Page 43 of Lost Touch

I squeezed my thighs together, wishing I could feel it, my stomach muscles clenching oddly. Had he inspected me after his knot went down again and he slid out of me? Watched his come trickling out of my well-used hole, maybe spread me with his fingers and thumb to see if he’d damaged me? I’d been dead to the world, lying limp and passive for his examination.

I shuddered, my eyes drifting closed. I could imagine it so clearly. Had it aroused him even more, made him hard to touch me like that after he’d literally fucked me unconscious?

“Ash, are you all right?”

My eyes popped open as I let out a startled squeak. Drew had leaned over me, frowning down worriedly.

“I’m fine!”

Drew’s frown deepened. “You’d tell me if you. If I. You’d tell me if I’d done anything to upset you?”

“Other than keeping secrets until I have to pull them out of you with pliers?”

His grim expression melted into a sad half-smile. “Other than that.”

“I’d tell you. And you haven’t.”

He sighed. “Well, then I’m about to upset you a little bit more. Not more about my family!” he added quickly as I popped up on my elbows, my haze of imaginary arousal disrupted by the burst of anger that detonated in my chest. “About you. I found something the other day. I’d meant to tell you at lunch. And then you tried to deep-throat your own hand and I…yeah. I kind of forgot about it until a little while ago. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the second I found something. I’ll dig out the baseball bat if you want.”

My heart had started to thump in a weird, double-triple non-rhythm that felt like I’d always heard a heart attack described.

You couldn’t have a heart attack at twenty-five, right? Well, at least it wouldn’t hurt.

“What did you find?” I asked him, through lips as dry as sandpaper.

Drew leaned back again, retrieving the laptop from where he’d left it further down the bed and turning it so I could see the screen. When he clicked over from whatever tab he’d had open in front of it, the first thing I saw was my own smiling face: the same photo that’d been in the missing persons database.

Except it wasn’tonlymy face. This photo included another guy, his head leaned in close to mine, black hair tousled and a cocky smile on his all-American-good-looking face.

My first absurd, inane thought:Well, I certainly have a type.

And then the real point of it hit me:This is someone who knows me.

My breath caught, and I couldn’t look away, staring at that unknown man as if the force of my will could bust through the screen and wrench the truth out of him.

“Where did you find this?” My voice didn’t even sound like mine, thin and shaky.

“I had to use a few different image search tools, because partial images aren’t that easy to pin down,” Drew said, his own tone very even, as if compensating for my impending freak-out. “But this came up on a social media profile. Shitty privacy settings,” he added disapprovingly, as if he couldn’t help it. Right. Network security. I almost smiled in spite of everything. “I have his name: Clayton Moore. He’s twenty-five, graduated two years ago from the university in the town you supposedly stole that car in, and as far as I can tell, he still lives there. Parties all the time. Dates blondes with big tits and drinks a lot of flavored shots. I’ve got a background check running on him for more practical information.”

Clayton. Clay, maybe? Ash and Clay. There was a combination for you. Had we laughed about that? Had we kissed and touched and…maybe I’d been getting ahead of myself, because that one photo didn’t prove we’d been dating, or even hooking up.

But the body language suggested it. It kind of looked like we might have our arms around each other just out of the frame. Something blue behind us…a couch. We were sitting on a couch. Practically close enough that one of us had to be in the other’s lap—me in his, probably, since he looked a lot bigger than me and would’ve squished me like a bug that never went to the insect gym.

“You want to hear the kicker, though?” Drew asked, more grimly than evenly this time.

Oh boy, did I ever! Christ. “Sure,” I whispered.

“I didn’t even find this photo on Moore’s profile. It was in an older photo album in the profile of a girl who went to the same school. I’m guessing you did, too, based on that, although maybe you were from that town and not a college transplant. There’s no trace of you in Moore’s photos. And I looked through all of them, and what a fucking pleasure that was. Total douchebag, as far as I can tell.”

I mulled that over for a minute, setting aside Drew’s oddly disproportionate anger at Clayton’s lifestyle and doing my best to order my whirling thoughts. It was like trying to pull a single strand out of a tangled ball of thread. My brain felt like it’d been lit on fire.

We looked close in that photo, both physically and emotionally. And he didn’t have a trace of me on his profile.

If these people had been my friends, wouldn’t there have been something about my disappearance? A plea for information? Anything?

“I looked for a profile under my name a couple of weeks ago,” I managed. “I didn’t find anything. I’m guessing you didn’t either? Looking through these people’s friends lists, or whatever?”

Drew shook his head. “Nothing. And most of their friends have their personal info locked down a little better.”

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