Shelter Read online

  Shelter

  Lauren Gilley

  Author’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction, and as such, any resemblances to real persons or events are purely coincidence. Any technical errors concerning the Atlanta Police Department and its operation are the fault of the author. I took some pretty big liberties for the sake of the plot and hope none of you will hold that against me.

  This one’s for my fans. You know who you are.

  Prologue

  It should have been raining. Or snowing. Sleeting. It should have at least been overcast. But instead the sun sliced down through a crisp wedge of blue, cloudless sky and laughed as the swaying willow limbs threw its dappled light across the grass, and over the coffin.

  Alma didn’t see much of the proceedings. Her world had been a blur since the phone call, clarity returning in fits and starts that left her breathless. Wild collages of the past three days would bombard her senses: the phone falling out of her hand; the glass breaking as it hit the tile; her mother’s arms around her; the insanely shrill sound of her own screams punching through the night, the empty other half of her bed; the casseroles, sad smiles, hugs and shoulder slugs, well wishes, condolences, coffin catalogues, the funeral home smell, his wedding ring coming back to her in a clear plastic sleeve from the hospital…

  And now it was all down to this: A beautiful mahogany coffin the same color as her hair with a bundle of red roses and baby’s breath across the smooth lid. The headstone was lovely – polished black granite with laser script.

  Samuel James Morales

  1982- 2012

  He’d only been thirty. And she was twenty-four. And a widow.

  On a clear, sunny autumn day, just like this one, Alma had been kneading homemade dough into a nice round ball, sprinkling flour over it and humming along to the radio because Sam had a craving for pizza, he’d told her so over the phone that morning. There had been a smile to his voice when he’d said, “I miss you, baby, but I’ll be back tonight.” Only it hadn’t been Sam who’d knocked softly on her door that night. It had been his cousin, Carlos, wringing his stocking cap in his hands and shaking his head, hardly able to say the words to her.

  Alma lifted her head, eyes skipping up over the coffin and to the other side of the gathered crowd. All the people present were her family. Carlos had been Sam’s only living relative and she found him standing alone, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, his big brown eyes looking red-rimmed as they snapped up and locked onto hers. Like he’d sensed that she was watching him.

  His face wavered and she knew it was because tears were pouring from her eyes, ruining her makeup. Her mother, Diane, tightened her arm around her waist.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart.”

  But it wasn’t. And Carlos knew that. He tilted his head back as the pastor began his recitation and over the proud ridge of his nose, Alma could see the unshed tears in his eyes, the overwhelming grief that was second only to hers. It was comforting, if anything could be considered a comfort at this point. Sam had been her whole existence, and even if her family was only grieving for her, Carlos grieved for her husband too. They were alone in that, bound together in this hell that swirled around them.

  Or maybe that was her love and imagination getting the best of her again. Because she wasn’t sure anyone could feel so broken, so sawed in half, as she did now. She rested her head against her mom’s shoulder and closed her eyes, letting the tears push out logic and awareness, until she was trapped in her own body, with all her howling grief, her world shattered into a million, glittering, sharp pieces.

  1

  The dream was always the same. Carlos was in the stairwell of that Godforsaken warehouse and Sam was in front of him: his cousin the tall one, the brave one, the one who got things done. As if in slow motion, a man came floating down the stairs from above them. Carlos saw him only a moment before the crack of the gun echoed through the stairwell, and then Sam was collapsing.

  Only this time, when he tore his own shirt off over his head and pressed it to his cousin’s wound, Sam’s bleeding stopped. And the light didn’t slowly fade from his eyes. He didn’t tell him in a choked voice to look after his girl. It was okay, Sam was going to live, it was all going to be fine…

  And then like always, Carlos went jacking upright in bed. He was sweaty, the sheets clung to his damp skin, and he was breathing in huge inhalations that shook his whole body. His hands trembled and the true scene played out behind his open eyes: Sam dying in his arms, his blood spreading out in a red, unstoppable tide across the cold concrete floor.

