Soul and Blade (16 page)

16. CRASH INTO ME

M
rs. Starling hands me a spade and nods her head at the flower bed. “Now we turn the soil as deep as we can.”

I dig it in and push with my foot, lifting and turning the dirt. She kneels and plants as I till and turn. It’s the best-case scenario for her, and me. I get to work out my frustrations in life and she gets to plant a flower bed without the hard part.

“I sure do miss that Dash. He was a sweet boy. You can always tell by how someone acts when they don’t know you’re looking.” She looks up at me and smiles. “Caught him talking to Binx once. He was going on about you. Told Binx he was going to work hard to deserve you.”

I snap. “He’s an ass and we’re done. You need to get past this. It’s been months. He’s over it too, I’m sure.”

She flinches, but the saucy old lady she is rebounds. “He was a nice boy, Jane, and you shouldn’t call him an ass. Whatever he did, he’s sorry. I know that. I see him all the time, walking by with that dog that’s slowly turning into a horse. He’s not over it.”

“He walks by?”

Her eyes light up. “Oh, he does. All the time. Back and forth, talking to himself, and then off he goes again. Then I see him a few days later and it’s the same thing. Twice every week for months now.”

I gulp. “Let’s just stick to the gardening.” It doesn’t dawn on me that she means to set me up so that he walks by as I am digging an old root from last summer.

“Dash, how are you? That dog is something,” she says. “Hello, Sirius. Such a fancy name for such a goofy dog.”

I freeze, hearing his voice. “Thanks, Mrs. Starling. He’s a good dog.” I stand and turn just as he says my name. “Hello, Jane.”

“Dash.” I lift a dirty hand. Sirius, who has indeed become a horse, jumps at me. Dash can barely contain him as he hurries over to sniff and rub against me. “Hey, boy!” I pet him, scratching his ears. I can’t fight my gaze lifting to Dash. He smiles at me, but it’s his hand I catch. He’s got a wedding ring on.

My insides ache the moment my eyes lock on the silver-looking ring. Though I’m sure it’s not silver, but instead made of some kind of titanium or platinum—another metal that is expensive and hoity-toity.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s the one that he matched to the rings he got me? The ring is on the correct finger, but then I realize it’s the wrong hand.

Oh my God.

He is wearing the ring we should have been married in.

My chest tightens and aches, but I focus on petting Sirius and brushing off the dirt I’ve wiped on him. “Can we talk?” I ask, hating that Mrs. Starling is grinning from ear to ear about it, but the ring has me thinking.

He nods, and his eyes get a bit hopeful. He holds an arm out for me. I don’t take it, but I can’t stop myself from wanting to.

Four months has killed off all the hate. My heart has spent all this whispering that what he did was for the best. He took away the things I didn’t want anyway. But the common-sense part of my brain shouts that he lied to me for years. Years more than I am allowed to remember. I am thirty-four and I have known him for seventeen years.

Walking beside him, I can’t help but still love him. I love his smell, the one I assign to all good men in my brain. They always smell like Dash. My father, kindly men, and cops I meet. It’s all the same.

The memory of him on top of me and inside me haunts me, making me crave him in the dark of night. It’s worst first thing in the morning when I swear I can feel him next to me. Sometimes my feet seek him out and I end up sleeping sideways on the bed.

It’s fairly awful.

Seeing the ring on his right hand on the wedding finger makes me sick. I don’t want to let him go and I don’t want someone else finding his feet in the night.

“How have you been?” he asks, almost like we are going to go for the weather next.

“Fine.” I don’t want to know how he’s been. I haven’t been fine.

“I’m fine also.” He laughs and looks at me. “I miss you. I miss everything about you.”

“You miss me?” I glare. I can’t even stop myself. “What exactly? All the things you put in there? I was essentially the perfect woman for a while. I was whatever you rebooted me to be.”

