by A. L. Woods
Penelope gave me a waxen smile that had me rolling my eyes and stepping away from her to clear my head for a minute.
“He’s not willing to compete with Cash,” she called to me.
I whipped around on the heel of my Docs. “He’s not.”
“That’s twice now that Cash has shown up when he’s with you, Raquel.” She swallowed as her statement settled over me. “I don’t blame him for being apprehensive about pursuing this any further. Not until you take the trash to the curb.”
My face fell. Nerves had me threading my fingers through my hair, my fingers settling on my scalp, massaging the tension headache away.
“Look,” Penelope started on an exhale, “Cash deserved to have his ass kicked, but you need to stop sending Sean mixed messages.”
“What mixed messages?” I hissed.
“You’re hot and cold.” She pointed at me with a hanger in her hand. “And don’t you dare say that you’re not.”
My oscillation had nothing to do with being hot and cold. I vacillated between being afraid and then being brave. Wasn’t that normal for a person in my situation? Still, I couldn’t help but consider how it would appear to someone who hadn’t experienced life the way I had up until now.
One minute I was with him, the next, it looked like I was with someone else.
I had thought that Sean’s presence in my life was divine intervention from Holly Jane, but maybe it was just a sign from the fiery pits of hell that I was better off alone. That sure as shit felt like the safe bet.
“Maybe it’s better things just stop here, then.” I dropped my arms to my sides and shrugged.
“Before you fucked him?” She laughed, injecting some levity into the situation.
I managed a smirk that felt empty. “Sex isn’t going to fix anything, Penelope.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said, ambulating toward another rack of offensive-looking shirts. “A good fucking can do the soul wonders.”
“Penelope,” I hissed.
“What?” she asked with a shrug, sending the snotty moms a quizzical look. “You know I’m right, and I know that you want to fuck him. And if your answer is ‘no’ or some other colloquial way of saying ‘no’, I really don’t want to hear it—what about this one?”
I glanced at the maternal shirt that was a fluorescent shade of orange that reminded me of a traffic cone.
“It’s a no for me.”
“Agreed,” she conceded, turning to face me. “But don’t try to hide your reservations around fucking Sean behind the shirt. The shirt is a no, the fucking is a yes.”
“You’re not responsible for my vagina.”
“No, but maybe I should be.” She stepped toward another overflowing rack that carried shades of neutrals that didn’t make my heart palpitate. “If I had been, Cash would have never so much as seen the moon-shaped birthmark on the inside of your thigh, trust me.” She tut-tutted, then held up a peplum shirt that made my skin recede into itself. “Yes?”
“Absolutely not.” My head shook emphatically in the direction of the ugly shirt.
Penelope let out a dejected sigh. “Really?” She fingered the material, her head tilting to look at the shirt from another angle in an effort to see the flaws I had found, “I thought this one showed about as much promise as you getting dicked by Sean.”
An old woman cleared her throat noisily, darting a stare in Penelope’s direction.
“God, the people in this store could afford to have more sex,” she said with a scowl, sending her own glare back at the disapproving old woman. “Take a look around you.” She flicked her hand in the air. “This is your future if you let your lady bits dry up because of your pride.”
I rolled my eyes at her. It wasn’t my vagina I was worried about; it was my heart. I suspected she knew that as well as I did but was sparing me for the time being.
“I may be having zero sex, but you could afford to have a lot less.” I nodded at her stomach, watching as the flush hit her cheeks, her lips curling into a smile. With a hand on the new small swell of her belly, she shrugged as if the suggestion was asinine, plucking a demure oversized plaid shirt that produced a nod of approval from me.
“I like that shirt; it’s very you.” I scratched the back of my neck.
She grinned at me, draping it over her arm, and led me away from the shirts. I trailed behind her, watching her with round eyes as we entered the cosmetics area. “Y’know, I think you’re just comfortable with the familiarity that Cash represents,” she began. “Sean is unfamiliar. He’s unchartered territory, and he feels unsafe to you because you don’t know where his head is at.” She glanced at me over her shoulder, a bottle of perfume in her hand. “And that’s a normal reaction for anyone, but that doesn’t make Cash the safer choice, even though the ground feels uneven with Sean—that’s just the lack of familiarity, and that comes with time. The safest people generally tend to be the ones you least expect.”
“I don’t want Cash.” My voice shook as the confession bubbled out of me. “I want Sean.”
Penelope’s brows rose at what was potentially the most unsolicited admission I had ever made in the history of our friendship. I looked away, catching my reflection in a mirror at an adjacent display counter. My expression was weary, as sleep had been elusive the last couple of weeks, and I didn’t foresee that changing in the near future. But it was my eyes that struck me. They were like my dad’s—a toasted cinnamon color that looked amber under the artificial lighting of the cosmetics counter. There was something irradiating within them, something I had never seen glowing there before.
It was want.
It was need.
And it was all because of Sean’s doing. He had sparked a light in them that had never existed before, and I had gone and snuffed it out because I’d been caught up in trying to do the right thing for the wrong person.
“Penelope, I fucked up,” I whispered with a sad shake of my head. “I really fucked up.”
