Page 2 of The Grave Between Us
He searched the crowds, scanning and discarding faces left and right, until he found the tall blond man helping a young woman on a snowboard to her feet. He was laughing, and so was a dark-haired man, older than Cole, standing beside him and helping the girl up as well. They both had their hands on her elbows, steadying her. Both had smiles stretching their ruddy cheeks. Both were laughing.
There was something about the way they stood. Angled together, as if they’d just broken apart to catch the girl. They’d been holding hands. He was sure of it.
The girl’s long brunette hair was braided in pigtails, the ends poking out from beneath a knit beanie. She was squawking, grasping the two men with both hands as her snowboard slid out beneath her. She was sixteen, maybe. He’d never been good at guessing young girls’ ages. He didn’t have experience looking their way, letting his eyes travel over their features. For a man like him, any girl under twenty might as well have been fifteen or eleven.
Was she Cole’s daughter? No. It had only been eight years since he’d seen Cole. Cole had been young and single back then. Painfully single, if the hours he showed up at the prison were any indication. No boyfriend or husband to go home to, no child he had to tuck in at night, whisper “Sweet dreams” to as he kissed her brow.
She was the older man’s child, then.
Older man. About the same age as Ian, now. Jealousy slid up his spine. He hissed, almost crumpling his paper coffee cup.
Tell me, do you like your men a little bit older, Cole?
Eight years where he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Cole, and on a bright, sunny day, Cole reappeared in his life. Happy, laughing, and with an older man and a young girl. He’d made himself afamily.
Ian watched as they steadied the girl and led her back to the bunny slope. She turned around and waved as she stood on the moving carpet that took her up the gentle hill. Cole sagged into the older man, who threw an arm around Cole’s shoulders and buried his face in the crook of Cole’s neck. They were laughing again.
So happy. So fucking happy together.
Ian watched the girl bobble down the hill, arms straight out, teetering left and right until she reached the bottom. She was heading straight for Cole and the other man, and she clearly had no idea how to stop. She screamed and then pitched backward, landing on her ass in a puff of snow at their feet. And the routine of helping her up began again.
So fucking happy.
He’d waited for an hour, watching—cravingyearningscreamingragingneeding—until a man coming off the cross-country ski trails stopped at the base area. Ian’s gaze lasered to the man, taking him in micron by micron. He felt the quickening, the heat curling through his blood. He followed the skier into the parking lot, ditching his coffee cup on the way and making a show of looking for his keys. The man glanced at him and then away as he strapped his skis to the roof of his car.
It took nothing at all to come up behind him, to subdue him and bring him down silently. To push him into the back seat of his own car, restrain his hands and legs in plastic ties as he lay unconscious on the cold bench seat. Ian was out of the parking lot and driving the man’s car south, to Ledges, in under a minute.
* * *
It was all wrong.
He’d started the day needing to scratch that itch. He’d needed his moment, his hit, his rush, and instead had found the last thing—the last man—he’d ever expected. The skier was supposed to plug the chasm that had opened inside him when he saw Cole, like shoving chicken bones down a drain to block the deluge.
The man didn’t sound like Cole. He didn’t whimper the way Cole would if Ian were thrusting inside him. He’d had time to imagine how Cole would sound, unfurl the fantasy in his mind, all those days and nights over the past eight years.
Ian fell into the past and into the darkness as he growled, as he thrust. The darkness of a grave, water spilling over the muddy sides, soaking dead skin and swirling in eddies inside open eyes and mouths. His mind kept flashing back to Cole. Haughty, arrogant Cole. Delicious, delectable Cole. The way he’d smelled, the brief taste he’d managed to stealthat dayby the lake.
Cole laughing. Cole smiling. Cole holding hands with that dark-haired older man. Cole across the interrogation table from him, hungry eyes searching inside Ian, trying to unlock all his secrets. Both of Cole’s hands moving over that pencil, over wood and #2 graphite. A young man’s nerves, encased in steel but betrayed by his fingers.
Memories shook his world, made the center of the sun tremble. Snow puffed around the man’s face, screams rising as Ian squeezed tighter. The universe narrowed, focused down to the rush and the tremble of the man beneath him, a fish dying on Ian’s line. He whispered Cole’s name into the skier’s hair, and everything went white, his mind going nova as heat emptied from him—and for an instant, the hunger poured out of him while the man thrashed and weakened and then, finally, went still.
Ian breathed him in, nose buried in the sweaty hair at the nape of the skier’s neck.
Cole.
Wrong, all wrong. That wasn’t the scent he’d held on to for eight years. That wasn’t Cole beneath him.
His rush left as fast as it came, darkness and disgust sliding on its heels. Not what he’d wanted. Not even close. He sighed, pushing off the back of the man’s still head.
There was no substitute for Cole. He’d been a fool to believe that.
What would it be like to take Cole? What would Cole’s fear taste like? Not his youthful nerves. True fear. The slick heat of terror. The stink of it. Ian could almost imagine it, but the true essence eluded him, a shape in darkness or a shadow at midnight. There was nothing he could compare to Cole.
So many different layers to fear. So many different permutations. Different vectors that led straight to the quick. He’d poked at Cole’s psyche all those years ago, had tried to stir those primal fears inside his young mind.
Back then, Cole had so much less to lose.
A teen girl. A dark-haired man. So much fucking happiness.
