Hold Me by W. Winters
Zander
“Ella!”
She disappears.
Drops out of view.
One second she’s there, the next she’s gone, and I lose my mind. I don’t know who it is that I shove out of the way. One guest, maybe two, and then the bartender.
“The fuck are you?” some prick questions as I fist his shirt and shove him back. He’s the one who helped her up, some asshole she decided to punish me with.
No one’s screaming around me. The air isn’t filled with terror. They’re cheering. Pure delight electrifies the air.
My heart is in my throat, caught there along with my voice.
I can already see the blood when I reach the bar and hurtle around. My legs slam into the railing on the side of the balcony. My hips connect. I lean out over the drop—I have to see if she’s still alive, and …
It’s a pool.
There’s a pool down below. Ella floats in the middle of the pool, kicking her feet and pushing her soaked hair back from her face.
My beating terror screams itself into anger.
“It’s a fucking pool, man.” The asshole who helped her up dares to fucking speak to me.
Gripping his collar with both of my hands, I look the son of a bitch in the eye and warn him, “If you ever touch her again, it’ll be the last thing you do.”
What the hell was she thinking? My hands shake as I storm my way down, ignoring the gasps and onlookers.
I was already counting the ways I’d redden her ass. I was already cursing myself for taking it too easy on her. For not being more forceful. I’d let her push and throw her tantrum. I’d let her get it out of her system and when we got back home … I’d show her who she belonged to.
If she wants me to say it, I’ll fucking say it. I want her, I need her. I have love for her that I don’t anyone else. I can’t lose her. Yes. I’ll tell her I love her.
My blood rushes in my ears. My hands fisted and every muscle in my body is coiled.
I let her get away with too much all because I was waiting on Damon or Cade to get their asses here. Why the fuck did I listen to Silas and wait for The Firm?
She’s mine. She misbehaved. I’ll be damned if I let this situation get in the way again.
Taking the stairs as fast as my feet will carry me, not a single thought in my mind is spared for anyone else at this hellish party. Not one. All I care about is getting to Ella. I need to secure her safety, I need to get her out of here, and I need to punish her for what she’s done. I need to make her understand what she’s done to me.
It’s cold out by the pool, with heat from the water rising into the air.
And I’m not the first one to arrive.
I don’t know how the hell that fucker got here, but there he is, helping her climb out of the pool and laughing. Peering up at the house, I see an iron spiral staircase down just on the other side where the bar was.
The two of them laugh like this is funny, like my heart hasn’t been ripped out of my chest and beaten. They’re a pretty match like that. A young couple, in each other’s arms, pretending that life is a joke. One of them hasn’t been wounded. One of them doesn’t feel like a madman.
None of it matters. I can’t stop. I get there just as he’s leading her away from the pool and take her by the shoulders.
“Fuck off,” I spit out. “I told you to stay the fuck away from her.”
“Hey man,” he says and reaches for Ella who doesn’t spare him a glance.
“I thought you didn’t want me,” she says. As if I’ve ever not wanted her.
His eyes go wide, darting between us. “Have you fucked him, El?”
I’m dimly aware of cameras around us. Cameras and phones. Recording. We need to get the hell out of here. “It’s not like that,” Ella says. Her voice is soft at the margins. She’s been drinking.
I lean in, looking him dead in the eye. “She’s mine.”
“Z,” she says and her voice is broken. I know I didn’t say the things she wanted. But I’ll be damned if I don’t fight for her to give me a chance to make it right.
She’s fucked up. I’m fucked up, but together we work.
“We’re leaving.” I see the opening in the crowd and move us toward it with Ella tucked tight into my side, my arm across her shoulders.
Her pace barely keeps up with me. If I didn’t think someone would call the cops, I’d throw her ass over my shoulder.
“Zander,” she says, her voice barely audible over the noise from all these people talking, talking, talking. They make so much noise. “Zander, stop.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
It takes forever to get us through the house. The crowd seems to have multiplied and all of them want to be in our way. In my way. Ella’s not helping. Every time she turns her head, she sees someone else she wants to talk to and tell them it’s fine. I can’t find the words to make her understand the situation we’re in. She jumped off a second-floor bar and into a pool below.
She could have died.
She could have died.
Cade and Damon both said the same thing. Don’t make a scene. They said they’d be there after she took the first shot. A fucking half an hour and a goddamn heart attack later and they still aren’t here.
“Zander,” she protests as I pull her along, her long legs and heels not keeping up with my strides. I swear I’m two seconds from throwing her over my shoulder. I can barely contain myself.
I can feel myself falling into that old spiral. It’s the same thing that happened after Quincy died. I questioned every action I ever took, trying to figure out which one would have kept her alive.
I can’t do this again. I cannot fall into that shit again. It almost destroyed me the first time.
“We need our coats,” Ella says as we make it to the front entrance. “Coats!” she yells out and everyone around us takes notice. “You’re acting like a maniac,” she scolds me under her breath.
