by L. D. Davis
“Does he know?”
“Know what?” I asked, even though I already knew what he’d meant.
“About the incident that sent you into recovery.”
I shook my head. I had to work hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice when I answered.
“No. He was long gone by then.”
“What happened between the two of you?”
I snorted. “You and I don’t discuss romance, Sterling. You know I hate to think of you putting your tongue in my friends’ mouths, and you’re not thrilled thinking about some dude doing the same to me.”
I became friends with Kyle’s wife, Lily, after Emmy uprooted from the east coast, leaving Lily in charge of a bar she’d owned. I’d gone in there often to check up on things for Emmy and to have a drink. When the bar burned down about five years ago, I had helped Lily get a job at Sterling Corp. I gave her the very position that Kyle had booted me out of years before, the same position Emmy had occupied before she blew out of town. It had been rather amusing to see his face after he’d realized I had given him Emmy’s former bartender to take the job.
Lily, however, had been no slouch. She may have been just managing Emmy’s little hole in a wall bar before going to Sterling Corp, but she had an MBA behind her—which had been more than what Emmy had. Lily was almost as good as Emmy, maybe even better in some regards because she didn’t take any of Kyle’s shit. After a short time, even Kyle was impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that he put his dick in her and started another employer-on-employee love affair.
It didn’t end violently for them, though. Five years later, they were happily married with two small children. Even Kyle freakin’ Sterling had a happily-ever-after.
“We don’t discuss romance,” Kyle agreed. “But I’ve never seen you this affected by anyone. You’re very agitated. What did he do to you to make you react this way to seeing him again?”
I didn’t stop pacing, but I did slow down. We didn’t discuss matters of the heart, but Kyle was correct. There was no one else that could affect me the same as Grant. From Kyle’s point of view, I probably looked like I was ready to call up my dealer at any moment to relieve the anxiety and restlessness I was feeling. That wasn’t too far from the truth.
I stopped pacing in front of a wall of glass and gazed out at the city as I thought about exactly what Grant had done to make me react so harshly.
Grant came to see me after Sharice’s funeral, still dressed in his black suit. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and he looked so damn tired and weary. He was twenty-six years old, but stress, heartache, and grief made him look three times his age. I knew I had to fix myself for him. I knew I was part of the reason why he looked so ragged and anguished. It made me feel so fucking guilty.
I was glad that he came to see me before I got moved to the psychiatric ward. We weren’t allowed visitors there during the evaluation period. I would have been able to talk to him on the phone, but I needed to see him face to face. I needed that physical contact to reassure and comfort me, just as I knew that he needed it for his own comfort.
He came in as he always did and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. Cupping my cheek in one hand, he asked, “How are you feeling, Baby Girl?”
“I’m not the one who just buried a sister.” I traced his jaw with my fingers.
Tears slid slowly down my cheeks. I was crying for Grant’s sorrow, and I was crying for my own. Shari had been my best friend.
He gently grasped my wandering fingers and pressed them to his lips, closing his eyes. We stayed like that for several moments. His own tears dripped on my hand, trickled down my wrist, and dropped onto my lap.
When he finally opened his eyes, he held my hand tightly and leaned down to kiss me. It started out soft and tender like the first kiss, but quickly developed into one of desperation. He held the back of my head with his free hand and kissed me as if trying to save a life, but I didn’t know if it was his or mine.
He pulled away suddenly, leaving us both breathless and slightly dazed. I watched him warily as he stood just out of my reach. He closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. I knew I had to tell him something to ease his pain. There was no substitute for Shari, but we could find a patch of green grass amongst all the dead, brown landscape around us. We could find a piece of happiness together, and it had to start with me. I knew that.
I opened my mouth to tell him, but he spoke first, in a murmur so soft, I didn’t understand what he said.
I reached for him. “I didn’t hear you.”
He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t move his fingers. He didn’t come to me, even though I knew he could sense me reaching for him. He did, however, repeat himself.
“I’m leaving.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I understand, but you know the routine. I won’t be out of here for a few days at least. When I come out—”
He looked at me then and dropped his hand to his side in a fist.
“Mayson, I’m leaving. I’m moving back to Texas. By the time you’re released, I won’t be here.”
Astonished, I could only stare at him with my mouth open and my eyes wide. When he began to cry, I jerked into action and tried to go to him. He put his hands up to ward me off, though, like he was afraid of me. Maybe he was.
“I love you,” he said with such force that it almost knocked me over. “I love you, but I refuse to watch another person I love to get put into the ground. I can’t stay here anymore and watch you kill yourself. I will not hold your dead body. You are going to die, Mayson, and I don’t want to be here when it happens.”
He turned away from me, and I knew I would never see him again if he walked out the door. As panic swelled in me, I scrambled to my knees, sobbing as I again reached for him.
“Grant,” I cried and began to frantically implore to him. “Please. I’ll get better. Please, please, please. I’ll go into rehab and do it for real this time. I promise. Just please don’t go. I need you. I need you.”
