Page 51 of Safe in Shadow
“I think it’s something gifted to those who are between portals. Knowledge that is not truly our own. I recognize languages I never spoke while alive. And I know secrets of pleasure I never would have dared try with a woman in my time. But you... You are so strong all day. It makes sense that you are so ready to rest and rely on my strength at night. All you carry and haul. Lift and drag. Tireless.” Nyx allowed himself to float up from the bed, to carry her with him. “Let me carry everything for you, my love. I can give you that.”
She sighed his name with pure contentment, her beautiful eyes closed, face blissful and serene. “My Nyx.”
“My Grace.” He took her to the window, let his shadows cushion her back, and made love against the backdrop of rain while wrapped in their own black clouds, bodies making their own special kind of lightning.
Chapter Seventeen: The Stranger
The man always made this trip in the late spring. Took the turnpike, so there was a record of his EZ Pass flowing along the highways with clear timestamps, predictable and unmistakable. It was his assigned route, too. No one could ask him why he was there without looking like an ass.
Because it’s my job, idiot. That’s what he’d say if anyone ever asked.
But you weren’t a sales and service rep for twenty-three soul-sucking years on the same hick-town route through the mountains without learning a few of the back roads.
The road from Antonia, Pennsylvania, to Pine Ridge, New York, was his favorite. Two tiny towns that somehow held onto college campuses.
College campuses meant pretty scenery in the spring, right before the summer emptied the campuses.Hiskind of scenery. The girls in their bikinis, white as ghosts, trying to get a tan lying on beach towels stretched on the grass, bodies shiny with oil, trying to bake in the sun while the barely warm air turned their nipples to teasing tents.
All of them. Teases.
And the turnpike meant rest stops. And rest stops meant trucker cast-offs, the lot lizards who charged for sex or bartered their time for a ride to somewhere with new, desperate customers. The rest stops were kept clean and neat in thedaylight, but were littered with human waste after dark. Everywhere he looked, he could see drug-addled bitches with two-tone hair, black roots near the scalp, and frosted blonde mats beyond them.
He didn’t pass over so much as he didn’t see the young African American women in braids or with their lace fronts, or the Latina women with tight jeans and crop tops. The thin, tattooed brunettes with hard mouths and too much eyeliner. The plump, healthy redheads calling everyone “Sugar” in a southern twang. The smiling blondes with shining hair and cowgirl boots, who still looked like they were enjoying themselves.
No. His eyes only saw those thin women who were in their twenties or thirties, but looked a decade older, maybe missing a tooth or two, too much makeup, too little conditioner on dry, overtreated hair. They all smelled of cheap booze, menthols, and something sour. Desperation. If they didn’t smell like that, he didn’t speak to them. They didn’t even register.
He liked to imagine them as those young, pretty things getting tans. He liked to imagine them, all white flesh and hard nipples, on a towel in the grass. Liked to imagine them the way he’d last seen her before she changed. The way she should have stayed.
Only, every time he tried to remember her, the way she was supposed to be, tried to separate these sickening substitutes from her—something happened. His thick glasses, which were forever sliding down his short, snubbed nose, did something funny.
He was onlyimaginingthem there, young and lovely, like they could have been.
Like she could have been, if she’d married him. If she hadn’t stayed at that college getting her tan, her toy boys, her drugs, her drinks, and her party girl reputation.
If she’d come home that summer, like she promised... he wouldn’t have had to go and find her.
He blamed it on his glasses. Fine one second, playing tricks on him the next, no matter what his eye doctor said at each annual exam.
When he was finished showing them how they should spread the towel on the grass—they stopped being substitutes. Started being her.
But they kept ending up the same—well, all but the first one.
The first one was an accident. He only wanted to make her come home—especially when he saw what she’d become. Only twenty-three, and she looked about forty. Meth and alcohol, and speed, and cigs, and sleeping with every fucking frat boy...
That’s when his glasses would unfog, and there would be another pale, washed-up beauty queen. Naked on a towel. In the grass. Unmoving, eyes staring at nothing, mouth silenced.
