Tasting, Finding, Keeping: The Story of Never (33 page)

“I have a right to spend Christmas Eve with my family,” he says indignantly, pointing over at poor Darla who isn't even his child. Obviously, Maple is not his real priority here, not truly. His priority is to claim and own. He wants to see Beth submit to him.
Think dog,
I tell myself as I meet Danny's eyes challengingly and wait for him to spring at me, to tear at my throat with metaphorical teeth. “You've been back, what, a few weeks? And you think you have the authority to tell
me
what to do?”

“Excuse me,” Noah Scott says from the sidelines, but I'm not Noah's concern anymore. I'm Ty's, and he's just gone off the deep end.

Without a word, McCabe releases me, steps forward, and decks Daniel Delphino aka Danny square in the face.

Ty strips off his shirt and steps into the hot water of the shower with a hiss. While I can't deny that he kicked the shit out of Danny Delphino, he didn't escape unscathed.

“You want a raw steak or something to throw on that shiner?” I ask as I lean against the shower door with my shoulder and try not to stare at Ty's rock hard ass glistening with moisture and shrouded with steam.
Remember to breathe, Never.
I tear my gaze away from his body and try to focus on his face as he turns to look at me, letting the water run through his hair and down his face. Ty isn't meeting my eyes, and he isn't answering. In fact, he didn't speak the whole time he was beating the shit out of Danny nor did he say a word after when Noah and I managed to pry the two men apart. Suffice it to say, Beth was not pleased, but Jade was, and India, too, I think. When they came out of their rooms to check on the commotion and saw what was happening, neither of them moved. Jade gazed down with undisguised glee on her face, and India watched with a hopeful but guarded expression. Beth just cried. I slam the butt of my hand into the door and Ty cringes when it shakes. “I had things under control.”

“Did you?” he asks and then he cringes again and turns away from me, grabbing a bottle of shampoo and lathering up his dark, dark hair that glitters like friggin' ebony when it's wet. “He was getting tough with you, Nev.”

“So?” I ask, refusing to admit to myself how nice it was to see Ty's ringed fingers smash into Danny's perfect jaw. Pretty sure he's going to need Botox or some shit to fix that up. “When have I ever needed you to protect me? I am capable of taking care of myself, you know.”

“Maybe, but … ” Ty begins and just stops talking. He's done talking anyway. Before I know what's happening, Ty has my wrist in hand and is pulling me fully clothed into the steam of the shower, slamming my back against the tile wall and kissing the hell out of me. I lift my hands to push against his chest and come across hard, soapy muscles that make my whole body sag like I've just downed a bottle of muscle relaxers.
Wow.
“You're my wife to be. I had to step in there. I'd expect you to do the same for me.” I wrap my arms around Ty's neck and let him kiss my ears, my jawline, my throat.

“That's why you attacked him?” I ask and then follow that serious question up with a moan.

“Yup.”

“That's the only reason?” We both know that it's not, and I'm just waiting for Ty to lie to me, to prove that we're both the same, that I'm not the only one that can make a mistake. Ty pauses his kisses and puts one hand on the wall above my shoulder. The other slides up my side under my soggy sweatshirt, looking for the quickest, easiest way to get it off.

“I'm a whole barrel of reasons, Nev, but I don't want to talk about them.” He pauses and then gives up and uses both hands to tear off the sweater unceremoniously, tossing it out the shower doors and slamming them behind him. “I just want to fuck you and have a very, merry Christmas.” I smile, but the expression is tight. There is so much going on inside Ty's head that it's scary. One phone call is changing everything, and I don't like that. My lover boy is like a ball of yarn, ready to unravel, to roll across the carpet and unwind until he's nothing at all anymore but a tangled mess. I cannot let that happen.

“Something about your mother, obviously,” I say, trying to prompt him into a story, but only if he's ready. If he's not ready then I'm just going to have to wait because to force Ty to open himself up to me when he isn't ready is like asking him to commit emotional suicide, and if I can't live in this world with Ty fucking McCabe by my side, damaged but perfect, then I'd rather throw myself into the sea. Ty stares at me, and he looks pissed, but his hands are massaging my breasts through the white lace of my bra, so I know he's not about to lose it completely. I can still push him a little.

“Should we … should
I
leave tonight? Let you spend Christmas with your sisters and just get this over with? I don't want you to miss out on presents and shit because the bitch decides to up and die on the worst day of the year. She was always like that, selfish. You know?”

“No, I don't know,” I say and Ty stops massaging my breasts. Not good. “Because you never tell me. I don't know anything about your mother except that you stole her rings and that she ran over your cousin with her SUV.” I huff, but I'm not angry at Ty, not really, just at the circumstances of our lives and how fucked up they are.

