Thin Love(80)

She couldn’t shake the image from her mind or the feelings from her body. Kona might want Keira, but that didn’t mean he wanted only her. There were over a two thousand available girls on campus. It seemed like they all were after Kona. What was she compared to them? She was one of the crowd. One of the many.

And tonight, with him acting like a maniac, her getting aroused, so needy by his anger, brought back the sudden, ugly image of Kona on the ground with blood pouring from his cheek.

Aggressive tendencies. That’s what the doctor had told an eleven-year-old Keira she was fighting against. It was that buried, angry thread of rage that Keira had experienced the moment her mother had flippantly broke the news to her: “Your father put a pistol to his temple and killed himself, Keira.” And not ten minutes later, “Try not to carry on at the funeral.”

Her mother had made it clear that she was to hide what she felt; told her that tears were something only infants were allowed and so Keira swallowed up that grief, the rage that being left without her beloved father had kindled in her heart. She stowed away that anger, those tears, because that is what she was expected to do. That’s what ladies did. They shouldered others’ burdens, and ignored their own.

Pills helped when necessary, as did years of therapy, but then Kona Hale entered her life and that angry little girl forgot that she was supposed to breathe when rage hit her. She forgot that she should count, let the anger pass. He brought it out in her with little effort and tonight had been the catalyst, the tipping off point of frustration and heat, and desire denied, that sent Keira over the edge.

It wasn’t an excuse. It didn’t allow for reason or tell Keira that swinging a cold bottle at Kona’s face was in the least understandable. She felt like a freak, an unhinged monster and Kiera buried her face into her pillow, hiding from her guilt. The tears came again, harder, sharper than the ones she’d cried the day before when had Kona left her room.

Leann’s bed lay empty. Michael got her attention on weekends. Michael got her cousin’s attention most days. But it was Saturday night, game night, and Leann’s priorities were on her man and not her unbalanced, violent cousin. Keira understood that. But it didn’t make her feel any less alone.

Anger, lust, shame, they all coiled together, shot straight to Keira’s core, aching, throbbing and she felt stupid and unstable and thought she should touch herself, maybe hit something, to try to release the pent up feelings inside. She didn’t know which she wanted more - the emotional release or the physical one.

The clock on her bedside table blinked three a.m. and Keira wondered if Kona had been patched up, if he’d calmed, if he’d left the bar bloody, but not alone.

I’m so fucking twisted.

That throb got worse when she remembered Kona’s lips on her skin, his knuckles inside her just two nights before and she lay on her stomach, slipping her fingers beneath the shorts she wore. She rubbed twice, felt her pulse against her fingers and then her door slid open and she shoved her hands under her pillow.

“You didn’t stay at Michael’s?” she asked, expecting her cousin’s sleepy reply. But then large hands settled on her hip, a larger body slid in behind her on the bed. For one split, frantic moment she thought to scream in sudden fear at the intruder in her room, but then she caught a familiar scent, sensed his unmistakable presence. Her fear turned to shock that he was there, that he had been able to sneak into the dorm without catching the RA’s attention, but he moved so quickly, so soundlessly and felt so warm, so comfortable that her shock quickly faded.

He didn’t speak for several moments, didn’t do much else but move his huge hand around her waist. She didn’t move, didn’t turn around, willed the bed to swallow her up.

“I’m so fucked up. I’ve always been fucked up.” Kona brushed a kiss against her neck and Keira squeezed her eyes shut, trembling when the smell of his skin and his hot breath made the throb worse. His voice was low, soft and she could tell that whatever he’d been drunk on earlier that night had left his system. “I shouldn’t have touched the redhead.” His hand pushed against her stomach, and her back was flushed against his chest. “I shouldn’t have touched Tonya Lucas, not after you stayed with me at the hospital. I don’t know why I’m the way I am. I don’t know why you make me so scared of everything I feel, Wildcat.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He ignored her. “I shouldn’t have let her touch me.”

Feeble deflection seemed all Keira had left; it was the only thing that kept the guilt from suffocating her. “You can touch whoever you want, Kona.”