STORM: A Standalone Romance (104 page)

              I wasn’t used to sex with caveats. I was used to getting what I wanted.

              “That’s stupid,” I said, sipping my drink.

              “What’s stupid is that you can’t see it.”

              I wanted the sex. That’s the only reason I said my next words. “Fine. I’m beautiful.”

              “Was that so hard?”

              There was something between us that certainly was hard. Levi pulled me into his lap and undressed us—he was getting so good at it—and we struck up a friendly, leisurely pace. I liked this. I liked this casual gentleness. There wasn’t a need for desperation. There wasn’t anything to run away from right now. There was only us and this delicious furniture.

              Us and this feeling.

              We missed the lights of Manhattan from the window as we were too engrossed in each other. By the time we landed, I’d had so many Manhattans to celebrate that we had to go straight to Levi’s townhouse, forgoing the dinner he’d wanted to treat me to.

              I was so tired that I only barely registered the rich wood floors of the townhouse, the opulent furniture that looked too fancy to touch, and the way everything sort of gleamed.

              “Straight to bed,” Levi said, a smile in his voice as he kissed my forehead and tucked the covers around me.

              It wasn’t long before I was hearing the same voice say, “Meagan.”

              I stretched and searched my body for its various aches and pains, but there was nothing there. Puzzled, my mind flailed around for a little bit. Had I not spent the night on my couch cushion pallet? I wasn’t stiff or sore. I felt incredible, in fact. Where could I possibly be?

              I cracked an eye open to see Levi seated next to me, a steaming mug of coffee in hand. He was already dressed, and I wondered if I’d overslept something.

              “What time is it?” I croaked, feeling groggier than I usually was upon waking with the sun.

              “It’s nearly three in the afternoon.”

              “What?” I nearly burned myself on the coffee I’d taken from him, and his hands fluttered around the mug as if he could save me from my own clumsiness.

              “You must’ve been really tired,” Levi remarked. “You never woke up—not even once. When’s the last time you’ve slept in a comfortable bed?”

              “Never mind that,” I said, pushing myself up to a sitting position and blowing on the hot coffee. “I’m an early riser. Just what was in those Manhattans we drank?”

              “Nothing you’ve never had before,” he said, smiling. “Your body needed rest, and that’s what it got.”

              “Shouldn’t you be at work?” I’d slept too long—nearly fourteen hours—and yet I felt like I could sleep all day.

              “The company can run itself. I’ve created it to be pretty self-sufficient.”

              “Careful with that, or they’ll decide that you’re expendable.”

              “I’m not expendable. I own the place.”

              “Well, you don’t have to stick around here on my account.” I took a perfunctory sip of the coffee, which was roughly a hundred times better than what I’d been buying for myself at the gas station each morning back in town. I couldn’t play that game or I’d never be able to stop. Things in New York City were going to be better than things in my stupid town. That was just the reality. I was going to get old and gray by the time I finished making comparisons.

              “Actually, I feel like I should,” Levi said. “I was hoping you’d feel up to making the arrangements for your brother’s funeral today.”

              I grimaced. Definitely not the way I wanted to spend my first day in the city, but I recognized that it needed to be done. I wouldn’t even be here if Matt hadn’t sent Levi to get me. I had to pay my respects—and figure out how to send my brother off in a way that made sense.

              “I really don’t want it to be anything big,” I said. “I wasn't lying when I said I was the only one left. There’s nothing more depressing than a small funeral.” I knew that one from experience. “I’d be the only one there.”

              “That’s not true,” Levi said. “I’d be there.”

              “You don’t have to.”

              “I do. He saved my life. And even though he was on the payroll, I really did consider him a friend. I’m not saying that for your consolation. It’s the truth.”

              I decided, in the end, that cremation was fine. That the funeral could just be us in the room with my brother before they burned his body. That seemed to satisfy whatever part of Levi wanted the ritual of the final rites.

              “Do you want to see your brother before they put him in?” Levi asked. “All of the formalities—the paperwork, the identification—that’s all taken care of. It would only be if you wanted to. Before he’s cremated.”

***

              I wondered if I should be crying—if he expected me to cry. I just didn’t feel like crying. And I didn’t understand the draw of gazing upon the face of someone who was dead. He wasn’t going to hear me if I came up with anything to say. There weren’t going to be any pearls of wisdom I was going to catch from those dead lips.

              Still, there was the fear that I might regret not seeing him, consigning him to the flames without that last look.

              “I’ll be quick,” I said, motioning to the technician standing by, who opened the coffin.

              “Take your time,” she said. “There’s no hurry.”

              “I guess he isn’t going anywhere,” I said, wincing at my own poorly timed joked. I didn’t know what to do or say, didn’t understand how I needed to act. This was the second person I’d lost in my life to an untimely, violent death. It didn’t get any easier.

              I cast my eyes downward, and sure enough, there was Matt. Levi hadn’t been lying to me. My brother was lying in the casket, ready to be transformed into ashes that I could store in a convenient urn.

              I willed those eyes open again, even if I knew I was an idiot for doing so. He was dead. Gone. This body was an empty vessel. It wasn’t my brother anymore.

              And yet I did have questions for him. Why had he pushed Levi out of the way? Why hadn’t he just let the man take the bullet that was intended for him? What was the special thing that my brother had seen in Levi to save him? And why had he asked Levi to save me?

              I thought I’d known my brother well, but maybe I only knew him as well as he had known me. I’d made sure that Matt didn’t know what had happened to me, that he knew as little as possible about the hell he’d left behind when he went to New York City.