He stared at me for a few seconds with tears still streaming down his face. Then he came to me. He pulled me into his arms, held me tight, and kissed me fiercely. My heart just began to hope when he stopped kissing me and rested his forehead against mine. We stayed that way for a little bit, just breathing each other in and holding each other up.
Then he whispered the last words I would hear from him until thirteen years later on the streets of Philadelphia.
“I need you, but you don’t need me. I’ll never be the kind of high that you need.”
He released me, looked at me sadly, and left me on my own.
I kept the extended version of that memory to myself and gave Kyle the bare bones. There was no way I’d say the words “he left me” out loud and look like a vulnerable damsel in distress.
I deeply felt the contempt in my words. “He’s a disloyal, lying, cowardice, sack of feculence. That’s all you need to know.”
“You don’t have to say feculence to demonstrate your inferior vocabulary,” Kyle said blandly. He turned his attention back to the work on his desk once he realized that I wasn’t going to go any deeper and talk about my feelings and whatnot.
I chose not to use any words for my next vulgar statement and raised both middle fingers in his direction.
“Do you not have your own job to do somewhere else?”
“I thought you liked having attractive women locked in your office.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “I do. You should leave so I can let one in.”
I grinned. “You like my tits and ass. I think I qualify.”
Instead of doing as he suggested, I sprawled out on the leather couch in his office as best I could in a skirt. There was only about an hour left of the workday, but I had eaten lunch at my desk as I worked and had taken no other breaks besides quick trips to the bathroom. I think I earned a little down time on the company’s dime.
“Last night was the ‘family’ dinner.” I sighed.
Kyle snorted. “Did you have to piss into a cup and give them a vile of blood?”
“And I gave them a snip of my hair.”
I told him about the brief visit to my mother’s house. When I got to the part about my cousins coming to the state for a week, I almost missed Kyle’s reaction. If I had blinked, I would have missed it for sure. He winced as if I had just lanced him with a wickedly sharp and long needle. It only lasted about two seconds, and if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
Just like his casual use of her name, his reaction made me feel a little uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite explain. I didn’t ask him about it, though. Emmy was Kyle’s one memory that he didn’t want to necessarily remember.
“I guess I should go back to my desk and pretend to work for the next half hour,” I said, getting to my feet.
“And what are you going to do tomorrow?”
“About Grant? I’m going to pretend he’s not there.”
He gave me a look of doubt. “You sure about that?”
Speaking with an unshakeable confidence, I squared my shoulders and said, “Absolutely.”
I walked down the street with a bold stride. I was one hundred percent confident about my decision regarding Grant Alexander. I spent most of yesterday and all morning thinking of reasons why I shouldn’t follow through, but in the end, I came to the same conclusion. I had to put a stop to the early morning surprise coffee shop visits and take back some of my control.
I spotted him before he saw me. He was talking on his phone, awkwardly trying to write something down on a small notepad while holding the coffee and croissant that no doubt was purchased for me. By the time he put his phone and notepad away, I was almost upon him. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t look directly at him.
I took a step past him, and then I stopped.
I didn’t feel doubt about what I was doing, but I did feel anxiety. I harbored very hard feelings for Grant’s desertion of me all those years ago. I could not simply pretend that I had not been hurt or that the subsequent events that had followed never happened. To further complicate matters, we no longer knew each other. Under normal circumstances, I didn’t make friends easily. Letting Grant back into my life, even on a minor level, would be challenging.
The truth was…I was petrified.
I did the best I could to hide my emotions and turned to face him. I skipped the pussyfooting and spoke directly.
“How long have you been watching me?” I asked with conviction.
Grant skipped the pussyfooting as well. He didn’t blink, nor did his emotionless face portray any signs of surprise or discomposure as he passed me my breakfast. “About three weeks. How did you know?”
Kyle had been the one who’d put the notion in my head just before I walked out of his office the day before. He had stalked Emmy before pretending to stumble upon her in a bar the night their “relationship” began. He had stalked Lily when she started working for him and he started having feelings for her. In his book, stalking equaled caring.
“Just remember,” Kyle had said distractedly as I stood in the open door to his office. “There are rarely actual coincidences in real life. It probably won’t be the last time you see him.”
I knew he was most likely right. I was convinced that Grant had not just bumped into me, and there was no use in pretending otherwise.
“Philly is the fifth largest city in the United States,” I said to him. “It’s the third largest city on the east coast. You don’t just run into someone you haven’t seen for thirteen years in a city of over one and a half million people.”
“It’s possible.”
“Possible, but unlikely. Why did you pretend that the other day was the first day you saw me?”
Gently, he took my elbow and gestured for us to walk. I pulled my arm away from him but walked beside him as I waited for his response.
“I didn’t pretend,” he said. “I just didn’t advertise the fact that I had been watching you.”
