STORM: A Standalone Romance (102 page)

              The mystery of just what Levi wanted was enough even to distract me from the thing I usually wanted the most while working here. The customers ebbed and flowed, drinking their beverages fast and slow, and the mystery remained, a tantalizing anticipation.

              “Do you get a break at any point?” Levi asked, holding my eyes in his intense gaze while I poured him another shot of whiskey, even though he already had a double in his glass.

              “I can take a break whenever,” I said, batting my eyes at him. “Whenever you want.”

              “What I have to say…it’s best done away from prying eyes.”

              “You’ll see,” I said, busying myself by wiping down the bar with a rag. “There’ll be a lull before dinner. No prying eyes, then.”

              When that lull came, I found myself nearly as eager as he was to see what he needed to say, but it was Levi who was coy this time.

              “Maybe there’s a better place we could go?” he suggested, fidgeting with his glass. I didn’t know the man, but the way he sat at the bar, the way he still hadn’t taken his outerwear off, and the way he carried himself made me doubt that he was the kind of man who ever fidgeted.

              “What’s better than here?”

              “Is there a restaurant near here?” he asked. “Maybe it would be better to say over dinner.”

              “If you want to take me out on a very romantic date to the pride of our town, McDonald’s, then be my guest,” I said, laughing at him. “You should probably just say what you came here to say, though. I’m dying to know.”

              Levi flinched at that, and I found myself even more confused than before. Just what was going on here?

              “When was the last time you talked to Matt?” he asked, trying but failing to meet my eyes.

              “What did you say?” My amused befuddlement faded a bit. “Matt?”

              “Yes, Matt. Your brother. When was the last time you talked to him?”

              I shook my head slowly. “It’s been a long time. Do you know Matt? Are you a friend of his?”

              “I did know Matt.”

              I swallowed hard, but there was something in my throat, blocking me. Some obstruction that had suddenly formed at Levi’s use of the past tense.

              The door to the bar opened, accompanied by a pair of patrons and a puff of cold air.

              “We’re closed!” I yelled, charging around the bar toward them.

              “Closed? But the door was open.”

              “Come on, Meagan, we just want a drink.”

              “The bar’s closed. I said it’s closed. There’s a gas leak. You can’t be in here. The whole town could go up. I’m saving your lives. Really. Just go.”

              I all but pushed them back out the door as I babbled, then shoved it shut, locking it. I turned around and leaned against the glass, staring at Levi from across the bar.

              “I think you’d better say what you came here to say,” I said. “Right now, this is as good as it’s going to get.”

              “There isn’t an easy way to say this….”

              “So just say it.”

              “I knew your brother in New York City,” Levi said. “He worked for me. He was my bodyguard. But he…died. He died saving my life. I thought someone would’ve alerted you, your family.”

              “There isn’t a family,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, aware of just how cold the glass of the door was at my back but unable to step forward to get myself away from it. “There’s only me.”

              “That’s why I thought you would’ve known me,” he said. “I thought your brother would’ve mentioned he was working for me.”

              I shook my head, beyond words. Matt was…he was dead. I hadn’t heard from him because I hadn’t contacted him. He’d told me he’d get me to the city in a year, and I hadn’t heard from him because I wanted him to focus on that. I needed him to get me out of here, needed for him to succeed so I could escape.

              And he was dead. He had died in his efforts. Now I really was alone. There wasn’t any kind of hope for me anymore. I’d die if I had to stay in that house. I just couldn’t do it. I would rather fall asleep in the alleyway behind the bar and stay asleep, eyelids frozen shut, some stupid, small-town tragedy who would be forgotten by the New Year.

              My brother was dead, and all I could think of was wanting to die, too.

              I’d tried. I’d really tried to have hope over the past year. It hadn’t been easy, but Matt was the one who’d kept me going. He’d said that he was going to get me out of here, and I’d put my trust in that. Now there wasn’t anything to hope for. Nobody to trust. The thing I feared the worst was still out there, ever present in my mind.

              “Meagan?” Levi was standing right in front of me, approaching me without me even noticing.

              My world was imploding and I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed Levi’s face with both of my hands and yanked it downward, kissing him deeply. He yanked his face away just as quickly.

              “What was that?” he asked, his chest heaving up and down. “What was that, Meagan?”

              “Fuck me,” I demanded. “Now.”

              “No.” He stared at me like I’d grown an extra head.

              “You don’t want to fuck me?” I needed to vanish. I needed that hole to throw myself into. I was imploding, and it was the only thing that would save me. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand. But he had to do it.

              “You’re…very attractive,” he said hesitantly, “but this isn’t the place or the time. I just told you your brother is dead and you want to—”

              “I want to fuck,” I said, pulling on my own hair in frustration. “Just…fuck me. Don’t think about it. Just do it.”