              But somehow, with his dying breath, he knew that I still required saving, and had sent Levi to complete a task he hadn’t been able to do.

              Maybe Matt knew more than I thought he did.

              There was no more knowledge I could glean here. I stepped away and nodded at the technician, hoping I looked like I’d been making peace with the fact that my brother was dead.

              Levi put his arm around me as the technician closed the casket again and turned on the conveyer belt, feeding my brother into the oven. I waited there, expecting to feel grief, but there was just a gaping emptiness. My brother’s death had brought the man beside me into my life. It was a never-ending cycle of loss and gain. I’d known that long before I met Levi.

              I itched to go somewhere—anywhere—away from here, but I forced myself to be patient, to draw strength from the warmth of the man beside me, and the relentless professionalism of the technician in charge of this operation.

              “You can go, if you’d like,” she said, and I was so thankful that I could’ve kissed her on the mouth. “This is something of a process. We’ll have the remains ready for you in the urn you selected in a few hours.”

              “Let’s go,” I said eagerly, looking up at Levi. “Leave the professionals to their jobs.”

              “If that’s what you’d like to do.”

              Grief was a funny thing—a twisting, unexpected thing that I couldn’t begin to understand. I’d loved my brother, and depended on him. Why couldn’t I hold vigil there at the facility, staying with him until his transformation to ash was complete? I simply didn’t want to. I wanted a distraction. I needed one.

              We had a late lunch—or an early dinner—and Levi took me driving around the city, silent as I vibrated with excitement at the looming buildings, the landmarks I’d only ever dreamed about, the crush of people all wanting to be here, right here, in this city. My heart beat in time with the pulse of this place. This was going to be home.

              The next low point came when I held what remained of Matt in my two hands—a deceptively heavy urn that I regretted. It was too real, then, and I could sense a kind of eagerness in Levi, a desire to see me emote something normal. I wished I could squeeze a few tears out for him, but all I felt was surreal regret. All that was left of my brother had been crammed in this vase. It was almost silly.

              “Can we go home now?”

              “Home?” Levi looked down at me, startled. “You want to go home?”

              “Back to your townhouse.” I wondered if there was a normal way to ask Levi to carry the urn, but I couldn’t think of one, suffering silently over its strange weight in my hands.

              “Okay.” Levi looked strangely relieved.

              “Did you think I meant that house I used to live in?” My lip curled up derisively. “Because that wasn’t my home. I was only sleeping there.”

              “My townhouse is home now?” Levi and I motored down the road, and I pushed Matt’s urn to fit in the cupholder, able to breathe easier when not touching it.

              “Your townhouse feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been.” It was a stretch of the truth. That house had been home, once, but that had been so long ago that it was lost in the sea of painful memories. It was better to hate all of its history than to cling to the handful of happy moments.

              We arrived and Levi took the urn without me asking him, setting it on a table in the entryway of the townhouse.

              “What do you think you’ll do with him?” he asked. “Keep him in the urn? Take him back to your town?”

              “I don’t know.”

              “There were places in this city he loved,” Levi offered. “We could spread some of the ashes there.”

              Grief was a sudden tidal wave, and I grabbed at Levi, tearing at his shirt, casting about for the lifesaver that was going to keep me from drowning in it.

              “Meagan, wait.”

              “I can’t.” I pushed him to the city room, pushed him down on the satin couch that seemed like no one should ever sit on it, and unfastened his pants in one practiced movement.

              “We should talk about this.”

              “This is no place for words.” My pants were down, then off, and I straddled him, much as we had in the plane, but hungrier, angrier—the feelings I was used to. Levi wasn’t a novelty to me right now. He was an aching need. I needed to disappear. I didn’t care if it was light or dark on the other side. I needed to go.

              I impaled myself on him and rode him until I gasped out that completion, burying my face in his shirt that I’d only managed to half remove, cognizant of the fact that he was holding me, continuing to thrust upward, reaching his climax soon after I did. Even as he exhaled his release, his chest heaving, he picked me up, still buried to the hilt inside of me, and carried me to the bedroom.

              There, we did it all over again, rearranging the words in the verses, perhaps, but keeping the chorus the same, both of us coming again, pressing our bodies against each other.

              Losing ourselves.

              I didn’t know how long we’d been silent until Levi spoke.

              “I don’t know if we should do this anymore, Meagan.”

              “What do you mean?” I demanded. “Why would you say something like that?”

              “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

              I laughed in his face—a bitter, crumbling sound. “You can’t tell me it isn’t any good. I know just how good you feel because I feel like that. It doesn’t make sense to me that you would want to just stop. Why turn down a good thing?”

              I was so pissed. Did Levi just think he could just discard me without regard for what I wanted to do? At the same time, I was confused at my own visceral reaction. I’d never cared about keeping the same sexual partner prior to meeting Levi. I’d satisfy my needs with whoever came along.

              It scared me to think about what that might mean. Could my feelings for the man sitting with his back to me be more than physical? Was that even possible for me? It had never happened before, not even before the man I refused to think about but kept coming back to helplessly, a slave to memory.

              “It’s too good, Meagan, that’s the thing.” Levi turned around, those blue eyes burning. “I’ve never met anyone like you. I can barely match your appetites, and you fascinate me. I don’t understand who you are completely. You scare me sometimes. There’s something deeper there that I haven’t figured out yet. I want to figure it out, even if I think you don’t want me to.”