I push away from him and find Macom standing almost directly behind me. “He tastes better than you.” I step around him and keep walking, straight out of the club door. And I keep walking, tears streaming down my face. I wanted my man to be protective, possessive, even. I’d wanted him to want me that much. But he doesn’t and I either have to leave or find a way to deal with the reality: There is no such thing as a fairy tale. And maybe that’s the problem. I wanted that fairy tale romance that doesn’t exist and I have missed that point. Everyone in that club, including Macom, knows that but me.
The images go dark again, and I feel my heart racing, but the music returns to me. Moonlight Sonata. Soft piano playing. My hand on Nick’s chest, his breathing steady. Calm returns, and I slowly sink back into the music, reveling in the feel of Nick next to me. I fade into sleep, and my mind goes blank, a sense of relaxation overcoming me, but somehow I’m now standing in my mother’s garden. Or above it, looking down. My mother and father are there, kissing and laughing like young lovers, the way I remember them from my youth, but then my uncle walks up, taps my father on the shoulder and my father backs up. My uncle takes my father’s place with my mother and starts to kiss her. My father just watches. I start screaming at him, not them, but it’s like I’m not really there. Like he can’t hear me, or won’t hear me.
I gasp and sit up, blinking into sunlight, a new day already upon us, and Nick is no longer in bed with me. “Faith,” Nick calls out, rushing from the bathroom, now dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt. “Sweetheart. Are you okay?”
“Nightmare,” I say, throwing away the covers and scooting to the side of the bed. “Why are you dressed like that? Don’t you have work?”
“I have a gym in the basement of the house. I was going to ask you to join me, but you were dead to the world. You want to talk about the nightmare?”
I inhale and let it out. “Yes and no.”
He settles on his knee in front of me, his hands under his shirt, and on my knees this time. “You have a few hours before you leave for the gallery, in which you could paint. Maybe you need to paint to clear your mind?”
“How can you know me this well?”
“Because I care enough to pay attention, Faith.”
“Would you ever take me to your club?” I blurt, before I can stop myself.
Something flickers in his eyes, there and gone, in an instant. “Do you want me to?”
“Would you?”
“Never. Not even if you asked.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re mine, Faith, and I don’t share. And for the record, in case you forgot already: I’m yours, too, in all my arrogant glory.”
I’m his and he’s mine. “It was about Macom,” I say. “The nightmare was about Macom. And oddly, my mother.”
“I’m listening,” he says, his expression unreadable.
“I relived the first night Macom tried to share me at the club.”
“Tried?”
“Yes. There was a man who’d always flirted with me, and Macom wanted to watch me with him. I was furious. I left him there to do what he would. I walked home and at first I said that I’d never go back. But then I decided that everyone at that club was smarter than me. They knew that pleasure was pleasure and expecting fairy tale endings was pain. That’s how I went back. That’s how I became truly involved. And that’s how I survived Macom. That’s how I convinced myself we were the best I would ever have.”
“Where does your mother come into play?”
“The images shifted and I was in my mother’s garden. I watched my father kiss my mother and then my uncle showed up, and he backed away. He gave her to him. I was screaming at my father, but he couldn’t hear me. It’s like I wasn’t there. He settled for my mother. He convinced himself they were the best he would ever have. I decided before I ever met you that I was done settling. I just didn’t know where that would lead me or how to get there. Just that I needed to go.”
“And you needed to tell me this why?”
“It led me to you, and while I do not want you to be controlling, I needed you to be the man you were tonight with Macom.”
“Explain, Faith. I need to understand.”
“We have the clubs in our backgrounds. I think I needed…When you took that phone, you made it clear we are just us. I needed to know that we are just us. That you will protect us, not give us away.”
He cups my face, his voice low, raspy. “I will always protect not just us, but you, Faith. And everything I do, I do for you. I need you to remember that. Promise me, you will remember that. Tell me you know that.”
“I do now. I know.”
He pulls away and looks at me. “Don’t forget,” he orders, and on the surface his warning is all alpha male, but beneath it, in his deep blue eyes, there is something more. He lets me see that he is not unbreakable—that perhaps I alone could break him. The way he could break me. Something shifts and expands between us in those moments that I have never felt before. A bond forming that creates a need between us. We need each other. It is wonderful. It is divine. But long minutes after he’s departed for the gym and I stand at the easel with a brush in my hand, I cannot help but wonder—when two people become this vulnerable to each other, when we need each other to keep from shattering, does this mean together we are weaker, or stronger?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nick
“Would you ever take me to your club?”
That is the question beating me to death while I beat a treadmill to death with a fast, hard run, the torment of her question lessened only by my fantasy of beating the shit out of Macom. Though another part of me wants to shake the man’s hand for being stupid enough to lose Faith. I’m the winner in this one, but he also hurt Faith and that part of me that isn’t a nice guy really wants him to pay.
I finish running, and the idea of Faith upstairs waiting on me, has me flipping out the light and skipping the weights. And when I would normally stop by the kitchen for a bottle of water, I continue onward, up the next level of stairs and into the bedroom, where Faith is not. Certain she’s forgot the time and is still painting, I walk down the hallway to her studio, and step through the doorway. Sure enough, Faith is painting, but from the silky sheen of her loose blonde hair, and the faded jeans peeking from her cover-up, she’s already showered and is completely unaware of my presence.
Being absorbed with her work, she doesn’t look up, and God, she’s beautiful when she’s this focused on her art: The graceful way she moves. The way her brow furrows randomly with the strokes of her brush. The way her teeth worry her bottom lip as she tilts her head to study another angle of her work. Curious myself about what is newly developing on her canvas, I ease several feet deeper into the room, and behind her, keeping a distance so as to not break her concentration, but still she doesn’t seem to know I’m present. Bringing her canvas into view, I’m surprised to find red as her master color, rather than her favorite black or gray, the image created appearing to be some sort of skyward half-moon with a circle beneath it. I don’t know what she’s creating, but the red tells me that she’s doing what we discussed and unleashing a different part of herself.