Soaking fucking wet, dripping from head to toe, somehow still gorgeous, she dares to tell me that I’m the one acting like a maniac?
My exhale is long and audible as I stare down at her. “We need our coats,” she repeats clearly and I swear I’ll lose my mind if I don’t get her out of here and across my lap in the next five seconds.
There are dozens of coats here now. Maybe over a hundred. I park Ella at the door of the coat closet and dig through them.
“We don’t have to leave,” Ella says from behind me, her arms crossed, onlookers watching her calmly berate me. I swear to God.
Cade and Damon’s directions about not making a scene are fucking hysterical by now.
My coat appears and I toss it in Ella’s direction. It’s another fifteen coats before I find hers. Step over to her. Put it around her shoulders. I take my own coat by the collar, and take Ella by the arm.
“Z,” she says and the single letter is a plea on her lips.
“I’ll deal with you when I get you alone.” I’m too loud and too obvious, and from somewhere nearby I hear the click of a shutter. I don’t care. Anyone who takes a photo right now is taking a photo of a bodyguard doing his job.
“Zander, please calm down,” she insists, her voice getting rougher. It’s been too much. This night out has been too much for her. At least the last round of shots were water, courtesy of the hefty tip I paid the bartender, but still. I should have put a stop to it earlier. The second she asked me if I loved her, the words slurred on her lips, we should have been out the door.
The only thing that kept me here was the fact that she needed this. She needed everyone to see her. It was going so perfectly. Fucking hell.
I guide Ella out the front door and down the steps. Maybe it will look like a jealous man taking a woman out of a party before she’s ready.
I’m not jealous. I’m beside myself.
Ella doesn’t say a word on the way to the car. The cold is setting in. She shivers under my arm, wrapped in her coat. Her teeth click together as we reach the car. I bundle her into the passenger side and run around to mine and throw myself in. Start the car. Turn the heat all the way up.
The tires screech as I back out of the parking spot. I don’t bother to call or text a soul seeing as Silas is standing right there at the exit, watching us leave.
The radio plays along as I accelerate into the road and get us out of the neighborhood, thankfully, Ella reaches over and turns it off. I usually took city streets between the motel and Ella’s, but tonight I take the first available turn onto the highway that skirts the edge of town. Stars shine above the mountain in clear skies. What was she thinking, jumping off that bar? What the hell did she intend to do to me?
Ella huddles in the passenger seat, her teeth clicking together with her shivers. Her arms lock tight around her stomach. “I’m so cold.”
I try to turn up the heat some more, but it’s already at full blast. “That’s probably from jumping off of a balcony into the pool when it’s freezing outside.”
I don’t take my eyes off the road for even a moment and focus on not losing it. It doesn’t matter. I can still feel her watching me.
“Are you mad at me?” she whispers as the night whips by us.
Mad does not begin to describe what I feel right now. It’s such an intense storm of emotions that I hesitate to open my mouth. There are no words to describe it. Mad doesn’t encompass the terror and the relief and yes, the anger.
It doesn’t describe the need.
Because right now I am in a state of need. I need her to understand. I need an outlet for all these things I feel. I need to be in control.
I don’t answer, and Ella doesn’t ask again. She stares through the windshield as we sail through the night, headlights from the oncoming traffic gliding across her face at uneven intervals.
We pass the exit we’d have to take to go to her house.
I feel Ella notice it. Her wet clothes shift against the seat. But she doesn’t ask the question. On some level, she already knows where we’re going.
The exit that leads to the motel looms out of the night, and I give all my attention to driving carefully. To steering us off the highway and going the speed limit and not fucking up another thing tonight.
We’re here. The mom-and-pop motel is a strip of rooms on a quiet road off the highway. It was closer than my house, closer than hers. And we’ll have privacy.
Lights burn on the outside of each door, keeping the night at bay. I think it’s meant to be welcoming, but right now it’s more than welcoming. It looks like safety. There’s no one outside the rooms.
I park, and leave her where she is.
“Stay while I get a room,” I order and she nods. For a moment, a tic in my jaw spasms until she answers, “Yes.”
Once I have the key, I open my trunk to take out a spare bag that stays there. Most of it is useless, but there’s a dry undershirt and pair of boxers that will do. Grabbing them, I go around to her door. Wordlessly, I open it and offer her my hand.
Ella hesitates.
Then she puts her hand in mine.
That hesitation does something to me. I know she’s delicate. But I also know had I been stricter, this shit wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t be questioning a damn thing between us.
I hustle us to the door, take the key out, and let us in.
The room seems too small to contain me in this moment, but there’s more than myself to focus on. “Get out of those wet clothes.”
Ella stands by the door, still and silent, and I unbuckle my belt. As I pull it apart, ready to slide it through the belt loops, I see she hasn’t moved an inch.