“She also liked to photograph cars and keep her son in a house with a twice accused child molester, so there's that, too.” He is full on frowning now, standing there soapy and naked and wet and miserable. I don't know if it's because he's really worried about his mom or if he really does hate her as much as he says, but I know I only have one choice in the matter and that is to calm Ty down. He's been guiding me since that day he took me to the clinic and to SOG, and now he needs help. I imagine another dog reference and am surprised at how much that simple idea calms me.
Take control of the leash and when he's calm, reward him.

“Ty,” I begin and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me gently on the lips, nipping lightly with his teeth when he pulls back. It's a weird kiss, like a goodbye or something, and it really freaks me out, so I reach around him and grab hold for dear fucking life. “If you leave without me, I will hunt you down and castrate you.” Ty chuckles, but I'm not done. “And if you leave without opening presents with my sisters, they will collectively hunt you down and kick your ass, so don't suggest it again, you're staying.”

“Beth might be pissed,” he begins, but I reach down and wrap my hand around his surprisingly erect cock.
See, stud. I told you. Even ticked off, he's ready and rearing to go.

“Beth will be fine,” I promise as I use the slippery lather of the shampoo to run my hand back and forth along Ty's shaft, feeling with my fingers, exploring, caressing. We don't do stuff like this often, so it's nice. I'm getting to know Ty's body in a way I've never known anyone else's. I like that. “Now shut the fuck up and kiss me,” I say and Ty makes a small clicking sound in the back of his throat.

“Not until – ” he begins, and I'm forced to increase the strength of my grip until he moans and presses into me, wrapping his long fingers around my biceps as he sucks in a massive breath and lets his head fall back. “Just say it,” he groans, and since I don't know what he's talking about, I continue my journey, stepping in and running my fingers through his hair, pulling his face to mine and kissing him hard and fierce.

“Say what?” I ask as Ty's eyelids flicker closed and his breathing relaxes into a slow, heavy pant.

“Fuck Noah Scott,” he whispers as the muscles in his arms and shoulders tense and he gives fully into the pleasure of my hand, the touch of my lips as I press them into the hollow of his throat. “Say it.”

“Fuck Noah Scott,” I tell him and mean it.

Later that night, I wake to find Ty missing from bed, leaving this warm, empty place where his body had been resting. It's a strange feeling for me to process, but the thought that I now have a 'side' of the bed makes me unbelievably happy while at the same time, I stress because I am so positive that Ty McCabe has run away that by the time I find him smoking on the porch, I have tears in my eyes.

He's shirtless and pretty standing in the bright moonlight that reflects off the snow like a mirror, highlighting the bright butterflies on his hands and arm, turning them neon, spots of color against all of that white. When he hears the screen door, Ty McCabe turns around and finds me with wet cheeks and puffy eyes.

“Babe,” is all he says as he opens his arm and I step into it, comforted by the smell of cigarette smoke and the faint glow of the cherry. Ty drapes himself over me and rests his hand on the porch railing, cig clutched between two fingers. His bracelets are missing so all is strangely quiet when he lifts his smoke up to his mouth for a drag. I miss them already.

“Thought you'd run away,” I say because guys like Ty, well, that's what they do. When he smiles sadly, eyes locked onto the far away and the has been, the past and the positively painful future, I know that I'm still living with that old cloak of shame and doubt draped over my shoulders. Ty is not the same type of man that he once was, and I'm not the same type of woman. We have both come a long way in a short while, and I need to remember that.

“I'm tired of running,” Ty says as he passes the cigarette to me and draws another out of his pocket. I raise it to my lips, but I don't smoke it, just brush it along my mouth until I'm salivating and my heart is pumping a hundred miles an hour. Addiction. It's the second most powerful emotion there is. There's only one that can trump it, and that, that is love. I close my eyes and try to feel Ty's presence, his warmth, his belief that we are worth more in one another's eyes than we were in our own. Love. Love. Love. The only emotion that ranks first in both the pain and pleasure categories on the tumultuous scale of human feeling, the only one that can both start wars and end them, that can kill but that can also make new life. I touch my fingers to my belly and know that this is a good time to tell Ty about our baby. “I guess to move forward, I have to go back?” he asks and I nod.

“Sometimes, the only way to go forward, is to take a few, careful steps back,” I say, echoing the very lesson that Ty taught me before with his patience, his confidence, and his trust. “There's something I want … ” I pause because the words aren't right and they need to be. They need to be just right. “No, something that I
need
to tell you,” I say and the change in Ty is immediate. Behind me, he tenses and his cigarette falls from his hands, tumbles end over end and hits the snow with a hiss. Ty curses and moves away from me, leaving me shivering in the icy cold starlight. “Ty?” I ask as he moves down the steps and into the snow barefoot, retrieves the cig and comes back with a frown on his face.

