As much as I love Kat, I also hate her. Dueling emotions fight inside me for dominance. I’m a changed man with a cold broken heart that only her love and adoration can thaw. I want to shower her with love and punish her for what she did to me—to us.
Legs parted, she slides her hands down to her pussy. She knows exactly what she’s doing. Driving me mad. Kat’s playing with fire, and she doesn’t even know it. I’m no longer the optimistic and earnest boy she grew up with. It would seem she’s changed, too. Little Katelyn Shaw is now a seductress, a goddess I’m going to have begging on her knees.
Her panties feel so good, like I’m close to her in a fucked-up way. I jerk faster as my balls tighten, the need to come heady and consuming. Her head falls back, and I know she’s close, too. I recognize her body language, still know the blueprint of her anatomy, the secret tells of her desire. I fist my cock roughly, yanking until my cum explodes all over her panties.
I wave my hand with the lace undergarment up to her in the window to show her how I’ve defiled them, warning her there’s more to come.
The two of us. A fucking combustible disaster waiting to happen.
Chapter 14
Katelyn
What makes staying in Montauk bearable is the beach. So many dark secrets to haunt me, but the waves of this ocean help wash away the evil and console me. I swear I can still hear the faint sound of two young lovers laughing as they splash in the water. My shawl slips off my shoulders as I wander into the tide, and my long gauzy cotton dress blows around me in the balmy erratic wind of the oncoming storm.
The fickle ocean reminds me of him. Beautiful, wild, constant, but unpredictable. Heath has changed. I can see it in his eyes, in the way he moves through the world. He’s hardened, and whatever experience he’s had in the last five years has unmoored him, taught him to rely only on himself. His trust is gone, and maybe I’m to blame for killing the gentle side of him. But just as time has molded him to be harder, it’s done the same for me. I am not the same girl he fell in love with.
“Kat.” I hear him call to me in my head. “Kat, don’t.”
He used to hate it when I’d go deep into the waves, always worried that if something happened, he couldn’t save me. Heath wasn’t a swimmer, and the ocean held a certain morbid fascination for him. As it should for me, considering my mother walked into these waves and never came out.
I used to ask him what he’d do if I drowned in the waves, caught by a strong current or riptide, and he’d always respond the same way.
I’d follow you, Kat. Because there would be no point in living without you.
I doubt he feels the same way now.
I ignore his distant calls in my head and keep walking forward as if the sea beckons me into its permanent embrace. From what I can tell, it looks like life went on for him. But my life stopped in all the ways that mattered when I pushed him away. He recovered, found success, and I ran from the arms of one abuser to crash into those of another.
Time stopped for me when Heath left Wainscott Hollow. Without Heath, I couldn’t breathe, and I became another shadowy spirit that wandered these shores in mourning. The cherished paths of our love became my plank of penitence, the worn trails of a dead woman walking. I’m glad he moved on with his life, but I’m also jealous of time because for five years it had him, but the clock stopped for me the minute he looked back at me through my window at Wainscott Hollow, and his footsteps took him away.
I finger the silver locket on my neck that I never take off. His mother’s, the one that holds his black and white baby photo, the same locket I told Eddie belonged to my mother so I could have him close to my heart, secretly, forever.
I don’t notice the drop-off since I’m treading water until I try to touch down with my feet, and the sandy bottom has disappeared. The choppy water pulls me under and tugs my form like a ragdoll. The once airy and light cotton dress becomes a heavy entangled web that yanks me under the waves. But the strangest part is that I don’t panic, I don’t feel fear. I don’t care enough to try to fight it. A peculiar calm washes over my tired body and tattered soul, and I resign myself to my fate.
“Kat, Jesus, fuck. Kat. For Christ’s sake.”