Page 23 of Skin
He takes two glasses from the man behind the bar and turns to me, walking over to the couch where I’m sitting at a table in the main ballroom.
“If you need or want anything else, you’ll tell me,” he says. His warmth envelopes me and I slide closer to him without even an ounce of hesitation.
“I will,” I say. I smile up at him, his perfectly sexy smirk playing against his lips. “But I can’t imagine anything better than this right now.”
“I just need to know one thing,” Gabe says, caressing my hair, taking my face in his strong, dominant hands. “Why were you in that place? Because that wasn’t for you.This,” he says, pressing one finger under my chin and kissing me tenderly, “is for you.”
I turn away from him slightly, but I’m still drawn to him. I want to tell him why I was there - why I wasreallythere, but I don’t think he really wants to know.
“You already know why,” I reply. “I landed there because I needed the money. A girlfriend of mine from college told me about this gig as a massage therapist, and she said you could make some pretty good money from tips. I didn’t...I didn’t realize what kind of place it really was.”
“And you had a contract,” he says authoritatively. “I understand. But that isn’t why you were there.”
“What do you mean?”
My lips tremble as my fingers come to them instinctively.
“You know what I mean, Avery. Why did you need the money?”
“Bills,” I say plainly, my voice cracking slightly. The music around us swells. He is making me confront a part of me that I don’t want to think about right now. “Medical bills. For my father.”
“I understand,” he says. “You are taking care of your father. But who is taking care of you?”
“No,” I exhale, “you don’t understand. Not really. Iwastaking care of him. But he passed last year, and the bills are still around. As a reminder.”
His expression changes. It hardens. He looks down at me with pain and the hardness in his eyes and jaw melt into tenderness.
“That’s why you didn’t want to walk away from that place,” he says. “Because you didn’t want your past to keep haunting you. You wanted the money - excuse me,neededthe money - to keep the ghosts away.”
I swallow thickly. He is the first person I’ve really known who knows where I worked. Knows what kind of place it was. Realizes what even I didn’t realize before.
“Correct,” I say, nodding, my eyes cast down at my lap. “But it wasn’t even working.”
“I can’t keep the ghosts away,” he says, putting his arm around me. “But I can keepyousafe. And taken care of. And the ghosts will fade on their own. In time.”
He isn’t talking about the bill collectors this time, like I was. We both know what he was talking about.
I melt into him, closing my eyes.
I believe him. I can’t help but believe him.
And a feeling of warmth spreads through my body; and I know this is where I belong now.
With him
His.
Gabe
I’ve felt it, too. The wanting. The desire to move on from what you’ve left behind, but having it pull you back.
I used my father’s money to help build this place. I never knew him. I used the money to try to find the woman I was searching for. But it just didn’t work.
I kept coming back here, though. I never knew I didn’t need it.
That was the secret on her face.Thatwas the code I needed to crack. It was the secret I wanted to break into.
She is running away from something she can’t shake loose. And it wasn’t just the fucked up piece of shit men who went into that place to use her and toss her aside.
