Hero

51 Cataline

3 Years Later.

“I’ve got this, Melinda,” I say. “Go home to your boys.”

“You sure?” she asks.

“I’ll close up tonight.”

She winks at me. “You’re a good boss, Cat. See you Monday.”

“Monday,” I agree.

I lock the door behind her. The sun has just set through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the room is darkening quickly. I flip on two yellow lights, just enough to finish my paperwork. My eyes wander around the gallery. Do you see? I want to cry out. I’ve done it. I’ve done it without any of you. Without your money or your support. I’m speaking to all of them—those who left me with nothing, those who never gave me anything, and those who took everything away. It’s my gallery, with my signature on the checks, my sweat in the floorboards, my brushstrokes on the walls. I was there every step, building from nothing. Do you see?

Instead of pride, I feel my usual, inexplicable defeat. My arms are heavy at my sides. This feeling never seems to leave, but it’s been months since it weighed this much. As if on cue, my phone rings. I rub my eyes and return to my desk.

“Hey, babe.” Grant’s voice puts me at ease. “How’s it going?”

“As of today, my exhibit is officially the gallery’s best yet.”

“Wow,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “You’re a star.” He smiles because he’s proud and he loves me, fissures and all. He’s patient; he’s sweet. He worships my body when we make love. He is not Calvin. “Coming over for dinner?” he asks.

“Actually, I have some things to wrap up. Can we hang tomorrow?”

“You know, if you lived here, I could see you tonight.”

I nod, familiar with his teasing. “So you keep saying.”

“I know you’ve got a lot on your plate and that moving would be a pain in the ass, but . . . once it’s done, things will get easier. Not just financially.”

“I know, honey. I promise it’s on my mind. Along with a lot of other things.”

“Okay. As long as you’re considering it. Did you lock the gallery door?”

“Yes.”

“I worry about you there by yourself. I don't like that you’re so close to the East Side.”

“I’ll be careful. Love you.”

“You too. Call you in the morning.”

I hang up and stare at the phone for a minute before setting my face in my open palms. I do this most nights without meaning to—take a moment to myself once I’m completely alone. Sometimes to remind myself that I’m doing what I love. Sometimes to think about my parents. Sometimes I wonder about Guy Fowler and why he set the Cartel leaders up knowing Hero would knock them down one by one.

But tonight I don’t think about any of those things. Like most nights, I only think about Calvin. Not Hero, and not my captor. Just Calvin.

I replay the look on his face when I told him I couldn’t do it. Three years later, it’s just as clear. It’s seared into my heart because I’d never seen him look like that before. I’d seen anger, domination, frustration, maybe even remorse in his eyes. But this was something else—pain that came from the depths of a man I never got to meet.

Nobody ever knew my soul like Calvin, even if it was a forced entry. Not before then, not since then. That’s what I’m thinking when I hear a noise and look up. Calvin stands in the doorway, one shoulder against the doorframe as he watches me.

My heart’s in my throat in an instant. Some slivered-off piece of relief floods my system, like part of me was afraid I’d never see him again. I guess that part was wrong.

“Cataline.”

“Calvin?” My elbows are still on the desk, my hands frozen where my forehead had been. “What are you doing here?”

His eyes scan the walls, lingering over my photographs. “I had to see with my own eyes,” he says quietly. “Why now?”

I follow his gaze. The exhibit took me this long to present, but it still threatened to reverse the progress I’ve made the last few years. My hell, plastered in color, black and white, and sepia against eggshell walls. Yet, in being surrounded by photographs taken in the mansion, I’ve also found comfort because they take me back to him.

“Why are you sitting there, your head in your hands, looking miserable?” Calvin asks. “You of all people know what misery is. It’s not this.”

“I think I should be the one asking the questions.”

He glides a hand through the air, an invitation.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“I read about the exhibit.”

“So?”

“I watched you take some of these photos. I know what they mean to you.”

“That’s it?”

He sighs and after a moment, walks further into the room. “Tell me one thing.”

My hands drop into my lap. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s just broken into my gallery after three years and is demanding answers from me.

“Are you happy?” he asks.

Years ago, I would’ve asked him what he cared if I was happy, or why it mattered to him. I would’ve asked him what right he had to know that about me. But all this time away from him, missing him, has loosened the angry knot that replaced my heart when I left. “I don’t know, Calvin. I don’t think I know how to be happy.”

