Page 67 of Untouchable

She could see her father in glimpses and flashes. His broad, laughing face, the lines beside his eyes and his mouth, the hairon his forearms beneath the pushed-up sleeves of his old gray sweatshirt.

She could hear hints and glimmers of his familiar voice, his comforting chuckle, the sound of him clearing his throat.

And she could smell him in heartbreaking wafts. A mingling of coffee and the soap he used and the indefinable, unmistakable scent of Dad.

In the midst of those fleeting, sensory flickers of the dream, Kelly could feel him too. His hand in her hair. On her shoulder. On her back. Until, at the very end of the dream, he was hugging her.

And he didn’t feel like a flickering vision. He was solid, warm, strong, real.

It felt so real.

But even in the dream, she knew he was lost. Knew he was gone. Knew that, no matter how much she clung to him, she’d never be able to keep him.

She was sobbing as she woke up.

As she’d slept, she must have turned over onto her stomach because her hot cheek was pressed down against the mattress. She turned her head until she could bury her face in her pillow. Choked on the waves of grief, trying desperately to hold them back, knowing she couldn’t cry in front of Caleb, even while he was sleeping.

He’d fallen asleep beside her again after they’d had sex that evening.

But there was no way she could hold back the emotion. She wept in tight, jerky spasms, clenching her whole body to try to keep from making any sound or shaking the bed. It felt like an old wound had been violently torn open.

Felt like her father had just died.

Caleb was sound asleep, just a few inches away. She could feel his presence and hear his steady breathing, although shedidn’t dare turn her face to look at him. She needed to be away from him. Needed a real outlet for her grief. Needed something warm and alive to comfort her.

Reese. She wished Reese were here. Or Ralph, the dog. Or Breah with her comforting maternal air. Anything other than lying alone beside a cold, sleeping form, strangling on sobs with her face smothered in a luxurious pillow.

She tried to capture the dream again. Tried to see, hear, smell, feel her father—who’d been lost for so many years. Wanted it so much she felt like her chest would implode, but the dream, like her father, was lost.

And all that was left were scattered fragments and feelings.

Flickers that could never coalesce into substance.

Kelly couldn’t seem to stop crying, something she hadn’t done in years. And the large bed, the dark room, the house that wasn’t hers, all felt like they were swallowing her alive.

Her whole body shook with coiled grief and helplessness, and she wasn’t any different than she’d been at ten years old when her father had been violently, unjustly, unbearably snatched away from her.

Leaving a body with half a skull, bleeding into the dirt.

It was three o’clock in the morning. Caleb was sleeping. The rest of the staff was sleeping too. Warm and safe and content. With people they loved. With people who loved them.

And no matter how hard she tried to put things in perspective and accept the bitter irony of her life, she still couldn’t make any sense of it.

That Kelly had to lose her father—who had been all she’d had in the world, who had been the only person who’d ever truly been hers.

She knew she was sobbing too hard, too desperately. It was dangerous and might hint at things about herself that could never be revealed. But she couldn’t stop.

She felt Caleb shifting beside her and knew that even her tightly suppressed sobbing had woken him up.

But before she could think of how to explain this, before she could try to make her mind work instead of simply howling in grief and outrage, before she could even remember why she was in bed with Caleb in the first place, he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her over.

Revealed her wet, crumpled face.

He silently pulled her against his bare chest, and his arms wrapped around her tightly as she buried her face in his shoulder. She kept sobbing because there was no way she could stop.

It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She knew why she was here and that Caleb was the reason for it. She’d seen the note on the computer screen not so many hours ago. But she clung to him anyway, let him hold her.

She knew that she hated him and that he was comforting her. And that she desperately needed him. She couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around that truth.