Say it Louder Page 10

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Righteous Ink is quiet when I enter, scanning the room for Willa’s pink hair.

  “In back.” I recognize the man’s deep voice as Thomas and I find him cleaning equipment in a small tattoo room. When he looks up and recognizes me, he adds, “She’s not here.”

  “I see that. Any idea where she is?”

  “Do you think she’d want you to know?”

  I pause at his direct question, a challenge. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I have to see her. There’re some things …”

  Thomas chuckles. “There are always things. I let her go early today. She had to finish a couple more canvases before she packs them up for the gallery. It’s a good thing for her, a big thing.”

  I nod. “I get it.”

  Thomas narrows his eyes. “I don’t think you do. A girl like her, she doesn’t get a lot of breaks. Has to claw for each thing she’s got.” He eyes my designer jeans and expensive sneakers. “Doesn’t look like you’ve got much experience with that.”

  “Actually, I do.” I grit my teeth, annoyed that I’m always explaining, always apologizing for the success I’ve built with my band and my own hands. “I didn’t grow up with much. I mowed lawns and recycled bottles to earn my first drum kit. I know what it means to work hard to make a dream happen.”

  Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to her, deep beneath the physical. Her focus on her art, her willingness to earn it, are two of the things that drove me hard when our band was starting out. I like that she doesn’t ask for permission.

  Thomas stands, kicking the tattoo artist’s stool under a table, and I follow him to the break room. He pours us each a mug, black, and he takes a chair, nodding at me to sit. I can tell I’m in for a lecture.

  “You don’t know Willa,” he says, and before I can interrupt, he hushes me with a glare. “You don’t. I met her when she was a street kid, shelter-hopping but just managed to earn her GED. I hired her as part of their job-placement program, just to run the desk and clean up around here, plus she was sporting a nasty amateur tattoo that needed fixing. And she liked to draw.”

  I run through what I’ve seen of her arms and he answers my question before it fully forms.

  “The ocean waves. I did that for her after she’d been here a couple of months. Some bastard inked his graffiti tag on her, like she was his property, and she let him because it meant protection. That he could kick her around but nobody else could.”

  He takes a long swallow of coffee. “She said she’d drown him in the deepest ocean if she was ever strong enough. So we did that together. Drowned his name beneath a sea of ink.”

  My mind reels with the weight of each new piece of knowledge. Willa used to be homeless. Things start clicking into place: things she’s said, the way she lives, and the way she moved seamlessly through the camp beneath the rail bridge.

  “Once she turned eighteen, she was shit outta luck in terms of housing, so I helped her out. Let her live with me a couple months.” I glance at Thomas, brimming with questions, and he frowns. “Not like that. I like ‘em pretty, but with a lot more going on between their legs.”

  I press my lips together in silent apology for assuming the worst.

  “She apprenticed for me. Worked her ass off to learn the craft and built her own book of clients and designs. She doesn’t want or need either of us to solve her problems. She can take care of herself.”

  “But I want to help her.” I want—so much more than that too.

  “And she’s not going to thank you for it. She’s going to resent the hell out of you. She earns her own way, doesn’t take handouts. Everyone who’s ever given her something for free has hurt her.”

  That utterly deflates me. Kristina’s affection was always laced with an expectation. I don’t know how to care for a person any other way.

  I want to give Willa things. I see her squalid apartment and I’m afraid for her safety. I could give her money for a better one. Or buy her a real bed, not pallets. Or even an air conditioner to make living in that place more bearable.

  “I won’t hurt her,” I promise him.

  “You won’t mean to, I think,” Thomas says. “Don’t think you can pull out your credit card and buy her a better life.”

  “I won’t—”

  “Save it. Don’t tell her I said anything. Hell, don’t tell her anything at all. Just show up and show her. Show her what she means to you. She’s hard-headed, but that’ll matter to her.”

  I thank Thomas and leave the shop, walking swiftly through the gathering dusk toward Willa’s apartment. I’m more confused than when I went in, but with a deep-set urge simply to get to Willa. She might not need me, but I need her.

  ***

  I process the splintered doorframe in the time it takes me to wait for her to answer my knock. I knock louder, more fearfully, and the door gives a little. I push, and it swings open.

  Darkness inside. Even the bare bulb hanging over the shadowy kitchen area is out.

  “Willa?” I say it tentatively, afraid of what I’ll find past the unlocked door. Worse, the front door to the derelict building was propped open when I arrived, and who knows how long it had been that way. It amounts to zero protection for a woman on her own.

  “Willa?” I say it louder, my eyes straining through the dusky light, my nose picking up the turpentine and paint fumes.

  “Go away.” A small, ragged voice comes from the far corner of her apartment and I fly toward that sound.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She’s huddled on the floor, back to the wall and knees pulled up to her chest, head down. She’s wrapped up so tightly it’s like she wants to disappear. She drags in a shuddering breath and a tiny sob escapes.

  “God, Willa, talk to me. What’s going on? What happened to you?” I try to wrap my arms around her but she stiffens and pulls away from me.

  “I said, go away.”

  “You know I can’t leave you like this.” I glance around the apartment for some kind of lifeline, and I notice it’s kind of empty. More echo. More walls.

