Deeper Than Need (3 page)

The chat box stayed empty. CTaz’s name remained, so Noah knew he hadn’t left. A minute ticked away before there was a response, and Noah groaned. “Please, God. Let me get through—”

A letter appeared in the box.

I

For a second that was it.

Then finally, the rest of the kid’s answer came up.

Just don’t know anymore. It’s all getting too hard. Drunk. Sober. It all sucks.

Noah understood that feeling.

You know, C, I understand that. I’ve been there. Drunk, sober … it all sucks. Every day, it seems to get harder,

he told the boy, each word coming from him like he had to carve it out of his own flesh.

If you get drunk tonight, and it makes it a little easier, you’ll want to do it again tomorrow. The next day. The next. But sooner or later, the drinking doesn’t dull whatever is hurting you. It just makes it harder to get through the day. The only way to fix it is to deal with what’s hurting you. I’ll help … when you’re ready to let me.

He would help.

If he could.

After he’d finished chatting with CTaz, or rather when CTaz had decided he’d had enough, Noah had shut down the computer for the night. The forums had been oddly quiet. Sometimes it would be sheer chaos; and other times, next to nothing.

Adam would keep an eye on it for the next few hours, and that left Noah free to deal with his own demons and then collapse. Maybe he’d even be tired enough to sleep.

But first …

Like a puppet on a string, he found himself being pulled to the kitchen. Over the refrigerator, tucked into a cabinet, there was a bottle. If he hadn’t been a tall man, he’d need a ladder or a chair to get to it, but he stood six foot three and getting to it was no trouble.

He pulled it down and stood there, staring at the cut glass, watching as the amber liquor caught the light.

Mesmerizing, really.

His own personal genie in a bottle.

His own personal Pandora’s box.

Moving over to the table, he sat down and placed the bottle in front of him. After Dad had died, this was a ritual Noah had carried out almost every night. It was even the same bottle. Unopened.

Staring into it, tormenting himself, taunting himself.

Reminding himself.

You pulled yourself out of that bottle. You only go back in if you make that choice.

Those had been some of the last words his father had said to Noah before he slid back into a drug-induced stupor as the cancer ravaged his body. Noah had all but begged him not to die.
Please, Dad. I’m not strong enough to do this alone.

You’ve always been strong enough. You just never wanted to see it. It’s time to stand on your own two feet, son.

His own two feet.

Sometimes it got damn hard to balance. Those demons nipped at his heels and he could all but feel himself ready to tumble straight back down into that pit. Over the past few years, though, it seemed like life had gotten easier.

Empty, all but meaningless, except for the kids, but easier. He moved through life in a grey cloud, no color, finding little pleasure in anything, but he managed to exist. It was boring. It was empty. But it was easy.

Days passed when he didn’t crave a drink—the burn of whiskey, the smooth glide of vodka, the casual ease of a few beers, as he just drank the pain away.

He’d even managed to get past the craving for a woman’s soft arms around him, pulling him through the nights so he could sleep without the screams, the memory of bloody swipes on glass, the ghostly echo in his ears:
Trust me.…

Those physical needs became his own personal cross, one he soldiered with until even those began to fade and he all but forgot the way it had felt to slide between a woman’s thighs, to tangle his hands in silken hair as he buried himself inside a welcoming body.

On nights like this, though, when he talked to a kid like CTaz who reminded him so much of himself, it was harder. Nights when all the scabs on the unhealed wounds inside him were ripped off and all the ugly poison came boiling out.

Staring at the bottle, he could almost hear a siren’s call.

Just one drink …

But it had all started with
just one drink.

Shutting the voice down, he continued to sit there. Stare.

Just one drink.
He could all but hear the bottle singing to him.

He could lose himself again. Just for a while. A few days. A few months. The rest of his life.

Would anybody really
care
?

“No,” he said softly, uncertain if he was answering his question or denying the bottle, once again.

Five minutes ticked away and he let himself get up. Tuck the bottle away.

He’d won. Again.

*   *   *

Trinity waited until Micah was sound asleep before she made herself walk through the house.

She’d never, ever admit it to anybody, but this place creeped the hell out of her at night. If she’d come down here to actually
look
at the place before buying it, she didn’t know if she would have made this leap.

She was kind of glad it had turned out this way, though, because she’d needed to get away from New York, from the mess her life had become, away from the stares, the whispers, the pity she saw in everybody’s eyes.

For the most part, she didn’t even regret it.

It wasn’t until nightfall that she had any problems. But come sundown, it was like the house became some nightmare creation. The shadows lay in thick, heavy piles that no amount of light could penetrate and the odd, eerie noises she tried to pass off as the normal sounds of an old house often kept her awake for half the night.

The floorboards seemed to all but vibrate under her feet as she moved across them. She had some horrible, fanciful idea of them shattering under her feet and her falling through into some unknown hell.

“Stop freaking yourself out,” she muttered as she checked the front door. “Otherwise, you’ll have another night where you don’t sleep until three a.m.”

She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since she’d moved here. When she wasn’t tossing and turning because of nightmares about the house, she was tossing and turning because of restless, hot dreams about the oh, so sexy contractor.

Man, what she wouldn’t give for
him
to be dominating her thoughts just then.

She checked the windows in the living room and reminded herself—the windows were being taken care of soon. They couldn’t be first because a few structural things had to be done, but soon the windows would be done. Soon everything would be done.

The windows, opaque and dirty no matter how many times she washed them, never seemed to let enough light through, and she’d taken to leaving them open until it was time to get ready for bed. Paranoia always drove her to double-check and make sure she’d shut and locked them all, and she was finishing up that very task when she came to the final window, the one in the kitchen, facing out over the slow-moving Ohio River.