She tossed me a pitiful ‘no shit’ look of remorse.
Okay, I’d admitted it. The only problem was, I didn’t know how to fix it.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Are you sure you don’t want to come to Connecticut? We could pick you up from your apartment on Wednesday,” Penelope offered one final time as we parked in front of her place.
I sighed, shaking my head. “I’d better not. Pauline might have a conniption if I don’t show up.” Thanksgiving was the only day of the year my ma and I tolerated each other.
Or at least attempted to.
Penelope’s nose scrunched up at that. I knew we were both thinking the same thing, but neither one of us dared to utter it. Instead, she said, “I don’t like the idea of you spending time with her.”
That made fucking two of us.
I undid my seatbelt, watching her from the corner of my eye as she gnawed on her bottom lip. I feared she might chew a hole through it from worrying. “She’s my mother, Pen,” I replied with a sigh.
It wasn’t exactly my idea of fun, either, but it was the one day a year we tried to spend more than ten minutes together without one of us trying to kill the other.
“By DNA only, Raquel.” She released the prisoner that was her swollen bottom lip from between her teeth. “My mother’s treated you with more respect.”
My eyes rolled so hard they saw the back of my head. “Your mother’s never shown any reservations about how much she dislikes me. What are you talking about?” I laughed.
“She still asks about you, which is probably a lot more than your mother can say.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. I don’t think my mother has ever asked me how I was doing. Mrs. Cullimore had at least managed polite platitudes that I liked to think came from a well-meaning place.
Sorta.
I leaned back in the passenger seat of Penelope’s Range Rover, my stare getting lost in the stretch of uniformed brick rowhouses that went on for a mile.
“Do you know what you’re
going to say to him?”
I shook my head. “Not a clue.” I’d gone over hypothetical sentences the entire drive here, but they all fell a little short.
“Try speaking from the heart,” she offered, sounding more like a TV talk show host at this moment. I rolled my eyes, shooting her a sardonic look.
“What the hell is that?”
My laugh earned me a playful shove.
“You’ve got a heart,” Penelope insisted. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be sitting here trying to claw your way out of this.” Forget clawing my way out of anything. This felt more like going to war. I was a lone soldier with a chink in my armor, standing in the middle of an open battlefield with no weapon to speak of to defend myself against…
Well, myself.
I was my own enemy and my own hero in this situation, and it kind of fucking sucked. After so many years of taking care of myself, depending on no one, I had to consider that maybe I hadn’t been as self-reliant as I had thought, I had just been deflecting in an effort to avoid the enemy territory that made up the contents of my heart.
Stretching across the center console, I kissed Penelope on the cheek and launched out of the car just as she called out, “Good luck!”
It took me all of fifteen minutes to get back to my apartment. I scored a spot out front, and after letting myself into the building, I took the stairs two at a time, rushing to my apartment door. Sliding the locks back into place once I was inside, my shoes were barely off before I was fishing my cellphone out of my bag, and depositing my coat, wallet and keys on the couch in a pile. My hands shook when I found Sean’s contact listing in my phone. What if he hung up again? God, this incessant worrying and prophesying was annoying. I didn’t care for this part of liking someone.
I’d never worried this much with Cash.
I settled the phone onto the coffee table and took a tentative step away from it, eyeing the thing like it might go up in flames if I touched it again.
This was stupid. I was being stupid. I picked the phone back up, shaking off the trepidation and hit call, willing him to accept this time.
To my surprise, it rang only once, and he answered.
I was too nervous to speak, my breaths sliding out of me as I watched the efforts of my rehearsal speech on the way home from Penelope’s vanish into thin air now that I was on the spot.
“Your persistence is unmatched,” Sean said, sounding flatter than anything I’d ever heard come out of him. I winced at his word choice–I had said the same thing to him weeks ago at O’Malley’s when he wouldn’t let up. I had insulted him and pushed him away, and he eventually took my requests to heart and intended to let me be…before I hunted him down.
That had been the real start to things. The moment I hopped off that bar stool and chased after him. It was like running headfirst into a burning building, but instead of being singed by the flames, they had set off a different kind of blaze inside of me. Something had come over me, and instead of being concerned about the risks, I had just gone for it.
I took a fortifying breath and found my will to speak, opting for a little levity before I launched into my apology. “I learned from you.” The laugh died in my throat when he didn’t join in.
He cleared his throat before speaking again, in that same monotone. “What do you want?”
I heard the TV in the background, and I wondered if he was alone. No, I told myself. That didn’t matter. This had to be said.
I lengthened my spine, my hold on the phone tightening alongside my resolve. “I wanted to apologize.”
“For?” More of his boredom slammed into me, but I shook it off, trying to remain undeterred by his laconic speech. I knew it was Sean on the phone—I recognized that hard and nasal inflection of his Bristol accent—but the responses sounded like they were coming from a stranger. Not from someone I had grown to like, who had always clung to every word that left me with rapt focus.
