“It takes a piece of you to do it,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.”
“I remember the first time I saw it happening to her,” I said. “Her right hand twitched. She made this extra brushstroke and didn’t mean to. The look of fear and anger on her face. She covered it up. But it kept happening. It took a month before her paintings started to look different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Parkinson’s,” I said.
“No.”
“Of everything she had and lost… it wasn’t fair. I wasn’t the greatest of help at that time either. I had gotten involved with Murph and his crew. And I had this girl on my mind…”
“Did you?” Amelia asked.
I grinned. “You have no idea, Amelia.”
You eased a lot of pain, Amelia. But before you there was Delilah. There was what my father did. The horrible things…
“So, while you were telling your friends we were having sex, you were dealing with your grandmother being sick?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Josh… why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were in your own hell. I needed to protect you first. It was dangerous where you were. And what I told Murph and the guys… I had no choice.”
“I know that. I’m not worried about that. What happened to your grandmother?”
“She got worse. By the fucking day. The only thing she wanted was to watch me though. She’d sit in another chair and watch. She pushed me to never stop. To think of new ideas. To create with my heart. I hated every second of it.”
“No, you didn’t…”
“Of course I did. She was dying. She was shaking so badly that she couldn’t eat. The one thing she had for herself she couldn’t do.”
“She had you.”
“And I…” I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. She had me. Until she was gone.”
“So that’s why you do it,” Amelia said. “That’s where it all came from.”
“I guess so,” I said. “That’s why I told you I took off. That night with you…”
“You had so much going on in your life, Josh. And I didn’t know.”
“I told you the truth then.”
“It hurt. To see you leave. And then you were really gone.”
“There was no choice. There were things running through my head. What I wanted to do…”
Amelia swallowed hard and her lips fluttered.
I knew where the conversation was going next.
So I moved at her, to stop her from asking anything else.
Enough was enough for one night.
The only way I could think of keeping her question from being asked was to steal it.
With a kiss.
I held her tight against my body. I tasted the whiskey on her lips and on her tongue. My hands ran up the sides of her body, following the natural curves that made every muscle in my body tighten as I ached for her in a way I never thought could happen. Not just an urge, but a need.
She broke the kiss and put her head back, letting out a breath and a sigh.
My lips touched her neck, my nose smelling the sweetness of her skin.
She clawed at my lower back through my t-shirt.
I kissed up to her ear and brushed my nose against her earlobe, then paused for a second, realizing where this was going.
We were using the pain of the past to try and fix the present. That was a road I had been walking for a long time and it never worked. It never fucking worked. Acting like a drug with a high that lasted a few hours, maybe all night, but by morning, it was the same.
“Josh,” Amelia whispered.
“Talk to me, love,” I whispered into her ear.
She jumped and giggled.
I pulled her closer again.
My hands were over her shirt, at her sides, my thumbs resting just under the swell of her breasts.
“I have to sleep here tonight,” she whispered.
“Already planned on it.”
“I don’t want to sleep on the couch,” she whispered.
“You’re not sleeping on the couch, Amelia.”
“Then where am I sleeping, Josh?”
“In my bed. Where I can keep you safe.”
“Josh…”
“Don’t worry, love, it’s just whiskey and sleep.”
She smiled.
We both knew that was a lie.
It would never be just whiskey and sleep.
Our last goodnight kiss was the tenth kiss.
I kept count.
Which pissed me off.
I was not the kind of guy to keep track of how many times I kissed a woman. Not to mention I was kissing Amelia that many times for that long, in my bed, and nothing else was happening. My hands were strong yet tame, respecting the way she would touch them if I started to move too far up or too far down.
She was torturing me in a way she didn’t calculate on doing, but I understood it.
Getting closer felt inevitable, but that didn’t lessen how risky it was for us.
Our last kiss was my lips to hers.
My last kiss was my lips to her forehead.
I whispered for her to get some sleep and she rolled to her left side and fell asleep.
I watched her, letting the flood of memories hit me.
It took me back… sitting on the edge of her bed so she could fall asleep when she was afraid in her own house. The way her room looked. She had tried so hard to make her bedroom look clean and normal, like a normal girl. But it had been impossible. The look and smell of her room and the entire house was just bad. Just that vibe that the people who lived there weren’t good people.
I hated that she grew up there.
I hated it even more that I couldn’t do anything for her then. My home life was just as bad, if not worse. Those pieces of the puzzle I left out of my story were big ones. Pieces that defined me. Pieces that stuck with me. Pieces that left me writing that letter to Delilah that I lost. The words she’d never see. The words I should have never written. I should have written a letter to someone else. Or just kept my words to myself.
I looked at Amelia as she slept and gritted my teeth.
That was the bigger problem… all the words.
And all the words floated through my head all night.
Being in Amelia’s presence was soothing. But it was a dangerous soothing.
My eyes shut and opened over and over until the sun came up. The first sign of light creeping through the windows, I crept out of the bed and went to make Amelia coffee. She started to stir, so I put a hand to her shoulder.
“Sleep, love,” I whispered. “I want to bring you coffee in bed.”
She let out a purring sound and grinned. That half smile while she was half asleep was deadly for me.
I growled under my breath.
A second later and I wouldn’t have gotten out of the bed at all.
I walked across the hard floors and caught the reflection of myself in the window.
It was a new record for me.
A woman spent the night, and nothing happened. I was making her coffee instead of making plans for her to leave.
Better yet, I didn’t want her to leave.
I didn’t want to look at the clock and think about time or what needed to get done for the day. I wanted to turn the world off and just be with Amelia. Tell her everything else she didn’t know. Touch every strand of hair and every inch of her body. And when the words ran out, there was plenty more I would tell her with my mouth that didn’t require words.