“The pieces you ordered came in. It got finished without you.” His tone was flat and uninterested.
“And?”
He took a swallow of his cognac before answering. “Everything looks nice.”
It looked fan-fucking-tastic, I was sure of it. He knew it too, but there was no way he’d give me anything, even that.
“Anyway.” I let my focus drift, as though I was telling something romantic or whimsical. “I gave up my business, moved across an ocean, and married him. Then he told me he wanted to kill me. Now he’s keeping me captive on his pleasure island.” I brought my gaze back to him, narrowed and piercing.
If he wanted me to talk about something that affected me, then this definitely should count. There were very few moments in my life that had changed the course of my life the way that meeting him had.
* * *
His breaths were usually measured, but this one was deep. I saw it in the slight rise of his torso, the one tell he had that I wasn’t as easy for him to manage as he liked me to believe.
He took another swallow of his drink then set it down on the side table. With laser focus, he regarded me. “Is this really what you want to talk about?”
Yes. Yes, it really was.
Except…
He’d said he might ask questions. He’d said he wanted me vulnerable. There were so many ways he could poke and prod at me in this arena, and it was an arena that truly did belong to him. I might be a bull, determined and horned, but he was a skilled matador, and no matter how tempting he was with that cape, he’d be sure to sidestep when I charged.
There were other things to tell. Things that were harder to say but impossible for him to subvert.
Needing an escape from his unrelenting stare, I closed my eyes. Without meaning to go there, I found myself at the beginning, in a time when I was still only innocent, in a country garden, on a rope swing with a wooden seat.
Bile burned at the back of my throat. These weren’t memories I ever allowed, and I felt their foreignness like an illness. My body fought to remove them. My head ached with their presence.
But the actual beginning came before, in the reason I’d been in that garden in the first place. “I was close to my grandpa Werner,” I said, feeling the tremble in my voice. “I spent a month with him every summer, four glorious weeks without my mother and father. It was just me and him, and I was spoiled and loved. When he died—”
“You were six,” Edward said cutting me off. “This isn’t what I’m looking for, and you know it.”
My muscles tensed as though preparing to fight. He thought I was giving him something basic. Too basic. He assumed I was going to tell him how my granddaddy died when I was a kid and how it broke my heart and how I’d never been the same after, and while all of those things were true, it had only been the prologue to the real story.
But it was good he’d stopped me.
This wasn’t something I wanted to tell either. Not now. Not ever.
With a soft laugh, I shook my head, surprised with myself for starting down that path. Irritated that he’d been the one to draw me back when it should have been me.
I propped my elbows on my lap and leaned my forehead into my palms. My fingers rubbed into my skin, massaging my brow. I knew what story to tell. It was the one that I told myself meant the most, which was a bold-faced lie, but it was easier to clutch to it as the cause of all my pain than giving acknowledgment to the others.
For one last moment, I let myself contemplate telling a lie instead. I believed I could get away with it, but I also believed that, if I couldn’t, the consequences would be significant.
And what would happen if I told the truth? I sort of wanted to find out.
With my mind made, I dropped my hands to my lap and sat back. Composed. “There was a boy I grew up with. A boy who changed everything. And don’t stop me this time because this is real.”
He nodded for me to continue.
“Our mothers were friends. Our families got together a lot. Holidays, summers, vacations. We probably should have thought of each other as brother and sister, and maybe he did…” I trailed off for a moment, wondering if that had been the case for Hudson. “Anyway, I never did. My mom believed we’d get married one day, and maybe that’s why I did too. It had been bred into me to be his bride, and so it was natural to fall in love with him.
“All through high school, I crushed on him, putting myself out there, waiting for him to make a move. Watching as he went through girls like they were tissues.”
“Girlfriends?” Edward asked. “Or just lovers?”
The difference was relevant.
“Lovers,” I said quickly. “Never a girlfriend. Which was why I held out hope. I mean, I wasn’t the only girl fawning over him. He was super attractive, lean and gray-eyed. He came from mega money and everyone knew he was the guy who’d take his inheritance and quadruple it before he was thirty—which he did. He had the serious thing going for him. He was scary smart and controlled and calculating and strategic. Always a step ahead of everyone else.”
“So you have a type.” His smug smile made me lightheaded while at the same time want to kick him in the balls.
I gritted my teeth. “The type that likes to fuck with my emotions, yeah. I guess I do.”
“What’s his name?”
I paused, about to give it. But his wanting to know, even if I couldn’t guess why, made it valuable information. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I’ll decide if it matters.”
“No, actually, you won’t. This is my story—” I corrected myself at his brow raise. “A true story, but totally mine, and that means I’m the one who knows what details are significant and which ones aren’t. His name is not.”
His jaw flexed, and for the first time ever, I felt him warring for control.
“We’ll leave it then,” he said, handing me this one win. “For now.”
It was impossible not to be pleased with myself, and I didn’t bother to hide my grin. “As I was saying, he wasn’t popular in the way popular kids usually are, but people knew him. Girls knew him. And if they weren’t scared of him, they were into him.”
