Never Let You Go (a modern fairytale) (15 page)

He raised an eyebrow, purposely turning the arm inward as he took another sip of soup. “N-nothing.”

Intrigued, Griselda leaned forward. “Holden? What is it?”

“Ten years is a long time to be stupid,” he said, staring at his soup bowl.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“Not really.”

“Will you anyway?”

He put the spoon in the bowl, looking up at her with a conflicted expression, then turned his arm outward, showing it to her. It looked like a bunch of haphazard tally marks to her—four lines crossed through, another four crossed through. He stared at her face as he twisted his arm, and she counted over eight bunches, then nine, then ten, seeing countless others before raising her eyes to his.

“What does it mean?”

“It means I was lonely,” he whispered, his face defensive and challenging as he stared back at her.

Her lips dropped open, and she sat back in her chair, holding his eyes, her stomach lurching as she realized how many women he’d been with, how many times he’d been touched and held and loved . . . by someone other than her. It knocked the wind from her lungs, and an uncomfortable lump rose up in her throat.

“Oh.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared back at her, unapologetic, unsmiling, uncertain.

“I see,” she said, her voice breathy as she finally exhaled.

Telling herself she had no right to judge what he’d done to cope with the misery that had been his life, she still couldn’t help how much it hurt. She wished it didn’t, but it did. God, it hurt so much.

“How many?” Her eyes flicked to the tattoos. “Total?”

“I stopped counting.”

“Why count at all?”

“It felt . . .” He shrugged. “C-comforting.”

He didn’t blink, and his face didn’t shift expression. He didn’t explain further. He just stared back at her, letting his truth sink in.

Finally she broke eye contact with him, looking out the window as she took a deep breath, her tongue darting out to wet her lips nervously.

Griselda had lost her virginity in her third post-Holden foster home, at the age of seventeen, and slept with four other boys in quick succession. She’d been looking for a connection, for a safe haven, for belonging, but she never found it. She found only disappointment and an aching, intense loneliness for what she wanted and couldn’t have. Just short of getting a bad reputation, she graduated from high school, and once she started working for the McClellans, Griselda cleaned up her act, emulating Sabrina McClellan, concentrating on work and swearing off of men.

Until Jonah.

Jonah had bulldozed his way into her apartment, into her bed, into her life, and to her everlasting shame, she’d allowed him to stay.

“Why isn’t he your boyfriend anymore?” Holden asked, as though he could read her mind.

“Jonah?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I called him on your phone while you were sleeping and told him I wasn’t going home with him. I told him to leave without me. I said I was staying here for a little while.” She swallowed past that big lump in her throat, wondering if she’d been foolish to make such a rash decision for her life. Would Holden mind that she wanted to stay? Could she bear it if he asked her to go?

Holden didn’t say anything, and she bit her bottom lip again. It was getting raw from so much biting, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Releasing it self-consciously, she reached up and ran her finger over the irritated skin, before adding, “He didn’t like it.”

Holden’s eyes were wide and searching, resting on her lips, then skating back up to her eyes, his breathing ragged and audible. The spoon fell from his fingers, clattering to the bowl and splashing a bit of red soup onto the cheap folding table.

“You’re staying?”

“Just till I know you’re okay,” she said softly, feeling embarrassed, because he had tally marks and a girlfriend. They barely knew each other as adults, and he certainly hadn’t invited her to stay.

“You’re staying,” he said again, his voice less tentative but still giving away little.

Her cheeks heated up as she looked away from him, bracing her hands on her knees to stand up and get moving. “I don’t have to. Listen, if you don’t want me to stay, I can—”

“G-Gris,” he said sharply, a fierce edge to his voice.

She cut her eyes to his.

“I want you to stay.” He paused, as though trying to figure out what else to say. “I want you to stay.” His eyes glistened as he stared at her, and he blinked several times. His voice broke as he repeated one more time, “I w-want you to s-stay.”

Once Holden had finished his soup, Griselda rinsed the pot, dish, and two spoons, placing them in the drying rack, and helped Holden to his feet so he could use the bathroom. After pissing, he paused in front of the mirror to check out his face and winced at what he saw.

Both eyes were discolored and badly swollen, and his cheek was a blackish color and very tender when he grazed it with his fingertips. His nose had a white bandage over the bridge, with tape between his eyebrows and on either side of his nostrils. He pulled the tape off gingerly, cursing softly from the pain and swallowing at the deep purple color. His lips had somehow managed not to get split, but there were several other ugly contusions on his face, mostly scabbing over now, but not pretty.

You look like a fucking animal. It’s a wonder she doesn’t run away.

His eyes drifted to the bandage under his heart and then to the larger bandage on his hip that covered three stab wounds. Peeling that one away, he took a peek. Neat black stitches had closed the three incisions. He counted four on one, five on another, and seven on the longest. Covering them back up, he flinched as he smoothed the tape over his skin and shifted his eyes to his chest. How Eli had managed to stab him in the chest wasn’t entirely clear, but Holden had been so distracted by seeing Gris, Eli must have reached around from behind and Holden never saw it coming. The doctor said it was just a few millimeters from his heart. He’d been lucky.

