But what if I was wrong? What if I was throwing this away based on everyone else I’d met, not based on him? What if he was different?
Every inch of my body was urging me on, pulling me towards the road. He’d stopped following me, leaving it as my decision. I could walk off, get a cab, and never see him again. My secret would be safe and I could go back to my old life.
Only...I didn’t want my old life anymore.
I turned to him. The rain made it impossible to see tears, but I could see how red his eyes were. I could feel my soaked dress draining every last ounce of heat from my body, and I hugged myself with my arms. Behind him, the mansion—warmth and shelter. But I couldn’t imagine being shut inside it with him, in the quiet of the workshop or the stately elegance of the dining room. I needed neutral ground, so I could run if I had to. “Out here,” I told him. “We talk out here.” It was important to me, somehow, that he accepted that condition. Maybe I had to feel like I had some control over things, or maybe I just wanted to know he cared about my feelings, after he’d so viciously invaded my privacy.
His face lit up at the faint possibility of hope. He looked around. “But it’s—” He saw the look in my eyes, the way I was just barely holding it together. “Okay! Okay, out here.” He reached for my hand. “Come on.”
I looked at his hand warily, as if it might bite. “I’m not going inside.”
“We’re not going inside. Come on.”
I took a deep breath and took his hand. I’d give it one last try.
***
As we got closer and closer to the mansion, I started to hang back, stretching our joined hands to breaking point. But we didn’t go to the door. We went around to the side, and then into the garden, where I’d waited for him happily on the grass. The bottle and glasses I’d brought out were still there, half full of cold rainwater. By now, I was shaking with cold, my arms and legs numb with it.
He led me around a corner, to an area the party hadn’t reached. There was dark timber decking, with beams holding up a pointed roof—a mini-bandstand, almost. And in the center of the decking, a squat timber box as high as my hip, covered with a padded blue lid.
Darrell pushed off the lid and steam rose up in a cloud.
“A hot tub?” I said disbelievingly. “You want to get in a hot tub...now?”
He indicated the crashing rain outside. “It’s out of the rain—but still outside.” He shivered, and he wasn’t acting. “And doesn’t a hot tub sound like a really good idea right now?”
It was utterly insane. We were in the middle of a blazing row, on the verge of breaking up. But I was freezing.
“We can just talk,” he told me. “Until the rain stops.”
I looked at the tub, at the snakes of steam drifting upwards from it. I was trying to stop my teeth from chattering—the water looked incredibly inviting.
“I’m not taking my clothes off,” I told him. I couldn’t bear the idea of him staring at my scars.
He blinked at me, and then pulled off his shoes and jacket and climbed into the tub in his shirt and pants. The groan of ecstasy as his body hit the steaming water didn’t sound fake. He sat down, the water rising to his shoulders, and looked up at me.
Decision time. Did I dare risk another talk with him? I was in enough pain already—why would I open myself up to more?
I looked into his eyes as he sat there, that pure crystal blue that let me see right into his very soul.
I kicked off my heels and stepped into the tub, gasping as the steaming water unfroze my bare legs. My dress stopped clinging to my skin and unfurled in the water, billowing around me. I sunk down until only my shoulders were out, and then sat on the seat opposite him. We both sat in silence for a moment, letting the heat soak into our chilled bodies.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I said at last.
“I’m sorry I pushed.” Under the deep, bass rumble of his voice, I could hear the fear. He knew he’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing me. We were still balanced on the edge of the precipice, stable only because we’d stopped moving. Somehow, we had to claw our way back to safety, and I knew it was going to have to be me who did most of the talking. When he’d tried to guess at the reasons, that had just annoyed me more. I had to explain it to him.
I took a deep breath and looked straight into his eyes, and that seemed to calm me.
“It’s not for attention. It’s not to hurt myself. I mean, it is hurting myself, but that’s not why I do it.” I stopped and thought, and marveled at his self-control. I knew he had a million questions, but he was letting me do it at my own pace. “It’s not about pain—it doesn’t even hurt much. It’s not about damaging myself.” I took another deep, shuddering breath. “It’s...about control, I guess. Having something real that I can hang onto. Something stable and solid that will always be there.”
I stopped for a second because I could see the question in his eyes. “Yes. You’re like that: you’re solid and real. That’s why I’d stopped doing it, but—” My throat tightened up. “I don’t want you to think that—that you have to”—I sniffed—“I don’t want to put that on you and make you feel like—”
He reached out and brushed some of the sodden tangles of hair off my face, making the little shhing noises. “I will always be there,” he told me.
I sniffed and nodded, tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t speak.
“The reason you need something stable and solid...is that”—he saw the look of panic in my eyes—“no, no, it’s okay. I’m not going to ask. Just—is that because of something in your past? Something you don’t want to talk about?”