              I launched myself at him again, my fingers clawing at the front of that coat he’d never removed. He jerked away, but I had him by that scarf, digging my nails into the soft fabric, wishing I had the strength to rend it to shreds. Levi held his hands up even as I dragged my tongue up his neck, desperate for the reaction I craved.

              “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I don’t understand what you’re doing, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

              “I don’t care if you hurt me,” I said, kissing his throat, his jaw, his chin, his mouth, a kiss for every syllable. “Just fuck me.”

              “Meagan…”

              I kissed him full on his mouth, pushing my tongue in-between his lips. He resisted for a long moment before giving in, his tongue flaccid in his own mouth, letting me probe his mouth to my heart’s content. Only I wouldn’t be content. I couldn’t be content. I needed this. I needed him.

              “Fuck me.”

              “It isn’t…I just…Meagan…”

              “Save me.”

              Those were somehow the magic words, because Levi began kissing me back, pushing me back against the cold door, ravishing my throat, working his warm hands beneath my shirt. Without warning, he ripped his pants open, then did the same to mine, before lifting me, wrapping my legs around his waist, using the freezing door behind me to prop us up. With one hand pressed against the glass beside my face, Levi used the other hand to guide himself inside of me.

              It was exactly what I wanted, exactly what I needed, and it still wasn’t enough.

              He started moving inside of me, and I tried to give myself over, tried to lose myself to that irresistible tide. I tried to disappear into the opening maw, focused on the pulse of each thrust, held on for dear life as Levi grunted into my neck, burying his face there as if he were afraid to look at me.

              He put his hand between us and found my clit, rubbing in time to his thrusts, and I banged the back of my head against the door in the rush of climax, not caring about the pain or the cold or the loss or the horror or the helplessness.

              I didn’t care about anything in that void, and that was what I needed. It was all I needed.

              I came back to myself slowly, aware that Levi had stopped thrusting. He simply held me against the door, one hand cupping the back of my head where I’d hit it.

              “It doesn’t even hurt,” I lied.

              “It looked like it hurt.”

              “Why did you stop?” I was in that sticky afterglow, the one I hogged. I usually wanted to be alone for this feeling, hoarding the time when I felt sated and free, but I didn’t mind that Levi was there, holding me, still inside of me.

              “You came.”

              “But you didn’t.”

              “I don’t need to. You seemed like you needed to.”

              “You can keep going,” I said, my eyebrows knitting together. I didn’t know how to react to this situation. Men were only eager to sleep with me so they could get their rocks off. The vast majority of them didn’t concern themselves with my pleasure.

              “I’m good.”

              “But you didn’t come.”

              “I didn’t want to.”

              He sat me down gently, pulling out just as softly, doing up his pants without looking at me. I watched him, absolutely flummoxed, standing with my pants undone, exposed and not caring.

              “What now?” I asked him. He looked up, those blue eyes as soft as I’d seen them.

              “Your brother told me to help you. So tell me what you need. I’ll take care of it.”

              He stood there and looked at me, a stranger whom my brother had died for, a man I’d had to beg to be with me, who’d guided me to completion and forgone his own conclusion.

              A man who had answered my plea to save me.

              Maybe it was the fact that I was still standing there, my pants completely open. Maybe it was the cold door still at my back, making me shudder. Maybe it was the fact that my brother was dead. Or maybe it was the curtains of my afterglow parting at last and letting the light shine on my piece-of-shit life.

              “Take me to New York City,” I demanded.

              “Fine,” Levi said easily. “We can leave as soon as you want. My jet’s on call at the airport the next town over.”

              I burst into tears.

The next time I was self-aware, I realized that I ensconced in a strong pair of arms. I struggled when it dawned on me exactly where I was—trapped in a man’s grip inside my hell house.

              “You sort of fell asleep.” Levi’s voice calmed me a little bit, but I still couldn’t keep my stomach from churning. I didn’t want to be here. It didn’t matter that there was still daylight filtering in through the windows. It was the same nightmare in the light or the dark.

              “You can put me down.”

              He set me down, his hand still on the small of my back. “You were crying.”

              I gritted my teeth. That was the last thing I wanted to think about right now. “Sorry.”

              “I guess that was the response I expected from you,” Levi said. “Not the…other one.”

              “The one where I wanted you to fuck me.”

              Even here, as the man in front of me shuddered, I felt the stirring. I wanted him again, wanted him to push me over the edge and into that darkness again. I didn’t care that I was back in this house. I wanted him again.

              I turned in his grasp and nearly succeeded in kissing him before he stepped away.

