One second, I was gabbling a confession, sobbing all over Rocco Noble, the next ripping off my clothes. Mutual and brutal. Want and take. A weird distillation of sex and death.
“Christ. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
Sleeping with strangers was outside my experience. Not on a first date and this definitely wasn’t one of those. Not like that. Not ever.
I felt as if I’d been in a cage fight. My bottom lip was swollen. I had a graze on my knee and a bruise on the inside of my thigh. Rocco wasn’t in much better shape. Any longer, we’d have eaten each other alive. Wondering what the hell had just happened, Scarlet streaked through my mind. Is this how she’d behaved with Bowen? With that overpowering desire to connect, forget, obliterate, at any cost? Passion like that could explain why she’d driven him off the road; one final ‘fuck you’.
I rolled over and studied Rocco’s face, the way his hair fell over his left eye, the smooth planes of his cheeks, the dimple on his chin, those lips that had searched my body. “So, what are you on the run from?” I knew why I was fleeing. But him?
He threw back his head and laughed. “Me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Takes two to tango.” Or, in our case, fuck each other’s brains out.
“I simply went with it.” His top lip curved in a suggestion of a smile. Couldn’t tell whether he was teasing, dissembling, or it was the truth. “You think too much.” He ran an index finger delicately from the corner of my eye down my cheek, along my jawline. Part of me felt relief that there was no deep discussion of feelings, that sex was nothing more than a transaction based on physical attraction and desire. The other part felt leery.
“God, I have to go.” I sat up, scrunching the covers up around my neck. My eyes searched the room for my clothes, which lay scattered, telling their own story.
“Why?”
“Because this is madness. I shouldn’t be here, and you have places to be.”
“Ah, change of plan.”
I gave him a sharp look.
“It’s cool. I didn’t trick you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I took time off to see a good mate who broke off his engagement. Well, he had,” Rocco said, as if his friend were several brain cells short of the full complement. “Seems they’re all loved up and back together again, my services no longer required.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him.
“Honest,” Rocco said, in response to my less than enthusiastic endorsement. “You don’t think I’m that devious, do you? As I recall, you came to me last night.” His smile was warm and trustworthy. When his fingers tiptoed up my naked arm and slipped the covers down, I couldn’t resist.
Early sunshine spilled from the narrow lattice-window across the bed, illuminating the pair of us. To me, it felt like a searchlight.
“You were pretty upset last night,” Rocco said. “Want to talk about it?”
“No.” How could I tell him what I hadn’t told anyone else?
I might have known, I raged. You always were the bloody blue-eyed girl –
Molly, that really isn’t fair. Scarlet blanched, taken aback by the venom pouring out of me.
Not fair? What would Little Miss Perfect know about injustice? How come you get to have when I have to borrow?
Molly, I—
Sure, Mum and Dad helped me out, for which I’m genuinely grateful, but I have to pay it all back
“That’s hardly my fault.”
Yes, it is. You’re always creeping round Mum. Makes me sick.
“Did you know that guilt is the most corrosive of emotions?”
I gave a start, unsettled that this man could read me so well. “Who do you think you are, my shrink?” The attack in my voice was unmistakable.
“I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Yes, you did.” I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. End of.
“Molly, I—”
“If you must know, I laid into my sister a few days before she died.”
“About what?”
“It’s no longer important.” So what if my parents gave her money to buy a house when I’d been forced to take out a loan?
“It clearly is.”
“I was jealous, okay?” Monstrously so. The hitch in my voice gave me away. Quick to pick up on it, Rocco elevated an eyebrow, the intensity of his gaze enough to force false confessions from the innocent. No way could I lie to him, so I told him the truth about my parents’ ‘no strings’ gift to my sister. “When they generously loaned me money for a deposit for my home and business, I’d always been expected to pay it back.”
“And do you?”
“Religiously. Every month.”
He shifted position. The butterfly tattoo on the top of his arm spread its wings. “Could the gift have been part of some sophisticated tax dodge? You said your dad works with your brother-in-law?” Only for now.
“My dad wouldn’t dodge so much as a missing item on a bill. Used to be a police officer.”
“You never discussed it with your parents?”
It would have been the honest thing to do. Scarlet had suggested it, but I didn’t want honesty. I wanted retribution. In that one fatal moment all the jealousy I’d stored for the best part of twenty years came tumbling out and I was savage.
Throughout my tirade, Scarlet stood, white-faced and scared. Worse, I’d never apologised, and I’d never had the balls to talk to Mum and Dad. I could burrow under the covers on Rocco Noble’s bed, but I couldn’t hide from the guilt that cackled at me long and loud. Unsparingly, I described the rest of the argument – my argument –to Rocco. Shoot the messenger was my style because it suited me.
He didn’t excuse the inexcusable, exonerate or let me off, which was pretty honest of him if rather alarming. He shook his head, disappointed, I’m sure. I wasn’t fooled when he gave my shoulder an affectionate squeeze that utterly crushed me inside. “Had Scarlet lived, things would never have been the same afterwards and that’s on me.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know how much I hurt her.”
“Don’t you think you’re over-analysing because of the accident?”
It was a fair observation, but nothing could shift the blame. I’d half-expected him to throw me out once he’d digested how vile I could be.
Feeling as if I’d been hit by a summer cold, I lay exhausted, yet unable to sleep other than in brief snatched moments, Scarlet last on my mind as I dropped off and first as I came to. Staring into the shadows, I pictured her face staring back, haunting. Rocco, when not exploring every inch of my body, slept the way he lived: happy. Disinterested in words, he rarely talked. Me, I only needed to feel something other than the great deadweight of guilt and grief and fear that was weighing me down. Rocco seemed to get it and asked no questions.
I crooked myself up on an elbow. “You said you’d lost someone.”
“My mum. Heart attack,” he said sadly. “We were close, so it was tough.”
Something behind his eyes briefly flared, shattered and drifted away. Is this how I looked to others? His long fingers smoothed the sheet as if to wipe away the past.
“What about your dad?” I said.
“Don’t really see much of him.”
“I can’t imagine what that must be like.” And I couldn’t. Love them or loathe them, we were family, ‘brand Napier’ Scarlet would often joke, that huge source of strength and human weakness. Except one of us was now missing.
And I still didn’t know why.