I nodded. I could feel myself tensing up, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been when we’d been out on the driveway. I was emotionally exhausted, incapable of getting angry with him, and he was looking at me with such sadness it broke my heart.
“It holds the memories back,” I said at last. “Stops me sliding down into them. So does dancing. So does the bike.”
He frowned. “The bike? Your exercise bike?”
I let out a snort of teary laughter, and nodded. “But none of it works as well as...you.”
He moved off his seat, closing the gap between us. He looked me right in the eye and waited until I was completely, utterly focused on him, as if he wanted to be sure that his words would really soak in. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told me.
I sniffed, blinking tears from my eyes, and slid off my seat. We met in the middle of the tub, and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me to him, our clothes flapping and tangling in the water. He pushed my sopping hair back out of my face and laid kisses on my forehead, then down my cheek, and then we were clinging together, close enough to share heartbeats, warm and safe in the water as the rain hammered down outside.
“I don’t know if I can stop,” I told him haltingly.
“Okay,” he said, and I knew he meant it. I knew he’d wait for me, for as long as it took—forever, if he had to. As he held me, the feel of his arms and the touch of his cheek nursed something back to life, deep inside me, a tiny glimmer I’d thought was gone forever: hope. If he could resist pushing, accept that there was a part of me he’d never know...maybe we still had a shot.
***
We stayed there for a full half hour, the water gradually warming us through. After a while, I slipped my dress off under the water and sat there in my bra and panties—I wasn’t ready for nak*d, yet. He stripped down to his jockey shorts and we sat with my back against his chest, looking out at the rain as it pounded the ground, six feet away but unable to touch us.
When it became obvious that the rain wasn’t going to stop, we agreed to make a dash for the house. We left our wet bundles of clothes by the side of the tub, scrambled out and ran in our underwear down the garden, the freezing rain sluicing down our steaming bodies. By the time we’d run around the side of the mansion and in through the front door, our feet were sticky with mud from the waterlogged lawn and we were gasping and shaking with cold. Without words, we headed straight upstairs to his bedroom and then through to the shower. We stood there under the spray, trying to stand so it could rain down on both of us, and watched the water blast away the mud until we were clean and perfect.
I looked up into his eyes and felt the mood change. The anger and hurt wasn’t forgotten, but we had a fresh start.
And that left us standing near-naked in the shower.
He moved just fractionally closer to me, leaning in over me and blocking the spray with his body. I could feel everything speed up as the realization of what was going to happen hit us both at the same time.
He leaned down and kissed me, lips just brushing at first as I raised my head to him. Then tasting, his hands on my shoulders and the wet straps of my bra. It felt like we were kissing for the first time—a whole new part of me had opened up to him, and as ugly and broken as it was, he loved all of me. He moved back a little, checking it was okay. Waiting for a sign.
I reached back and unhooked my bra, then peeled it off and let it fall with a wet slap of fabric. Then his body was against mine, my br**sts mashing against his chest as he drove me back against the wall. His mouth was at my throat, kissing the water from my skin as he worked his way down to my shoulder, to that magical bit of skin along my collarbone where his lips made me go weak.
My hands were on his back, tracing the hard contours of his muscles. As his hands cupped my br**sts, mine were sliding down his back and around to the side. One palm felt the ridges of his scars and he drew back again, looking into my eyes. I tensed, thinking he was about to push my hand away....
He put his own hand over mine and held it in place. I nodded and held him close, my body molding to his, my lips against his chest.
Then he gently moved back and started to kneel down in front of me. I had to clench my fists to keep from stopping him, feeling his eyes track down my stomach, down to my thighs. The hot wave of shame as he saw my scars close up. He moved forward and kissed them, a feather touch against the brutal lines, and I had to bite my lip to let him do it, force myself not to turn away. He kissed them again and again, and with each kiss the hot shame lifted just a little, until finally I could accept his eyes there, his touch there.
He felt me relax, and his mouth moved away from me. A second later, his hands hooked under my sodden panties and peeled them down and off my legs. Then my shoulders were pressing hard against the tiles as his lips and tongue found me, his shoulders nudging my legs wider as he began long, long minutes of licking and plunging and circling until I turned my face up into the spray, eyes squeezed tight shut, and gasped and panted into the water as I came.
I stood under the spray as he went over to the bathroom cabinet. Through the steam I saw him roll on a condom, and then we was back in front of me, moving between my thighs, and I kissed him hungrily as he drove up into me, his hands on my ass. I felt myself lifted and wrapped my legs around him. He took each nipple in turn into the slick heat of his mouth, letting the spray lash the other one, until I ground and panted against him. He started to move inside me, pinning me to the wall as he thrust, long glorious strokes that made the heat within me spin faster and faster. I dug my fingers hard into his shoulders, writhed and trembled and finally, as we both reached our peaks, I called out his name.