Just like that, his words crawl through the cracks in my heart and seal them. I melt into his strong body.
“I don’t know if I know what love is, Selena, but I know this is the closest I’ve felt to another person.” He pulls out of me and turns me to face him. He draws me close to his mouth. “I wanted you to leave because I needed to protect the one person who made me feelsomethingother than numb or angry. The only person capable of humanizing someone as barbaric as me.”
I swallow, his breath mixing with mine. “I don’t know what love is either, Lex. I never have. I just know it wasn’t what I had with my husband, and that’s why I didn’t want to leave you. Leaving meant losing the one thing that made me feel...safe.” The word almost catches in my throat, but I manage to get it out.
Lex buttons his jeans, climbs into the truck bed, and motions to me. I dress and climb up with him. We lie down, and he holds me tight. I feel bad he didn’t finish, especially when he made me come the way he did. I slip my hand down his stomach, but he stops me with a firm grip.
“We’ll play more once we find a cabin. And I’ll give you twice the amount of my come.”
I nod and kiss him before rolling onto my back and staring up at the dark, star-filled sky. I’ve never seen something so beautiful. So peaceful. It feels like home, and I’m surprised how little I miss my family and my old life.
But what can my new life possibly be?
ChapterNineteen
Lex
There it is. A quaint cabin tucked away in the middle of the national park, far away from everyone and everything. The whole outside is natural wood, aging ungracefully. Big solar panels line the moss-covered roof. At least there’s electricity, which is more than I expected. Selena cranes her head to see what I see.
It’s perfect.
We leave the truck a little ways back and follow an overgrown path on foot. She keeps looking at me as we walk, and I know she wants to know why I stopped us from fucking more last night. Her brain is probably in overdrive, trying to figure out what she did wrong. She didn’t do anything wrong. It’s all in my head. Even then, I still did what I needed to do to make her come, because that’s what matters.
There’s no way to explain to her what I felt. In that moment, I realized just how important she was to me. You’d think realizing that would have made me want to keep going. Fuck her better. But the foreign, uncomfortable feeling did the opposite. It made me close up.
I knew what to do with her pussy but not her heart.
I’ll make it up to her. I’ll make her forget I ever stopped us last night.
“What do we do if someone is home?” I ask, trying to get out of my head because it’s not a place I like to stay in.
“Get rid of them,” she says without looking away from the cabin in front of us.
There she goes, surprising me again with how dark and dangerous she’s become.
“Sadistic fucking rabbit,” I say through gritted teeth. I feel guilty that she has no qualms about killing someone else. Decades of coldness froze me. She may have warmed me, but she’s also taking my coldness as her own. Now I’m freezing her. Even thawed, I have no issue killing, and that’s how I know just how fucked I am. But she doesn’t deserve this.
We stop just outside the yard behind some trees and bushes. We watch and wait, but there aren’t signs of anyone having been there in a while. Weeds grow upward and have overtaken a wheelbarrow leaned against the wall of a shed. Its tire has been reduced to a pile of melted rubber beneath it. Tattered curtains line some of the windows, which are dirty and broken in some places.
We head toward the front door, looking over our shoulders. I rub my hand along the rickety wooden door. Humidity has warped its edges. I grab the doorknob, and it turns with a rattle because of a missing screw. The moment I open the door, I smell it. I recognize the scent as if I’m thrown back into my childhood within one breath.
“What’s that smell?” she asks as she covers her nose with her hand.
“That, rabbit, is the smell of death.”
Her eyes widen. “What do you mean?”
I motion for her to wait here. I don’t need to worry about protecting us both, but that smell makes me fairly certain I know what’s home, and it’s not someone living. “Just stay here for a minute,” I tell her as I load a round in the rifle.
The smell intensifies as I walk toward the back of the cabin. When I turn the corner, I see a man in a recliner. He’s slumped over, the television’s remote still in his mottled hand. His face is gray, but he hasn’t been dead all that long.
I’m so used to the smell that I hardly notice it at all. I’m almost completely nose blind to the familiarity. “Well, that’s fucking convenient,” I say through a laugh.
I can’t help but think the luck is from her stupid little rabbit’s foot, which is nestled in my pocket.
I go back to the front door and find Selena still covering her nose. “Can’t kill what’s already dead,” I tell her.
“What?” she asks, breathing through her mouth.