“You lied. You said you had been thinking about me since the first time you saw me in the coffee shop.”
“I did not lie. I had been thinking about you since the first time I saw you in the coffee shop. I just didn’t mention when that was.”
I could have picked that apart and made it clear that lying by omission was still lying, but that would take us off track. There were still answers that I wanted before we had to part ways.
“How did you know I would be at that coffee shop when you first saw me?”
“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I had your address and your place of employment. It took me a couple weeks to figure out your morning route.” He looked down at me curiously. “You don’t take the same route to go home.”
My skin crawled with the knowledge that someone had been following me without my knowledge for weeks. He knew what time I left for work, the path my feet took to get me there, where I stopped for breakfast, and even what I ordered. He knew that I walked home a different way, though I doubted that he knew why I did that…
I wouldn’t have been surprised if he knew about my Tuesday night meetings with Kyle, and the takeout places I ordered from. If Grant could do it, anyone could do it. Who else could be following me around as I walked about oblivious and stupid?
“Why did you do all that?” I asked angrily. “Why not just call me or send me a letter? My email is on the company website. You could have sent me an email. Why go through all that trouble and do something so creepy and psychotic?”
Distracted by our conversation and my emotions, I started to step into the street without looking. Grant reacted quickly, binding his arms around my waist and pulling me back onto the curb just as a car entered the space I had been occupying only two seconds before.
I had been surprised, but not frightened by the possibility of death by car. There were worse ways to die, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t died before. The irregular beating of my heart had nothing to do with my near folly, and everything to do with the man whose arms were still tight around me, pressing my back into his body.
He let out a heavy breath before bending slightly to whisper into my ear.
“I really want to get you to work in one piece, Baby Girl.”
I shivered—not just a little bit, no. It was a full body shiver that left me slightly breathless. I was angry that he had that effect on me after so much elapsed time, but what made matters worse was that I knew he had felt it. My suspicions were confirmed when he chuckled softly just before releasing me.
“Do not call me that,” I snapped.
Then, with as much dignity as I could muster, I safely crossed the street without waiting to see if he followed. Of course, he did, but we didn’t speak again until we were standing in front of Sterling Corp.
“You didn’t spill any of your coffee, did you?” he asked, looking at the cup still clutched in my hand.
“Not very much, no.” I checked my watch, noting I only had a few minutes to spare before I’d run into The Mommies.
Seeing my impatience grow, Grant cleared his throat and finished explaining himself. All his earlier humor was gone and was replaced with a quiet solemnity.
“I have looked you up many times over the years,” he admitted. “After a while, I was able to do it without feeling anything. It was you, but it was just you on paper. You can’t really know a person like that. It’s impossible for me to know that you drop all your spare change into the same homeless guy’s cup every morning before you leave your block. It’s impossible for me to know that you avoid walking on the grates in the sidewalk so that your heels don’t get stuck. I can’t know that you order a coffee and chocolate croissant every morning or the satisfied look on your face when you step out of the coffee shop. Looking at plain facts on paper, I can’t see you.”
He looked away briefly as he gathered his thoughts, but I couldn’t stop staring at him. I knew the minutes were ticking away, but I wanted to hear what else he had to sa
y. I could not possibly move on my own before hearing it all.
Finally, he turned back to me.
“After I moved back to the east coast, I waited until I was settled to look you up again. By that time, you had moved out of New Jersey and into the city. When I saw that you didn’t live too far from me, I started looking for your face in every crowd. I began to imagine scenarios where I’d bump into you on the street. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. The Sterling building isn’t too far away from my place, and I have to walk in the general direction of your apartment to get to work. But you’re right; we could have gone on that way forever and never run into each other in a city this size.”
“But you sought me out,” I said impatiently. “You’re killing me here, Grant. I’m riveted by your heartfelt story, I truly am, but there are only so many hours in the day. I don’t know what you do for a living or where you work because I didn’t stalk you, you see, but I have to get into this building.” I pointed to the skyscraper. “You’ve totally disrupted my entire schedule over the past few days. I would like to get inside my office, avoid the clusterfuck of mommies that want to show me pictures and videos of their snot-nosed children, and enjoy my croissant and hot coffee. So, can you please just tell me why you shadowed me for three weeks like a fruitcake before revealing yourself so dramatically?”
Grant laughed hard. It was one of those laughs that started belly deep and left a person trying to catch their breath. I didn’t see what was so damn funny, but I had to clamp down on the fleshy inside of my bottom lip to keep myself from smiling. The sight and sound were so familiar and comfortable, but I had to remember that as familiar as it was, things were different.
We were different.
Straightening my back, I gave him a reproachful look and started to walk away, but he caught my arm and gently pulled me back.
“Okay,” he said, as his laughter faded. He licked his lips and I reflexively licked mine, which drew his eyes to my mouth. When he met my eyes again, his laughter had gone entirely, though his eyes were still bright with mirth. They also burned with I could only categorize as desire.