The distorted mess of the window made it hard to make out anything, but she could just barely make out the way the moon reflected off the water. One day
soon,
she’d be able to stand here and watch through a gorgeous
big
window as the sun set over the river. She could even see it. Leaning in, she checked the lock, tried to tug the window up—

Something moved.

Her breath froze in her throat as a shadow, darker than the other shadows, separated itself from the rest, moving away from the densely wooded section of trees.

There he stood, in the moonlight, staring across the distance at the house.

A man…?

She swallowed, her heart leaping up into her throat.

Instinctively she moved to the side. The lights in the kitchen were off. Nobody could see in—

Leaning back in, she stared back out.

But there was nobody there.

Nothing.

At least nobody she could see.

*   *   *

Sheets tangled around him.

Sweat gleamed on his skin.

His hands clenched into fists while the muscles in his arms bunched. Everything in him was poised, aching, ready.

That was reality.

In his dreams …

Her hair tangled around his hands.

Sweat gleamed on
her
skin.

And he wrapped his hands around her waist, bowing her back over the bed as he bent over her, pressed his lips to her belly.

Noah …

His name was a ragged sigh on her lips, fractured and broken. Nothing had sounded that sweet to him in a long, long while and he eased her back down, settled her on the bed—hers? His? It didn’t matter. Levering himself over her, he stared down into her flushed face, watched as her eyes came to his. She reached up and touched his face.

This isn’t real.
A smile curved her lips.
If it was real, you wouldn’t touch me.

That’s because in real life, I can’t. Here …
He lowered his mouth, touched it to hers.
I can.

She wrapped her arms around him, arched up so that the wet heat of her slid against his cock, teasing and taunting.
Why not?

But he couldn’t think. Not when she moved against him like that. Sliding one palm up the firm length of her thigh, he caught her behind the knee, opened her. The swollen hot flesh of her sex parted slowly and he groaned as he sank into her like glory.

Why not, Noah?

He slanted his mouth over hers, kissed her roughly. He couldn’t think about all the whys, all the reasons … all the excuses.

Let me love you.…

*   *   *

He came awake on a harsh groan, his cock throbbing against his belly, his body rigid, need pounding through him in a heavy, almost vicious torrent.

The image of Trinity beneath him danced through his mind and he growled, shoving the heels of his hands against his eyes in an attempt to banish it from his thoughts, but the memory of her body, imaginary or not, continued to haunt him. His cock throbbed, pulsed in rhythm with his heart as years’ worth of hunger surged to the fore.

He’d gone all this time,
all
this time, and managed to ignore this.
Why
now
?

Because it was Trinity. Because of the way she smiled. Because of the way she moved and the way she laughed and the way her eyes gleamed as her son recounted yet another crazy thought that spun through his mind. Because of the way her hair gleamed gold under the sun and how he thought about fisting his hands in it and holding her steady as he kissed her until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think for want of him.

“This isn’t helping,” he muttered.

He rolled out of bed, well aware of the fact that not much was
going
to help. Unless she showed up at the door, and that would just bring him a different set of problems. He’d gotten himself on level ground after years of digging himself out and he didn’t know how he’d handle it if he fell again.

Fell for
her
and she …

He closed his eyes.

He couldn’t fall again. Not for anybody. Distance was easier.

Safer.

Lonelier.

But safer.

So he’d handle this on his own.

Just as he’d gotten through every day for so many years.

Alone.

*   *   *

“Are you going to the vigil?”

Noah looked up from the paper he was reading, stared at Ali Holmes as she slid a calzone in front of him. A dozen things to say formed inside his brain and he discarded all of them. He took his time when he said things, something people had remarked upon more than once. There was a reason for it, and that reason was a temper that he’d learned to control.

In moments like this, it was harder, though.

The vigil.

His initial response was to curl his lip and laugh at the stupidity of the idea.

The Sutter family of saints. Go to the vigil and talk about the patriarch and matriarch of the beloved family, taken far too soon.

Noah had never been able to lie well, even a polite lie. But how did he say that he’d rather stab himself in the eye with a teaspoon than attend that vigil? A muscle pulsed in his cheek and he looked down, reached for the sweet tea to give himself a minute to compose himself.

Vigils, every year for the Sutters. Every year, for twenty years. But never one for Lana …

“No,” he said, his voice gruff. “I don’t go to any of the vigils.”

Ali arched a brow. “Why not? It’s practically a town party.”

“Not my kind of party,” he said. Okay,
that
he could answer. No, when the town gathered for the vigils he tended to go to another part of town. They’d all be gathered at the First Church of Christ, talking about their lost family—the Sutters, who disappeared twenty years ago. But nobody would mention Lana.

Noah, just trust me, okay?

He fought to push the ghostly echo of her voice to the back of his mind as he felt the weight of Ali’s gaze.

The people in town would gather at the memorial the First Church had erected in memory of the Sutter family. Noah would go to the gazebo down by the river. Nobody knew it, but Lana had her own memorial. He’d taken on that project because he wanted a place she would have liked and that had been one of her favorite spots. Each flower planted was a type that she had loved.

That was her place, and when the whole town gathered to mourn a family who was lost he went to remember her, because almost everybody else seemed to forget she’d ever existed.

Ali sighed and he looked up. She was staring out the window toward the street. “You know, the way the town acts, you’d think the Sutter family had been saints. I don’t…” She stopped, shrugged. “I’m not speaking ill of them, really. But it’s been twenty years. And they still do this. Is … is that normal?”

“I am not one to decide what is normal,” he said, smiling.

She laughed. “Hell, who is?” Then she leaned across the bar and kissed his cheek. “You look pretty sad today, Preach. Hope you’re okay.”