              “As…nice…as that was, having sex with you,” he said, holding his hands up, that same defensive posture as earlier, “I think that we really need to talk.”

              I sagged in disappointment. “I thought you promised my brother you’d help me.”

              “I did. And I will.”

              “Then what if fucking me was the only way to help me?” I tilted my chin up at him, defiant, hiding my own anxiety in the same motion. It frightened me to think about it. What if it really was the only way to help me? Everything I did was motivated by ways to get sex. And as soon as I did it with someone, my mind was already looking ahead, trying to figure out where my next lay would come from. It was the only reason I worked at that damn bar. Part of it was to earn money, sure, but the other, larger impetus was easy access to men who would do whatever I asked of them, surprised but delighted by my insatiable lust.

              What if that was the only thing I could do for myself—find someone to have sex with me? What if that was the only thing that would ever distract me from myself?

              “I can appreciate a healthy sexual appetite,” Levi was saying, “but I know that you need things beyond a good orgasm.”

              Right now, a good orgasm was the only thing on my mind—in spite of this house. My stomach was sick with the feeling of being pulled in two different directions. I was ready to take him, right here and now, and yet I wanted nothing more than to flee from this place.

              “Meagan, talk to me. I want to help you. I’m going to help you. I just need to know what you need.”

              I exhaled for so long that my head swam. “I need to gather up a few things. And then I need to get out of here. How did you know where to find this house, anyway?”

              “I’m a modern man. I can Google things.” A half smile graced Levi’s face, and I recognized that he was parroting me from earlier, at the bar, when I still didn’t know that he was here for some reason other than me throwing myself at him for some momentary relief.

              “This house isn’t under my name,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him.

              “So maybe I did something a little more hardcore than Google,” he said, shrugging like it was no big deal that he’d magically come up with my current residence without having the means to do so. “I have some tricks up my sleeve.”

              “You’re a magician who somehow knows where I live?” I eyed him, uncertain. Was it safe for him to be here with me? I’d already given my body to him, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get on his jet with him and go to New York unless I got some answers.

              “This is why I think it’d be a good idea if we stopped, sat down a moment, and talked this out,” Levi said.

              “If you think you’re going to talk me out of leaving this place…”

              “If you want to leave town, you can,” he said. “That’s not the kind of talking I want you to do. If you want to go to New York City, I’ll have you there by tonight.”

              There was something inside of me that was placated, but the rest of me remained on edge. It was this house—being here in this house with someone. That and knowing my brother wasn’t going to be coming back for me.

              “Okay, talk to me about why my brother died for you,” I said, trying to resist the urge to begin pacing and failing. I led the both of us into the living room, beside my pallet of pillows. It was the only room in the house I could stand to be in.

              “Are you sure it’s okay to talk about?” Levi watched me stalk around the pillows, kicking at them. “Don’t you want to sit down or something?”

              “Just say whatever you need to say.” I didn’t stop my circuit of the room.

              “I don’t know what I expected when I found out Matt had a sister,” Levi said, halfway to himself. “He’d never mentioned you until…then. Until he got shot. But you’re nothing close to what I expected.”

              I stopped in my tracks. “He got shot?” That headline from the newspaper I’d glanced over—the shooting in New York City. I’d wondered why the tiny local paper had picked that up, and now I knew. It was because our town’s own Matt Green had been the one who died. I should’ve read the article. At least then I would’ve been prepared for Levi upending my existence.

              “Your brother was my bodyguard,” Levi explained. “I was attending a meeting with the heads of other companies my company is working with on a project, and there was a man with a gun outside the building. Matt pushed me out of the way. He saved my life.”

              I shook my head. It was hard to think of my brother being dead. Even if I hadn’t spoken with him in a year, I always had it in my mind that he was out there, working toward a time when we could be together again. Now that I knew he wasn’t, it was difficult to fathom.

              “Where is his body?” I asked. I knew that probably sounded weird, but I’d done this before. There was a body, and there were people who took care of bodies, and there were still more people who took care of all the other details.

              “It’s in the city,” Levi confirmed. “I also wanted to consult with you on the funeral arrangements.”

              “No need for a funeral,” I said. “I’m the only one left. There’s no one else.”

              Levi opened his mouth as if he were about to argue with me, and closed it again. “I can contact the facility where he’s at to have them cremate his body, if you want.”

              I didn’t know what I wanted. Matt wasn’t supposed to die. He was always supposed to be there to catch me, to take me away from all of this. To save me.

              Even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t true. He hadn’t known what was going on while he was in the city. He hadn’t known what happened to me, or what I’d become.

              He’d died and left me alone, and yet I found myself no more alone now than before.

