Tease Me

  believe that?”

  Another teardrop landed beside the first. Her sniff was scarcely audible, as if she’d learned long ago how to cry in silence.

  He reached to tuck her hair behind her ear so he could see her face, and her tears didn’t bother him half as much as the bruise on her cheek did. His fingertips hovered over the mark, but he didn’t touch her. He had no business touching her. He dropped his hand and clenched it into a fist on his knee. How could he reach this woman? He knew what it was like to be a bullet train on a collision course with a reinforced brick wall. And yes, he’d often thought that everyone would be better off if they let him run headlong into it. Jacob had tried to stop the inevitable crash, but he hadn’t been able to reach Adam. Only Madison had gotten through to him. What had she done that was so different from what Jacob had done? He thought back to their early sessions, when he’d been too angry with the world to even answer her questions, and then to the session when he’d finally opened up. What had she done differently?

  She’d been patient. She’d found common ground. And most importantly, she’d listened without judgment. Adam could do that for Nikki if she was willing to open up. He knew it wasn’t the guy who’d bruised her face that had broken her spirit. Her wounds were deep and emotional. They’d been scored into her soul long ago.

  “Sometimes I think I hate my mother more than I hate my father,” Adam said. He rested his hands against the dry wood of the table on either side of his hips and leaned back, just shooting the breeze.

  Nikki wiped her face on the hem of her T-shirt and angled away from him. “Why’s that?” she said after a long moment.

  “Maybe he’s a twisted son of a bitch, but at least he was there. She knew what my father was like, knew he was an addict and abusive. She ran, and I’m glad she got away from him, but she didn’t take me with her. She just left me there with him, knowing he’d hurt me. I always hoped she’d get her shit together and come back for me and make it all better, but she never did.”

  It had been Madison who’d made him face the hatred toward his mother that he hadn’t even recognized and move forward. What was he going to do without Madison in his life? Go back to being bitter and angry and high out of his fucking mind because it was the only way he could function through the pain? But that wasn’t functioning at all. That wasn’t even living.

  Without Madison’s direction, he didn’t know where he’d end up or where was headed. He didn’t want to be that guy anymore, but that guy was who he was used to being. That guy was the person he knew how to be. He knew how to avoid reality. He knew how to be a junkie. He still didn’t know how to be clean. He was clean, but he had no idea how to feel normal in this new skin. It seemed too small for him, like he needed to climb out of it.

  He glanced at Nikki, wondering if sex was how she dealt with her pain, if sex was her narcotic. “Did anyone know what your father was doing to you?”

  Her head jerked slightly in his direction, and she peered at him out of the corner of her eye.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said and lay back on the tabletop, his feet still resting on the bench. He threaded his fingers together, put them behind his head, and stared up at the sky. Puffs of white floated lazily across a field of azure. He searched the heavens for familiar shapes in the clouds. “That one looks like a turtle.”

  “What?”

  “That cloud,” he said. “It looks like a turtle.”

  Nikki turned her face upward, her eyes scanning the sky. “Where?”

  “Right there.” He nodded toward the turtle-shaped cloud above.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Come down here.”

  She offered him a look of uncertainty, her brows drawn together, split lip puckered out slightly. He supposed she thought he was trying to make a move on her, but really, he just wanted her to let her guard down. He had no idea why he wanted her to confide in him. Maybe he was full of himself, thinking that he might be able to offer her some comfort by showing her that he was as fucked up as she was and hey, that was okay, everyone was fucked up in one way or another. The two of them just happened to have an extra pound or two of baggage to deal with.

  He turned his attention back to the sky. “Rabbit.”

  She lay back on the table beside him, mimicking his position, her bent elbow inches from his. “All I see is a cupcake,” she said after a moment.

  “Where?”

  She pulled one arm out from under her head to point at a cloud. “Right there.”

  “Are you blind?” he said. “That’s a turtle.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like a turtle.”

  “It does if you squint at it like this.” He squeezed his eyes completely shut, and she laughed. Music to his ears.

  “There’s a carrot!”

  He opened his eyes and followed her pointing finger to a cloud obviously shaped like a bunny.

  “That’s a rabbit,” he said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s a carrot.”

  He took her wrist and traced the outline of a rabbit around the cloud.

  “Rabbit,” he insisted.

  She retraced the shape of a carrot in what he’d seen as the rabbit’s ears. “Carrot.”

