Stay With Me (14 page)

“What the hell—are you fucking kidding me?”

It was padlocked shut like Celia Burns’s was. What the hell was wrong with people? This was garbage.

I jiggled it, just to be sure, and squinted down the alley to see if there was another one, because honestly, I couldn’t remember. Not everyone had big Dumpsters, and I’d never really invested much time in who had what going on in their alley before.

“Fuck you, Terrence!” I whisper-yelled. Celia Burns needed to put a curse on him. Normal, sane people shouldn’t have to skulk around after dark looking for places to dump their trash.

Then, in a flash of light and noise, the door behind me opened.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I think I screamed, I know I jumped, and I’m pretty sure I would have sucked my tongue down my throat if it hadn’t been attached. Whirling around to see the profile of a large man wielding a large bloody cleaver didn’t improve things.

“Shit! It’s me!” I shrieked, throwing my hands up like I was in a police movie.

“Savi?”

“Fuck, you nearly made me piss myself, Ian,” I said, sagging against the Dumpster, not caring about how gross that was.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to use their Dumpster,” I said. “What are you doing, charging out here all bad-horror-movie?”

Ian looked down at the cleaver in his hand and wiped his other hand over his face, turning around. “Hang on, there’s a key.” He disappeared for a minute and I took that minute to breathe deeply and think bad thoughts to both Celia Burns and Terrence Hebert. My karma was severely fucked up. Ian appeared in the doorway again and walked out, cleaverless, unlocking the padlock with a key on a string. “You come over here to break in and can’t even open a commercial padlock, Savi? How far you’ve fallen.”

“I wasn’t breaking in!” I exclaimed. Probably too loud. Probably, Celia Burns knew about it by now. “Who locks their damn Dumpster?”

“
Someone
has been dumping their garbage over here and Jim had it padlocked.”

I scoffed as I lifted the lid and hauled one of my bags in while Ian grabbed the other one.

“Well, it wasn’t me until tonight,” I said. “I’m being blacklisted.”

“You’re being what?”

“Head of water and sewer is mad at me over a commission I wouldn’t take, so now our Dumpster isn’t being emptied. We’re overflowing.”

“So you thought sneaking over here after dark was the best way to do this?” he said.

“If I came in the daylight, somebody would have called it in and blacklisted them, too,” I said. I noticed then, in the light from the open door, that he had the white apron on. Smeared with blood. “You’re working this late?”

“Fixing something to eat,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow at the blood on him. “From scratch?”

I could see the crooked grin in the low light. “Carving myself the perfect steak,” he said. “Come on, you can learn.”

“Uh, no, thanks,” I said, making to walk around him.

“Hey, you think we just—chop up cows, was it?” he said. “I told you I’d show you the real deal. What better time?”

I had to laugh. There were about a hundred million better times.

“Not a good idea, Ian.”

“What, you have to eat, right?” he said, holding his hands out.

“I can eat alone,” I said, moving past him.

“Savi. You really hate me that much?”

The words, the tone, the question stopped me cold. The dampness on my skin chilled me in spite of the thick heat. I turned slowly and blew out a long controlled breath. Fuck if it wasn’t the talk I didn’t want to have. He was determined to have it.

I could only see one side of his face clearly. The other half was cloaked in shadow. But the half I saw wasn’t the old cocky Ian. He was looking at me with turmoil in his eyes.

“I did,” I said. “But I stopped hating you years ago. Wasn’t productive.”

Chapter Nine

I could hear the long inhale of breath over the oppressive silence.

“I’m sorry for earlier,” he said after a long pause, pointing randomly toward the barn. “What I said.” He blew out a weary breath and rubbed at his eyes. “That was—out of line, and I—I don’t know, I evidently still go places I shouldn’t when I’m around you.”

I laughed. It was short and awkward and sounded funny in the quiet, but there were just no truer words spoken and it hit me. “More reason for me to leave,” I said softly.

“Give me ten minutes,” he said, taking two steps forward. His eyes, normally gray, looked almost black in the weird light. “Hell, you don’t even have to eat with me, Savi. You can take yours home if you want, just—give me that much.”

“For what?”

He held up a hand and then dropped it. “For old time’s sake.”

“Old time’s sake,” I repeated, walking closer so I could see his eyes better. The proximity was dangerous, making my insides go all wiggly.
Focus, Savi.
“You walked away from those times, Ian. Now you want to toast to them?”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t change a single expression. “I want to talk.”

“I told you, you don’t owe me anything on that.”

“I know what you told me,” he said. “But I have things to say.” He looked toward the door again and the grimness lightened. “Humor me?”

Every nerve ending, every lick of sense in my head told me to run. To go home. To keep ignoring all things Ian-related like I’d done for over a decade. To maybe call Duncan? So my feet moving me farther in his direction was pretty much treason as far as I was concerned. I held my head up, hoping he couldn’t see the anxiety I was wearing like a second skin.

“This had better be some amazing steak.”

His face transformed into the sexy grin I remembered and I dug my fingernails into my palms. Sweet God, what was I doing.

“Trust me?”

Crap, just beat me with a stick.

“I just had one of Jim’s filets last night,” I said. “It almost made me—cry.”

No.
Stop with the innuendo.

His eyes took the challenge. They always did. “Well, let’s see if I can get you in a full-out meltdown.”

Let’s not. “Oh, I don’t know about all that.”

Still, I followed him. Shit.
Following Satan straight to hell.