“I imagine some were both.” Like you with me, his tone said clearly.
I ignored the pointed remark and went on. “I didn’t care about the other girls, though. Because he was mine. I was the one he grew up with. I was the one who knew him—well, as much as he let anyone know him. I was the one he had a nickname for when he never had one for anyone, including his siblings. By all rights, he was mine.”
“What did he call you?”
“Ceeley.” That wasn’t technically true—Ceeley hadn’t been a nickname that Hudson started, my mother had. He’d simply adopted it, probably because he’d heard me called that more than Celia for much of our younger years. It was a relevant detail to omit, but I was who I was and that meant I reveled in slipping in something that Edward would never know to counter.
“Original,” he huffed. “I thought you said he was sharp.”
“We were kids,” I reminded him. Asshole.
I took a breath, hearing my own words echo in the room, letting them sink in for both of us. “We were kids,” I said again, “and it was a kid crush, and by the time I graduated high school I realized that it wasn’t going anywhere, and I needed to move on.”
I got up, wary that I hadn’t been given permission, careful to portray that I didn’t believe I needed it, and wandered around the back of the couch to the bar. When Edward made no protest, I crouched down to examine the contents of the wine fridge.
“I wasn’t what you’d call studious. I had good grades, and I was smart, but I didn’t get into it the way a lot of the preppy kids did, and, having spent all my teen years believing I didn’t have to grow up and do anything except marry my friend, I had no real plan for college.” I pulled out a Malbec and stood. “I liked art and literature. I could study those anywhere. So my only real requirement for choosing a sch
ool was that it be far from wherever he was going to be. He was staying east, so I went west. UC Berkeley.”
I had to rummage through three drawers before finding the corkscrew, which was only annoying because Edward had chosen to watch me search rather than stand up and help me.
“No, no, don’t get up,” I said sarcastically when I began the awkward job of removing the cork. “I’ve got it.”
I did have it, and I didn’t actually want him helping me. I especially didn’t want him close to me. I preferred him over there, with a distance between us. It wasn’t something I was willing to give up just so he could open up my wine.
When the struggle was over and the cork had eased from the bottle with a satisfying pop, I plucked a wine glass from the rack and poured. Then I turned back toward Edward, resting my ass on the bar as I took a swallow.
I let the taste register as I decided what to say next. It had a black-cherry flavor, full-bodied with a hint of chili. “Nice,” I said, because I wanted to prove I could give a compliment even if he couldn’t.
He didn’t react except to prompt me. “Berkeley?”
“I met a guy there. Dirk.”
“His name was Dirk?” He didn’t hide the mockery in his inflection. That had been Hudson’s reaction, too, if I remembered correctly.
I really did have a type.
“Dirk Pennington,” I said, unfazed. “He was…” I searched for how to describe a man I’d barely thought about in a decade. “I don’t know, he was a good guy. He was nice. Genuine. Sweet.” I played up the adjectives with my vocalization, throwing them in the face of a man who wouldn’t see himself in any of them.
“In other words, boring.”
“A lot of women find the good guys more attractive than the bad.”
“But not you.”
My stomach flipped at his accurate pronouncement. I despised that he saw that about me even more than I despised that it was true, so, of course, I became overly defensive. “I really liked him! We were good together.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Are you jealous?” There’d been no hint of it in his remark, but I couldn’t help myself.
Edward said nothing, expressionless and impervious to my charm.
I sighed. “Not that it’s relevant, but yes. He wasn’t my first either, so don’t try to make that into anything it’s not.”
“So you fucked him, he wasn’t your first, and he was nice,” he said in summarization.
I took a swallow of my wine. “Right.”
“And he made you forget all about the nameless guy.”
“That’s right,” I said cautiously, feeling there was a challenge in his last statement that I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
“I see,” he said in a way that made me sure he didn’t see at all. At least, he didn’t see what I wanted him to see. “And then what happened?”
“Then I came home for the summer. Dirk stayed in California because that was where he was from. He invited me to move in with him, which I considered, but I was young, and I missed home.”
“You wanted to go back and flaunt Dirk in the nameless guy’s face.”
“No.” It had been the first thing I’d told Hudson when I saw him again. My mother had plans for us to go to a garden show that afternoon, and I didn’t have much time to visit, but I’d snuck off to his summer house just to tell him. “No, not to flaunt. I wanted him to know I was over him, though, yes.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, unconvinced.
“Because I didn’t want my old crush to be an obstacle in our friendship.”
“I don’t believe you.”
His skepticism was maddening.
“I wasn’t trying to make him jealous,” I insisted. If that’s what he was suggesting. “What I had with Dirk was real. I thought he could have been it for me.”
He let that sit for a moment, letting me absorb the truth of what I’d just said, or the untruth, as he believed.
But it was true. Wasn’t it?
“So then you wanted to see the old crush to test yourself,” he said when I didn’t say anything else. “To be sure.”
