Page 27 of Stay Away from Him

This time, the wrong decision could cost Melissa her life.

Thomas burst to his feet, walked jerkily across the room. Melissa gasped at the suddenness of his reaction, startled by his movement. He’d put his boxer briefs back on after they’d finished, but otherwise he was still naked. There was something suddenly animal about him, his muscles straining beneath his skin, sinews and tendons popping taut to the surface. Strength coiled within him, and anger. At the wall next to the door, he cocked his fist back behind his head, and though his clenched hand was pointed in the other direction, away from her, Melissa’s arms jerked instinctively, protectively upward, toward her face. She braced for the sound of his knuckles against the wall, the cracking and crumbling of plaster, but it never came. Just as his fist was about to make contact with the wall, he stopped himself, pulled up short. His body still pulled taut, he simply placed his hand on the wall, flat. Pressed his weight against it, like he wanted to push it down.

“Goddammit,” he whispered.

Then he turned, and Melissa could see his face again. And it was the strangest thing.

The look on his face wasn’t angry.

Thomas was crying. His lips pressed together, folded under, a streak of wet down each of his cheeks.

Melissa couldn’t believe it, didn’t understand. Men were such odd creatures. Their pain always coming out first as anger.

“This again,” he said, almost to himself. “I’ll never be rid of it.”

“Rid of what?”

“Theaccusation,” Thomas said, his voice rising, cresting, then growing soft again. “You’re afraid of me. After everything we said to each other at the bar. After what we just didhere. You’re still afraid.”

His nakedness in the room—the bulk of his thighs, the dimming light playing across the roundedness of his shoulders—underlined for Melissa what he was saying, the vulnerability of what the two of them had just done together. Stripping down to nothing, removing the armor that separated them.Intimacy.Yes, Melissa had wanted him, and it was fun. But it was also risk. Risk for Melissa to bare herself to a man she was still getting to know. And maybe, she was realizing, it was a risk for him too. She hadn’t imagined it before then, that Thomas with his perfect body and his beautiful face and his physical strength might be nervous, might even beafraidto make love to Melissa. But maybe he was.

Maybe he really did adore her. Maybe he really meant it when he said she was beautiful.

Maybehegot butterflies in his stomach when he was around her.

And maybe, by doubting him so soon after he’d made himself vulnerable to her, she’d hurt him without intending to.

“I was telling you the truth back there, you know,” he went on. “There’ve been no women, not since Rose. No one at all, untilyou. You talk about me like I’m this desirable thing, like anyone wouldwant me, but—but did you know that the woman who was at the table when you came out of the bathroom, she didn’t actually come over to flirt with me? She recognized me. From the news. She asked me how it feels to be a murderer. To have killed my wife and gotten away with it. She said that. To myface.”

“Oh, Thomas,” Melissa said, the ache in her voice matching the pain, the hard lump of sympathy, that had risen in her chest. “How awful. I had no idea.”

“Thisis my life,” Thomas said bitterly. “People see me, they recognize me from the news, and they approach me. They think I’m guilty, they think I’m innocent. It doesn’t matter. Everyone has to comment. And thewomen…” He cut himself off and let out an exasperated puff of air. “I suppose some of themhavewanted me, actually.Havefound me attractive. But it’s all been tied up with the accusation that I murdered Rose. Half of them think I didn’t do it, and they want to comfort me. The others think I did it, but it’s some sort of perverse turn-on. Can you believe that? They think I killed Rose, but it doesn’t scare them. Itarousesthem.”

Melissa bit her lip, feeling guilty. Was Thomas describing her without knowing it? In the past twenty-four hours, she’d been on both sides of the dichotomy he described: gossiping with Lawrence about the case and feeling both repulsed and excited by the danger of it, the danger ofThomas—then, in the next moment, imagining him wronged, imagining him innocent, imagining herself as his savior. The woman who could love him back to life.

“Then I finally meet someone I’m actually interested in, someone I really like for a change, someone I might even be capable of falling in love with…”

Melissa let out a gasp at the L-word.Love.

“I like her so much, in fact, that I bring her to my house to meet my daughters. I meet her son. We make love—my first time in years. And it’s beautiful. Everything I’ve been waiting for.” Thomas’sexpression soured. “But then here it is again. Rearing its head. The accusation. Ruining it. Making her afraid of me. Because of this thing, this terrible thing that happened to me—I have to be compared to a bad man. A weak man. A man who hurt her. That’s who I am, in her eyes. I have toprovemyself. Even though that’s not whoIam.”

Melissa let the covers fall away from her, her breasts baring to the late evening light cutting across the room, and moved to the end of the bed. She clasped Thomas’s hand, pulled on it.

“Thomas, stop. It’s all right. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

There was a voice somewhere in the back of her mind, protesting:But you’re right to ask, you’re right to be afraid, you’re right to want him to explain. There’s so much you don’t know. So much you still need to know. What about your safety? What about your son? What about the fact that Thomas is changing the subject, refusing to answer your question?

The voice was soft, though, and small, and it was drowned out by a new fear: the fear that she was about to lose Thomas, and so soon after she’d made him hers.

“You’ve said it, though,” Thomas said. “You can’t take it back.”

“I know,” Melissa said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have doubted you. It was just a moment, okay? A moment of doubt. I’m messed up, remember? My divorce—it messed with my head.”

Thomas looked down at her. “Yeah?”

“I need you,” Melissa said, and in that moment it felt true. “I need you to help me heal, okay? And maybe you need me too.”

She tugged on his hand, and he began to sink once more toward the bed.

---