  They lay there for a long while, disagreeing on cloud shapes. He always saw animals. She always saw food. After a while, she took his hand and held it gently. He let her hold it. Her touch wasn’t sexual—he knew the difference—it was a hand in need of something to hold on to. A hand in search of something solid and real. He knew that feeling well. He remembered the first time Madison had held his hand during a session. It had been innocent on her part, but it had completely changed his mindset. For the first time, he’d craved someone’s touch to remind him that he wasn’t alone in his struggles. She was there for him. Eventually that craving had turned sexual, but it hadn’t started that way. He had to tread lightly here, with Nikki. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea. He didn’t want her to think he could be interested in her. Not because she was unworthy, but because someone else already owned his heart, even if she didn’t want it. He turned his head to look at Nikki and found her staring at him intently.

  “My mother knew,” she said.

  She didn’t need to explain further. He knew she was answering his question from earlier. And he’d figured that would be her answer.

  One wounded beast recognized the wounds in another.

  Something clicked in his mind, and he could see the two of them lying side by side in the sweltering desert sand watching things far more sinister than clouds above them. And then words echoed through his brain as if someone was whispering in his ear.

  One wounded beast recognizes another

  Together we watch the buzzards circle

  Who will be the first torn to shreds?

  I can’t watch

  Close my eyes

  Behind blistered eyelids I see nothing but red

  I still feel the pain though I must be dead

  Eaten alive

  I’ll take the coward’s way and beg it ends

  I’ll go first; say goodbye, my friends

  Devoured from the inside

  Never to finish life’s ride

  Better dead than outliving your screams

  Better dead than forgetting your dreams

  Better dead than lying in wait

  Kissing the devil might change my fate

  I’ve touched brimstone; why hesitate?

  She’ll wait for me at the pearly gates

  But will only be disappointed

  When she realizes she’ll spend her eternity alone

  As I rot in Hell

  Adam sucked in a breath and held it, waiting for more words to come. He needed to write them down before he forgot them. The lyrics were rough, but he could use them in a song. Part of him—that part that wrote the songs that made Sole Regret what it was—had missed this darkness, the morbid place where his creativity dwelled. But most of him missed the light in his lif
e. Madison had been gone only hours, and already he was in full mourning. Full darkness. How dark would it get before he fractured completely? He could already feel the cracks forming in his soul. It was only a matter of time before it shattered.

  Adam sat up and gently pulled his hand from Nikki’s. She blinked up at him.

  “Will you wait here for a minute?” he asked. He needed something to write on and had nothing with him.

  “I guess.”

  “You want a beer while I’m up?”

  “Are you going to throw the bottle against the side of the bus after I finish it?”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her. “If I feel like it.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, I’d like a beer. Unless you have something stronger.”

  Adam shook his head. Something stronger always led him to trouble. And he would avoid that trouble for as long as he was able.

  “A beer is fine.” Nikki tilted her face to the sky. Sunlight kissed her smooth cheek and danced in the blue of her sad eyes. Watching her, Adam was struck by another spark of creative inspiration. He really needed a pencil and paper. Maybe he should start carrying a notebook around in his pocket again. He hadn’t done so for a long while. Hadn’t needed to. Because when his life had gotten light, his creativity had fallen silent.

  On the bus he grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge before he dug one of his sketchbooks and several charcoal pencils out from under his bunk mattress. He tucked the pad under his arm and headed back to the picnic table behind the bus, replaying the lyrics in his head and searching for more.

  Nikki hadn’t moved from the spot he’d left her, but she wasn’t staring up at the clouds. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, her lips pursed together, brow knotted as if she were in pain.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as he settled on the surface of the picnic table beside her.

  Her hand shot out and scrambled to find his. Only when she had it clutched firmly in her own did her body relax and her breathing begin to slow.

  “I don’t like to be alone,” she said in a whisper. “When I’m alone, bad things happen.”

  “Is that why you’re so clingy with Melanie?”

  Her eyes snapped open, and she glared at him. “I’m not clingy.”

  He huffed in amused disbelief. “If you say so.”

  Her hold loosened slowly until she released his hand. He flipped open his sketch pad and wrote when I’m alone, bad things happen on one page. Something about that sentence struck a chord with him. He then flipped to a clean sheet and, along the left margin, he wrote the words that had come to him earlier.

  “What are you doing?” Nikki asked.

  “Writing something.”

  “Yeah, I sort of figured that out. What are you writing?”

  “Song lyrics.”

  She lifted her head off the table and craned her neck to try to see what he was hurriedly scrawling across the page. He pulled the notebook up against his chest and lifted an eyebrow at her.