My cheeks flamed with guilt. “Okay, maybe a bit of that too.” I pushed myself off the bar with my hip and walked back around the couch and sat down. “But I truly didn’t have some glorified plan to make him fall for me. I had fond feelings for him, and I wanted to find a new way to be in his life. So I told him all about Dirk, and it worked. I had a boyfriend and wasn’t after him anymore so suddenly I wasn’t someone he needed to avoid. We were together so much that summer, going to the movies and the beach and parties of people we knew in high school. Except for my parents and my best friend, Christina, I saw him more than anyone else.
“It was all fine until the end of August. We’d gotten close, really close, and, sure, I still felt things for him. Those aren’t the kinds of feelings that go away easily, but I was okay with what we were and what we weren’t, and I had Dirk, who I talked to every day.” I checked myself. “Maybe not every day. Not at the end.”
“Because the boy was seeming interested.”
I scowled because I hated how Edward thought he knew everything. But he was right this time. Which I hated even more. “Yeah. He did seem interested.”
I took another swallow of the Malbec and ignored the way Edward made me feel with his presence in order to better remember how Hudson had made me feel in the past. Literally manipulated me into feeling, to be truthful, but I wouldn’t know that for sure for another several months. “He would brush up against me, accidentally. Or he’d sweep the hair from my face. Touching, he was always touching me, and that had never been like him before. He’d never been a real physical guy. And he was thoughtful about me. I’d lamented to him about not knowing what to major in, and he’d researched my school and gotten all these brochures on interior design and gave me a gorgeous coffee-table book about it.”
The memory made me smile. It had seemed utterly romantic to me—a guy going out of his way to help decide what I should do with my life. What I should be. It was the best proof of mattering. A guy wouldn’t go out of his way like that, wouldn’t notice, if I didn’t matter. That kind of gesture got me fluttery every time.
Though there hadn’t been that many. The last time a man paid that much attention to me…
I glanced quickly at Edward, as if he could read my thoughts, as if he could know I’d almost compared his gifts over the last three months to the gift Hudson had given that had swept me away.
They weren’t the same. I refused to think of them as the same.
“Is there something else?” he asked, trying to interpret my train of thought.
“I didn’t sleep with him.” I couldn’t tell from his expression if that had been truly what he’d assumed. “I did kiss him. Or I let him kiss me. I’m not sure which it was anymore. And I wanted him to kiss me.”
I’d wanted him to do more than kiss me. I would have let him, if things had gone the way I’d wanted. I’d thought it was inevitable after that kiss. That we’d be together. That we’d be a couple.
I could still feel that wanting, under layers of years and walls and nothing. Like a bruise that never healed but only hurt when I pressed on it. Of all the made-up things there had been between Hudson and me, before and after, that moment was real. That wanting was real.
Wanting that was magnified by believing he felt it too.
I’d thought all that had stood between us was Dirk, a guy who, as Edward had pointed out, was good but bland.
“I wasn’t a terrible person.” How long had it been since I’d been able to say those words? “Not yet, anyway. So I did the honorable thing, and tried to call Dirk to break up. But he was at work so I had to leave a message and when he called back I was already at this big party Christina was having, which wasn’t the place to break up with a guy, and I knew it, but…” My only excuse had been eagerness, and that sounded petty, so I left it there. “He was hurt. I could tell. Even over the phone.” Let
’s wait and talk this over when we get back for the new semester, he’d begged. “It hurt more than I’d imagined it would, hurting him like that. I had to leave for a bit to take a drive and get my head together afterward because it hurt so bad. But when I came back, I was better and ready, and I saw...I saw the boy’s car, so I knew he was inside, and I looked for him everywhere. Asked everyone. Searched every room, and when someone said he thought he was hanging in Christina’s room, I ran up there.”
I could still see it like it was happening. Me flinging open the door, and them. The image permanently seared into my mind.
“He was fucking her. Fucking my best friend. As if we hadn’t kissed the night before. As if we hadn’t agreed to talk more about our relationship at the party. As if I hadn’t told him I loved him.” It sounded so insignificant in the telling compared to how it had felt to witness.
The worst part, though, hadn’t even been that moment but after, when I’d confronted Hudson, and he’d pretended there’d been nothing, that all the signs I’d read were mistaken. He’d told me to grow up.
What did you think was going to happen between us? You thought I was going to love you? You thought we were going to ride off into the sunset together?
“And all I could think was how duped I’d been. Because I hadn’t thought he was going to love me until he made me believe he would.” It was strange how mad I could still be about it, even after everything that followed. How hurt and abused. How raw. “He’d insinuated the only thing holding him back from me was my relationship with Dirk. And so I’d ended that! To be with him! I’d had real feelings for him, and me? I’d been nothing more than something to do. Nothing more than a game.”
It was over. I’d said it all. I’d told it the way it happened, in a way I’d never told anyone, and, yeah, I felt vulnerable. It was cathartic too. Cleansing.
Edward remained silent for long beats after, as he’d been through much of my wandering through the past, and while I’d never forgotten he was there, he had made it easier to feel like the telling was natural. My parents had always poo-pooed therapy, and I wondered if it was like this—sitting on a couch, uncomfortable, trapped. Waiting for the therapist to speak and declare you sane.