Detained

Will gripped the bench again. “That’s enough.”

She moved her hand to her sternum, hand arrowed down, skimmed her body until she touched herself.

He hissed.

“You need to tell me.”

“No. You don’t need to hear it.”

She was so tense, so sensitised to Will’s pain, t

he profound damage he’d suffered. She jerked as her fingers found wetness, as his breath quickened.

“Darcy.” His voice was cut into ribbons of bright coloured emotion. Red for pain, yellow for fear, orange for shame, green for guilt, pink for desire. He seized the bench so hard, every muscle in his torso stood out in relief.

She couldn’t give him absolution. Her forgiveness meant nothing to him. That’s why he was here, to find it for himself. But she could give him amnesty, safe haven, release.

She lay back on the table, knees bent up, displayed to him. She closed her eyes as waves of shocking, unexpected pleasure trilled though her body. The wrongness of it, the astonishing response.

He ground out a, “Stop,” like the sting of a whiplash, and her ribs vaulted off the table.

“Not your fault, Will.”

His hands were on her ankles, sliding around her calves. He hooked a chair with his foot and pulled her down the table.

“Not your fault.”

He sat, placed her feet on his shoulders, and his mouth where her fingers had been. And with his tongue and his hands and his body, he exorcised his demons on her.

45. Monster

“Study the past if you would define the future.” — Confucius

When Will remembered who he was again, he was on the floor. Darcy was above him draped across the table, her hair a golden waterfall over the edge, one arm dangling limp.

His body was steaming, wet, worked through. But the rage he’d felt, for Norman, the intensity towards Darcy for pushing him to remember, to talk about it, had retreated. He knew he could find it again, it wasn’t lost, but it was exhausted for the moment. He felt oddly clean.

He reached for her fingers and she grasped his hand. She was a lifeline, pulling him out of that last fucking crippling memory. He tugged her arm and she rolled over to look down at him. “Wow.”

He caressed her hand with his thumb. “You started it. Come down here with me.”

“You come up here with me.”

He pushed a chair with his foot. The only chair still standing upright. “We tried that. It was crowded.”

She laughed. “You didn’t seem to mind crowding me.”

He tugged her arm again. The crowding—getting lost in her had been insanely good, but it was the talking, telling her things only Pete knew that’d been powerful—powerful and freeing. She was studying him over the edge of the table like a damage assessor.

“Did I freak you out, Lois?” If she’d run screaming naked to her car and taken off, he could hardly have been surprised; the fury had poured out of him. A close relation to the fury he’d felt that night when he found Pete cowering in a corner of the container and Norman beating him with a piece of broken fence paling.

“Only in a good way.”

He let go her hand and sat up. “Hell, what does that mean?”

She swung her legs over the table edge and came down to the floor beside him. He caught her chin and turned her head to face him. “What do you mean in a good way?”

She peeled his hand away but held onto it. “You need to talk this out, Will. And I’m good at listening.”