Sacrifice (10 page)

He pushed his arms either side of me, blocking my escape with his body. His face was inches from mine and I could feel the cool fan of his breath across my lips and cheeks. My legs trembled and I was sure at any moment they would cease to hold me upright and collapse beneath me, leaving me to crumble in a heap at his feet.

He cupped my face with one hand, his thumb brushing across my cheekbones. My heart raced in my chest and my breaths came in tiny gasps.

“I said I came here to do what I should have done this morning. What I should have done when I had the chance.”

He leaned in a little closer his gaze penetrating down into the very depths of my soul. Searching for something in me, maybe something that told him what he was about to do was ok. He didn’t need my permission to do what he was doing. And he couldn’t have missed the look of desire and longing in my eyes this morning in the diner. My eyes automatically fluttered shut as his breath fanned across my mouth and his lips closed down over mine.

The kiss was like one of those perfect never ending moments. Never ending because you didn’t want it to stop, didn’t want him to stop crushing his lips against yours.

He tasted sweet like a bite from the first apple of summer. His mouth moved over mine, his tongue skimming along my lips, enticing me, drawing me out. When my lips parted his tongue dipped into my mouth. His hands cupping my face as he crushed his body to mine. I could feel the damp rain from his clothes soaking in through my t-shirt and I didn’t care. All I knew and wanted in that moment was the perfect kiss we were sharing. His hands tangled in my hair drawing us even closer.

It wasn’t until his knee pressed between my legs that I tried to pull away. The second I showed any signs of wanting to stop he drew away from me. His breath ragged and his pupils large. I could see the desire smouldering in his gaze as he smiled at me.

“I’ve wanted to do that since I laid eyes on you.” He whispered the words against my ear, his hands trailing down over my neck, down my shoulders and over my arms.

It made me shiver but not with the cold. Heat had flooded my stomach and an ache had started between my legs. I didn’t really want him to stop. Didn’t want to lose his touch on my skin.

He moved away from me, releasing me from his grip. It wasn’t until he began to move away from me that I realised my t-shirt was stuck to my body. It was plastered to my skin, accentuating ever curve of my body. I tried to cover my chest, folding my arms across my body in an attempt to hide from him.

When I looked up at him again the look in his eyes made me whimper. It made me want to throw myself back into his arms and give into the sensations the look in his eyes promised he could give me. It took all of my will to grab a jumper from the chair near me and tug it on over my head.

I looked at him again and this time he smiled at me with his lopsided grin. He had stopped dripping but that was probably due to the fact that all of the water from his clothes was now all over me. Shakily I pushed away from the door and moved towards the bed where I sat, perched on the edge.

“I’m sorry, Nat, I didn’t mean to do that… Normally I have better control than that but seeing you like that… The way you looked at me this morning… Well I had to…” He cut himself off with with a frustrated sigh.

All I could do was continue to look at him with wide eyes. I was still a little shocked by my own actions. I’d behaved like a whore. Just throwing myself at him. What was I thinking? Had I lost my mind? The more time I spent with Sam the more I was beginning to feel as though I had.

“Look, I’m not explaining any of this the way I want to. I had it all worked out in my head before I got here… It’s part of the reason I look like this.” He gestured to his damp clothes.

“What you paced around in the rain thinking of what you were going to say?” I started to laugh but then I saw his serious expression and the laughter died on my lips. “You can’t be serious? That’s crazy?”

“As crazy as barging into your bedroom and kissing you up against the door?” He asked, one eyebrow raised.

I laughed softly. “I guess not…”

“So you think it was really that crazy, huh? From where I was standing you seemed to enjoy it.”

His words made me blush again, harder than before. I glanced up at him as he continued to stand awkwardly in the centre of the room.

“You can sit?”

He shook his head and continued to stand there, watching me with an intense gaze. 

“Well look you can’t continue to stand there like that. So sit.” I gestured to the chair near the corner. I thought about offering him the edge of my bed but it was too close to me. Too close and way too easy for me to simply give into him again. What if he touched me, tried to kiss me? At least with him sitting that far away from me I stood a chance of keeping my cool.

