Jill Sorenson - Crash Into Me

“My brother beat you to it,” she said. “He’ll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life.” Upset with herself for giving too much personal information away, she made a nervous gesture from him to her, indicating their relationship. “Last night you told me this was about sex. No emotional involvement.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Sex continues to be my primary objective,” he said with a lazy smile, looking out at the open floor. “Let’s dance.”

She cast him a skeptical glance. The music had just started, and several other couples were already dancing. “You cumbia?”

“Does it involve a lot of thrusting and grinding against each other?”

She smiled back at him, amused in spite of herself. “No.”

He sighed in mock disappointment. “Let’s do it anyway.”

James borrowed some clothes and a duffel bag from his brother and left. He couldn’t face the idea of fighting off Rhoda, or anyone else, tonight. Stephen didn’t know it, because he’d been more interested in drugs than sex for years, but James had already been with some of the party girls who drifted in and out of his brother’s house.

On James’ seventeenth birthday, Arlen gave him a shot of whisky and a punch in the eye, saying that anyone who was still a virgin at his age was either queer or retarded. James was just a teenager, all hormones and attitude, with a lot of anxieties and even more to prove, so he set out to prove he wasn’t queer with the first girl he laid eyes on, in an awkward but consensual grapple against Stephen’s bathroom sink.

It wasn’t a shining moment of his life, but it was a breakthrough.

He’d known he wasn’t queer, but he hadn’t been sure he could have sex like a normal person after all he’d seen and done. James discovered that not only could he do it, he could enjoy it, with an empty heart and a blissfully blank mind.

His performances hadn’t been memorable, but neither had the girls, and at least he didn’t need money or violence to get off. Still, it had deepened rather than filled the void inside him, so he’d stopped going over to Stephen’s house looking to break up the monotony of his miserable existence by getting laid.

When Lisette Bruebaker showed up a few weeks ago, James hadn’t approached her with anything particular in mind. They’d laughed about playing seven minutes in heaven at her thirteenth birthday party. She was so pretty, so full of life, so much different than the intoxicated, hollow-eyed girls he usually saw at Stephen’s.

And she reminded him of Carly.

So when Lisette took him into Stephen’s closet, he followed her, and when she dropped to her knees to give him her own little version of heaven, he didn’t tell her not to. He just threaded his fingers through her hair and pretended she was Carly.

He hadn’t lasted anywhere near seven minutes.

James groaned aloud at the memory, feeling sick to his stomach. If Carly ever found out about that, she’d never talk to him again. He knew very little about sex, and even less about girls, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. Carly wouldn’t like to hear that he’d been in a closet with her friend.

Her dead friend.

As he walked by Carly’s house, he looked around, checking it out, making sure everything was safe. If someone could brutalize Lisette and dump her in the water, what was to stop them from doing it to Carly?

His gut clenched at the thought.

Stashing his bag between rocks at Windansea, he walked down to the 24-hour mini-mart to make the call. He knew better than to dial 911. Instead he looked up a phone number for a homicide detective.

“Staff Sergeant Paula DeGrassi, Homicide Division,” one of the listings read. It sounded pretty official, and for a moment, he wavered. This could get him in some really deep shit.

Then he thought of Carly, her pretty face. Her slim body tangled in a net.

So he dialed, palms sweaty, heart pounding, blood pumping to his ear where it was pressed against the receiver. Thank God for voice mail. James left a short message, giving Lisette’s name and a pair of memorized GPS coordinates.

When he returned to Windansea, he stayed awake for a long time, staring at black waves crashing against a bone-white beach.

He was dead-tired, too freaked out to sleep.

The following day, Ben rang Sonny’s drunken song-bird doorbell several hours before the pool party was scheduled to begin. When she opened the door, he smiled, and her heart did a funny little flip-flop in her chest.

“I know you work out,” he said, like that was a greeting.

“How?”

“You’re in great shape.”

Smiling back at him, she leaned against her door-jamb. “Is that a challenge?”

“I’m not allowed to surf on Christmas. Family rules. Carly wants to run on the beach, and I’m dying to get some exercise.”

So was she. “You go stir-crazy after only one day without surfing?”

“Yeah. I get the shakes.”

Sonny tried to wipe the silly grin off her face, but it was Christmas, and she had nothing pressing on her schedule. Grant wouldn’t even expect her to check in. Her boss would be spending time with his real family, unavailable for the entire day. “I’ll meet you in a few minutes,” she decided. “Prepare to get whipped.”

Before the run, Sonny gave Carly her first self-defense lesson as a warm-up. The girl was lithe and limber, and would have been a good student if she’d taken the subject seriously. But she was a typical teenager, naïve and optimistic, confident in the assumption that she would always be safe.

Ben, on the other hand, was a very quick study. He was able to flip her over, off her feet, after less than five minutes of training. It unsettled her, but she reminded herself that he was a world-class athlete, a powerful man in top condition.

She cut the lesson short before he got too cocky.

Carly was a better runner than a grappler, having natural grace, legs like a gazelle, and energy to burn. She lacked drive and endurance, however, so she tired more quickly than Sonny or Ben. After a couple of miles, she let them go on ahead, taking a break to sit on the sand.

Sonny gave it her all, but Ben beat her easily. In a contest of self-defense, he was no match for her. In one of raw athleticism, she was the loser.

Gasping for breath, she collapsed on the sand, totally spent, conceding her defeat. She hadn’t pushed herself so hard in a while, and it felt good, although winning would have felt better. Gloating, he sat down beside her, pulling his T-shirt over his head and using it to wipe his face.

“Oh my God,” she said, when she saw his chest.

He looked down, running the T-shirt over himself absently, mopping his sweaty abs. “What?”

“Your body,” was all she could manage.

“What about it?”

In a wetsuit, he was spectacular. In jeans and a T-shirt, a suit, or a sweater, he was gorgeous. But bare-chested, he was…wow.

“It’s hideous,” she said, smiling.

He smiled back at her. The sexy, off-center smile, the well-toned body…it was like a double whammy. “I’ve been told that before.”

“I’m sure you have. Put your shirt back on. You’re scaring little children.”

He laughed.

She rested on her side, facing him, one hand against her cheek, bent elbow supporting the weight of her head. The other arm, draped across her stomach, made slow, lazy circles in the sand. “How often do you jog?” she asked.

“I don’t.”

She sat up in disbelief, no longer relaxed. “How could you beat me, then?”

“Surfing, swimming, paddling out. It keeps you in shape.”

Her eyes wandered over his chest. “I can see that. You must lift weights.”