He looks injured and I’m angry. Maybe we haven’t changed in four months. We haven’t even traded places. He looks exhausted still, if I stare and really try to see past the golden tan he’s sporting. He’s clearly been somewhere warm. Maybe out boating a lot. I always did hate boating.

“Can we start over?”

“No.” It’
s a lie, but I will not yield. “I just needed an answer from you.”

“I dropped your gun off months ago. It’s back in the closet. I left my key with Mrs. Starling.”

“You went in my house when I wasn’t there? Or was I sleeping? Did you watch me sleep?”

“No.” He steps back. “Please, stop. I’m not a freak, Jane.”

“I think you are. I think you liked that I didn’t know everything and you did.” I don’t believe my words. I just want to hurt him. And not because he hurt me, but because I am hurting and petty.

“You’re wrong!” Rage fills his eyes. “If I could have forgotten too, I would have. You don’t even know the things I have done.”

“I can imagine.”

He reaches for me, grabbing my arms, not violently, but assertively. “I didn’t have a goddamned clue what you did for the ten years we were apart! I kept track of you—as in, I knew you were in Beirut or wherever you went on mission—but I didn’t know what you were doing! I knew once upon a time you were a scared little girl who had been brutalized! Jesus! Do you want to know it all?” He runs his hands through his hair, grabbing it and tugging a bit. He leaves it sticking out all over. “Fine! Fine, goddammit. Fine! You probably were raped and then stabbed. Is that what you want to hear? Those scars on your stomach are not from a car accident. They’re from a teenaged girl being gutted like a fish to remove the baby she had been carrying.”

I gasp and he calms down a little and speaks with the deepest regret I have ever heard. “The police found you in an alley in the winter, bleeding out from head wounds and practically disemboweled. The cold saved your life—your heart slowed down, so you didn’t bleed to death. No one knows who you were but me. I happened to be working that night, an intern at the hospital. There are police reports if you don’t believe me, but it’s all about a Jane Doe. You can Google the whole story. It was in ’98 and you were found in New York. The Lower East Side. A teenaged homeless girl was attacked and her fetus cut from her. There’s a reason you hate Manhattan.”

I shake, trying to wrap my head around it all, but I can’t.

He looks distraught. “You stayed in a coma for a winter. When you were stable, they transferred you to the brain-injury facility and I went with you. I had us both put there because of the remarkable things they were doing. I thought I could help you come back.”

“No.” I twitch and tremble.

“I stayed with you until you woke up, and my face was the first thing you saw. I have always been the safe person for you. Which was why I was always the bad guy in your scenarios, as you said. I feared it was some part of you realizing who I was. Which was why I agreed to let Rory be the bad guy in that one scenario with Ashley Potter and the girls in the cells. That played rather well for him unbeknownst to me.”

He’s rambling and I’m still stuck on pregnant teenager.

“I have spent my entire adult life protecting you from this,” he continues. “When you signed up to be a mind runner, I tried to convince them not to use you, but they knew you were already susceptible to the process. And being military, you had the training to go with it. They convinced me that you would attribute most of the bad things to the minds you were in and not see them as your memories at all. And to be honest, they didn’t give a shit about you either way.”

He pauses, releasing me, though his hand still grips me. I have a terrible feeling he’s going to cry. “I won’t ever forgive myself for what I did, but I could not bear that you might wake and remember you had been pregnant. That you had been growing a life and someone took it. Or that you had had that terrible existence. Every day I walked into your room to assess you, and every day I was stunned by how perfect you were. I didn’t understand how you had come to the fate you had.”

My eyes fill with tears as I step back. Sirius whines and rubs against me. I part my lips as if to speak but I can’t. I’m in shock. Absolute shock.

I don’t have words. But I don’t need them. He steps in, wrapping himself around me completely. He holds me, shielding me from it all, and whispers, “You are not that girl. We buried that girl. We let her die and let it end for that poor, sad soul. We created
your
past, for you. You are strong and capable and a better person than anyone I know. You were an amazing spy and agent for the CIA and FBI. You have always been brilliant as a Master Sergeant and soldier. You are strong and capable.”

