LITMIR.BIZ

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sixteen. Still angry. And he hadn’t been able to resist her. She’d pouted and toyed with him, then grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him down on the table with her. Her lips had been hot and moist, her tongue rimming his lips, her fingers eager as they pulled his shirt over his head, then ran feather-light over his muscles.

      It had been fast after that. Both of them stripping away each other’s pants and underwear. He’d wrapped his arms around her, kissed her breasts and then, despite all his promises to himself, he’d made love to her with all of the heat of his youth, lost in the warm, the mystery, the sheer feminine thrall of her like he’d been since the first time they’d come together, his knees pushing hard against the felt-covered slate.

      Afterward, sweating, gasping, while he lay naked on the hard surface, she’d pulled herself away and dressed quickly.

      “You don’t have to go,” he said, levering up on an elbow.

      “Yeah…yeah, I do.”

      “Jessie—”

      “Don’t say it, okay?” she insisted, knowing that he was going to promise that he loved her and for the moment, he did, but that was it…only for the moment. They both knew it. She yanked on her clothes and regarded him with sober eyes while he lay on the burgundy felt table, staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own teen angst.

      “I’m going,” she said, pulling her hair through the neck of her shirt and shaking out the long strands.

      “You could stay.”

      “I don’t think so.” She started across the room.

      “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

      “Maybe.” Her tone was fatalistic.

      “Oh, for the love of God, stop that,” he said in a flash of anger. He hated the way she sometimes acted like they were only living for the day, that there would be no tomorrow. “Why do you always do that?”

      “Because you don’t care!”

      Hudson swore under his breath.

      “Don’t lie to yourself,” she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “And quit trying to make yourself the good guy. You want out of this…whatever it is we’ve got going.”

      Before he could stop himself, Hudson bit out, “You’re the one who wants out.”

      She laughed. “Oh, right.”

      He was already reaching for his pants.

      “What about Becca?” she demanded.

      “What about her?”

      “You think I don’t know?” she charged, one foot on the stairs, her head twisted to watch him as he struggled with his zipper. “I see things, y’know. I do. And I see the way you look at her.”

      “I’m sick of fighting,” he muttered, angry at her. At himself. At the fact that there was more than a grain of truth in her charges.

      “Me, too. But…there’s something I need to tell you.”

      “Can’t wait.”

      “Stop being a bastard. I think I might be…in serious trouble…”

      Jessie was silhouetted by the light from the staircase and there was something in her expression that gave him pause. Something darker than their petty argument, something that made her bite her lower lip, as if she were afraid of the next words she might utter. She gazed down at the bottom step, the one his father had replaced, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the new boards or nails holding the stair in place. She was somewhere else. Lost in her own thoughts.

      “What?” he asked.

      “Trouble. Serious trouble.” She wouldn’t look at him.

      Swallowing hard, he prepared himself for the fact that she might be admitting she was pregnant. No matter what she tells you, you have to be a man, Walker. Tough up.

      She looked up at him, worry and more—terror?—shadowing her eyes. “Trouble’s coming to find me,” she said almost inaudibly over the rumble of the furnace and the frantic beating of his own heart.

      “What kind of trouble?”

      “Bad trouble.” She ran a hand nervously through her hair, pushing the golden brown strands from her face. Her fingers trembled slightly. “I don’t know what I was thinking…I…I should have stopped. But I just couldn’t.”

      “Stopped what?”

      “Searching.”

      “Searching for what?” he asked, totally confounded. She wasn’t pregnant? Relief washed over him, but still he was confused. He crossed to her and reached for her hand resting on the banister.

      Instead of explaining further, she changed her mood in her quicksilver way. As if by sheer willpower, she straightened up, then winked at him slyly and said, “You’re not over me, no matter what you think. You’re hooked.”

      Hudson stared down at her. She was like that. One way one moment, completely changed the next.

      “I’m in your blood,” she said.

      And then she was gone.

      She’d run up the stairs and out the back door, and as he’d followed and reached the porch, he heard the engine of her car turn over. From the porch he watched the glow of her taillights disappear in the rising fog.

      Now he trudged back up the stairs, hearing the ancient boards creak under his weight.

      He’d never seen her again.

      And what had he done after Jessie disappeared that night twenty years ago? Mourned? Grieved? Longed for her return?

      Well, maybe he had a little, in the beginning. Then there had been the questions from the cops and the wondering, always the wondering what had happened to the girl he was supposed to have loved.

      But in the end he’d sought solace, comfort, and a chance to forget in sex with Becca. Yes, it had been a few years later, but it hadn’t felt right. He’d wanted to drown himself in her, but Jessie’s face, her voice, her ways…had never gone away, not completely.

      Had it been his own guilt eating at him? Undoubtedly. But that feeling had been real and raw enough that it had forced him to give up on Becca. Forced him to discover a new life. Forced him to move on.

      I see things… That’s what she’d said, what Tamara had echoed tonight at the restaurant. It was as if they, the friends who’d known her, understood that she was different, a bit ethereal.

      He drained his glass, left it in the sink, then walked into his living room and threw himself down on the sofa. The blank screen of the television stared at him but his mind was viewing a film of its own making.

      Were those Jessie’s bones found in the maze? The only news released through the media was that they belonged to a young female victim. Nobody was saying whether they’d been lying there twenty years or if they were newly deposited. The police were mum, and the story had been eclipsed by more recent local news: a murder apparently from a burglary gone wrong; flooding along lower elevations from a rapidly melting snowpack; a defendant in a criminal trial suddenly hauling off and smacking his own lawyer in the face.

      Hudson sighed. He’d been running for years from thoughts of Jessie…and Becca. He’d been running for years from his own feelings. Regardless of what was decided about the bones found at the base of the Madonna statue, maybe it was time to remember, think, even conjecture. Figure out what happened, if anyone could.

      It was time to stop running.

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