“Little bird.”
Her eyes snap to mine.
“Get out of those clothes.”
I don’t know if it’s because she’s responding to me or because it’s cold that Ella’s fingers go to work on the buttons of her coat. She strips it off and tosses it across the table, then goes for the hem of her dress. Anger surges through me again. She could have died, and then I would have been there with her broken body and my broken soul. She could have died and left me to live through the aftermath.
Ella has her dress over her head, her bare breasts perky, her nipples pebbled. She’s not entirely steady. Probably still drunk, and how the hell did I let that happen? I told her there would be punishment for drinking. She knew that going in. And she did it on purpose.
Which could mean—
I don’t know what anything means anymore.
The rest of her clothes come off, and Ella stands naked by the door of my room. I stalk across the too-small space and grab a clean towel out of the bathroom, then return to her. “Dry yourself off.”
She follows orders with a sullen set to her chin. Ella’s got a lot of nerve to be pissed at me in this moment. Like it’s my fault that she threw herself into a pool on a cold night. Like it’s my fault she threw herself at her ex-boyfriend.
Ella hands me the towel with that same tension in her chin.
Handing out the spare shirt and boxers, I tell her, “Put these on.”
When she’s pulling the clothes on, I sling her coat over the radiator.
I turn back to find her looking at me, her eyes huge and questioning and pissed. “What am I here for, Z?”
“You know why we’re here.”
“Why don’t you just drop me off at home and leave me?”
“Leave you?” The incredulity is palpable.
“You don’t want me. I know you don’t.”
With a deep, steadying breath, I dare her to call me a liar. “I want you more than I want anything, Eleanor.”
My words bring her lips to part and a shuddering breath leaves her. I close the space between us, splaying my hand against her back. “The fact that you question that at all tells me I failed you. But my little bird, you are here because it’s time for a punishment that I don’t want anyone to see. I intend to fuck you into the early morning, and it’s only for us. Everyone else needs to get the fuck out of what we are until you know damn well that you’re mine.”
Her breathing picks up, her chest rising and falling chaotically and her beautiful gaze caught in mine. My heart beats wildly, knowing that look and that need. Knowing this is exactly where we’re supposed to be.
“Z,” she whispers.
“You need someone to fuck the wild out of you,” I growl, and it’s wrong. I know it the second I say it. Ella’s eyes fly open, her lips part, and the shock on her face tells me I’ve screwed this up. I’ve stumbled over a hidden pain I didn’t know existed.
As she pushes me away, my phone goes off.
I ignore it. “You okay?” I question her as she crosses her arms and moves toward the bathroom, everything changed. Something’s wrong.
She nods, but doesn’t speak it.
“Ella,” I start and my phone goes off again. Again I ignore it.
“Ella, look at me,” I command her and she does as she’s told, her wide eyes staring back at me. “Are you all right?” I question, already knowing she’s not.
My phone rings in my pocket and I reach for it without thinking. “What?” I snap into the phone.
“We have a problem,” Damon says. “There are photos of you and Ella at the party and—”
“I need tonight, Damon,” I cut him off.
I turn my body away from her, as if that will give me any privacy. As if it will stop her from hearing this conversation. “We need a moment. We can talk—”
“Photos of you two. At the party. They’re on social media. There’s a story already posted. Several outlets are picking it up. She’s not nobody, Zander. What happened? You need to tell me what happened so I can figure it out.” Damon’s worry amplifies a different concern, one I wish had waited.
Wood knocks against wood, and I whirl around to find the space by the door empty, the door banging against the frame.
Fuck! I run out of the room, dropping my phone and race to the end of the hall. I could have gone left or right, I chose left and I chose wrong. With no one there I race to the other side and find that empty too.
“Ella!” I cry out, desperate for her to come back. Fuck.Fuck. “Ella!”
* * *
Ella
“I’m going to fuck the wild out of you, El.” James’s whispered words echo in my mind. Tears stream down my face and I can’t stop them. Huddled into a ball in the corner of some utility closet, I don’t really know, it’s so dark, I’m rocking back and forth. All I can do is cry, grieving for a man who loved me truly and deeply.
My hands tremble, my body’s shaking. With my hair stuck to the side of my face, I let the cold seep in. Needing to feel anything at all. I’ve gone numb. Numb all over.
I feel it happening again, this darkness that takes over as I gasp in air and wish it would all stop. I’m slipping backward faster than I ever could have imagined.
In the distance I hear Zander calling my name. Once, twice, then it fades. At least it gave me a moment to breathe.
I don’t want to be this way.
It was a moment. Only a moment.
There’s only one truth that I know as I sit here in the cold dark. I’m not okay.
* * *
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The National SuicidePrevention Lifeline is a United States-based suicide prevention network of over 160 crisis centers that provides 24/7 service via a toll-free hotline at the number 1-800-273-8255. It is available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.
