The Wall of Winnipeg and Me

by Mariana Zapata

  Drugs.

  Drugs would make him think that wasting his time by coming here was a good idea. Hadn’t the parting comment I’d asked Trevor to deliver for me been enough?

  What I was thinking must have been apparent on my face because he shook his head and repeated himself. “I’m not on drugs, Vanessa.”

  I’d grown up with an addict, and I was well aware they denied they had a problem even if the signs they were out of control were right smack in front of their face. I narrowed my eyes and searched his features again, trying to find a sign he was on something.

  “Stop looking at me like that. I’m not on anything,” he insisted, faint lines crossed his tan forehead—the children of the time he spent in the sun and a marker that he was thirty years old and not twenty-two.

  I glanced at his arms to make sure there weren’t any weird bruises on them and came up with nothing. Then I glanced at his hands, trying to peer at the delicate flesh between his fingers to see if there were any track marks on there. Still, nothing.

  “I’m not on anything.” He paused. “Since when have you ever known me to want to take a painkiller?”

  It was my turn to pause, to meet his eyes in the safety of my apartment, and slowly say, “Never.” I swallowed. “But then I also didn’t know you to be an asshole either,” I replied before I could stop myself.

  For one second, he reared back. The motion was minute, tinier than tiny, but I’d seen it. It had been there. His nostrils flared wide, the gesture so exaggerated I couldn’t help but take it in. “Vanessa—”

  “I don’t need you to apologize.” My hands fiddled at my lap as that small hint of betrayal scourged its way right between my breasts, reminding me that maybe I hadn’t completely gotten over what had happened. Maybe. But I made myself tell him, “I don’t need anything from you.”

  He opened his mouth, and I would swear on my life the muscles high up on his cheeks twitched. He made a small sound, the beginning of a stutter, like he wanted to say something substantial to me for the first time since we’d known each other, but didn’t know how to go about it.

  The thing was, I wasn’t in the mood for it.

  Whatever he might have contemplated saying was a month too late. A year too late. Two years too late.

  I had lied to my loved ones about why I’d suddenly quit. Adding up another lie to add to the list of things I’d refrained from telling them over the years because I didn’t want them to worry or be angry over something so dumb and insignificant.

  It didn’t matter though. I didn’t work for him anymore, and I’d honestly expected never to see him again. What was the point in getting all bent out of shape? I tried to tell myself that leaving the way I had, had been the best way to go about it. Otherwise, who knew how much longer I would have hung around waiting for my replacement? Maybe they would have tried to get rid of me quickly, but I would never know.

  We were as even as we possibly could be. I didn’t feel anything except the barest hum of recognition for someone I’d seen hundreds of times. This guy who I had admired, that I had once respected, who had slightly broken my heart and disillusioned me.

  I have moved on with my life though, I thought, forcing my hands still. “I just want to know why you’re here. I really do have things to do,” I said in a calm voice.

  The man who had earned his nickname in high school, because even back then he’d been a big son of a gun, cocked his head to the side, his tongue sweeping over his upper teeth. The big knot of his Adam’s apple bobbed before he finally aimed his gaze back at me, accusingly. “I kept expecting you to come back after a few days, but you never did.”

  Had I been that much of a pushover? “You honestly thought I would do that?” I gave him my best ‘are you serious’ look.

  His eyes slid to the side briefly, but he didn’t admit or deny anything. “I want you to come back.”

  No matter what, he wasn’t going to guilt-trip me. I didn’t even have to think about my response. “No.”

  He decided to ignore me. Shocking. “I tried to get Trevor to find you, but no one even knew you had another cell phone or had your right address.”

  Of course no one did, because neither one of them had ever made an effort to know anything about me, but I kept that to myself. The address they had was from the place where I’d lived with Diana and her brother in Fort Worth, a sister city to Dallas. Rodrigo had moved out a year and a half afterward when his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, and when I got my job with Aiden, I got my own place, needing to be in Dallas instead of travelling back and forth almost an hour every day. Since then, Diana had moved in to her own place.

  It also didn’t escape me that Aiden didn’t drop Zac’s name. He was the only one in our small circle who knew my personal number, and I was sure he wouldn’t share it.

  “Come back.”

  I pushed the bridge of my glasses up and used one of the strongest, most resilient words in the English language: “No.”

  “I’ll pay you more.”

  Tempting but “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Why not? Men. It was only freaking men who would be so… so dumb. He hadn’t apologized to me for what he’d said. He wasn’t even trying to be nice and win me over to come back—not that I would. It was the same old shit it always was.

  Come back.

  Why not?

  Blah, blah, blah.

  Why not?

  Why the hell would I?

  I almost said I was sorry for not doing what he wanted, but I wasn’t. Not even a little bit. As I took in Aiden, his overwhelming size swallowing my couch, demanding that I come back and not understanding why I wouldn’t want to, I realized that being ‘nice’ wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I had to tell him the truth, or at least the closest thing to the truth as possible. A small, immature part of me wanted to be mean.

  I wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but as I took him in, I took in the man who had provided me with a job that had allowed me to fund and fulfill my dreams. This was the same person who I’d seen at his worst, when he’d faced the possibility he would never play the only thing in the world he loved again.