Lucky
didn’t even scratch the surface.

He was alive. And Griselda was alive. He knew better than that doctor. He knew that there was no luck left in the entire world tonight, because all of it—every last fucking drop—belonged to him.

Opening the bathroom door, he stepped out slowly, looking left into his bedroom. Some stupid, horny part of him half hoped that Gris would be lying on the bed, waiting for him with a playful grin, but his room was neat, quiet, and empty.

He leaned his head against the doorway, trying to get a fix on reality before rejoining her in the living room.

As a rule, Holden didn’t connect with women emotionally. Physically? No problem. But he hadn’t met a woman since Gris who could get through to him emotionally. No matter how many women he’d bedded, the end result was always the same: the face that always flashed through his mind as his body climaxed was Griselda’s. It didn’t matter whom he was with. It didn’t matter that Griselda was dead, or that her face was still teenaged in his fantasies, which, he knew, was a big leap beyond creepy. An argument could be made that he’d searched for years for someone to replace Griselda in his mind, but his memories of her were too potent to displace. For a decade, she’d been his deepest, most impulsive, most unavoidably instinctive sexual trigger. For as long as he could remember, she was the beating heart of his sexual life. Whether he liked it or not, it had always been that way.

Why? Because as an adolescent with raging hormones trapped in a terrifying life, Griselda had not only been Holden’s only source of solace and tenderness, but she’d been his first taste of feverish, passionate desire. He’d watched her body blossom into curves day by day, and felt those growing curves press into his body at night when he held her. She’d been the first girl to touch his heart and his body with tenderness. She’d been his family, his best friend, his confidante, and companion. He’d loved her fiercely and unconditionally, and her brutal loss had only served to idealize her in his mind and his heart. She was everything he wanted, everything he’d lost, something he could never have.

Now suddenly, after ten years, the girl of his dreams had been delivered to him, and it didn’t matter that they’d been reunited for only a handful of hours. His body had roared to life in ways he’d never experienced as an adult man: his heartbeat erratic, his blood pumping wildly, his skin primed for her touch, his lips starving for a taste of her. In every possible physical way, he wanted her. Badly. Urgently. He wanted the tactile satisfaction of touching her, the warmth of her body beside his, the sound as she drew breath, and the feel of it when she exhaled against his throat. He wanted to reassure himself that she was actually alive and not just a beautiful and cruel delusion. And no matter who she had become, he never, ever wanted to let her go.

Besides his very real and visceral physical desire for her, he also wanted to
know
her again. He wanted to be as intimately familiar with her heart and mind as he’d been ten years ago, when he could read every nuance of her tone, every expression that crossed her face. They’d been so close, so in tune with each other, words had been almost unnecessary. For a decade, he’d grieved the loss of that kind of closeness. He desperately missed it. And now that she was here with him, he wanted it back.

Taking a deep breath, Holden turned back down the short hallway, toward the living room, and tried to calm his body down. Despite his longing to instantly reconnect with her in every possible way, emotionally and physically, he needed to slow down and try to relax. He didn’t want to scare her, for God’s sake, and, he reminded himself, this wasn’t just any girl to be taken or had.

This was Griselda, risen from the dead.

Taking a few slow, halting steps, he walked back into the living room, where he found her sitting on the edge of the couch, head bent forward, talking on his cell phone. Though his instinct was to sit beside her, he purposely stood across from her, giving her space, trying to read her face.

“. . . I am so sorry, Mrs. McClellan, but I don’t have much family, and I need to stay here for a little while and take care of him. Yes, ma’am. Mm-hm. My foster brother.” She paused, looking up at Holden. “Yes. It’s been a long time.”

Holden raised his eyebrows to ask her if everything was okay. She shrugged, before looking back down at her lap, but her body was tense.

“I know that. I’d never leave you in the lurch, and I would have given you more notice, but his injuries—it was a bad, uh, accident.”

Holden lowered himself into the easy chair across from her, wincing when his ribs ached from the movement.

She exhaled, and her shoulders finally unbunched. “Oh. Okay. Thank you. That’s really . . . nice of you.” She used the back of her hand to swipe at her eyes, even though her voice remained level and even. “I appreciate that. Mm-hm. He’s going to be okay. Yeah. Please give her a kiss for me. Tell her I promise more stories when I come back. Okay. Yes, I will. Bye.”

She pressed the End button, looking up at Holden. His first guess was that she looked bewildered, but he wasn’t sure, and he hated it that he couldn’t read her better.

“I used your phone,” she said. “I hope that’s okay.”

“What’s mine is yours, Gris,” he said again.

She gave him an uncertain grin, but it faded quickly, and she glanced down at the phone again, furrowing her eyebrows. “My, uh—Jonah called a few times while it was off. And it looks like he left some messages. I don’t want them. Just delete them, okay? I would’ve deleted them for you, but I didn’t have your voice mail pass code.”

“Sure,” he said, taking the phone from her extended hand. It was warm from being pressed against her ear, and he curled his fingers around it. “Was that your boss?”