He made his way to the chair and then hovered near it for a second before giving up. “Look, I didn’t come hear to make everything in your house damp.”

His words brought an image to my mind that I tried to push away. His lips on my neck, down across my collarbone and lower. It brought a rush of heat through my body that hardened my nipples and caused my breath to catch in my throat.

I stared up at Sam and he was smiling at me. A knowing smile as though he had just witnessed the images that had flashed through my mind. But it was impossible. How could he know what he did to me? How could he know how he made me feel.

I cleared my throat and tried to behave business like. “Well as you’re here. Why don’t you go and have a shower and I’ll toss your clothes in the dryer? Otherwise sitting around like that, you’ll get sick.” It was lame. A stupid lame excuse thought up by my brain to prolong his stay. I was torn. Part of me wanted to keep him here, wanted to see him take his shirt off and see his naked skin exposed to me. The other part of me was terrified. Terrified that if I gave into the temptation that I’d only end up hurt.

Sam grinned at me, his smile lighting up his face. “Well it would make life easier. I wouldn’t feel so weird standing here telling you what I need to say.”

I stood and pointed towards the bathroom and he slipped inside. Within seconds I heard the sound of running water. Internally I was berating myself for allowing this to happen. He had probably come here in the hopes he could get into my bed. Again. But I wasn’t going to let it happen. I wasn’t ready for something like that. But being with Sam made me feel human again. As though I could have the feelings I was having and I didn’t need to be ashamed of them. That I was allowed to desire and… I cut myself off before I thought of something stupid and emotional. I didn’t need to go there. Life was complicated enough without adding to it.

The phone sitting on my bedside locker vibrated and began to ring. I scooped it up and pressed it to my ear. My mind beyond occupied about who might be calling at this time of night.

“Hello?”

“Natasha.”

“Dad?” My voice shook as I spoke. It was him again. Two phone calls in the space of two days. It was beyond weird. For him to be calling me there had to be something terribly wrong.

“Natasha, I don’t have much time. I need you to tell me you’re alright.”

Confused I shook my head but he couldn’t see what I was doing. He couldn’t see that I was confused.

“Dad, I don’t understand? Why are you calling? What’s wrong?”

I heard him sigh on the other end of the line. A sign that I was frustrating him. It was something I had done all the time before he had left me here at the college. I was nothing but a frustration to him.

“Natasha, I don’t have time. Tell me if you’re alright?”

“Yes. Why? What’s going on?”

The line went dead and I was left staring at the blank screen. Sliding my finger across the screen it lit up in my grip. I scrolled back to the last call and hit the redial button. Lifting it back to my ear I listened carefully, my heart hammering in my chest. What if he was in trouble? Why else would he be ringing me? Why else would he be asking me if I was alright? It just didn’t make sense.

The phone rang and rang until the line went dead again. I pressed redial over and over. Each time waiting to hear his voice, waiting for him to tell me what was wrong. But it never came. Each time I was met with nothing, the line falling dead.

Sam stepped out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. Water glistened in his hair and he looked more relaxed then when he’d first arrived. But whatever he saw on my face killed the smile on his lips.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” He asked hurrying to my side and sitting next to me.

I stared at him, my gaze absentmindedly tracking a droplet of water down over his chest to the flat muscular plane of his stomach.

He shook me gently, pulling me out of my panicked thoughts about my father. We hadn’t spoken in so long and he’d more than made his feelings about me clear. But to think that he might be in trouble. That something might actually happen to him scared me. He was still my father. Losing my mom had been too painful for words. I didn’t want to lose him as well. But could you really lose what you didn’t have?

“Natasha, tell me what happened?” Sam gripped my shoulder and with his other hand tilted my chin until I was forced to look up into his face.

“It was my dad…”

Sam’s face grew pale beneath the tan he had. But he recovered so quickly I almost didn’t see it. Closing my eyes slowly I counted to ten before opening my eyes again. I must have imagined the look on his face, the look in his eyes.

