Page 109 of Look, Don't Touch

“No.” He kisses my nose and the squints of my eyes. “But I would, which is why they made the deal and allowed me to leave earlier than I told you last night.”

I blink, just now remembering where I am. “How did you find me?”

He smiles, and his severe jaw turns deadly. “Stalker, remember.”

“Nat?” I giggle.

“Nat.” He sets me on my feet and turns me toward the painting. “Do you really think we’ve made no connection?”

I pull his arms around me and hug them close. We have, but it’s been awfully one-sided. Standing here, looking at what we were and knowing what we could be, I want to change that.

“Both my parents are dead. Like you, mine died when I was thirteen. Both together on the same day, like yours did. Only it wasn’t a freak accident.”

His lips brush my temple, and his arms tighten around me. “You don’t have to do this here or now.”

“I do.”

“Okay.” He loosens his hold, grabs my hand, and tugs me to follow. There’s a bench on the far wall. He sits on it, then pulls me onto his lap. His fingers grip my chin and he shifts my gaze to his.

I grab his hand and hold it in my own so tight that I know it must hurt. He only gives me his most attentive eyes.

“My safe word is Aria.”

He nods. He knows it. Though I’ve never used it with him.

“Not because it’s a particularly safe word for me. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s jarring and traumatizing. It’s my mother’s name.”

His thumb strokes my wrist.

“It was a Friday, my dad’s birthday. I was stuck at school, but we—my mom and I—had planned a party for that evening. We’d gotten balloons and streamers and hung them up the night before. I got up early that morning and cooked him pancakes, and my mom helped with the bacon. We had a great time. We hadn’t had many great times recently.”

I draw a deep breath and press my lips to his forehead to center me.

“I should be grateful for that, but somehow, it’s always made it harder. Why did it have to go from so great to so terrible?”

His brows draw down. His gaze searches mine.

“My parents had been having trouble for a couple of years by that point. They never talked about it with me, but my mom was gone a lot, saying she was going to hang with friends. After a while, we knew it wasn’t true. Still, no one said anything. It was like we all held our breath around each other.” I shrug.

“I was antsy to get home that day since things had gone so well that morning. My stomach had been feeling off all day. I suspected it was from eating too many pancakes, but at lunch, when I stood in front of the entire cafeteria, I found blood in my seat and on my pants.”

He grimaces as though he knows my pain. I’m sure he knows plenty about being embarrassed, humiliated more like it. I hate that he does.

“By the time I had myself situated enough to call home for someone to come get me, there was only an hour until school got out. I thought that was a good thing at the time, that I only had one more hour in the school day because no one answered the phone. I wrapped my jacket around my waist and hid out in the nurse’s office until it was time to get on the bus.”

I look down at my fingers.

“There was this red rim of blood under my fingernails that I couldn’t get out, no matter how many times I washed my hands, like I’d played in it, when in fact, I’d done my best not to touch it at all. I stared at those red rims all the way home. It was the safest place to look when everyone talked about what had happened that day.”

He brings my gaze to his again. His lips graze mine, and then he eases back.

“I turned the knob on the front door with blood under my fingernails and opened it to find two giant pools of blood in the long hallway of our foyer. For several seconds, it didn’t compute. I thought I was going crazy, seeing blood where there wasn’t. Where there shouldn't have been blood.”

I chew the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. I map the slope of his nose and the cut of his jaw, the thicket of his brow, and the pout of his lips to maintain my composure.

“Their bodies, lying twenty feet apart, in the pools of blood told me that this wasn’t an illusion brought on by period pain. My mom was closest to me, just three feet away. Like she’d answered the door and…” I stop and breathe through my nose. “They were staring toward the door, but they didn’t see a thing.” My head shakes. “I must have cried or let out a gasp. The next thing I knew, a man I’d seen talking to my mom in town a few times stepped out of the kitchen, over my dad’s body, and into the hallway.

“He had a knife in one hand and a bloody rag in the other. He’d been cleaning up to make it look like my mom had stabbed my dad fifty-eight times, and then killed herself.” My throat burns. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Because…he stabbed her in the chest. Something she physically couldn’t have done.”

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