  No canvases.

  I reach for her shoulder again, feeling her warmth and the strength of her muscles, the shiver and sob as she chokes down another breath. I ditch my bag and slide down the wall beside her, waiting, just letting her be.

  After several minutes of sniffles and silence, I try another tack. “Did you send them already? Your paintings? To the gallery?” I’m not making much sense with these short little questions, but they’re the wrong thing to say because they set off a fresh round of sobs that Willa doesn’t try to contain.

  I’ve never cried like this. Never seen anyone with this depth of sadness. And yet I feel responsible for it. I helped push the contract through with the gallery and made it all but impossible for her to say no to selling her art.

  It’s just like I bullied my bandmates. My direction was right, it made us a success, but they all ended up hating me a little for pushing so hard.

  And now I’ve done that to Willa. I feel like the worst kind of friend.

  I wrap one arm around her shoulders and put the other under her knees, hauling her into my lap. And I just let her cry, and I kiss her soft hair and smell the eucalyptus in it, and I don’t care that tears or snot or whatever are making a wet mess of the front of my shirt.

  Fuck. I have no idea how I ruined this, but I need to make it right. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you didn’t want this. I’m sorry for pressuring you to sell them.”

  “I didn’t,” she hiccups, and another wave of tears come.

  “You didn’t what?”

  “S—sell them.” She lifts her head and her shadowed expression sends terror and sadness knifing through me. “I didn’t send them to the gallery. They’re not due for a week, but somebody…”

  She collapses against my chest again and my brain supplies the next words as she whispers them.

  “Somebody stole them.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Some of m
y BDSM clients tell me about the lifestyle. While the idea of giving up power to someone else fills me with dread, there’s one thing submissives talk about that fascinates me.

  They call it subspace.

  It’s the point in a scene when they’ve endured so much pain, or so much stimulus, that a switch is flipped in their minds. Some describe it as floating free. Others call it an adrenaline high. All of them tell me it’s a kind of euphoria.

  I think that’s where I must be right now. I’ve cried so long that I’m not sure I have another wave of tears left in me. The pain has burned off every nerve ending. The throbbing in my head shuts down the rest of the world, and I’m just … floating.

  Empty. I poured everything I had into my art, and now it’s gone.

  Nothing left to feel.

  Nothing left to do, with a gallery deadline a week away. They’ll have nothing to hang, and nothing to sell. I’ll embarrass them by failing to deliver, and that will no doubt poison my name for other galleries.

  Dave pulls me closer to his chest, still not speaking. It’s humiliating to lose myself so completely with him, to let him see me at my most vulnerable and broken. But all of my armor has fallen away in despair.

  Dave’s silence is like a death sentence, a noose swaying soundlessly from the gallows.

  “Say something,” I plead.

  “Oh, Willa.” His voice is low and aching, heavy with the sadness that’s blanketed me since the moment I returned home from work to find my door ajar and my workspace cleaned out of every canvas with paint on it. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  For you. Those are the words he doesn’t add, doesn’t need to, but I hear them as clearly as if he spoke them.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I snap. A little spark of anger cuts through my fog of self-pity. “Not helping.”

  “I don’t. I mean, I do. Feel sorry that this happened. I wish I could have—”

  “What? Waved your magical credit-card wand and made the problem go away?” My anger sparks and catches fire, and Dave’s the only one here to take it. “Don’t even go there.”

  “—been here for you.” He cuts me off with a glare. “That’s what I was going to say. I wish I’d been here sooner so I could have been here for you. So you wouldn’t have to deal with this alone.”

  I pull away from him and shakily get to my feet. I dust my hands on my jeans. “Alone is where I’ve been for years. I’m good with alone.”

  Dave stands, taking a step into my personal space, daring me to back away. “Bullshit. You can tell me to back off, or to go away, but don’t lie to me and tell me you’re fine here, alone.”

  “I am fine. I was handling it fine.”

  “Crying in a corner? Aaaangh.” Dave makes a grating, wrong-answer buzzer sound from a game show. “That doesn’t look like handling it. Try again.”

  “I just needed a minute to regroup.”

  “Wrong again. You’ve been here for an hour at least. I stopped by the shop.” Dave’s on a roll now, his anger pushing back against my pain, forcing me to stand taller in resistance. “I’ll take Things That Are True About Willa for five hundred, Alex.”

  I narrow my eyes. I don’t like his attitude, and I give him a little jab in the shoulders.

  Instead of stepping back, he gets in my face. “Go on, give me one true thing. I dare you.”

  “I don’t like you very much right now,” I mutter.

  “Ding, ding, ding!” Dave’s act is obnoxious and strangely disarming. “That answer is true. Give us another, Willa. Something for the people watching at home.”

  I kick at a floorboard that doesn’t lie flat, debating whether to play along. He’s being so positive that it’s pushing me out of the spiral of despair.

  He waits.

  Sounds from beyond my apartment, and our quiet breathing within, stretch the moment longer.

  Still, he waits.

  “This isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” I confess it quietly, eyes downcast.

  Dave stays quiet, opening a space that forces me to fill it, to give him a little more.

