Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(16)

I leaned over the counter. I wasn’t interested in either the green foot-long stuffed snake or the furry brown dog.

“My girlfriend has a snake. It fits under her neck when she sleeps.”

“Sold!”

He tossed me the prize. “Don’t join the army. You’re a lousy shot.”

“Thanks for the advice!”

Caden put his arm around me, snickering at the kid’s comment. “What else do you want to conquer today?”

“The world!”

Skipping on air, we got popcorn and beer. I forgot to worry about the bite on my neck or how much I’d liked getting it. I let go of the word that brought to mind and all the psychology behind it. I rejected things in myself I was trained to accept in other people, so I didn’t think of the word in relation to myself. I didn’t think about anything but Caden and how happy he looked when he fed me popcorn.

A cheer went up from a crowd, and we turned to it.

A tower crane rose from a fixed base in the water. Cranes were normal in New York, apparently. It seemed as if something was always being built, and of course everything was tall.

But this crane had a person dangling from the end of it. Their arms and legs were splayed like a starfish as the line behind them got longer to lower them to the ground.

“You want to bungee jump?” Caden asked. “Get fear of heights off the table?”

“Could you watch me fall?”

Caden’s parents had died in 9/11. When nothing was found of them but his mother’s shoe, he’d convinced himself they’d jumped over a hundred stories.

“Negative.” He dropped the popcorn container in the trash and held out his hand. “Let’s go.”

I took his hand and pulled him toward the jump. “Watching me fall is a great way of overcoming your own fear.”

He yanked me toward him. “You’d do that for me?”

I looked up at the crane as someone fell, and I shuddered. My first fall was at six years old, from the top of the monkey bars. I’d cut open my lip and broken a clavicle, but what I remembered was how powerless I felt on the way down; how long it took and how many seconds I spent waiting for impact. Then while in the ROTC program at UCLA, I was making out with Scott Verehoven on the high dive, where—being a diver no girl said no to—he was perfectly comfortable. However, I said no because in the first place, I didn’t think he was worth it and in the second, I didn’t think it was safe. Nor did I trust him to keep me from falling. He proved all three points by pushing me over.

The fact that I could swim didn’t make it funny in the least. If I was half afraid of heights from breaking my collarbone on the monkey bars, I was fully terrified once Scott pulled me out of the pool with a sprained neck and half my body richly bruised from my collision with the water.

I wasn’t bungee jumping off a crane. No way. My endorphins had been reabsorbed. I wasn’t all-powerful anymore.

“Nope.” My hands slashed the air. “Changed my mind.”

“All right. No heights today. Hey,” he interrupted himself as if that was the only way he was going to say what he needed to. “Last night.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not going to happen again.”

“Oh?” I almost said, “why not?” as if I wanted to get bitten again, which I did. But I didn’t want to tell him that, because there was a name for someone who got sexual pleasure from pain and I wasn’t ready to say it out loud.

“Yeah. And I’m sorry.”

“If you were doing something to be sorry for, I would have said stop.”

“In any case. That wasn’t okay.” He took me by the chin and kissed me. “Thank you.”

He wasn’t getting it. Maybe I wasn’t either.



* * *



We made love that afternoon.

And by “made love,” I mean we fucked passionately and considerately. We used our mouths for pleasure. He eased into me with grace, touched me where I liked to be touched, made sure I came long and hard before he did.

The bite mark was gone the next day, and though I didn’t forget about the self-doubt it had revealed, I didn’t think about it much because I didn’t want to.

Two weeks passed.

I picked up two more clients from Ronin, which pretty much filled my schedule. I seemed to have a gift for counseling and medicating PTSD. Go figure. My military life was of use, and as that became apparent, I missed it less and less.

One night, as I was coming out of the bathroom, I caught Caden looking into an empty corner. I say “caught” because when he heard me, he jumped as if he was doing something wrong, then he passed me to go into the bathroom without saying a word or touching me.

He usually found some way to touch me.

The last lack of affection had ended at the fundraiser where he’d fucked me on a banquet hall table. Brutal sex after days of growing emotional distance. And boom, fixed the next morning as if nothing had happened.

Was he having an affair?

I felt every pulse of blood through my veins, hot with sparking electricity at the thought of his body touching another woman’s.

I breathed through it, telling myself nice things about trust and the basic goodness inside my husband. It worked to clear the room of the noise, but the hum of possibility remained in the corners, cowed but not killed.