“Do you still not love me?”

“That’s two things.”

His lip twitches into a half-smile. “Do you?”

The question dangles in silence as I look at him. He absentmindedly slicks hair away from his forehead and then burrows his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He’s not wearing his glasses, only a dark, pullover sweater with pushed up sleeves and he’s just Calvin.

“You broke me,” I say just above a whisper. “And nobody can put me back together but you.”

He inhales a deep breath.

The confusion I’ve always felt since the mansion throbs in my veins, heightened by his presence. “Why are you here? To torment me?”

“Because I love you. And I’m not a strong enough man to bow out like I should. After three years, that love hasn’t waned. Because I’ve always loved you, since you were a little girl, I just didn’t know I was allowed to.”

“Who says you are now? Who says you’re allowed to love me? After everything we’ve been through, how could we possibly be anything but what we were in the mansion?”

“I want to set you free. Let me heal what hurts.”

“You hurt,” I say, tearing up as I place my hand over my heart. “Here. You put the wounds here, and now you want to heal them. You’re the captor who wants to set me free.” I ask him the questions I haven’t stopped asking myself since the night I learned the truth. “How can you be evil and good? How can I love and hate you? How can you be both my savior and my enemy? How can I want both punishment and forgiveness for you?”

He latches onto the word immediately. “Forgiveness?”

“I forgive you,” I say.

“For what I did to you?”

“No. I forgive you for my parents.”

Unfiltered pain crosses his face in a way that I know he couldn’t have hidden if he tried. “How could you forgive me for that?”

I rise and walk from the desk to where he stands. “Because it was never your fault,” I say, holding his gaze. “You’re not responsible for their death, for my childhood, or for me.”

“I am,” he says. “I’ve failed you, over and over.”

I flatten my hands against his chest. “It’s not your fault,” I say with an unsteady voice. “But I know you need to hear that I forgive you.”

His hands circle my wrists, and he brings my palms to his lips to kiss each one. There is wetness at the corner of his eyes, and I wipe it away. “You’re so good,” he says.

“I don’t know why, but your pain is my pain. I’m impossibly connected with you.” When hope appears on his face, I wrest my arms from his grip. “But I have a life now, and a boyfriend who loves me.”

“A boyfriend you love?”

“I don’t know what love is either. I’ve been stripped of it too many times.”

“I’ll teach you how again.”

I can’t believe that here, surrounded by photographs of my hell and my sanctuary, the enemy is asking me to love him.

He touches my face so gently I’m sure I’m imagining it. My lids fall shut as he brushes his thumb along my cheekbone. “I’m nobody without you to care for.”

“Don’t do this,” I say. “Don’t you dare kiss me.”

The heat of his mouth is near my cheek, his body inching closer until it’s pressed up against me. It’s familiar in the best way. He kisses my forehead, the bridge of my nose, the corner of my mouth. My lips are parted to grasp at small breaths, and suddenly, silently, there’s nothing to breathe but each other. His arms circle around to pull me as close as I can get.

I touch the sides of his face, and our mouths meet. He tastes like Calvin, a taste I’ve wanted since the day I laid eyes on him. What I’ve been starving for since I left. My hands feel him, my lips touch his, yet I still ache for him.

His tongue is a warm plea, licking along the inside of my bottom lip, and then back across the edges of my teeth. Finally it connects with my tongue, and my arms squeeze around his neck, trying to pull him deeper, because I want us to fade into each other, merge into one. His fingers dig into my back, his erection into my stomach. Calvin my captor isn’t altogether gone.

He walks us backward until I hit the edge of my desk. He pulls his head away to watch as he slides his hands in my top, feeling me everywhere. They are calloused, memories burned into his palms, his fingertips brash as he runs them over my body. I’m panting up at the ceiling while his thumbs glide up the length of my throat and under my chin. He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers. My moans are soft with his hands around my throat, his teeth sharpening themselves along my jaw.

“Can you?” he asks.

“I already said I do,” I respond in a short breath.

My heart beats in my ears and between my legs. He touches the tip of his nose to mine. “For everything? Can I have your forgiveness?”

I see the word in the air, letters flashing in front of me like they’re spelled out in fire. They break off and fade all at once, and the room is spinning. The hairline cracks inside of me are shifting and widening, my blood spilling through them, turning everything red.

His touch is disappearing.

Was he ever here?

Forgiveness?

