Sugar on the Edge (25 page)

I listen to his story intently, noticing that there’s no fondness in his voice, but no bitterness either. It’s as if he’s telling me a simple story about a ship sailing past the shore one night.

“At any rate, we dated… fell in love, lived our lives together. Amanda eventually moved out of her Goth phase but she continued to be morose, even when she wasn’t writing her dark poetry. After I graduated, I got a job as a technical writer for a company that developed training manuals for large corporations. By day, I’d work my job putting dry and boring words on paper, and at night, I tried to make Amanda happy.”

“Why was she so sad?” I ask, my fingers lightly stroking his chest while my face is pressed against his heart, so I can hear the thrum of his life.

“She was depressed… or so we came to find out when I insisted she see a doctor. We were living together, and I was thinking about asking her to marry me, but I wanted her to be well. I wanted her to be happy and in love with me the way I was with her. They tried her on various medications, she seemed to get better for a while, and our lives marched on.”

“Did you marry?” I ask hesitantly.

“No. But she got pregnant. We were just using condoms, and I guess one must of have broken. It was a surprise to both of us, but we were happy with the news. Nine months later, Charlie was born.” Gavin pauses, clears his throat, and says in a raspy voice. “He was so beautiful. So perfect.”

“He looks just like you,” I say.

“Except he had Amanda’s eyes,” he adds on. “At any rate, I was brimming with happiness, but Amanda seemed to become more depressed again. Her doctors tweaked her medication, but nothing seemed to be working as a permanent fix. Postpartum depression, they said, and that it would get better if we just gave it time.”

“But it didn’t?” I guess.

“No, it didn’t. Amanda seemed to drift further and further away. I had to urge her to do simple things to take care of herself, like bathe and eat. I couldn’t trust Charlie with her, so my mum would watch him while I was at work. But I chose to ignore it, because Charlie was well cared for during the day, and at night I had him all to myself while Amanda would sit in front of the telly and watch game shows.”

“You must have felt so lonely,” I say quietly.

“Sometimes… but mostly I wasn’t because I had Charlie. And he had me, and really… that’s all I cared about. However, there were times that Amanda seemed okay. She’d take an interest in Charlie and me, and I could almost pretend that things were going to get better. She even had times where she was perfectly normal and was able to care for Charlie just fine.”

Gavin shifts on the couch, pulling my body up tighter to his. He takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly.

“One weekend, I got a call on a Saturday that a project I was working on needed some changes made before it was going to be presented for review on Monday. I had to go into the office. I tried to call my mum to watch Charlie, but she was out. Amanda seemed okay that day… had even gotten up that morning and made us breakfast. She assured me she would be fine with Charlie and urged me out the door. I was hesitant, but I looked at her as she smiled at me with reassurance, and I figured it was only a few hours. What could possibly happen? So I kissed her, kissed Charlie, and I left.”

My heartbeat is pounding madly within the weak walls of my chest, and I almost beg Gavin to stop the story. But I hold my tongue while he continues.

“I was gone for two hours and twenty-three minutes. When I walked back in the house, I found Amanda sleeping on our bed. I couldn’t find Charlie anywhere.”

My stomach cramps as I imagine Gavin’s rising panic while he searched for his son.

“I ran out the door… through the yard, calling his name. One of the neighbors heard me and came out to help me search. We went from yard to yard, until we reached the end of our street, which butted up against a small embankment that rolled down to a tiny creek at the bottom of the hill. We found Charlie there… in the water. He had a bruise on his head. The coroner thinks he must have fallen and hit his head, landing face first in the shallow water. He drowned. He was two years old.”

My fingers clutch desperately to Gavin’s shirt, clawing deeply and biting into his skin. My tears start up again, and I let them silently fall down my cheeks. He holds me while I hold him, burrowing my face in tighter to his chest while my tears wet his shirt.

After several minutes, I lift my head and look up at Gavin with sad eyes. His own are swimming in the memories of his dead son, and I touch my fingers to his cheek. “How did you ever survive something like that?”

“I didn’t,” he says simply. “I tried as hard as I could to kill myself with drugs and alcohol. I don’t even remember the first few months after his death, because all I could do was blame myself for leaving him with Amanda.”

I jolt upward and out of his arms. Turning my body, I straddle his lap and hold his face firmly in my hands. “No,” I practically shout at him. “That was not your fault. That was all on Amanda. She failed Charlie, not you.”

Gavin takes one of my hands in his and kisses my wrist. He leans forward, grazes his lips over mine, and gives me a sad smile. “It was on both of us, Savannah. I’ve accepted my role in his death, and I’ll always bear that cross.”

“What happened to Amanda?”

“She had a breakdown. The police investigated, but no charges were filed against her. She had a legitimately documented medical condition of depression, and besides… I didn’t want her to go to jail for it. She couldn’t help her illness… that was beyond her control.”

“Weren’t you angry with her though? I don’t even know her and I’m angry at her, and I don’t care that she was sick.” My voice is rageful and so unkind. So not me.

“I wanted to kill her,” Gavin admits to me. “I wanted to drag her down to that little creek and hold her facedown in the water, so she could feel the water saturate her lungs and know what it was like to suffer that slow death.”

My body shudders over the violence in his voice, but then he takes another deep breath and lets it out slowly. “But I found another outlet for my anger. Outside of the drinking and drugs, I expressed my frustrations in other ways.”