Walking the back hallway behind him like a fool, it was impossible not to dart a glance up the stairway as we passed it.
Let that soak in, Savi. Let that keep you strong.

I felt the familiar pang in my chest as the memory of what I’d walked in on up there mingled with the view of him in front of me.

“Baby, I bought you some chocolate milk to keep up here,” I said, breezing through the unlocked door and heading straight for the fridge. “The real kind,” I added with a laugh. “I know you think it’s stupid, but I don’t want to have to make—”

An unfamiliar sound stopped me. Something different, something—

“Did you get a dog?” I headed toward the sound. Toward Ian’s bedroom and the wide-open door to it. “Ian? Seriously, what the fu—”

I still remembered every detail, as if my brain needed to catalog it. I remembered his face, already looking at the open door when I walked in, as if he’d expected it. As if he’d been waiting. The look somewhere between sorry and rebellious that said
this is who I really am.
The way my body froze in the doorway, unable to look away, unable to speak. The woman’s face, glancing at me and then down at Ian, completely unashamed and uncaring. The long red hair swinging around her shoulders as she moved up and down on him. The last look he gave me before shutting his eyes and turning away. The bile that rose in my throat, and the split-second decision I made to walk out and walk away instead of dragging the bitch down the stairs by her hair. The feeling of shutting down. Of losing everything.

As I watched him walk in front of me, I realized with a start that I wanted the ten minutes, after all. I wanted the explanation I never received.

As we emerged into the backside of the kitchen, my steps slowed. He already had a large hunk of meat set out and he pointed to the two large stainless steel doors catty-corner from each other in the far corner.

“Go pick out something from the cooler. We’ll trim it up.”

I opened my mouth to talk first and shook my head. I’d just go get this over with. I opened the big door on the left and was hit face-first with a blast of frigid air from a walk-in freezer. That was good. I needed that. I needed to probably just stay in there and watch Ian from afar. But my plan didn’t work that well, as two steps in, when I turned to ask where to look, the door shut in my face.

“Ugh,” I said, pushing at the bar to open it.

It didn’t move.

“Um, what the—”

The door opened from the outside, with Ian staring at me like a tolerant parent.

“This is the freezer, Savi,” he said. “Unless you want a beef Popsicle, this isn’t where you want to go.”

Don’t make that dirty. Don’t make that dirty.
“Well, then be more specific,” I said, kind of glad for the freezing temperatures cooling what would have been a pink-up from hell. “And what’s with the door?”

“It’s a death trap, and I’ve told Jim he needs to get it fixed before somebody gets stuck in there,” Ian said, holding up a broom. “For now, they’re putting this in the door when they go in.”

“Innovative.”

“So,” he said, standing aside so I could come out. “This is the cooler.”

He opened the other door, which was really just a glorified refrigerator, and not something you could die in. Unless maybe you were five and could crawl up on a shelf. Fresh cuts were wrapped and labeled, and I selected a filet. Again. What the hell, I’d see if he could do any better. Duncan had been quite the master.

“Probably not much work to do on that,” Ian said when I handed it to him.

“That’s okay.”

Less up-close-and-personal time, and that was a good thing. Because my question was burning me now, pushing and prodding to be let out. He headed to the butcher block table and set my package next to the raw slab of—I assumed cow.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, hearing the words fall out of my mouth and float in the air around us.

I had no plan, no thought process. I hadn’t thought out anything past getting rid of the damn trash, and now there I was in the back kitchen of McMasters Meats, following the devil to hell and poking the underbelly.

His gaze shot up to meet mine, hitting me in the gut like a physical fist before it softened at the edges. He blinked a few times and then looked back down at the project before him and picked up a long skinny knife instead of the cleaver. With swift precision he carved what he didn’t want right off that steak.

“To make you hate me,” he said.

I widened my eyes and smiled, even though he wasn’t looking up to see it. I needed the precious few seconds to breathe in and out. Maybe go climb back in that freezer, because something was making my blood hot. Something I wasn’t supposed to care about. I’d told him he didn’t owe me anything, that we were water under the bridge. No, part of that was the spiel to Lily. I was losing track of my bullshit trail.

“Okay,” I said on a forced chuckle. “You know, an
‘I changed my mind, Savi’
would have worked just fine. You didn’t have to—do that.”

“There was a reason,” he said, methodically working on his meat.

I held up my hands in a waiting pose. “Okay?”

“Come over here,” he said.

“No, seriously,” I continued, a little annoyed that he was all invested in cutting up that steak instead of looking at me. He was the one wanting the ten minutes of my time. “In all these years, when I thought of what you would say—
not
that I thought of it often—but when it flitted by—” I stopped for a second as he looked my way, something churning in his eyes.
“To make you hate me
was never the sentence.”

“Come here.”

“Ian, fuck, can you walk away from the steak for one second?” I said. “You asked
me
in here.”

He flipped the knife so it was pointing downward and stabbed it into the butcher block countertop. Yanking the apron off with two quick movements, he crossed the space between us in seconds. I had nowhere to go, as I was already against the back wall, but I managed to hold my head up along with my breath. I’m pretty sure my heart hit pause as well when he reached for my face and palmed the wall behind me instead.

Ian inhaled hard and fast through his nose. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath as his forehead came down to mine.

Words tore through my mind. Words screaming
no,
and
run,
and
push him away,
and
fucking remember what he did.
My hands tried to obey, tried to shove at him, but the adrenaline of the moment, the smell of him all up in my senses and the sensation of his body against mine made logic slow down.