by Ava Lore
We’d both been going places back then.
But only Damien had gotten there.
Of all the elevators in all of New York City, Damien Colton just had to walk into mine.
Now on the roof of the hotel where I cleaned up after people who didn’t know how to use modern plumbing, I wanted to quietly fold up and die.
I yanked my hand back. “I don’t go by Lauren anymore. It’s Cassie now, Damien.”
He grinned at me. “So you do know me.”
“Of course I fucking know you,” I snapped. “Who doesn’t?”
Taking a drag of his cigarette, he pondered this question. “Good point,” he said, smoke fluttering from between his teeth. “Which was why it was so weird that I got on an elevator with a pretty girl my age and she pretended not to know who I was.”
Pretty girl! my brain shrieked like a parrot on crack. Pretty girl, pretty girl, he called me a pretty girl!
I told that part of my brain to shut the fuck up. It was nothing but trouble and I certainly didn’t care what a handsome, sexy, talented near-total stranger thought of me.
“Maybe she just wasn’t a fan,” I said.
He tilted his head. “Are you not a fan?” he asked. “I’m not going to be mad if you aren’t. But usually people know. They don’t always say something, but I can tell.” His smile returned. “You’re a bad actress.”
I scowled at him and turned away, sticking my cigarette between my lips and giving it an aggressive puff. What a jerk, I thought. The Dalton I’d known had been modest. I didn’t like this Damien guy.
I still found him ludicrously attractive, though, and was violently reminded of this when he leaned over and nudged me, sending shivers over my skin like ripples in a pond. “So what have you been up to since high school?”
My heated blood cooled immediately upon the sudden clenching of my stomach in shame.
“Nothing,” I said. I pulled on my cigarette again.
“Oh, come on. It’s been what...six? Seven years? Jesus, we’re almost old fogeys. Seven years. You never friended me on Facebook so I can’t keep up with you.”
“I don’t do Facebook,” I told him. “I don’t really have time for it.”
The gentle scent of pants on fire wafted past my nose. Yeah, I have a really tight schedule of drinking a bottle of wine or two and watching whole seasons of TV shows in one go. The truth was I was too ashamed to look at Facebook. I didn’t want everyone to see what a failure I’d turned out to be.
“So? Now you have to dish. Come on. Why didn’t you want to talk to me?”
I glared at him. The end of his cigarette flared cherry-red as he took another smug puff. I hadn’t known until now that it was possible to smoke smugly. “Probably because we aren’t friends and were never friends?” I said.
He blinked. “Oh,” he said, and I suddenly realized that this was the sort of person who thought everyone was his friend by default.
Awkward silence intruded and I tried to ignore it and smoke my cigarette as fast as possible so I could leave. Smoke burned through my throat and filled my lungs and I savored the nicotine.
“Sorry,” he said at last. “I thought that since I recognized you after all this time that we must have been friends. I mean, I remembered your name and talking to you and everything.”
I looked at him sharply, but he was just watching the smoke from the end of his cigarette slowly rise into the air, curling over and in on itself until it rose above our little alcove and the roaring wind whipped it away.
“We never spoke in high school,” I told him.
He frowned. “We didn’t?”
I would have remembered. Believe me, I would have remembered, I wanted to tell him, but that would be admitting my huge and embarrassing crush and even seven years after the fact that seemed like a very bad idea. Besides, he was a rock star and I was the maid in the hotel he was staying in.
So I just said, “Nope.”
“That’s weird,” he said. “I could have sworn we did.”
“Well, we didn’t.”
“Oh.” He looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You seem mad about that.”
I stiffened and forced myself to scoot away from him. The heat of his body and the smell of leather and hard-living man retreated. My pounding blood subsided a little bit. “I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m just annoyed. I still have to catch my subway home and I’m exhausted after a long night’s work, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t fall at your feet like your fangirls.”
“Yeesh,” he said. “You really are mad at me. Whatever it was I did, I’m sorry.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. “Whatever,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
He was quiet for another minute. “This smoke break turned out awkward,” he said at last. “This is the least relaxing smoke break I’ve ever had.”
I couldn’t help myself. I snorted at that. Dammit. It’s hard to keep someone at a distance when you laugh at their jokes.
“We should start over,” he added.
I huddled down into my hoodie. My toes were starting to get cold. “Start what over?” I asked.
“Our smoke break. I swear to god, I just wanted to catch up with you.”
I blinked. “You did?”
“Yes. Well, and get a cigarette. I mean, I try not to because I have to keep the pipes in working order, but yeah. I was like, ‘holy shit, that’s Lauren Bell, what are the odds?’ And you were going up to the roof for a cigarette and I just...” He trailed off and frowned. “Now that I’m thinking about it, if you hadn’t recognized me that would be really awkward, wouldn’t it? A random guy wanting to follow you to the roof?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t recommend saying that to anyone unless you’ve introduced yourself first.”
“But we know each other.”
“You could have been mistaken.”
He shook his head. “Not about you,” he replied, and his eyes found mine in the strange twilight of New York on a cloudy night.
