Other Side of Beautiful (A Beautifully Disturbed #1) (22 page)

Chapter 46

Elle

The pounding in my head won’t ease up. The beeping, the dripping, I feel hyperaware of every sound. Through foggy eyes the picture begins to emerge. No longer in the ratty motel room, I think I’m in a hospital.

“Hey.” Sabrina pushes my bangs to tuck behind my ear. “How are you feeling?”

“Water…” I whisper, unable to raise my voice any higher. She brings the cup to my mouth. The cool water slides effortlessly down my parched throat. My eyes droop again. “What day…is it?”

“Day? Honey, you should be asking month.” I spit out the water, a coughing jag erupting from the remnants I’d choked on. “It was March when we found you. It’s April now. Sweetie, what happened? You are so sick.”

A steady flow of nurses in and out of the room distract me from having to answer any of her questions. Someone had called Cricket. She showed up, according to Errol who replaced Sabrina when she had to go to class. Cricket stayed a couple days to make sure I didn’t die and then went back home to perfection. I try to sit up, but my skull burns like it’d been struck with a pickaxe. “How did you find me?” I ask.

“We were worried about you. Elle, you just disappeared off the face of the planet. Just checking places off the list one at a time. I think it was Kip who suggested we check with your bank to see if you’d withdrawn any money. When they said you’d taken it all, we knew we had to look at places that wouldn’t require a credit card. The trail led back to that motel. We planned to convince you to come stay with us, but clearly that all went to shit.”

“I’m not such a great roommate, anyway. You two are better off without me. Besides, I-I might be transferring…out.” Errol fumbles and drops the book he’d been reading. He and Bri are good friends.

“Where are you thinking of going?” he asks.

To hell. Is that an answer? Isn’t that where the damned end up? I certainly am damned, damned fat. Damned ugly. Damned unlovable. His blue T-shirt hangs loosely along with the jeans that look like they’d been slept in. Lucky bastard. I had to bleed out my ass to get clothing to hang like that on me. But he keeps staring, presumably waiting for an answer. “I haven’t really decided. But it’s time to move on.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding. What would we do without you? Benton and Collin would be crushed if you left.” I manage a small burst of laughter. His incredulous glare tells me to prepare for an argument. “Who do you think switches off with us when Bri or I can’t be here?”

“No. They’d be relieved to have me gone. Trust me. They won’t be back now that I’m awake.” I don’t want to discuss Benton Hayes with Errol. They are friends. He’ll never understand the utterly crushed, empty shell of a person lying in the hospital bed. “I’m tired,” I say and roll over on my side, pretending to sleep so I don’t have to talk to him anymore.

God help me, what am I going to do now? Cricket knows. That’s an inevitable phone call I just don’t want to deal with. I’ve tried for two years to keep a low profile and not embarrass the family. I’ve tried to keep away from her, away from home, away from all the unpleasantness. Why would someone call and remind her that she gave birth to such a disappointment? And Ben—Benton—who talked him into sitting with the hag? How could I have let him touch me like that?

How?

How?

How? The question pounds against my skull.

How much further could I go? To disappear? To fade into a distant memory? Elly Dinninger doesn’t exist. Elle Dinninger can’t exist any longer, if she ever really existed at all.

Kelly never came in, not once. I guess I didn’t really expect her to. But we were roommates at one time. It would’ve been the decent thing to do. Neither Benton nor Collin show up again, just as I called. Only Errol or Sabrina. I pretend to sleep each time to avoid facing the awkward conversations. I pretend to sleep, because I can’t tell them who I really am…but I’m not Elle or Elly or Dinninger. I pretend to sleep until the doctor won’t let me anymore. Until he sheds me from his floor. Until he forces me from the hospital.

My nurse, Kristin wheels me down to the front lobby doors. Such a sendoff for nobody. “Take care of yourself,” she says. I stand and thank her, then step outside. Errol leans against his 1972 powder blue Malibu, blue smoke billowing from the exhaust. Sabrina stands beside the open door, smiling at me. I hate knowing what they must think of me, seeing myself reflected in her glassed eyes. But I climb in the backseat anyway.

“Do you know what happened to my stuff?” I ask.

“Yah, yah,” she chirps. “It’s all at our place.”

“Girl, what’d you think we’d just kick you to the curb? Pin a dollar bill to your collar and wish you the best?”

“You’re staying with us, I told you,” Sabrina says.

