it, but they’d met
too recently, gotten too thoroughly wasted on the intoxicating sex and the impossibility
of it all. It couldn’t be trusted. But she
felt
it—she did. And it felt better than she’d ever imagined, a thousand times as wonderful
as any connection she’d rounded up to good-enough, looking back at her small procession
of lovers and boyfriends.

“You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met,” she whispered, speaking to his hands.

He squeezed her fingers.

“I hope maybe I’ll see you again, someday,” she said. “But if I don’t, I hope another
woman comes along who can make you feel all naked, the way we’ve done for each other.”

“No one could.”

She met his eyes. “I hope you’re wrong.”

Rob was silent for a long moment, eyes cast down as he considered his reply. “I can’t
ever be what a woman needs,” he finally said. “The things
I
need, sexually . . . No woman could indulge that forever.”

She turned their hands and linked their fingers. “Anything’s possible. If we were
able to find each other, all the way out here?
Anything
is possible. Maybe the universe doesn’t want you to be alone. Ever think of that?”

“I’m not really much for fate or higher powers. Though it’s a nice thought,” he added
softly. After a pause, he said, “If you and I . . . If we’d met under normal circumstances,
living in the same town, and stumbled into all this. Would this have been enough,
to keep you with me? What I have to offer?”

“It’s hard to say . . . I won’t lie. I’m pretty infatuated with you.”
Try in love.
“But whether your fetish is a novelty to me, or a part of you I’d be satisfied to
live with and cater to long-term . . . I couldn’t begin to guess. But I’d certainly
be willing to find out.” She studied their hands before meeting his eyes squarely.
“Can I ask you what I’m afraid might be a totally rude question?”

He smiled. “You ask me that so often. You should know by now, I always say yes.”

“I know the rope, like, gets you off, and the dynamics. But do you crave more from
a woman? Like companionship, or affection, or love?” She knew the answer. She’d seen
it and felt it, lying in bed with him the night before. All that need that lingered
even after his lust had been so thoroughly quenched.

But she wanted to hear him say it.

He nodded faintly. “I do want those things, I think.”

“You think?”

Again he made her wait as he turned some thought around in his head. When he spoke,
the words were heavy and brittle, winter branches draped in snow. “I was married,
for a time.”

Married.

Well, he was thirty-six. No shock, really, if a little weird he’d not bothered to
mention it. Whatever. She could roll with that. “For how long?”

“A little over three years. I wasn’t a good husband.”

A chill cooled her, subtle and passing as a breeze off the mountains. “No?”

He met her eyes for only a second before his blue ones fled again. “I never hit her,
but I was cruel, and mean. Spiteful.”

Merry struggled to square this confession with the vulnerable, gentle man she’d come
to know. “Okay.”

“I hurt her. I hurt her so much . . . Had she been my sister, getting treated the
way she had with me, by a boyfriend or husband . . .” He shook his head, looking disturbed.
“I’d have fucking killed the bastard. I literally would have strangled the life out
of a man like that. Like me.”

She stroked his knuckles, unsure what to say. She could feel his anxiety, real as
a vibration.

“I want to say I wasn’t myself . . . That I wasn’t the man you’ve met, out here. I
had no control over my temper, and I’d stuffed so much down inside, all my rage and
resentment and every ugly thing a man can feel . . . It got pushed to the surface.
And I don’t know which man is the real me.”

He took a deep breath, seeming to calm. “But before all that, yes—I did want love.
And affection. I wanted to feel bonded to a woman. But the way I became . . . I lost
so much of that. And by the end, I knew I hadn’t been acting as a man worth loving.
I was a monster. I shut those things off. I hadn’t even let myself register those
needs after I moved here—affection and kindness and all that. Not until you showed
up, offering them.”

She could see his pulse throbbing along his neck, and his brow was set in a tense
line. These memories affected him the way a terrible scare or a physical threat might.
It occurred to her then—Rob didn’t trust himself. Not his sexuality or his self-control,
or even who he was. She couldn’t reconcile this with her own assumptions.

