Page 90 of Little Deaths

The Best Buy bag was still in the front hall where Rafe had left it. She glanced at the receipt and winced.Another thing I’ll have to pay him back for, she thought, putting on the coffee while she plugged in the computer and began the excruciating process of set-up.

She was halfway through when Rafe cleared his throat. The sound made her jump and wonder how long he’d been observing her. Another difference between the father and son. Marco treated words the way he treated money: big and loud, like he couldn’t spend them fast enough.

But Rafe was as economical with his silences as he was with his speech. The written word had always been his preferred means of doing battle. She’d seen that with his letters and his books. They could seduce and they could wound. Sometimes both, in a single breath.

I should hate him, she thought. But whatever it was that ran through her heart was soft and porous. You couldn’t make it anywhere in Hollywood if you were the type to nurse a grudge. Everyone was in bed with everyone, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.

Rafe had betrayed her in the worst possible way but she had spent ten years getting to know him before that, and when she thought of him now, everything was muddled in a cocktail of anger, resentment, and fear.

But not just fear, that weak part of her whispered, when he sidled closer.Now you want to fuck him.

“Do you need help?” he asked quietly.

She hesitated. He was fully clothed this time, but the deliberate way he spoke was almost suggestive in its neutrality.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”

She wished she remembered what they had talked about last night. She could feel the impressions of their talk baked into her emotions, like fingerprints in clay, and they made her freeze when his chest pressed up against her back. He began clicking through the windows and even though she knew she should be watching what he was doing, she found it hard to focus on anything but his breath on her neck.

“You can have my seat,” she said at one point. “We can switch.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m perfectly comfortable.”

Well, I’m not, she thought.

“Do you have the flashdrive?”

She pulled it out of her pocket and set it on the counter within his reach. Rafe plugged it into the USB socked, his arm brushing her shoulder, making her sleeve ride higher on her arm.

“I’ll get the coffee,” she said abruptly, but when she got to her feet, he barred her path.

“I’ve noticed you never touch me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m touching you right now.”

“No.” He dragged his fingers down her arm, raising goosebumps. “You never touch me, Donni. Not unless I make you. Why don’t you want to touch me?”

She squeezed her eyes shut as a memory inserted itself. Embracing the boy that she’d started to think of as her son in a ballroom where the lights gleamed as fiercely as stars, only to feel the swell of his erection against her belly. He had just turned eighteen and had skipped his senior prom to come with her, and she had thought the darkness in his eyes had been resentment.

But his eyes had been alight with admiration that night—not that of a child’s, no. It was the way a man looked at a woman he was considering making his. Acquisitive. Possessive.

It scared her.

Hescared her.

That was the first moment that she realized Rafe was a man capable of hurting her, the way all the other men had hurt her in her life. A man who could betray her or leave. A man who could look at her so hotly that her clothes seemed to burn.

The wrongness of it had pulsed through her like lightning, chased by guilt.

A guilt that had intensified when she had found him in her bed and the house had become a prison of gilt and glass and weighted silences.

It made her think of that line fromCat on a Hot Tin Roof.“I’m not living with you. We just occupy the same cage.” Desperate animals, they were. Locked together.

Ready to consume each other whole.

Breaking free from his loose embrace, Donni retrieved the steaming cup and slammed it down violently on the granite counter. “Open the files.”

There was a thick silence as he watched her swing herself onto the other stool. Then, almost reluctantly, he did as she demanded. There were only three things on the flashdrive: Adonica.mp4, Adonica1.jpeg, and Adonica2.jpeg. The movie file, she noticed, was almost five minutes long.