They both try engaging me in conversation. I just don’t have it in me. These people are so good, so happy, so…so beautiful inside, I know I’ll taint them somehow. It’s who I am. It’s what I do. Surprisingly, the trees are full with leaves, not the buds from my last memories. As I lay my head against the little triangle window, the warmth of the spring sun caresses my cheeks.

Errol rolls to a stop along a curb in front of a Tudor style mansion, one of many mansions in the city from the time of lumber barons, converted to apartments in the 1980’s. Sabrina takes my hand to help me out of the back.

Before she lets go, I pull her into a brief hug. “Thanks,” I say. She doesn’t ask for what. We climb the stairs just inside the foyer, to the second floor. Theirs isn’t a large space, but the curtains have been drawn open, dousing the area in natural light. Dust particles, typical of these old homes and their archaic duct systems, dance for us in the light. The whole apartment smells of Pine Sol, a scent all my friends know I love.

“C’mon,” says Errol, “your room is over here.” He walks a couple paces ahead of me to the room opposite the bathroom. The one that used to be rented out before the previous tenant left for grad school last fall. When he cracks the door, I’m shocked to see all my stuff in a couple of plastic garbage bags on the floor. The life I once led reduced to a couple of garbage bags. Then I notice the strong figure of a man sitting near the head of the bed. “I’ll just be in the—well, I’m going now.” He scratches at his hair and leaves.

Chapter 47

Ben

“
Ben,
” she whispers.

I search her face, her body, scrutinizing every inch of her. She’s lost so much weight. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” I tell her.

“I’m leaving,” she responds abruptly.

“It’s your room, I’ll go.”

“No…I mean I’m leaving school…Michigan…they don’t know yet.” Elle motions her head out to where Errol and Sabrina sit. My eyes narrow, glaring at her, trying to read that mind.

“Why, Brontë? Why would you do that?”

“Because I have to…because I failed the semester…because someone called Cricket…because, because,” she takes several gulping breaths, “because of you…” Her knees go weak, toppling her to the ground in a heap. Ugliness and disappointment surge through me. Fuck me, she’s leaving because of me? Without even thinking, my arms wrap around her almost as soon as she hits the floor, pressing my cheek to hers.

“You didn’t fail,” I tell her, to which she looks confused. Rightly so. I talked to all of her professors. Told them she was in the hospital. They all agreed on pass/fail going off the work she’d already turned in. “So see, you don’t have to go anywhere.” My fingers pull at her T-shirt, folding myself tighter around her.

“Why did you do it, Elle?” The warmth of my lips press gently against her temple, and I feel hot tears glide along the curvature of my cheekbone. But they aren’t my tears. Not until I realize they aren’t, and then they are.

“There are things that you don’t know about me, Ben.”

“I’m not talking about the hospital. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.” My tone turns low and serious. Somehow, she has to know I’m not talking about that. “Why did you leave me?”

“You didn’t defend me,” she says so softly I might not have even heard if I hadn’t been right there holding her. But my arms tense. “I was coming to tell you that I’d be in the car. Your dad.”
Oh god
. I breathe. “He called Collin a fag. And he called me, he called me a hag—fat and ugly—no real man would be seen in public with.”

“I’m so sorry you heard that, Brontë. So sorry…” My lips brush her temple again.

“But you didn’t say anything back. I waited. I waited to hear you say he was wrong, that I’m…I don’t know, anything but that. And you didn’t. You didn’t say it.” Then her whole body racks with sobs. “You saw my thighs. I saw your disgust!”

“Damn it, Elle!” I bury my nose in her hair. “You didn’t wait long enough. I did defend you. My dad’s an ass. We were in a funeral home and my mom was hysterical. I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I breathed to calm myself. Someone needed to be rational. And you don’t disgust me. I was shocked, not disgusted.”

“You broke my heart, Ben.” Her voice breaks my heart.

“I punched him. I punched my dad and said he was dead to me. I told them both. That I love you, Elle. I told them how beautiful you are. But you, I couldn’t find you. I was so scared. You can’t do that to me again.”

And I can’t give her the chance to respond. I can’t listen if she still thinks any less of me. Instead, I press my lips to hers. Her hands tug my face, pulling me in deeper into the kiss. I suck her top lip, grazing my teeth against her plump bottom one in turn. A groan escapes my throat, deep, almost threatening. When my mouth parts to take in a breath, her tongue moves in, probing, meeting and tangling with my own. I feel alive for the first time since returning from Indiana. And I’m not about to waste this feeling, scooping her up into my arms, she’s feathers, and move us to the bed. My stomach constricts in nervous anticipation. She still wants me.