“What did he say?” Sam asked, his grip momentarily tightening on my arm.

“He wanted to know if I was alright, if I was safe.”

Sam exhaled softly and I tilted my head to the side. There was something off about it, something that I wasn’t seeing. But maybe I was imagining it? Maybe suddenly hearing from my father after all this time, hearing the concern and fear in his voice. Concern and fear for me. Maybe it was messing with my head. Making me look for things when there was nothing to be found.

“And why are you so freaked out?” Sam asked, his grip on my arm had relaxed.

“Because I haven’t spoken to him in over three years. Because he never calls me. Because him calling me means there must be something terribly wrong. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Sam stared down at his hands for a second, as though deep in thought. I wanted to jump up off the bed, pace around the room. Anything would be better than just sitting here. Doing nothing. There had to be a way for me to find him. How hard could it be to track my father down? There had to be something that would lead me to him and then I could ask him what was going on. Find out once and for all what all of this was about.

I started to move off the bed, when Sam wrapped his hand into mine. He tugged me back onto the bed and for some reason I let him. I had all these plans and thoughts about what I was going to do. How I would track down a man who until this moment hadn’t cared whether I lived or died…

“Maybe he’s trying to reach out to you? Maybe he knows how much he hurt you and he wants to take it back?” Sam’s voice was quiet and it made me pause.

Could it all really be that simple?

I shook my head and stared down at Sam. “You don’t know him like I do.”

Sam’s eyes sparked with an emotion that I didn’t recognise and he shot me a lopsided grin. “Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do?”

I tugged my hand from Sam’s and stared down at him with suspicion. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means time changes people. Maybe it has changed him. It’s not impossible you know?”

I swallowed back the tears that threatened to spill down my cheeks. I wanted it to be that easy. I wanted it to simply be a case of him forgiving me finally. Trying to rebuild our broken relationship. Him realising that I hadn’t meant to kill my mother… That I would do anything to take that day back.

“He’ll never forgive me because of what I did. It’s impossible.”

Sam smiled at me again and this time it was a smile filled with sadness and regret. “It’s amazing what time will make you forgive. Who it will make you forgive. I never thought I’d forgive my father or my brother for what they did… I forgave Jackson first, it wasn’t his fault, but at the time it sure felt like it… It felt like he had deserted us, left us alone to fend for ourselves.”

“I don’t understand? What did he do?”

“Got himself killed.” Sam’s voice was low and filled with a pain so deep it made my heart ache to hear him talk about his brother. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him everything would be alright. That he was safe. That it wasn’t as bad as he first thought… But I couldn’t. Instead I found myself sitting on the bed, frozen as I listened to what he had to tell me.

“He got involved with a bad crowd. My dad used to do some work for these guys but when he met my mom he got out and things were fine. Life was good… Or so my mom always told me… And my dad, he was a good guy, he didn’t mean to have that sort of past. Didn’t mean for it to hang over us…”

Sam paused again, his jaw tight as he relived a painful memory that I knew he would have rather ignored.

“And then she got sick the first time… Cancer, it’s a bitch you know? And my dad went a little off the deep end. Started drinking, fell in with that crowd again, ended up owning them a lot of money… More than we could afford. But when mom came around from the cancer, when she pulled through it seemed like a miracle. Suddenly the debt didn’t matter because of someone could beat cancer then anything was possible, right?

“But it doesn’t work like that. We didn’t know it at the time but Jackson had agreed to work for them in order to pay off dad’s debt… They tried to make out like it was this huge favour they were doing us. That they didn’t ask for any of the money back…

“And then one night, Jackson did a job for them that went bad… I don’t think I’ll ever know for certain but I think it was a set up. Like a punishment for my father for leaving all those years before…” 

Sam’s voice drifted off. I could see a vein in the side of his neck, it throbbed over and over and his fists were balled into the blanket on the bed. Almost as though he needed it to hold on. That if he didn’t have something to anchor him that he might just drift away in his anger. Be carried off by it never to be seen again. And part of me understood that. I understood anger, and pain, even though I didn’t want to.