I don’t feel that way. I shove him back and turn, running away from it all. I push everything away, but he catches me, again gripping me. “Jane. What’s the difference now? Your childhood was shit either way.”

“I had a baby cut from my stomach, Dash!” I snap.

“Right. You were a drug addict on the streets. High as fuck. You got pregnant, likely sold it and then backed out of the deal, so the broker took the baby and left you for dead.”

“The baby? Did anyone find the baby?”

“No. The investigators attributed it to black-market baby brokers. They believe it was either a pimp or a broker, but the baby would have been sold if it had lived.”

“Did anyone ever come for me? Try to claim me?” None of this feels real, but I fear it is the real world.

“No.”

“I’m Jane Doe? I don’t have a name?”

He steps to me, huffing his breath. “Jane, let me give you one,” he says and kisses my cheek, brushing his face against mine. I love his breath on the side of my face. “Let me make you part of my family.”

I nod. I don’t have another answer or the capability to speak. I lean into him, letting him surround me until he feels too big, like all the words he has spoken are falling in on me, smothering me. I push him back. “This isn’t true.”

“I am so sorry, but it is. I have all the proof you need. I can show you video footage of you as a pregnant junkie, Jane. I just didn’t want to. I wanted to keep you safe from this.”

He steps back in and lowers his face, pressing his lips to mine. He kisses gently.

I need it. I need to feel something other than this desperate pain.

I grab his hand and we turn back to the house. We haven’t made it far, so we just walk back. Mrs. Starling jumps up and grabs the leash from Dash’s hands. “Let me take him for a walk. He’s such a good boy.” She turns and leaves the gardening, taking the happy horse with her.

I ignore her and the dog and drag him up the stoop.

We crash into the foyer, kissing and tugging. I hear Binx running for me, but I am lost in the warmth of the kisses and clothing being pulled away. Dash slams the door and lifts me into his arms. He carries me to the bed, laying me back and tugging my dirty jeans off. He stops and kisses a scar along my thigh before moving up and kissing the scars along my belly. The ones that took something I never knew I had. Something I can’t even feel because I have not even dealt with that yet.

His lips and tongue trace the spots that try to tell me I am broken and hurt and damaged beyond repair.

But then he slips his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and tugs it down, spreading my thighs and landing soft kisses along them. When he reaches the center, the warm place I desperately want him to put his mouth on, he pauses. “Did you miss me, Jane?”

I nod, impatient for the warmth of his breath and mouth to make me feel something beyond the sadness he has caused, anything. I want to feel something beyond the horror of my broken heart.

“I missed you so much.” He places another gentle kiss on the inside of my thigh, so close to the right spot I swear I feel him brush against my lips slightly.

His hands move with his face, one finger inserting into me the moment his mouth encloses around my clit. He sucks and flicks and fingers. I cry out, instantly lost in the movements and pleasure.

I am not that girl.

I am me.

I am Jane.

Even if Doe is my last name now, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

I am me.

I chant it a little, like a crazy person. It makes me laugh and I don’t even care that I’m laughing alone like a crazy person.

I care that his finger is speeding up and my body is in a swirl of chaos. I care that his tongue is putting me over the edge. I care that I am about to orgasm for the first time in ages. And it’s my favorite way to do it.

He sucks and flicks at the exact speed I like. He knows me. He didn’t make me like this; I like it because it is who I am. My body knows I like it.

I clench with the buildup as he pumps his finger, maintaining his perfect rhythm. When I come, it’s with a tremor the whole world can feel. I shake and shudder and grunt.

There’s no recovery time for my overstimulated clit. He spreads my legs wide, sliding between them, rubbing himself between my legs. He pushes his cock in gently, breathing like he’s already desperately holding on to control. Like I have bewitched him.