              “Whatever,” I said, feeling tired. I could’ve curled up on those pillows and fell fast asleep, but I’d be afraid that Levi would be gone when I awoke, a fever dream of salvation that would never come to pass.

              If Matt had died, he’d sent Levi in his place to save me, to finish what my brother had started.

              “I’m going to say something, and you’re going to be offended, and I don’t want you to be.”

              I cocked my head. “Say what you want to say. We’re supposed to be talking.”

              “You don’t seem very upset about your brother.”

              I shrugged. “It’s been more than a year since I’ve spoken with him. I got used to him not being around.”

              “But you were close before?”

              “We were siblings,” I said, shrugging. “He was older. He left home first. We had different experiences growing up, but he knew I wanted to leave here, and he was going to help me.”

              It suddenly dawned on me why Levi was asking what he was asking.

              “You want to know why he made you promise to help me,” I said.

              “That doesn’t matter.”

              “It does,” I insisted, “and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” Even as I said that, a little voice inside of me screamed in despair. I wanted so many things from this man that he probably didn’t want to do. I increased the speed of my pacing if only to make myself think of something else, like dodging the pillows I was kicking all over the floor.

              “Meagan, the last thing I want to do is shock you, but your brother died in my arms.” I slowed, then stopped again. “The last thing he said on this earth was that he wanted me to find you and help you. I don’t know how many last words you’ve ever heard, but there’s a gravitas there that you can’t just decide to ignore.”

              “How important are you?” I demanded.

              “Excuse me?”

              “How important do you have to be to have people dying in your arms, whispering their last words to you?”

              “I’m the CEO of a renowned architectural firm,” Levi said.

              “I didn’t know that was a job that incited violence.”

              “It’s not. I have a lot of money, but there’s not a good reason I could think of for why someone would want me dead.”

              “How much is a lot of money?”

              “I’ve been in Forbes.”

              I wasn’t sure what the requirements for that achievement entailed, but it seemed to come with bullets.

              “Do you think it was just a random act of violence, then?” I asked. “Did you catch a glimpse of the shooter?”

              “I don’t know,” Levi admitted, casting his gaze downward, looking chagrined. “I might’ve seen him from behind. At least, I think it was a
him
. I don’t know. I told the police this. I just saw someone hurrying away. Could’ve been anyone rushing to get out of the cold. Your brother saw him coming, though. Shoved me out of the way. Saved my life.”

              It just didn’t seem real that Matt had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time—or that he’d sacrificed himself to make sure that Levi wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seemed so…meaningless.

              “So, whoever it is, he’s still out there,” I said. I searched my heart for righteous anger, for the desire for justice, but I didn’t think my heart was capable of feeling anything anymore. I’d taught it how to curl up and die out of pure necessity, so it was wrong of me to try and prompt it to function. All I felt there was a sort of dull throb—not its usual state of being, but not altogether unpleasant. It was as if the grief I should’ve been feeling was muted by nearly soundproof walls. Someone was crying in there, but I wasn’t sure who, or why.

              “The police are good at what they do,” Levi said. “I know really excellent investigators, and I have connections that go beyond the police force. What I’m telling you is that we’re going to find the shooter. It’s just a matter of when and where.”

              “You’re not scared?” I’d spent so much time being scared that I just assumed it was a default emotion for other people under duress.

              “Not scared,” he said, shaking his head. “Angry. Matt didn’t deserve to die. I wish…I wish he hadn’t pushed me out of the way. If I could go back, I’d push him out of the way, instead. I’d take the bullet that was fired at me.”

              “Why did you hire a bodyguard in the first place if you didn’t want to be protected?” I reasoned. “You care about your life.”

              “Not enough for me to want anyone else to die for me.” Levi heaved a sigh. “I’d do anything to give your brother back to you. I really would, Meagan. Please tell me you believe me.”

              It was then that I realized that Levi was suffering from an acute and very recent case of survivor’s guilt, and that made us more alike than he could know. I wished I could let him know that it wasn’t going to become any easier, no matter what anyone told him, but I didn’t want to make him despair.

              “I believe you,” I said. “Maybe we’ve done enough talking for now.”

              “You’re ready to go to the jet?” he asked, surprised. “Are you sure you don’t want to know anything else?”

              “I’m satisfied—knowledge-wise, anyway,” I said. “I could be more satisfied….” I took a step toward him, and another step, until our torsos were pressed together, angling my chin up to look him in the eye, dare him to do something that would further satisfy me.

              “You don’t have to feel obliged to…um…make me come,” he said. “Earlier, I understand that it was just a response to trauma. It was just shock, you wanting me to…have sex with you. You’re not obligated. I was glad to have helped you during your time of need, to give you some comfort.”