Page 43 of Dread

The bed took our weight. Katy’s skin was warm under my hands. I traced the curve of her waist, the dip above her hip bones, the faint silver marks along her stomach where her body had carried Ellie and rebuilt itself. I put my mouth on them, followed those pale lines slowly with my tongue, and she made a sound against my shoulder, half-laugh, half something else, her fingers tightening in my hair.

“Tickles,” she murmured, and I kept going lower.

I watched her face while I worked her with my mouth -- the furrow between her eyebrows when a sensation landed right, her bottom lip caught between her teeth when it got to be too much, her breath going shallow right before her hips lifted off the mattress on their own. I slowed when she needed slower. Pushed harder when her body asked for it. Her hand found my wrist and guided me, and I let her, because that told me more than instinct alone ever could.

When I finally pushed inside her, Katy slid her hands around my neck and pulled me down to her. I kissed her as I moved, swallowing the sounds she made while her fingers curled against my skin. Whatever control I’d started with disappeared fast. There was nothing clinical about this, nothing measured, and the sound that escaped me when she tightened around my cock belonged entirely to the moment.

“Katy.” I breathed her name against her mouth, then kissed her again before I could say anything else.

She held on as I drove into her, one hand buried in my hair, the other gripping my arm. When her release hit, she broke the kiss and turned her face into the pillow, her body tightening beneath mine. I lasted only moments longer before pleasure overtook me too, my mouth pressed to the curve of her neck as I rode it out with her.

Afterward, we lay tangled. Her head on my chest, her hair spread across my sternum in a way that made the lamp light catch it and turn it amber. My hand moved along her spine -- slow passes, from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine and back again, the cadence of a man who had nothing urgent to do with his hands and had chosen this. Her breath warmed my skin. Even. Deep. The rhythm of someone who had stopped holding tension in her diaphragm and had allowed her body to remember what rest felt like.

The window unit cycled off, leaving the room noticeably warmer. Outside, the perimeter road had gone quiet, and the curtains shifted faintly from the last push of cool air.

We stayed tangled together while our breathing slowed and the heat between us faded. Katy rested against my chest, one leg draped over mine, comfortable enough that neither of us seemed interested in moving. I ran my hand along her back once and left it at her waist.

After a while, Katy lifted her head and propped her chin on my chest. “I keep waiting for it to stop feeling like this.”

I looked at her. Her hair was mussed, strands falling across her cheek and sticking near her temple. I brushed them back, taking my time with it.

I understood what she meant. The difference was, I’d stopped waiting.

“Like what?” I asked.

She pressed her palm flat against my sternum. Right over my heart, her fingers splayed, feeling the beat through skin and bone and whatever else lived between us that neither of us had named. “Safe,” she said.

The word hung between us. Small. Heavy.

I covered her hand with mine. My palm over her knuckles, my fingers folding between hers, and I didn’t answer because the answer lived in the contact -- in the press of her body against mine, in the particular stillness of a house where the smallest door was cracked and a nightlight cast an orange glow into a hallway that no longer needed to be checked twice before bed. She knew. I knew. The space between knowing and saying was its own kind of language, and we had both become fluent in it somewhere between the porch and the bedroom and the kitchen sink where a child had asked for permanence and had been given it without hesitation.

We lay there. The house held us. The perimeter road stayed quiet.

I kept my hand over hers while she rested against me. The bedside lamp lit the rumpled sheets and the clothes we’d left scattered nearby, evidence of how thoroughly my bedroom had changed since Katy came into it. I’d spent the day thinking about cameras, the service road, and a man whose location we still couldn’t pin down. Lying there with her, I realized I hadn’t thought about any of it for several minutes. I wasn’t checking the clock or planning what needed to happen next. For once, my attention stayed exactly where I wanted it -- on the woman beside me.

Chapter Fourteen

Katy

The heat hit me the moment I pushed through the glass doors. Mid-afternoon Missouri, the kind of heat that sat on your skin like something alive, and I shifted the paper bags in my arms and squinted across the parking lot toward the SUV where it sat baking in the sun.

Three days of nothing. Three days of the clinic feeds showing empty parking lots and quiet service roads. Three days of Cotton at the gate with his green eyes and his two-finger wave, three days of Dread coming home from work and checking the deadbolt and not saying the words we were both thinking because saying them made them real, and somewhere in that stretch of ordinary caution, I had started to believe it was over. That he’d given up. That the man in the gray hoodie had looked at the compound fence and the brothers on rotation and had weighed the odds and found them wanting.

The grocery bags were heavy. Bread, the kind Dread liked with the seeds in the crust. Milk. A carton of orange juice because Ellie had finished the last one at breakfast and left the empty box in the refrigerator door, same as always, as if the carton itself were a request. My purse hung from my right shoulder, the strap cutting into the cotton of my T-shirt, and I adjusted it with my elbow and kept walking.

The parking lot was mostly empty, its asphalt cracked in places where tree roots had buckled the surface. A county maintenance truck sat near the far entrance, nobody in it. An elderly woman loading bags into a sedan three spaces down, her movements slow and deliberate in the heat. The sky above was white-blue, cloudless, the kind of sky that offered no shade and no apology.

I heard the engine before I saw the truck. A low rumble from somewhere behind the storefront, the note of an American V8 idling too slow for the heat, and something in my lower back went tight, same reflex as always when a sound didn’t belong. I didn’t turn. Kept walking. My keys were in my right pocket, my hand already moving toward them, and the SUV was twenty feet away, both too far and not far enough.

The truck rolled into my peripheral vision as I reached the driver’s door. Dark blue. Chevy pickup, older model, the kind with the rounded wheel wells and the chrome grille that had gone dull with road salt and neglect. It came in behind my bumper at an angle, slow, deliberate, the front tires stopping six inches from my rear quarter panel in a way that left no room for the SUV to back out. Blocking me. The positioning of it was so exact it had to be rehearsed.

The passenger mirror was cracked. A spiderweb fracture across the glass, the kind that came from an impact hard enough to leave a pattern. That detail lodged itself with the perfect, useless clarity irrelevant things get in a crisis -- and then the driver’s door opened and Marcus stepped out.

He was thicker. Not fat. Built. The kind of thickness that came from five years of prison iron and nothing else to do with your hands, his shoulders broader than I remembered, his arms carrying a definition that hadn’t been there in Indiana. His face was the same. That was the worst part. The same jaw, the same flat affect around the mouth, the same eyes that had looked at me across an Indiana kitchen while his hands found my throat.

He didn’t run. Didn’t shout. Just walked around the front of the truck with his hands at his sides and his pace unhurried, the particular economy of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it.

His fingers closed around my upper arm. Four points of contact, his thumb digging into the bicep, his other three fingers finding the tricep from behind, and the grip was so sudden and so precise that the paper bags dropped from my hands before I could stop them. They hit the asphalt with a soft thud. The orange juice carton split along its seam, the cardboard giving way, and bright liquid spread across the hot pavement in a fan that reached the tires of both vehicles and kept going, thin and viscous and orange in the Missouri sun.