For some reason his words made the blood leave my face. Why not about me?
But I couldn’t ask that. “Why didn’t you say anything in the elevator, then?” I asked him instead.
To my shock, he glanced away, and I could have sworn he was embarrassed. “Well, to be honest, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain it was you until I saw you walk.”
I stared at him. Silence stretched out. From the streets below I heard a car horn blare.
He shifted under my gaze. “What?” he finally said. “You have a distinctive walk!”
I stared at him some more.
“Stop looking at me like that!”
He knew how I walked. He remembered me because of the way I walked.
He remembered my walk.
I had no idea how to process that information.
I looked away from him and stared at the vent in front of me. Steam snuck out from between its metal slats only to be swept away by the wind almost immediately. Taking one last drag I stubbed out my cigarette and reached for my purse.
“Please don’t leave!” Damien said, and he grabbed my arm.
Even through the thick fabric of my sweatshirt I could feel the heat of his hand, and for a brief moment I closed my eyes.
How many nights had I dreamed of his hands on me? Even when I was a naive freshman in high school, so virginal that I had only just figured out the mechanics of sex, never been kissed, and certainly never been touched by a boy, I imagined Dalton’s hands on me. He’d been born to be a star, and he was the star at our high school, the star of everything. Everyone knew him, wanted to be him, wanted to be with him. He dated girls older than him, skipped over the veterans for starting lineups and coveted spots in clubs and the fine arts, and people didn’t even mind. That’s how good he was.
He’d been in my English class that first year, and I’d spent so much time staring at him from the corner of my e
ye and doodling little hearts in the margins of my notes that I almost didn’t make a perfect score, even though English was my easiest subject.
And my dreaming didn’t stop when we left high school. No boy in college had measured up to him, and I’d had to focus on my studies anyway...not that it mattered in the end. The money for college had dried up and I’d taken out loans and then the economy cratered and I couldn’t get a job, and so on and so on and so on...
...and even through all that, when I should have been living it up with the conviction that it was now or never for me to have fun, because I was going to spend the rest of my life as a wage slave to pay back the money for a useless degree, I had dreamed of Dalton instead of having a good time with the boys that did seem interested in me. Every time a boy kissed me, I imagined it was Dalton. When his band started to shoot up the charts and was suddenly on every radio station, I would close my eyes and imagine that he was singing to me. I started thinking of him as Damien, hugged my pillow at night, touched myself and wished I’d done something—anything—to be with him when I’d had the chance.
I should have asked him out. I should have talked to him. I should have done something.
But that wasn’t me. I was a good girl, a studious girl, one destined for law school and politics and I always thought of my future and never did anything spontaneous or fun, thinking of the consequences my actions could have on my career. No drugs. No underage drinking. No casual sex.
No sex at all, actually. No guy had ever seemed serious enough for me to date, and none of them were Damien anyway, and I didn’t want some guy telling all when I was a rising political star...
Maybe I’d let myself pine for Damien for exactly those reasons. Maybe I’d used the impossible dream of him to keep everyone at a distance so I could keep my focus on what I was supposed to be doing.
Now all of it had blown up in my face and I was on a rooftop with Damien Colton and his hand was on my arm, making my blood pound in my pulse points. Between my legs was a throbbing ache I’d only known in dreams of him.
I’d denied myself so much, and for what?
He was still staring at me, his eyes pleading. He really, truly did not want me to leave.
“I’m not going anywhere yet,” I told him. “I was just going to get some more smokes so we could start our smoke break over.”
The hand on my arm relaxed and, to my frustration, retreated. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to grab you like that.”
“It’s okay.” So very, very okay. My own hands were shaking again as I dug through my stuff for my pack of cigarettes. My fingers found the box, slightly crushed by the trauma of living in my purse with the rest of the detritus of my life, and a sudden, wicked thought came to me.
Something wicked. Something...spontaneous.
Keeping the pack in my purse, I nudged the top open and frowned at it. “I only have one left,” I told him.
Lie, lie, lie. I had at least five left. I tried to put disappointment into my voice. It sounded completely fake, even to my own ears, and I was certain Damien was going to laugh at me and call me out, but all he did was look disappointed and sigh as he slumped back against the wall. “Oh?” he said. “That’s okay, you can have it.”
I pretended to debate something in the privacy of my head, pausing and frowning as I pulled the cigarette out and held it up. It seemed to glow in the dim light.
“Or...” I said, dragging it out as though I were just puzzling through this dilemma, “...or we could share it.”
Damien turned his head sharply—too sharply, did he suspect?—and gazed at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Okay,” he said at last. “That’s cool.”
My cheeks heated under his scrutiny. “Like a peace pipe,” I said. “We share, make peace.”
To my relief he smiled at that. “All right. Give it here.”
I handed it over and then passed him the lighter. I watched, my mouth dry, as he wrapped his lips around the butt, cupped his hand over the end, and flicked the switch. The sudden flare of fire illuminated his face in ways that made him even more striking and beautiful, in a rugged and tired sort of way. Then the flame went out and he inhaled deeply. The ash chased the embers down the paper.