  “Damn,” he groaned against his hands as he rubbed them across his face.

  When he’d stopped quaking, he clicked on his bedside lamp and dug a pack of smokes and a lighter out of his nightstand. The first sweet draw of nicotine calmed him further and he was able to take stock of his bedroom.

  The place was in a shambles. Clothes – clean, dirty, or neither – were thrown all over, hanging onto his chair and his desk like clinging vegetation. Moss or some shit. Food wrappers. Dirty paper plates. There was a musty smell of sweat and stale beer hanging in the air. His blinds were cracked and through them he could see a heavy rain falling. Thunder rumbled overhead and the storm was confirmed. It seemed like it had rained off and on constantly since the funeral three weeks before.

  Sam had felt more like a brother than a cousin. Sam’s mother Nadia had raised Carlos from the time he was thirteen up until she’d lost her battle with cancer two years prior. If that loss had been crushing, losing Sam on top of it was absolute devastation. So much so that he’d been unable to do the one thing Sam had asked of him.

  He had to go see Alma today, he just had to. He’d avoided it for too long and his guilt was starting to outweigh his grief.

  With one last drag on his smoke, he stubbed it out in the overflowing glass ashtray on the nightstand and pushed himself out of bed. It was after eleven – he had such trouble falling asleep that he always overslept his alarm. But with this rain, he didn’t have to show up for his fulltime job and he had hours until he had to be at the bar, so he headed for the shower, plucking what he hoped were clean clothes up off the floor as he went.

  Alma, her name flashed across his mind as he leaned into the shower and cut on the taps, cranking the hot water all the way on with just a trickle of cold to keep from scalding himself. He shrugged out of his wifebeater and boxers in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and pulled up a mental image of his dead cousin’s wife.

  Slim but shapely, with long, silky dark hair, Alma Harris – now Morales – had always been a vision of classic beauty that nonetheless had inspired countless raunchy dreams. At least for him. He guessed Sam had never had to dream since he’d had the real thing in his bed every night.

  “Dumbass,” he muttered to himself, stepping into the shower.

  **

  It was dark where she was. Warm. The surface upon which she rested soft and smooth. The bed. Their bed. The place where she slipped naked between the sheets because he was already waiting; where his mouth found all the most sensitive, tender little places on her body; where she gave all of herself up as their bodies melded to one; and where afterward, he let her sleep curled up at his side. The bed smelled of them…of him…the sheets cool but the covers fighting off the chill of the approaching dawn. It was their haven: a place where age and time and the baggage of the past ceased to exist. Here it was just them, together, and there was no limit, no boundary that marked anything as too intimate.

  Alma loved it here, in their bed. Eyelids still too heavy to lift as sleep slowly left her, she stirred, kicked drowsily through the bedclothes. She still clung to a scrap of a dream, not quite ready for the day, holding off awareness. She reached across the bed and was met with empty, sof
t sheets. Sam must have hit the shower early. He no doubt had another job on the roster; he’d been home with her for weeks, the two of them wallowing in the house, their house, and Sean no doubt wanted him on the road again.

  Alma smiled to herself. She should join him. He would put her hands over her head on the wet tile and the water would cascade down his lean, rippling, tattooed body. Her personal sex god: a dark, mean-faced Adonis who devoured her with his eyes while he took her under the hot jets of water.

  She stirred at the thought, heat rising in her cheeks, need tightening deep at the pit of her stomach. God, how she loved him. And wanted him. Sam was her everything, her one and only. As long as she had Sam, she didn’t need anyone or anything else. She burrowed her nose into the pillow, breathing deeply the combined smells of his cologne and skin. She wanted to go find him in the shower, peel back the curtain and climb in behind him, pass her hands up the ink work snake on his back, sliding over the sinewy, soaped skin. But she wanted to lay here and dream about him also.

  The decision was made for her when a sound like cannon fire reverberated throughout the house.

