In spite of not having had relationships, she wanted to try everything with her partner. She wanted to live life large. She wanted to die with no regrets. After her parents had died, she’d been so ill. So exhausted. She’d been barely able to walk across the floor, and she’d gone to a doctor. After running a multitude of tests on her, he’d given her the bad news—she had the internal organs of an old woman. Her heart was worn out. She didn’t have heart disease like her father, but she might as well have. Her body wasn’t going to last long.
She took vitamins. She ate right. She walked. She did the best she could to prolong her life. She noticed that when she sang in bars with bands, that feeling of being drained often came over her, just the way it did when she had tried to help Sahara recently. She chose crappy bands so she wouldn’t want to sing with them for very long.
She knew Savage thought he was the only reason she hadn’t gone to the bar in Caspar and auditioned with the band there, but she had a feeling the musicians were very good. She knew if she heard them, it would be difficult to resist joining them. She’d never really had the opportunity to be with a good band, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to people in the audience if they were really ill.
She’d admitted to Savage that she had no control. She just hadn’t told him what exactly she had no control over. It was a terrible compulsion she couldn’t overcome, to try to relieve suffering when people were sick. She suspected that was what was shortening her life, but she just couldn’t stop herself, so she limited her singing gigs and the amount of time she spent with people she didn’t know, especially crowds.
She wanted to date. She wanted to have crazy, wild sexual experiences, but when she met men, they weren’t in any way exciting to her. She found she didn’t respond physically to the men she encountered. Everything was so different with Savage. Every nerve ending in her body went on high alert when he was in the same room with her. If he touched her, just a whisper of a touch, it was like a small splash of hot wax on her skin. When he spanked her . . . that was pure fire.
Savage felt as if he needed her. The pain he caused was heartfelt, emotional, but he didn’t deplete her body. He filled her up. He gave her energy. Exhilarated her in ways she didn’t yet understand.
The nights with him were always fun. He wanted to play that silly game of honest questions. Sometimes he asked her what she’d had for dinner, and if she hadn’t eaten more than a piece of fruit, which was pretty much her standard dinner, he would smack her on the butt, get up and go to her fridge to find eggs, cheese and mushrooms. He always complained that she didn’t eat meat, but he was teasing her. He brought meat for himself and he always cooked his food separately. He was thoughtful in ways she didn’t expect.
Seychelle found herself looking at Savage the way she did most times he came, so happy inside she didn’t know if she should allow their strange friendship to continue. He never told her when he was going to show up, he just did. Right now, he was scrambling eggs with cheese, and this time he had added hash browns to the mix. She knew he was always worried that she wasn’t eating enough, which was silly.
“You know I’m going to gain weight if you keep insisting I eat in the evening,” she pointed out. “I make it a practice never to eat after six o’clock.”
He didn’t turn around. “That’s bullshit.”
“It isn’t. In case you haven’t bothered to notice, I’m already carrying a few extra pounds.” She might as well point it out. He had sharp eyes. She couldn’t imagine that he hadn’t catalogued that fact. “If I eat at night, I’m going to just pack on more weight, Savage.”
“You have a perfect figure, Seychelle, and you have to know it. No man wants a fuckin’ stick in his bed. You’ve got great tits and an ass most men would kill for their woman to have. You need to eat. You want to go for a walk after we eat, just say so, I’m up for that. We can walk on the headlands. We do most nights anyway.”
Savage always threw out compliments so casually, as if they were facts and he was just stating them. He almost sounded annoyed, and he was getting more irritable as each day passed. He definitely wasn’t trying to flatter her.
“Nice of you to think so, Savage. I never thought about it that way. I guess I’ll eat the eggs and go for the walk with you.” She kept the challenge out of her voice. The last few nights he’d come, he’d just wanted to lie on the bed with her. The entire last week he’d gotten edgier.