There’s complete silence, and it’s possible I’ve dreamed the whole thing. But I jerk back to reality where the world is a blur, and all I hear is, “No, no, no, no, no . . .”

“Cataline.”

Calvin’s back, and there’s fierceness in his green eyes. His features are sharp enough to scrape my skin open like shards of glass, and that’s what I want. I want to cut myself open with Calvin.

“Where’d you go?” he whispers hotly, my face in his hands. He looks into my eyes for so long, I think he’s counting the flecks of grey.

“Take me home,” I tell him.

We walk the five blocks to my building in silence. When we arrive, I take his hand and lead him up the stairs, our only contact the tips of our fingers. As I unlock the door to my apartment, he stands so close that I feel his nose against the back of my head.

The door slams shut behind him. I leave the lights out and walk to the bedroom knowing he’ll follow. The moonlight flooding the room reminds me of the mansion, the way it turns the comforter into rolling hills of light and shade. I never close the blinds.

At the foot of the bed, he gathers my hair in a fist and inhales. “You,” he says. “Your smell.” He turns me around and spreads his hands over my scalp.

His kiss is like a drug, feeding me, quenching my thirst, my never-ending thirst, my infinite void, and planting himself inside me again. He pulls my dress over my shoulders and strips it away so I’m in my bra and panties. We fall back on the bed where he covers my body with his. His lips leave shining circles of saliva over my collarbone and the mounds of my breasts. He stops in the valley between them and taunts me with the tip of his tongue. My back arches to meet his mouth when he sucks my nipples through my bra. He splays his hand over my belly, skating it down over the lace, the only kind of panties I wear now. He grabs my pussy as if to possess it and lets it go just as quickly.

His body slides down the bed to explore my hipbone. I’m already trembling, imagining how it will be when I blissfully smash into pieces underneath him. He always knew how to touch me.

“What’s this?” he breathes. His finger is inches below my panty line, at the very tops of my thighs. I don’t need to read it for him, but I do anyway.

He traces the cursive ink as I say, “You’ll always be—”

His finger falls away, reappearing on the inside of my upper left thigh and swiping across it.

“—my superhero,” I finish.

He stops. The ceiling I’m staring at becomes blurry, and I know he’s watching me.

“Oh, God,” he whispers into the air. “And this?”

His touch on the small, careful scars below the words is the only thing I can feel in this moment. “That,” I say, “is so I know I’m still alive.”

“No,” he says.

I nod. “You protected me from everything, Calvin. Everything but myself.”

He buries his face between my legs, his hands spread to grip the outsides of my thighs. “Cataline,” he says over and over into my pussy. His nose pushes into my clit, his weighty words vibrate deep in my stomach. My body is convulsing in silent sobs, heat knotting deep and low, desperate for release as he whispers, “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

It feels like hours later when I rise onto my elbows, but it’s only been minutes. Calvin lifts his head to look at me, so differently than he used to. I reach and gently pull his hair, sifting the silky brown strands through my fingers. My hand runs down his cheek, and his eyes close when my thumb touches the corner of his lips. “I want this,” I say.

His eyes are still closed when he says, “I can’t. Look what I’ve done. I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

“Then why did you come here?”

My eardrums threaten to explode from the quiet that follows.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “But I think I need you.”

I sit up all the way and he does too so we’re facing each other, cross-legged on the bed. I lean over to my nightstand for a blunt and a lighter. Even in the dark I feel the heat of his stare as I sit up, spark it, and put it to my lips. I take a drag and close it up inside myself, letting it work its magic. When I open my mouth, he distorts behind the smoke.

“It numbs,” I explain. “But you know that.”

“I don’t want you smoking that shit, Cataline.”

“What are you going to do? Forbid it? Tie me to the bed so I can’t?”

He inhales loudly and asks, “Do you want me to tie you to the bed?” His rumbling voice is so thick that it fills the space between us, and for a moment, I think I can touch it, put it in my hands, and roll it around.

“No,” I lie. The truth is, since he walked into the gallery, I’ve been aching all over, gaping like a wound I want him to Band-Aid himself over. I cut my skin because I haven’t felt anything real since the last time I felt him. Because the only thing that makes it better is watching the pain bleed out. I want him on top of me, inside of me—I want him to make himself a part of me again. But instead we sit in silence, the smoldering orange embers of my blunt the only sign of life as I take another hit, blowing more smoke in his direction.