“Yeah. She didn’t fire me,” said Gris, laughing in surprise. “She said she’d find a replacement for one month and hold my job.”

“A month.” It hurt to smile, but Holden couldn’t hold it back, because having thirty days with her felt like a miracle. Still, he didn’t want to push her. “You staying here for a month, Griselda?”

“I—I don’t . . . I mean, I
can
, but I don’t . . .” She looked down, her cheeks turning pink.

“Stay,” he said simply, the words falling from his lips, as they had a hundred times before in Caleb Foster’s cellar. He caught her eyes as they blinked at him uncertainly.

Stay
, he thought, wishing he was sitting beside her so he could tuck a stray lock of reddish-blonde hair behind her warm ear.
Stay forever. Don’t ever leave me again.

“I’ll stay for a while,” she said, standing up and taking two folded towels off the arm of the couch. She spread them out across the cushions, smoothing them with her hands and treating him to an awesome view of her backside, which served to distract him from what she was doing for an extra moment.

“What’s with the towels?” he finally asked.

She turned slightly to look at him, “Making up a bed for myself.”

“No, Gris,” he said, leaning forward a little and groaning softly when pain radiated from the trio of cuts on his hip. “I’ll sleep here. You sleep in my bed.”

There was an irony to his words, not lost on him, since she’d
been
in his bed many, many times, but had never once been able to
sleep
in it. She shook her head, glancing up at him before taking the thin blanket he’d been using before and laying it over the towels.

“You’re injured,” she said. “You need your bed.”

“It’s big,” he said softly, the words tumbling from his mouth before he had a chance to approve them. “Sh-share it with me.”

Her head whipped up, and she pulled her lip between her teeth—
damn it
—her blue eyes searching and cautious. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t be the first time.”

She tilted her head to the side, pursing her lips and crossing her arms over her chest defensively. “That’s an awful lot of tallies on your arm.”

“I’m not looking to add another tonight.”

“I just don’t—”

“G-Gris,” he said, in pain and beyond exhausted. He didn’t want to fight with her. He wanted the sweetness of her body next to his. He wanted the luxury of falling asleep beside her without the sound of boots coming down the basement stairs. He wanted to talk about everything that had happened to both of them, but not tonight. Tonight he just wanted to know that she was breathing beside him as he fell asleep. “Sleep.
Just
sleep. Beside me. Next to me. Please.”

He hated the uncertain look on her face, the way she looked at him like she was trying to find him. It made him feel lost.

“I’m too weak to do anything else,” he said lightly, offering her a small grin.

Her lips tilted up a touch in answer. “Promise?”

He stood slowly, holding his hand out to her. His heart thundered as she reached for it, pressing her palm against his and letting him curl his fingers around her hand. “Promise.”

***

Following Holden into his bedroom, Griselda tried to ignore whatever misgivings she had about how quickly things were moving between them. After a decade, they’d seen each other last night, found each other this afternoon, and here she was, planning to sleep beside him in his bed tonight.

And yet where else would she sleep? The pull to be with him, to touch him, to reassure herself that he was safe and strong, was powerful. She had crossed the finish line of an exhausting journey, and all she wanted was a safe and warm place to close her weary eyes and rest her bewildered heart. Could there be any better place than beside Holden, whom she’d loved so fiercely, lost so brutally, and missed so terribly these long ten years?

He had changed a lot, yes, but he was still Holden, who’d loved her and fought for her. He was still the gray-eyed, sweet-smelling boy who’d made life bearable when it should have killed her. He was still the keeper of her memories, the only sanctioned guardian of her heart. The need to share his space, to feel the heat of his body resting beside hers, was as visceral for her as it appeared to be for him. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight. Now that she’d found him, even altered, she didn’t want to spend a moment away from him. Whatever uncertainty lay ahead of them, tonight she wanted the solace of his heart beating next to hers.

“Will you crack the window?” he asked, lowering himself to the bed and exhaling like everything hurt.

She dropped his hand and crossed the small room, unlocking the window and pushing it open halfway. It looked out at the brick exterior of another two-story building and didn’t offer much of a breeze, but the sounds of a small American town—the occasional whoosh of a car, people strolling in the evening, a dog barking in the distance, the voices of people coming and going from the café below—it all served to make the room feel less isolated. And she understood the appeal. She chose the hum of humanity as her preferred lullaby too.

Turning around, she found Holden lying on top of his comforter, his head on one of two pillows, his arms flat by his sides. His eyes were closed, and in the dim light provided by one bedside lamp and whatever glow made its way through the window, he was beautiful.

A little over six feet tall, his long torso rippled with partially inked muscle that tapered down to a V, disappearing into his unbuttoned jeans. He was lean and hard-bodied, but his chest was covered with scars, and Griselda knew that if he turned over there would be even more. She flinched as the sound of the Man unfastening his belt buckle echoed in her head. How many times had Holden’s back been torn open?

Cast out his wickedness and sin, oh Lord, and make him clean again!

More times than she could count on two hands. She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest, and forcing Caleb Foster’s voice from her mind.