  “Do I need to ask you to leave? This is top secret.”

  She released a heavy sigh and flopped back on the table. “You know I’m a huge Sole Regret fan, right? You can’t really expect me to not sneak a peek.”

  A shadow crossed one of her eyes. Reminded him of a skull. Lyrics abandoned, he began to sketch her face, half in its realistic, lovely perfection, the other half exposed to the bone, and her flesh picked clean by the two buzzards he drew flapping their wings on the stark ground beside her as they fought over the heart they’d torn free from the now empty hole in her chest.

  “Are you drawing something?” Nikki asked after several long moments of silence.

  “Yeah.”

  Before he could stop her, she grabbed the edge of the sketch pad and tipped it toward her. Her breath caught.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure how upset she’d be to see herself drawn that way, half her flesh gone. Her chest an empty chasm.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  Beautiful? Not exactly the reaction he’d expected.

  “Where did you learn to draw like that?” She pulled herself up to sit beside him, her fingers tracing the penciled lines of her face and then the bones of her skull. Her touch was light enough that she didn’t smudge the charcoal. He wasn’t sure why her interest in the drawing made his heart thud against his ribs. Her fingertips hesitated over the pair of birds wrenching her heart in two directions.

  “My parents . . .” she whispered and then looked up at him for validation.

  He nodded and stroked a hand over the back of her head. Her brown hair was like silk beneath his fingertips. “It isn’t bad enough that they rip your heart out, but it’s as if they’re fighting over who gets to hurt you more.”

  “Yes, exactly like that.” Nikki considered him for a moment, her gaze searching his face and then meeting his eyes. “You’re different when you’re with someone one on one.”

  He lifted a brow at her.

  “Good different,” she said hurriedly. “I always thought you were so cool and pretty much an asshole, but you’re really kind. And deep.” She furrowed her brow at him. “And . . .”

  “Scary.”

  She laughed. “No, not scary. Dark, but not scary. The realism of that chest wound you drew . . . Pretty gory. And those lyrics?” She grinned. “They are a little scary.”

  Adam hugged the sketch pad to his chest again. He’d forgotten that he’d written them along the margin.

  “You weren’t supposed to see those.”

  “Sorry. I told you I was a fan. I couldn’t help it. They’re truly amazing. Have you written any other lyrics?”

  He snorted. “Just every song Sole Regret has ever released.”

  “No shit? Maybe you are scary,” she said. “In a good way, of course.”

  “Lie back so I can finish my drawing,” he said.

  She leaned back and settled on the surface of the table again.

  “I always assumed that as the singer, Shade wrote your lyrics,” she said. “You have no idea how many times I’ve lied awake listening to him sing those words to me. Screaming them in my ear. Imagining he’d written them for me because they touched me so deeply and kept my hope alive. I was so infatuated with him and the songs he sang just for me. And all along it was you who wrote the songs.” She glanced at him and grinned. “So I should have been trying to get into your pants all this time instead of Shade’s.”

  He shook his head at her. “I already said I’m not interested in sex.”

  “But we can be friends?” she said, and the innocent lilt to her voice made his heart clench.

  “Yeah, we can be friends.”

  She reached for his knee and gave it a squeeze.

  “Just friends,” he added, eyeing her hand pointedly.

  The offending hand slid from his knee, and she moved it to rest on the top of her head as she continued to gaze up at the sky. Apparently, being just friends meant that she should talk his ear off while he continued to add details to his sketch. As he drew the lines of her slender arm, she told him about how she met Melanie when they were children. And as he added the details of her fingernails and the creases and texture of her delicate hands, she told him how she’d gone to college with Melanie, skipping over the horrors of her adolescent family life because it had been devoid of Melanie. And as he tried imagining her bare breasts—yeah, it was a tough job—so he could do a decent job of drawing them around the gaping wound in her chest, she told him how Melanie always saved her from herself. Nikki had a thing for Gabe’s new flame. Even though it wasn’t any of Adam’s business, he should probably clue the guy in or someone was bound to get hurt. And in his experience, it tended to be the guy half of the relationship that was left with his heart shredded and who ended up drowning his sorrows in a bottle of beer or drawing Madison’s perfect tits on another woman’s body.

  I have issues, he thought as he drew an elaborate butterfly resting on the side of Nikki’s head—the
beautiful side of her, not the skeletal side. The butterfly’s wings were poised in mid-downstroke, giving the illusion of movement. The only things he like drawing as much as tits were animals. He hadn’t skimped on the