  “It’s been seven years since I left a fucked-up foster home.” I don’t color in the details, a groping dad and an alcoholic mom. “I was fifteen and had to figure out how to live in the city on my own.”

  “True.” Dave drops the game show routine to a low, urgent whisper. “Come on, bonus round. Don’t tell me what happened, just tell me how you clawed your way back from it.”

  My mind flashes to my first winter on the streets and I mumble a little of the story. I was unprepared for the bone-deep cold, and I didn’t have any friends. There were plenty of teens like me to bitch and moan to in shelters and social-services lines, but no one I could count on when things got really bad.

  And they did. I had to go to a clinic to get treated for a racking cough that bordered on pneumonia. I was always, always hungry. And never safe.

  “I improvised,” I tell Dave. “I got an under-the-table night job cleaning at a bakery. It was actually kind of the trifecta of awesomeness for someone like me.”

  Dave grins and pulls me back toward him, wrapping his arms around me as I continue.

  “Since I worked nights, I was warm in the bakery and out of the worst cold at night when the shelters fill up. Plus I could eat as much of the reject bread as I wanted. Every morning when I finished my shift, I took a bag of bread back to a camp, and in exchange, this guy Hal let me sleep in his tent until maybe noon.”

  “What was the third part?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said trifecta of awesomeness. There’s got to be a third benefit.”

  “Oh.” I laugh now, but at the time it was serious business, holding my breath each week, hoping to get paid. “I made ten bucks a night. Usually. Sometimes the owner ‘forgot’ to pay me on Sunday, and then Monday or Tuesday would roll around and he’d say I already got paid.”

  Dave holds me tighter, but I don’t feel the wash of pity from him this time, and I’m grateful. He finally relaxes his squeeze and pulls back to look at my face in the dim light. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  I duck my head, embarrassed. “Shut up.”

  Dave’s hand traps my chin and he forces my eyes to meet his. “I mean it. Willa, you’re amazing. You’ve shoveled miles more shit than anyone I know and look at you now. You have a cool job. You have your own place. You make your own rules, and you make time to make art. That’s more than a lot of people I know.”

  His expression darkens and he pulls me in, his lips finding mine, their gentle tease giving way to the scrape of stubble from a hungry mouth that sends a wash of bright color through my body, like paint on a new canvas. His hands plunge into my hair, fingers working my scalp as he fists the pink strands and tugs.

  Tingles race from my scalp to the bottoms of my feet as I revel in the way he’s touching me. Like he’s memorizing my skin, the way our lips feel pressed together, and the way I taste.

  I try to memorize him, too, but my thoughts are swirled in his scent, pine and mint, and everywhere he touches me lights little flames along my skin.

  And suddenly I want more skin. A lot more. Like the way we were that first night, when I could touch his whole back and explore him.

  I break off our kiss and tug at his shirt, pulling it over his head. My chest aches from sobbing, and my cheeks are lined with trails of salt from my tears, but right now I want Dave more than anything.

  I need him to take this all away. Make me forget. I drop his shirt on the floor and pull him toward me, begging him with body for a release from this pain.

  He squeezes me hard, like he’s trying to pull all of my broken pieces together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  For several quiet minutes, I just hold her, feeling her heartbeat.

  I bury my nose in the side of her neck and breathe in the warmth of her skin, the salt from her tears. Her chest hitches with a few more ragged breaths and I wrap my arms around her as tightly as I can
.

  I don’t believe in much—my world’s been turned upside-down in the past couple weeks—but I believe in her.

  My lips slide down her neck, from the hollow behind her ear to her collarbone. Her breasts swell and tighten against my naked chest, her nipples erect beneath her shirt, and my cock hardens against her.

  I’m about to pull away, to give her space, but her hips roll into mine, a delicious acknowledgment of what’s happening between us. The air feels heavier with silence and unspoken want. My skin prickles as she slides soft fingers up my ribcage.

  When her nails scrape the skin on my back I groan, feeling her want so acutely. I shove away questions of right and wrong, of whether being here with her like this—broken and fragile, open and needful—is the right way to show her I care.

  She presses harder into me and I slide my hand from her shoulder to the scant space between us, the rise of her breast, the pebble of her nipple. When my thumb grazes its tip she rolls her head back and gives me a tiny moan of pleasure that can’t be ignored.

  She needs this as much as I do.

  I drop my hands to the hem of her T-shirt and tug it up. She lifts her arms to reveal a simple, no-nonsense black bra. It’s not the kind of lacy Technicolor wisp of lingerie that Kristina favored, but somehow that makes it more enticing because it’s more real.

  Willa is more real, more present with me here than I can ever remember being with a woman.

  I kiss a trail from shoulder to elbow, then across her stomach and up to her sternum as my hands work behind her back. The clasp opens and her bra falls away, my face between her heavy breasts.

  I hold her against me, stumbling to my knees, mouth moving between her breasts, teasing and tugging and licking as she moans and makes whisper-soft pleas and promises.

  Her breathing quickens as I twist a button and unzip the fly on her jeans. I guide them to the floor, then her panties, and though she squirms and her fingers dig into my shoulders, I make my intent absolutely fucking clear.