He took the cigarette from his mouth, leaned his head back, and let the smoke spiral up into the night. His eyes were half-closed, as though in pleasure.
That’s what he would look like during sex, I thought to myself.
Then his heavy-lidded eyes turned to me and he gave me a lazy, sleepy smile. A bedroom smile.
“So,” he said, holding the cigarette out to me, “what have you been up to, Cassie?”
For a moment I was paralyzed, my nerves jangling like a fire alarm.
Then I sighed, tired, and took the cigarette from his fingers. This time our flesh touched, and though it sent me swinging and dizzy with want and need and desire and all the thoughts of the things I should have done, I managed to push it all away. Barely. I wished he didn’t look so good in the Manhattan night, artificial light gilding his face. He looked like an apparition from the past, something I’d conjured in my loneliness. It was too easy to pretend he was a ghost.
I took the cigarette and took a drag, turning my face away, but to my disappointment it didn’t’ seem like a secret, second-hand kiss. It seemed like taking a drag on a cigarette.
Well, there were worse things. I let my eyes close as I held the smoke in my lungs and felt the feeble warmth from the vent waft over my face. “Nothing,” I said after a long few seconds. “Same old, same old, you know?”
“Not really,” he said.
I shrugged. “Standard story by now,” I told him. “Go to college, money dries up, take out loans, jobs dry up, and then...nothing.” I shrugged again. “Then you’re working a shitty dead-end job cleaning up after other people’s messes in hotel rooms.” I passed the cigarette back. This time he took it without touching me, and I found myself stupidly grateful for that.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you’d be a lawyer or a CEO by now. Or a famous scientist curing cancer.”
I snorted and glanced at him from the corner of my eye. “Oh yeah?” I said. “And I thought you’d be a famous rock star by now.”
He had the good grace to be embarrassed as he took another drag. “Yeah,” he said as he let the smoke out. “I screwed that one up, right?”
I rolled my eyes and snatched the cigarette from his fingers, taking another drag. The illicit thrill I’d been hoping for, to touch the place he’d put his lips just seconds before mine, failed to materialize.
Too sad to be turned on, I thought. That’s when you know you might as well cut your losses and go home.
Pathetic. I was pathetic. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m sorry, too.”
And he did sound sorry. He really did sound sorry, like he’d wanted to catch up with me, like he’d wanted to revitalize a connection that he had thought long lost, except the only connection we’d ever had was in my mind. In my mind, and in the fact that he remembered what my walk looked like.
The wind shifted then, blowing into our cove and whisking out the warm out. I shivered in my thin clothes. I passed the cigarette back to him.
“Here,” I said. “You can have the rest. I’m supposed to meet a friend.”
His face shifted, as though he wanted to say something, but in the end he just nodded. “Thanks for the smoke,” he said finally.
I gave him an answering nod and stood up, brushing the dust of the rooftop from my clothes and readjusting my purse and hoodie. “I’ll see you around, Damien” I said.
He laughed at that. That strange, strangled laugh. “See you around, Cassie. Don’t get into too much trouble. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Like fail? I wanted to say, but that would have been rude, cruel, and entirely too intimate. I didn’t want to pick a fight. I just wanted to r
un away.
I shot him a little salute and rounded the wall, leaving him behind.
Oh well, I thought. So much for that. Might as well go home and sit on Dwayne’s couch and drink a box of wine and watch Downton Abbey or something. Maybe throw up a little. Sounded good, right? I reached the heavy metal door leading down into the stairwell.
Step through this door and you’ll never see him again.
Fine. Just as well. I put my hand out and turned the knob.
It was locked.
Chapter Three
I stared at the shining, icy metal under my freezing fingers.
Haha, universe, I thought. That’s a really funny joke. Now open the goddamn door.
Closing my hand around it, I tried again.
Nope. Still... yeah, still locked.
Uhhhhh.
I stepped back and stuffed my hand into my hoodie pocket, pressing it against my suddenly flip-flopping stomach to warm it up again, and looked around. There was another door to the stairs up here, right? Probably on the opposite side of the building. Yeah. That was it.
Only problem was that I had no idea where it was, and I’d have to walk straight past Damien to find it. As if I hadn’t made enough of an idiot of myself tonight.
Very carefully I reviewed my options.
Find the other door. Out. Didn’t want to look too stupid. Or risk seeing Damien again. Or...just no.
Call someone to open the door. Out. My phone was dead, and I couldn’t ask Damien to let me borrow his because I didn’t remember anyone’s phone number except my own and also I’d have to talk to Damien again so nooooooooo.
Hide.
I pursed my lips. Promising. I could hide. Then...wait for Damien to try to leave, and then he’d find the door locked, and then he’d call someone to come open the door, and then I could, I don’t know, run up behind him and squeeze past without being noticed somehow and then maybe I could cast a mind-erasing spell on him and he’d never remember he’d seen me or that I’d even existed and while I was at it I wanted a good career as a unicorn pooper scooper. I heard they crap rainbows.