  Alma startled awake, eyes flying open, gasping at the deep, booming sound. She clutched the sheet up across her naked chest, eyes going to the window. Rather than the deep, blackest dark of coming dawn, she saw the lead gray of an afternoon storm sky. Lightning ripped in jagged bolts low beneath the hanging clouds. Rain lashed the house, rattled against the glass and drummed heavily up on the roof. The scrawny, unkempt trees outside the window doubled over against the wind and scraped the panes. It was storming. A glance at the bedside clock revealed that it was twelve o’clock in the afternoon. And as she passed a hand over her breasts, she remembered that she wasn’t naked, but wearing one of Sam’s old shirts.

  A ferocious bolt turned the gray afternoon to the white-hot surface of the sun, the flash washing the bedroom, branding the backs of her eyes with its echoes. And just as it tore open the afternoon, it permeated the drowsy fog in her head, splitting open her memory, the disassembled bits of grief falling like the rain above.

  It all came back to her: One of Sam’s rare, white smiles splitting his hard face as he’d walked out the door that morning. Sean’s broken voice over the phone. Fainting in the funeral home. The long asphalt drive, the roses, the voices, the sorrys, the kisses on her cheek and pats on her hand.

  She remembered now. Three weeks ago…three weeks…Sam had…

  She was going to vomit.

  In a sudden flurry of movement, Alma tried to leap from her bed, their bed, her legs getting tangled in the sheets. She stumbled, went down hard on the carpet on her hands and knees. And bile was rising quickly in her throat by the time she finally staggered into the bathroom. She couldn’t make it to the toilet, instead curled over the sink, holding her own hair back as she retched. She hadn’t eaten in days, and it was only yellow bile and clear, bubbled saliva that she coughed up into the basin. She rinsed it away quickly, cupping water in her hand and bringing it to her mouth, splashing her face too. Afterward, when she shut off the tap, she glanced up at her white, dripping face in the mirror. She looked like a zombie: dark circles under her eyes, cheeks gaunt. Her hair was a limp, dirty, stringy mess around her shoulders. She looked terrible and couldn’t be bothered to care.

  Because Sam was dead, and he was never coming home, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do without him.

  “Oh,” she didn’t recognize her own broken voice as she slowly shifted around so she was sitting on the closed toilet lid. Sleep was killing her, bringing with it countless memories of the past, making her believe that he was still alive, only to be crushed each time she awoke. Her relatives had given up, one by one. Her mother still came to visit every day, but she was no longer hopeful, just resolute as she fixed her food she refused to eat and tried to comb the snarls from her hair. No one had loved Sam, not the way she had, and she wasn’t even sure they’d love his legacy.

  She pressed a weak, trembling hand over her belly and imagined she could feel the baby growing inside, even though it was a scant eight weeks since conception. Sam hadn’t even known. He hadn’t wanted children, but she suspected he wouldn’t have turned away from his own.

  “I want a baby,” she whispered, flattening her palms down over his naked chest, burrowing closer to him through the sheets.

  His frown was for show, but it put harsh lines at the corners of his mouth. “What do you need with a baby? Huh? Ain’t you busy enough already?” And he palmed her ass under the covers, making her laugh, getting her to lean even closer so he could kiss her.

  How had this happened? She’d been in love with him for as long as she could remember.

  The Morales cousins who’d performed odd jobs for her father had always been looked down upon by the Harris family, but only Sam had been dangerous, the younger Carlos just did what his big cousin did, always tagging along.

  Alma had been eleven when she’d known, when the then seventeen-year-old Sam had pulled her out of the lake after that ridiculous daredevil high dive off the edge of Reaper’s Rock. Dripping wet and poised above her, shaking her, asking if she was still alive, she’d fallen so perfectly in love with him that the next thirteen years hadn’t done a thing to dim her feelings. He’d been a hard man, a guarded man, who didn’t let many people in, and who had admitted, when she was seventeen and kneading the lean, rope-like muscles in his arms that he felt guilty about wanting her the way he did. But that hadn’t changed anything.