Gavin doesn’t elaborate, and I have a feeling I wouldn’t like to know those other ways. But I think I really
do
know, because he has hinted at it before. “With sex?”

“With everything,” he tells me honestly. “I did everything to the extreme, and much of that involved sex. I immersed myself in the dodgy underbelly of London, and I learned all the ways I could hurt a woman so exquisitely she’d orgasm multiple times. I took pleasure whenever it was offered to me, sometimes even paying for the privilege to forget my shitty existence while a woman would suck me down. I did things that would so thoroughly disgust you, Sweet, that I really have no right to even let you sit here on my lap and let you comfort me.”

His head hangs low with shame and dejection, and I didn’t think my heart could break further.

With shaking hands, I grip his face tighter and lift it so his eyes meet mine. “You could never disgust me. Those things you did… they were but a moment in your life. Just a tiny, incomprehensible moment, and you did what you had to do to survive. And you did survive. Just look at you now… you more than survived. You flourished.”

Gavin shakes his head sadly. “No, love. I didn’t survive. And I don’t flourish. I just exist. It’s all I know how to do.”

Leaning in, I kiss him sweetly on his mouth, and he sighs into me. I kiss him a bit harder, and his arms tighten around me. I clutch at his shoulders and kiss him some more, trying to suck out every bit of pain and doubt that I can. I can feel him grow hard beneath me as I straddle his lap, but I pull back from him. “You’re wrong, Gavin. When you just exist, you have no emotion. No passion. But when you live… you seize opportunity, you drink of a joyful life, and you’re motivated. The man I know… the man I’ve let into my heart, he’s a man that lives.”

The sadness in Gavin’s eyes melts away and curiosity fill up his gaze. He’s listening to me, so I continue. “You suffered unimaginable pain and horror in your young life, and you let it bend you. It bent you over backward, nearly snapping you in half. But it didn’t break you. You didn’t let it break you.”

“Savannah—” Gavin says and his words are husky, filled with emotion.

“The man that held my face and told me that I was the strongest heroine he’s ever known, that is a man who is living his life. The man who touches me so sweetly and does the loveliest of dirty things to me… the man that makes me crazy with lust and causes me to scream at the top of my lungs… that’s a man that is filled with passion. The man that writes such amazing words and sucks you into his story… he’s a man filled with genius and creativity. You’re sad, Gavin, and that’s okay. Let me share it with you, but don’t ever think for a minute that you will ever be a man that is content to just exist.”

Gavin stands from the couch in such a swift move that I yelp in surprise. He grabs me by the back of my hair, pulling my face back and kissing me hard. Kisses me with passion and yearning and a zeal to make the most of this very moment we’re sharing.

He carries me to the stairs and up to his second-floor bedroom, his lips never leaving mine. I feel something different. In the way he touches me, in the way that he stares at me. He’s opened himself up to something that he never did before… something he had held himself back from, and I realize what it is in the moment when he lays me on the bed and looks down at me.

He needs me.

Gavin Cooke, a man who swam through darkness and torture, drowned himself in the ecstasy of the next big high and probably fucked his way through half of London so he could forget his demons, rose from the ashes having survived, but having done so while being utterly alone.

Now he’s not. Now he knows that he has one other person in this world who is willing to share the burden of his sadness. And I can see it in his eyes… right this minute, that he is acknowledging that he needs me.

And God help me, I think I need him too, because he’s made me feel and experience things I never thought were possible in my narrowed existence.

Gavin crawls onto the bed, up my body, and lies down on top of me. He kisses me again, this time with more care than he has ever taken with my lips. He moves slowly but deliberately, pressing his mouth into mine, sucking on my bottom lip, giving me a soft bite. His tongue moves against mine. He angles his head to go deeper and possess me more thoroughly.

He kisses and kisses and kisses me, making no other move to touch me other than to stroke my face. I can feel his erection laying thick and long between my legs, yet he doesn’t even move his hips to grind into me. This isn’t about sex right now, although I know that’s coming.

It’s about him showing me how much he cares for not only what I just said to him downstairs, but also for the person I am.

He finally… yes, finally, because I am starting to fill up with a crazy burning for more of him, peels my clothes away, letting his lips travel over every bit of exposed skin. He silently caresses me with his hands, his tongue, and the very breath that rushes out of his mouth. I wriggle and moan, and even beg him to give me more, but he takes his sweet, filthy time with me.

When I’m completely naked, he rolls from the bed, standing briefly to disrobe, his eyes never leaving mine. When he crawls back in and lies back down on top of me, my heart hammers a hungry tune for him. I can feel his warm erection between my legs, pulsing and jerking with need. But he does nothing more than start to kiss me all over again, now whispering the sweetest of words that I’ve ever heard come out of his dirty mouth.

Sweet… your skin is so soft. I could kiss and lick at it for days on end.

Your nipples… so perfect. Your breasts, your stomach, your hips. All so fucking perfect.

Touching you is the best part of my every day.

We could live to the end of time, and even when the sun would finally die out, I’d still never have enough of you.

Oh, Gavin… my poet.

When he finally rises up just a bit, he looks down at me. He is suspended on one hand while, with the other, he takes himself in hand and guides it into me. He slides in easily, because I’m so ready for him, and when he’s seated to the hilt within my body, his eyes flutter closed and he sighs.

When he opens them again, he leans down and kisses me gently. After he pulls back from my mouth but before he gives the first move of his hips, he whispers, “Thank you.”

And in that moment, I’m pretty sure my heart has been enslaved.