  This was Aiden. I knew some of his secrets. I didn’t want to care about him, but I guess I couldn’t help it, even if it was a subconscious, mutilated version of what it had once been. And I didn’t want to be like Trevor, or Susie, or any other person I’d ever met who was mean for the sake of being mean.

  So I kept it as simple as I could. I stuck my fingers under my thighs and said, “I told you. I deserve better.”

  Chapter Six

  “Oh shit.”

  I spotted the black Range Rover in the parking lot the instant the taxi pulled up in front of the complex by the guest entrance. There was no way I could miss it; I’d taken it to get an oil change and a wash a few times in the past. It wasn’t necessarily the nicest car in the lot—a few of my neighbors had Escalades and Mercedes that I wasn’t sure how they afforded—but I recognized Aiden’s license plate number.

  Yet it still caught me off guard to see it there.

  He hadn’t exactly left my apartment with a smile on his face a few days ago. After I clearly told him I didn’t want to go back to work for him, he’d looked at me like I was speaking a different language, and asked, “Is this a joke?”

  There went arrogance for you.

  I’d answered the only way I would. “No.”

  He had gotten to his feet, turned his attention toward the ceiling for a moment, and left. And that was that.

  The last thing I expected was for him to come back. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d learned that this was a person who once he put his mind to something, nothing deterred him from his goal. This was the person who only heard what he wanted to hear. That didn’t exactly leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling. I guess a big part of me just wanted and expected to make a clean cut with him, especially after he’d made his lack of loyalty so apparent.

&nb
sp; The fact that he’d somehow gotten my address and gone out of his way to come to my apartment when he hadn’t even been able to put in a single effort to ask me how I was doing, frustrated me more than it probably should have. It was too little too late. All I would have wanted from him in the past was at least a little bit of loyalty, if not friendship, and he hadn’t even been able to give me that.

  “Everything all right, ma’am?”

  “Everything is fine, thanks,” I lied, gripping the handle. “I thought I lost my keys, but I found them. How much do I owe you?”

  Paying my fee, I slipped out of the car and hurried through the gate.

  I made my way toward my apartment with one hand wrapped around my pepper spray and the other with my keys and wristlet, all too aware that I’d had too much wine to drink to deal with this crap right now.

  My visitor was in the same spot on the stairs I’d found him days ago.

  Aiden’s gaze almost immediately landed on me, hovering on the hem of the dress I’d worn to dinner as he climbed to his size-thirteen feet. Dressed in workout shorts that reached his knees and a T-shirt, I was pretty sure he’d left practice and come straight over. If my dates were right, the team was halfway through preseason training camp, focused more on the rookies than on veterans like Aiden.

  “We need to talk,” he stated immediately, his eyes scraping their way to my chest and catching on the low dip of the cotton sundress right between my breasts.

  Huh.

  I gave him a side look as I approached my door, ignoring the curious expression he was giving me. It wasn’t like I hadn’t worn dresses around him before, but none of them had been above my knee, and they had all covered The Girls. The one I had on now? Not so much. But it had been my ‘I’m meeting up with a man for the first time in almost two years’ dress on a blind date with someone I’d met on the matchmaking website I’d signed up for a few weeks back. While we’d gotten along pretty well in the messages we’d exchanged, we hadn’t hit it off in person. Paranoid about meeting a stranger that could write down my license plate, I’d taken a cab to the Italian restaurant we were having dinner at.

  “Give me a few minutes,” he said in a slightly less confident and aggressive tone, his eyes still dipping to my dress.

  The temptation to say ‘Oh, you finally want to talk after two years?’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back and raised my eyebrows at him before sliding the key into the lock.

  A muscle in his cheek twitched and he ground out, “Please.”

  Hell was about to freeze over. He’d said please?

  Before I could think about it much more, voices suddenly came from one of the apartments above mine, damn it. Aiden’s big frame was a little too eye-catching, especially when he happened to be a celebrity in Dallas. Just a few days ago, I’d seen a handful of Three Hundreds jerseys around the complex with GRAVES stitched on the back. The last thing I needed was for someone to see him when I had made sure for years not to let anyone find out he was my boss.

  “Come in,” I muttered, waving him in quickly before someone spotted him.

  He didn’t need to be told twice. Aiden squeezed his way inside with just enough time for me to close and lock the door just as three men came down the stairs. I walked around him and headed into the kitchen overseeing my living room, frustrated with myself for inviting him in.

  “You look different.” His comment had my steps faltering for a moment.

  “I’ve worn dresses in front of you before,” I snapped a little more bitterly than I would have liked.

  “Not one like that,” came the quick, nearly brash retort that came out aggressively enough for me to frown. “I wasn’t talking about your shirt.”

  My shirt?

  “You look different.”

  I sniffed and circled around the kitchen counter. “My hair is a different color, and I lost weight. That’s all.”