I hover above her, knees straddling her hips. Elle tries to pull me close again but I shake my head. “Tell me you won’t leave. Tell me you’re my girl. Tell me, tell me you still love me, Brontë.” And I drop my head to rest against her chest. She runs her fingers through my hair with her eyes closed.

“I won’t leave you, Ben, because I am your girl. And I…Oh god, you punched your dad for me? You don’t just affection me?”

“No. I was too scared to tell you before, but I promise for the rest of our lives you won’t hear anything else.”

“Then I, then I love you, Benton Hayes.”

“Say it again,” I whisper.

“I love you,” she says, and she says it with even more confidence.

Her hands move to my cheeks, so warm beneath her touch. I turn my head, kissing first the inside of her wrist, moving slowly trailing kisses up her arm. Each kiss calming the worries I’ve clung to for so many weeks now. As my mouth moves up, my hands roam downward reaching the hem of her blouse, finding their way underneath to tease that luscious, skittish flesh. The fabric creeps up her body until I’ve pulled it over her head. Elle arches her back as my hands caress those beautiful, beautiful breasts, moving my hands behind her back to unlatch her bra. She’s exposed.

“I’m going to look at you.” She knows what I mean. She knows. My hands slide back down her stomach to the button flap of her jeans. I deftly weave my fingers between the fabric and her body, gripping the elastic on her lacy panties, simultaneously peeling them both away. She’s completely naked beneath me. Besides maybe doctors, no one else has seen her so uninhibited, and here she is sharing the moment with me.

Her breath quickens. My eyes lock with hers. And then they began to wander the length of her. My Brontë, she stiffens. But I bend over kissing the tender skin below her navel. “It’s okay,” I say between kisses, kisses that make me feel completely dizzy. She looks dizzy too. Like she could finally let go and just enjoy this, enjoy me, enjoy us. As I pull away, she watches my eyes look on the patterns of scar tissue splayed across her thighs. She finds them grotesque. I don’t. I really don’t. So I touch them, rub them. But never turn away, never wince. Never give her a reason to doubt me when I tell her, “You are so beautiful.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I do. God, Elle, I do.” My lips make their way back to that pink, tender skin, moving down, slowly moving down. Her fingers rake through my hair as her hips rock against mine, pulling me closer. She can’t keep her eyes open and bites back a scream that teeters at the tip of her tongue, instead releasing a glorious moan.

I sit up pulling my T-shirt over my head. “God, my Benton, you are a sight for these sore, lonely eyes,” she says, smiling seductively up at me. A sight my heart wants to look upon every day for the rest of my life. Her fingers fumble with the button on my cargo shorts, but we manage to get them undone together. And then they are a memory. She lies back against the bed. I hover above her completely naked too. Baring our bodies. Wanting so badly for her to bare her soul to me. It will come with time. I believe it. And then I don’t believe anything because her legs fall apart, opening up to me, eradicating all rational thought. I kneel between them, reaching over to my shorts tossed across the headboard and pull out my wallet. Then there’s the rip of the foil packet, and she knows. I claim her.

Every sensation hits me. Body to body. Skin to skin. Her firm kisses press hard against my mouth burning me with passion and desire. I miss her curves, but we’ll get them back eventually. And even if we don’t, I still couldn’t be more in love with this woman and her wet tongue slipping in, tangling with mine, and making me lose my breath as I ease inside her. “Oh,
Ben,
” she sighs against my lips. I wrap her up in my arms, pushing further in. Her legs involuntarily constrict around my hips. One more good rock has me filling her totally. My body grinds against hers, sparking every level of emotion, firing synapses of pleasure that I never imagined could be possible.

She works me over with her magic, unraveling me with every thrust, breaking me down with every kiss. Over and over. Over and over as I move, she moves me closer and closer to the brink—to the edge of the universe—or the climax of the best book ever written, until my pulse quickens too fast, until my muscles spasm, until I can’t hold on any longer. She’s right there with me, muscles clamping around me, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. When she cries out my name, it’s the fucking best sound my ears have ever heard. Then she kisses me again, sinking back into her pillow. Pulling me along with her. I still the same time, breathing heavy and shaking slightly, and press my forehead to her shoulder, remaining there several moments before rolling to her side, tucking my beautiful Brontë up under my arm.

“You can trust me,” I tell her, stroking her hair. “With anything.” I don’t know why I choose those words, but I want her to believe them. Because here we are. Exactly where I’ve dreamt of us being. Exactly where I doubted we’d ever get to when she left me in Indiana. I will never let her down again.

“I love you, Ben,” she says again, curling against me.