I ran my tongue over my upper lip, exhaling the breath that had been caught in my chest. “For yesterday.” I paused, hoping he would interject like he normally did…that he would wave me off with a laugh and a cheeky comment without me needing to grovel, but he didn’t. So, I continued. “I think I might be sending you mixed signals, and I just wanted to clarify any confusion.”
“There’s no confusion, Raquel,” he said pithily, my stomach knotting. “You’re not in this, and I’m not interested in wasting my time any further.”
Blood rushed to my ears, a nervous heat spreading up the back of my neck. “You’re not,” I argued, pacing my apartment, hating that it took me only thirty steps to get from one side to the other. “I wasn’t picking Cash over you.” I squeezed my lids together, recalling Cash’s interpretation of my action and what Penelope had observed. That hadn’t been what I was doing. That was Southie loyalty, nothing more, and nothing less. It was ingrained in me to make sure he was okay. Just like it had been when Dad was around. You handled your own, even when you hated them. That was how we had survived.
Sean’s harsh laugh filled my ears, the sound affecting me like an imaginary noose that slid into my chest and looped around the stupid beating organ that I had once believed was useless.
“He’s my friend,” I continued, though the word friend felt like a lie. Cash was more like a frenemy. My panic had become a cold sweat against my pores and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing upright. The heat from my nerves was now a fiery inferno that crept up the nape of my neck and flushed my cheeks. “I just needed to make sure he was okay. That was all. There was no double meaning,” I clarified, hoping like hell he understood that my checking on Cash had been merely a courtesy thing—and besides, Sean had left me with him. I had to watch him walk away and leave me to clean up the mess he had made.
“Right.” His one-word answer made the pause that pervaded our conversation unsettling.
“So, I’m sorry,” I repeated, wondering if he was even hearing me. “Sean?”
“I’m here.”
“Do you accept my apology?” I swallowed, though that lump in my throat wouldn’t budge.
“Sure.”
I couldn’t tell if his response was spoken in a monotone or not, being that it was a single word. “So,” I stammered. “We’re okay, then?” I held my breath, my pulse thumping behind my eyelids and in the center of the palm that cradled the phone to my ear. I needed him to accept my apology. I didn’t like supplication, but for him I was willing to borderline prostrate myself if it made this situation better.
Without skipping a beat, his next statement made my blood run cold. “If okay means that this thing between us is finally over before it really began, then yes.”
Ouch.
My whole body shook, my breaths short and tight as I considered the consequences of our mutual decisions.
I had never been on the receiving end of this kind of conversation, but I felt as if someone had stuck a vacuum in my lungs and flipped on the switch. Every ounce of oxygen being sucked out of me until the small breaths I did manage were painful as my lungs expanded against my rib cage.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I whispered. My mind chose that exact opportunity to replay the last couple of weeks like a vignette. Every bend of his brow when he was frustrated, every ghost of a smile when he was amused. That firm assertiveness from his kisses that told me he knew what he was doing. Every smart-ass remark, and finally, the sight of him walking away from me.
From us.
I swallowed the wave of nausea that hit me just as Sean laughed again…a bitter, sarcastic, breathy sound that cut me from the inside out, ripping its way through my heart, sending my equilibrium off kilter.
“Breaking up with you?” he repeated in a voice that could instantly freeze water. “That would require us to have ever been together in the first place.”
We were, though, weren’t we? Hadn’t our date at the diner solidified that? We were in the getting-to-know-each-other stage, sure, and it was still a new relationship
, but…had I read this all wrong? I retraced my steps as I let my body sink into the loveseat, the coils creaking beneath me.
I deflated, looking up at my ceiling. “We were.”
“You call that being together, Raquel?”
I hated that all the warmth that had been in his voice the night before Cash appeared was gone.
“I call it watching you walk away from me over and over again,” he continued. “It’s exhausting, and I’m too tired to keep doing this with you at this stage of our relationship.” He mocked me with his emphasize on the last word.
My teeth clenched while I blinked back the burn in my eyes. “You misunderstood what happened.” That was the only logical explanation for his hard stance on this. I had spoken from the heart, just like Penelope had suggested, and it wasn’t making a damn bit of difference. That hibernated anger awakened, slowly bubbling inside of me, kicking the anxiety out of the way as it barreled into the room, commanding an audience.
“I didn’t misunderstand shit,” he said. “I am not going to fight for someone who can’t fight for themselves.”
“Excuse me?” I vaulted off the couch, all traces of anxiety gone as my anger skyrocketed. “I’ve been fighting for myself my entire life.”
“No,” he corrected. “You’ve been fighting to survive. You haven’t been fighting to live.”
My bottom lip quivered, but I steeled that shit like my fucking life depended on it. “Why are you acting like this?”
Some part of him must have realized he was being a prick, because his exhalation filled my ear. This was not the man who I had spilled my guts to in that diner the night before, or who had taken the edge off of my guilt for Holly Jane’s death.
This was someone else. A transplant with Sean’s voice, but not my Sean.
“You’re right,” he amended, remaining detached. “I’m going to go.”
“Sean…”
He hesitated before he spoke again, as if the plea in the way I said his name made a fleeting difference. “Take care of yourself, Raquel.”
