I look to Elodie, who’s looking around her with a sombre expression. I realise she thought she’d never be coming back here. Now she has to because her dead brother’s body is missing.
“Come on, let’s get washed up, we’re making a mess everywhere.” I trudge forward, clothes weighing a tonne from the mud and rain.
I lead the way to my room and head straight into the bathroom, ungluing my clothes from my sodden skin as I go.
I could go to another bathroom, let Elodie have her privacy, but for some reason, I can’t. And when I turn and see her standing there, watching me get naked with a sorrowful, awkward look instead of her usual scowl, I can’t help but think she’s feeling this same weird, fuzzy affinity between us right now.
We just discovered the secret of the century for us. Neither of our dead brothers have been buried. We were connected bythis tragedy before, the only thing we have in common, but now there’s a stronger link between us. This urge to find out what happened to the two people we loved most. For Elodie, Lewis was the only good person she had in her life. I still had the boys, and they got me through the grief. Without them, I don’t know if I would have ever recovered, and when I look at Elodie, I always see what I could have turned out to be if it wasn’t for Fiz and Alf.
She attempts to get her mud-coated shirt off, but it clings to her damp skin. I walk over to her, guide her arms above her head. She lets me. Watching me in silence as I work the shirt off her body, rolling it up and stretching the neckline to pull it over her head without smearing any more mud on her face.
Dirt splotches her upper body, but I try not to take notice of her bare chest. Instead, I turn my attention to her shorts, shuffling them down her trembling legs. She’s freezing, skin like ice, and any skin showing between splatters of mud is a glowing red. Then I notice I’m shivering too. I’m not too sure if it’s because I’m just as cold, because it feels like my veins are filled with lava right now.
Elodie and I have never been this naked together. The thought hits me with the force of a bull.
Her neck’s healed, the scrapes of the scalpel left no scars. Neither did any of the grazes she’d accumulated during our grapple in the woods. But the rest of her… She’s still marked by terrors I haven’t learned of yet. Her entire body permanently marred by events she hasn’t shared with me. Possibly with anyone.
I help get the shorts off her feet, her hand coming to rest on my shoulder as I crouch down and she lifts one foot, then the other. I ball them up and chuck them with the rest of the clothes to the side. I slowly straighten up, my eyes glued to all the skin in front of me before I meet her eyes again.
No words come to me as I stare at her. My fingers twitch to reach for her body.
Then she blinks, breaking me from my weird trance, and she walks to the bathroom.
She steps over to the shower and turns it on. She’s stark naked, and under any other circumstance, I think I’d find it impossible not to run my hands all over that bare skin, bend her over and ram my cock inside her. But right now, it feels like the last thing I want to do. Okay, maybe not the last, but it’s not the first.
She steps under and my feet are carrying me over there. Elodie turns, and her eyes go wide as I step inside.
Before I can give her a chance to protest, to freak out and shove me out – before I can even process what I’m doing – I take her shoulders and guide her under the showerhead. She locks her eyes with mine but doesn’t speak as I start rubbing my hands over her skin.
I guess it’s this weird need not to be alone or to have some sort of physical touch to ground us, but I know she feels the same. This isn’t sexual, this isn’t inappropriate. For some reason, this is exactly what we’re both craving right now.
I stroke her body, getting the bulk of the mud off first with my hands, ignoring the bumps of certain raised scars, shoving away the sick feeling that comes with grazing over stories made from nightmares.
“Where do we start with all this?” she says, quietly, shakily.
I rub my hands over her breasts, ignoring how pebbled her little nipples are. “We tell my dad first. We’ll need help. I don’t know if you want to tell your dad…” I turn her around to do her back. “I doubt he’d be of much help and if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t want to have to deal with him.”
“I can agree on that one. We don’t have to tell him.”
I run over the slope of her ass cheeks and my cock twitches to life of its own accord. I crouch down to do her legs. It’s like we’ve brought half the graveyard home with us.
I’m face to face with her ass now and it’s becoming hard not to want to shove my face in there. Okay, so I’m still human. For a moment there I thought I’d lost myself to this new information about Max that I’d forgotten how to be aroused. Another silence falls over us as I clean the bottom half of her body.
I stand back up and rest my hands on her shoulders, looking down and seeing those beautiful round tits in front. My cock is hard now and I’m trying hard not to push my hips forward so she can feel it pressed between her cheeks. In the past twenty-four hours I’ve fought with this girl tirelessly, dumped her in an ice bath and left her shivering and going into shock, then wrestled with her and stuck a gun in her face. I can shove down this carnal urge to fuck her now and give her one tiny break. Just for now. I don’t know if I can deny it for much longer.
She turns her head slightly towards me as I hover behind her. “What did you do when you lost Max? Did you look into it?”
I run my hands down her arms, rubbing circles and working away any remnants of dirt I missed. “No.”
“Why?”
My jaw clenches. I grab the sponge, soap it up and start cleaning her properly. “Dad did it all. He said not to get involved until he had answers. If it was someone after our family, he didn’t want me shoving my nose in places and possibly get myself killed too. He put me on lockdown until he got answers. Eventually, he came back with nothing. A tragic accident. There were explosives in that warehouse that Max was supposed to help ship. The fire department told us it was probably a faulty bomb. He had to pay them a mortgage’s worth to keep them from filing a report. Couldn’t have the police prodding around in a place full of illegal shit. A tragic accident…” I sigh, shake myhead. My nose brushes against her wet hair. “But this… changes a lot. It may have been a horrible accident still but… that doesn’t explain why they weren’t buried.”
Even saying the words is like a bullet to the gut.
“A tragic accident,” Elodie murmurs under her breath. “That’s what they told Dad too. I never believed it.”
Up until tonight, I thought her obsession was pointless. “Why?” I don’t spin her this time as I reach round and scrub her front, careful not to rub my erection on her ass.
