Page 68 of Worth the Ruin
“That’s right. Take my cock, Melody. Take it like a good fucking girl.”
That’s it. I’m fucking done for. I cry out a muffled scream around his cock as I come on my own fingers.
“Oh fuckkkk,” he groans and thrusts his hips forward again, fingers tightening in my hair. Once. Twice. “I need to know where…” I glare at him, arching my brow and somehow conveyingwhere the fuck do you think, idiot?without words. He pulls my arm upward, forcing my hand from between my legs, and bends his head. He sucks my fingers, moaning as he moves his hips faster and how is every new thing he does sexier than the last?? I suck him harder and a moment later, he roars my nameas he comes in a rush. I swallow him down, eyes sliding closed in utter ecstasy. Who knew that blowing someone could be so fucking hot?Not this girl.I’ve never minded giving head before, had fun with it usually, but it had never beensexyto me before this moment.
I collapse backward onto the mattress and Austin joins me, breathing hard and limbs sprawling. I throw my legs over his stomach, and he rests one hand on my thigh.
“And here I thought I’d be out of practice,” I quip, breathless. He huffs out a laugh.
“If that is you out of practice, I am in big,bigfucking trouble.”
I chuckle, grabbing a pillow and shoving it behind my head.
After a while, when I’ve come down from that absolute high, I say, “alright, so tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Everything,” I breathe. I want to know everything about this man, the one who has somehow managed to light the spark inside me again, the one I thought was gone forever. The man who seems to know me on a level that I didn’t even know existed. The man who can work my body like a fucking nine-to-five. The man who it might just kill me to lose. I push that thought away and just focus on the here and now.
He smiles, a slow, sexy curl of his lips, as if he’s been waiting for me to say that single word, for me to want to let him in completely, no more secrets or walls between us.
And so we talk. For hours and hours, all through the night. We talk about our lives before, our childhoods and jobs and everything in between. We talk about our lives after the end of the world, how we got to where we are now. We take breaks in between the talking sometimes to do other things. To be fair, there’s still talking involved, just a dirtier kind…and afterwards we talk some more.
“And the dog?” he finally asks just as the sun’s rising, glancing towards the stuffed dog standing watch on the side table. I’m lying on my stomach with my head resting on my folded arms, looking at him. He’s propped on his side, staring down at me and running his fingers up and down my spine. I take a deep breath and prepare myself to tell the story. I think he knew this would be the hardest one, why he didn’t bring it up before now. I’ve never toldanyone. The only other person on the planet who knows about this part of my life is Jonah. Even Mull doesn’t know it all, at least not from my perspective. Jonah was like a father to Gabby, so he had every right to talk to Mull about losing her from his eyes, but I’ve never told my story to anyone.
But I want to share it with Austin. I want him to know me in a way that no one else does except Jonah, but this is different than even that. Jonah had been there with me through it all, he’d lived it too. Sharing it with Austin is choosing to give him a piece of me that no one else has.
“His name is Leo,” I say quietly, and though I’m prepared for it, the pain makes my breath catch, memories rearing up out of the pit I keep them in inside my chest. It feels like a line of spikes being slowly dragged down my body, each inch sending new shocks of agony ripping through me. It’s been so long since I let myself really look, that I let myself remember…
But I swallow hard and keep going.
“And he belonged to my daughter, Gabby.”
Austin inhales quietly. I know that he probably suspected who the stuffed animal had belonged to, at least a vague idea, and that he assumed that I’d lost a child after that first night at FOS when I’d told him how I was sure he hadn’t had children, but hearing it confirmed is different, I guess.
“Was it…was it Bloodies?” he asks gently.
“No, nothing like that. I was losing her before the end of the world. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia a few months before everything went to hell.”
“Oh God, Melody, I’m so sorry.”
I give him a sad smile, that one that you give people when they tell you that they’re sorry for your loss. The one that saysit’s okeven though it’s far, far from ok, but it’s all you can offer them.
But no, it isn’t all I can offer, not this time. I reach over and take his hand in mine, and he squeezes it gently.
“She was only six and it was…aggressive. Even with treatment, the odds weren’t in our favor. So…well, we were on borrowed time.” Tears burn my eyes but I don’t want to stop. “A good friend from the bureau found out about what was happening with the Bloodies before news broke, before everything got so out of hand and the bombs dropped and—” I take a deep breath, forcing myself not to spiral. “He shouldn’t have told me, but he did and he’s the reason I’m still here. He warned us about what was coming—the outbreak and the zombies and the bombs that they planned to use to try to contain everything—and told us to get as far from D.C. as we could. Mitch and Sean—that was Jonah’s husband—died years before that, so it was just me and Jonah and Gabby against the apocalypse.” I cast my mind back to the very beginning again, letting all of the memories hit me.
“We gathered as many supplies as we could and we went to Jonah’s lake house out in the middle of nowhere. That’s where we spent the first few years after the end. It’s where…it’s where Gabby died.” A tear rolls down my cheek and Austin reaches out to wipe it away before pulling me against his chest. With his arms wrapped around me, I can keep going. He’s here to hold me together, giving me permission to break if I need to.
“We were able to shield her from everything out there, so she had no idea what was going on in the world. Thankfully, the property was pretty secluded, so we didn’t have to worry about many Bloodies or other people wandering in. She just thought we were having a great family vacation,” I say with a laugh that fades quickly. “She was happy. She spent her last month on earth happy and that’s all I can ask for, especially given the state of the world. She started to decline pretty quickly after those first few weeks, and we knew it was time. It was…peaceful. We had a lot of pain medicine and we were able to make the end bearable for her. She went to sleep in my lap, one arm wrapped around Leo and holding my hand. And that was it.”
I can’t speak for a long time as I let the pain wash through me, letting myself really feel it for the first time in years. Maybe for the first time ever. I barely remember the days afterwards. I remember Jonah digging a grave beside Gabby’s beloved swing, the one Mitch had built for her by hand. He’d carved their initials into the seat and it was her special place, especially after Mitch died. I remember kissing her forehead one last time and Jonah taking her from my arms because I couldn’t be the one to put her in the ground. I remember kneeling in the mud as the rain pelted down on me, feeling completely numb and utter agony all at once, and I remember screaming.
But after that, it’s just darkness. It’s like I went to sleep for months, not really seeing or feeling anything at all, not truly accepting everything. I knew that Gabby was gone. I wasn’t in denial, exactly, but it was like when I thought about it, it seemed like a dream, or like I was looking at it through a pane of warped glass. Everything was there but also…not.
Austin gives me as much time as I need, just holds me as I cry and reassures me without words that he’s there. After a while, I find my voice again.
“After that, everything became about survival, about keeping Jonah alive and safe, and that was it. I went to a very, very dark place that really, I probably shouldn’t have made it back out of. I was ruthless. I was cruel. I was brutal. I did anything and everything in my power to keep Jonah safe and I didn’t care if that took every drop of humanity out of me. He was all I had left and I wouldn’t…Icouldn’tlose him.” Austin flinches ever so slightly, understanding now why Jonah is so important to me, why leaving him at The Cove meant so much. I squeeze him reassuringly. “I eventually came back, piece by piece, but that had taken me years, and even then, it’s like I kept this wall around myself, letting very few people inside. Mull, Renee, Wynn, Abuela—and you.”