  She’d had only seven years to actually be with him, only three years of marriage. And now he was gone.

  “My pretty little girl,” he’d called her and had brushed the long lengths of her dark hair back with rough fingers. And he’d kissed her until liquid fire pulsed through her veins.

  Alma shut her eyes and let the tears fall, holding herself tight around the middle, and rocked back and forth on the toilet lid, sobbing loudly because there was no one around to hear her.

  She didn’t know how long she stayed there, the storm raging around the little house, but she was eventually roused by a loud knock. And then another. Someone was at her front door.

  On shaky legs, Alma stood and dabbed a bit of toothpaste on her finger, rubbed it along the fronts of her teeth and then rinsed her mouth again. The knock repeated and she headed toward the door, knowing there was nothing to do about her shabby wardrobe or disastrous hair.

  The house was still fairly tidy, but a thin layer of dust coated everything. And the kitchen counters were heaped with casserole dishes that needed to be put back in their insulated zippered pouches and taken back to the various sympathizers. Diane had been forced to dump most of the food down the disposal because Alma could bring herself to eat very little.

  Through the gray haze of the stormy afternoon, she saw a shadow of a man on the other side of the sidelights that flanked the door. She rapped on the glass to catch his attention, anxiety tightening up her stomach, until his face, framed by the hood of his sweatshirt, turned to the window.

  It was Carlos.

  She unlocked the door and waved him in, a stiff blast of rain-soaked wind following him before she could close it again. Any opportunity for pleasantries and may-I-come-in had been lost to the storm, and now Carlos Morales stood dripping onto the carpet of her modest entry hall, already shrugging out of the zip-up sweatshirt that appeared to be the wettest of his clothes.

  “Here,” she took it from him and crossed to the kitchen, hanging it off the back of a chair where it could drip unhindered.

  “Thanks.”

  Alma turned around and found that he’d followed her and now stood propped in the doorway. Carlos was a little shorter than his cousin Sam had been, but a little wider in the shoulders. His muscles were thick bundled pads that filled out his clothes as opposed to the stark, lean cuts of Sam’s arms and torso. “Beefcake” Alma’s friend Caroline had always called him. He was in a plain black t-shirt and dark, loose-fitting low rider jeans today. Clean whit
e sneakers. He looked only distantly related to his cousin in the face; his nose more pronounced, his eyes larger, wider, kinder. He kept his hair buzzed close to his skull and when he smiled, though he wasn’t doing so now, it was huge and dazzlingly white; it lit up the whole room. Today he was somber though. He shoved his hands in his pockets and his muscled shoulders sagged as he met her gaze with unwavering sincerity.

  “Hey, Alma.”

  She twitched a tiny smile she didn’t feel. “Hey.”

  “You doin’ okay? I meant to come by earlier but I just never…”

  “I’m okay,” she lied and the way he swallowed, adam’s apple bobbing along his thick neck told her he knew it.

  Lightning cracked open the sky, the thunder chasing so close it sounded like it had borne the streak of light and not the other way around. Alma jumped reflexively and then sighed at her own jangled nerves. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head.

  Carlos took a step into the room and she wasn’t so out of it that she couldn’t see his hesitation, the way his foot hovered a moment like he wanted to take a few more steps and close the distance between them. But he hung back, hands now dangling by his sides. “You,” he paused and wet his lips. His eyes bounced around the room and then came back to her, head tilted back like he was now having a hard time looking at her. “You don’t have to apologize to me of all people.”

  She clamped her eyes shut before the tears could get kick-started again. So much of her wanted to stop feeling the way she did, even as she recognized that it might not be possible to ever be happy again. But another part of her wanted to let loose because with Carlos, there would be no need to explain how much Sam had meant to her: he just knew. She opened her eyes, batting at the moisture in them, trembling self-control becoming more unsteady as she watched grief twist his handsome, friendly face into one she didn’t recognize. He was a man lost, and still looked like he struggled with whether to come closer or keep his distance.