When they’d met, she’d thought he must be most self-assured man she’d ever come across.
He might not be elegant in human interactions, but surely a man who’d chosen the life
he had must know himself, inside out. He was who he was, and had no time for a world
that didn’t offer a space for him in it. She’d thought his lifestyle was a sign of
independent thinking, even an act of rebellion. She’d never have guessed it might
be more akin to hiding.

But a
monster
 . . . She couldn’t imagine Rob angry. She’d met only Dr. Jekyll. She couldn’t begin
to picture Mr. Hyde.

“Your wife . . . did you try to explain your kink to her?”

His brow furrowed. “Not to explain it, exactly. Not explicitly. But we . . . we tried
some things. Me being tied to the bed among them.”

“And it didn’t go over well?”

“No. She was disgusted by the entire thing. She made that plain.”

“That’s a shame. It’s not such a crazy request.”

He shrugged. “I think she knew I wanted those things. Maybe she caught on, the way
you did when you saw how I twisted the blanket around my hands. Or from a snoop round
my computer. I don’t know for sure. But I know the way she shut things down . . .
It was the truth of who I was, and what I wanted . . . Or the confirmation of what
she’d already suspected. That’s what repulsed her.”

“Ouch.”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t deserve any scorn. She’s a good woman, and she put
up with a lot. Including a husband who shut his eyes and went somewhere else in his
head in order to stay hard for her.”

Merry flinched at that. She’d been insecure her entire adult life, even now, after
the weight loss. She’d tortured herself plenty, theorizing about what went on between
boyfriends’ ears when the lights went out.

“With hindsight,” Rob said, “I know that must have hurt. I doubt I ever once looked
her in the eyes when I . . . you know. It must have felt so lonely, being with me.
It couldn’t have been what she signed up for.”

Merry’s heart ached. For Rob, and for this mysterious wife-done-wrong. For herself.

Much as she yearned to be confident in this new body, that was her trigger, too—fear
that any man she was with might be imagining a different sort of woman. A worthier
one. Stupid, undermining anxieties, but she could name them. They were hers. They
always had been.

But with Rob . . . those times she’d spoiled him, his eyes had been open. Wide and
full of wonder, watching her realize his darkest fantasies. Oh, he hadn’t been thinking
of anyone else, then. That gaze had burned with awe and worship, made her feel more
powerful than she’d known possible. His wife could have had that, and counted herself
a lucky woman.

Merry caught herself. She was being way too presumptuous, trying to put herself this
stranger’s shoes. She needed more information, though it was arguably none of her
business. Who was she, after all? Some random woman who’d stumbled into this man’s
life and bed, and who’d be gone as quickly as she’d come. She asked as much as she
dared.

“How did it end, between you two? She left you, you said?”

“She did. Probably three years later than she should have.”

“Dear John letter?”

“No, she . . . She met someone. He told me.”

“Oh, gosh. Was it ugly?”

“It didn’t have to be,” he said sadly, eyes on the horizon. “But I made it ugly. I
made everything ugly in those days. He, um . . .”

She waited, feigning patience even as the curiosity ate her alive.

“It was my brother.” His gaze dropped to the ground between their legs. “She left
me for my brother.”

Her heart wrenched. “How . . . Oh God, how awful for you. You said you were close
with him when you were young.”

“I was.”

She squeezed his hands. “That must have been so
painful
.”

“It was. I hated them, at the time.”

“With good reason.”

But he shook his head. “It wasn’t an underhanded thing. And it was me that brought
them together—their worrying about me. My depression, how self-destructive I’d become.
Plus, in the end . . . I’d changed. A lot. If my brother or wife betrayed anyone,
it wasn’t any man they’d ever claimed to love.”

She frowned, stymied both by the idea that he could have ever been anyone but the
good man she’d met, and that he had such a capacity for forgiveness. His brother
and
his partner . . .