“What?” he asks and his demeanor is completely different from before, like he's just turned a 180, gone off in the opposite direction and lost touch with reality.
What the hell?
I shift my feet nervously as I look at him and notice that my cigarette has burned down to a dangerous nub. I deposit it into the ashtray next to the porch swing and try to convince myself that there will be no better time than
now
to tell Ty. If I keep waiting for a certain ambiance, a certain facial expression, a specific tone of voice from Ty, then I might be waiting a long, long while. The past few weeks, he's been perfect, but then, he's been focusing on me and my problems, not on his, and despite his calm, quiet strength and reassuring attitude, he has a lot of them. Maybe living vicariously through me has cured some of his aches but not all them. There are things living inside of Ty that even I don't understand. After all, I never worked as a prostitute, never saw my worth in dollar signs and making ends meet. I'm not saying that I'm any better or any less damaged than Ty, only that I don't always understand what he's thinking or why. What I can say and that I do know for sure is that Ty McCabe has not gotten snippy with me in a while, and I know, know, know that at least ninety percent of his attitude is because of his mother. I have to remember that, so I can work gingerly with him, take him under my wing and show him the same love and consideration that he showed me.

“Sit down with me?” I ask as I hold out my hand to indicate the porch swing. Ty looks at it and then at me, and he stares for a long time, eyes shadowed by his position against the moon. I can't see what he's thinking and it makes me nervous. He smiles but there are no dimples, and shakes his head.

“My feet are cold. Let's go back to bed.” Ty holds out his hand and I take it though I don't move. Instead of him pulling me forward, I hold him back and try to look him straight in the face. Once again, like a frightened dog, he won't look at me, turning this way and that like he doesn't want to hear what I have to say.

“Ty, I'm – ”

“Never,” he interrupts and he moves forward, lifting both of his hands so he can take my face between them, kiss my lips with hot fire and draw me into his dark orbit. “I am on overload already, baby. I'm not thinking clearly. I know that, and I'm not afraid to admit it, but whatever you have to say, I won't be able to take it seriously if you tell me now. Can it wait?” My stomach spins and flips and turns over, almost like that bit of Ty that's inside of me is as anxious as he is. I pull away from him and he chases after me, like he thinks I'm trying to run. When I stop at the toilet and throw up Beth's over salted Christmas dinner, Ty breathes a sigh of relief and slumps to the floor in the hallway. “I'm so sorry, Never,” he says, and it almost sounds like he's apologizing for something other than his attitude, like he knows. Like he knows. He knows. I pause and raise my head up, turn slowly to find my lover's head back and his eyes closed.

Ty McCabe knows. He has to know. My eyes widen and I'm glad his are closed because if he saw this expression, he'd know that I was onto him.
You fucking idiot, Never,
I think to myself as I swallow hard and flush the toilet to keep Ty from hearing any sounds that may or may not escape my throat. When did he find out? How does he know? Did Beth tell him? I don't know, but at least things make sense now. His wanting to quit smoking, his refusal to hear what I had to say, his proposal …

Fuck.

His proposal.

I turn back to Ty and see that he's not paying attention to me. He is all up in his head, so buried in that shit that he can barely see what's right in front of him. Normally, the man has little to no difficulty reading me like an open book. As of right now, the book is closed and sitting shelved. Ty McCabe is thinking about his mother and his childhood and his dead cousin and his clients and whatever else it was that made him the way he was. He does not see the look of pain and anger that flashes across my expression as he glances up at me and smiles sadly.

“Get me through this?” he asks, and the plea is too genuine for me to ignore. On shaking hands, I crawl across the floor, touch my fingers to the purple bruise around Ty's dark eye and slump against him. He tugs me against him nice and tight, rings digging into my arm while my hands lay limp in his lap and the blue ring glints at me like a warning.

Did Ty McCabe ask me to marry him because he wanted me or because he knew I was pregnant? I won't know until I ask him, but I can't ask him until he lets me. Right now, Ty is shutdown. If I press the point that he so obviously does not want me to bring up, then I'll only be asking for heartache.

“Of course,” I say to him and then silently, I add,
and then after, I'll find out what you know and how, what your intentions are and how you really feel.
Ty McCabe loves me, but love alone does not a child raise. I have to figure out what's going on, so I can make some decisions. Tough ones. After all, that's what life's about: hard choices and the way we deal with them.

I promise then and there to prove myself not just to Ty, not just to this baby, not just to this family, but to a person long neglected who is overdue for a bit of respect: myself.