  Taking a seat at my small table, Aiden’s gaze brushed over the part of my body he could see, my face, my neck, chest, and bare arms. Good lord, he made me self-conscious. Making another sweep over me with those dark orbs, his thick eyebrows climbed up his forehead as he made an indiscriminate noise, like a “hmm.” Like most things with Aiden, another thought immediately forgotten. The next comment out of his mouth confirmed it. “I want you to come work for me again.”

  I couldn’t hold back my groan as I turned to the refrigerator.

  “I mean it,” he kept going as if I doubted him.

  I took my time opening the fridge, and ducked inside to pull out the water jug in there. I was stubborn. I accepted my flaw honestly. But Aiden? Good grief. He had me beat by a landslide; he took stubborn and hardheaded to a whole new level. He was supposed to have just forgotten my existence after a couple of days.

  Keeping my attention down as I closed the fridge door, I took a calming breath in and let it out. I knew him, and the way he was acting really shouldn’t be a surprise. It was like spoiling a kid his entire life and then trying to put your foot down once it was too late. I’d let him get away with too much over the course of the time we’d known each other, and I had to deal with it now. “I meant what I said too. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.”

  Silence ticked by, second on top of second, buoyant and endless with the things I thought we both could have said to each other but didn’t.

  The chair Aiden was sitting on creaked with his weight. I didn’t want to look at him. “You don’t get on my nerves,” he noted almost as if I’d cured cancer.

  I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t even look at him. You don’t get on my nerves. I had to set the jug on the counter, and grip the sharp edge of the countertop with my free hand. How did he expect me to respond? Did he want me to thank him for such a heartfelt compliment?

  I counted. One, two, three, four so that I wouldn’t just blurt something out in frustration. Picking and choosing my words carefully, I lifted my head and pulled a glass out of the cabinet. “Tell your next employee that talking isn’t required,” I said as I poured water into my cup.

  “I never told you that,” his rough, low voice responded.

  “You didn’t have to.” Actions spoke louder than words after all.

  He let out an exasperated noise and followed it up by saying something that stopped me in the middle of putting the water jug back in the fridge. “You’re a good employee.”

  One, two, three, four, five.

  Of all the things he could have said…

  I could have smacked him in the face right then. I really could have. “There are plenty of good employees in the world. You pay well enough for someone to not half-ass their duties.” I set the water into the fridge and closed the door. “I don’t know why you’re here. Why you’re insisting that you want me to come back when I don’t want to be your assistant anymore, Aiden. I can’t make myself any clearer.”

  There. I’d said it, and it was painful and relieving at the same time. “Do you remember when I first started working for you? Do you remember how I’d tell you good morning every day and ask how you were doing?”

  He didn’t reply.

  Perfect. “And do you remember how many times I’ve asked you if there was something wrong, or tried to joke around with you only for you to ignore me?” I licked my lips and paused where I was, one shoulder against the refrigerator, able to see him at the kitchen table. “I don’t think anyone could get on your nerves unless you let them. And anyway, I told you that none of this matters any more anyway. I don’t want to work for you.”

  The big guy sat forward in his seat, his nostrils flaring. “It matters because I want you to come back.”

  “You didn’t even care that I was there to begin with.” Sudden irritation at what he was trying to do set the nerves of my spine on fire. You will not bang your head against the fridge. You will not bang your head against the fridge. “You don’t even know me—”

  “I know you,” he cut me off.

  Exasperation like I didn’t
know gripped my chest. “You don’t know me. You’ve never tried to know me, so don’t give me that,” I snapped and immediately felt guilty for some stupid reason. “I told you I was quitting, and you didn’t give a shit. I don’t know why you care now, but it doesn’t matter. This work relationship between you and me is done, and that was all we had to begin with. Find someone else, because I’m not going back to work for you. That’s the end of the story.”

  Aiden didn’t blink, didn’t inhale or exhale; he didn’t even twitch. His gaze was locked on me like his pupils were all-knowing lasers capable of emotional manipulation. For the longest moment in time, there wasn’t a single sound in my tiny apartment. Then abruptly, in a tone that was completely Aiden, as if he hadn’t just heard a single word that came out of my mouth, he said, “I don’t want someone new. I want you.”

  I suddenly wished I could have recorded his comeback so I could sell it on the Internet to the hundreds of girls who filled his inbox every week with offers of dates, blow jobs, companionship, and sex.

  But I was too busy getting more and more aggravated by the second to do so.

  Where the hell was he getting the nerve to say that to me?

  “Maybe—and I just want you to think about it for the future—you should consider what other factors are important in employee retention. You know, like making people feel appreciated, giving them a reason to stay loyal to you. It isn’t just about a paycheck,” I replied as gently as I could, even though I knew damn well he didn’t exactly deserve to get handled with kid gloves. “You’ll find someone. It’s just not going to be me.”

  His brown eyes sharpened and left an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I’ll pay you more.”

  “Listen to me. This isn’t about money, for freaking sake.”

  About a thousand different thoughts seemed to go through his head in that instant as one of his cheeks pulled back into what seemed like half a grimace.

  I had no idea what he was thinking, and I sighed. How did we get to this point? Six weeks ago, I couldn’t get him to tell me ‘Hello.’ Now, he was at my apartment, sitting at my hand-me-down dining room table, asking me to work for him again after I’d walked out.