by Megyn Ward
I’m not.
We’ve been laying here for a while. Gray on his back, staring up at the ceiling. His large, callused hand curved around my hip. Me curled against him, my head resting on his chest. My arm hooked around his waist.
He doesn’t say anything else even though he knows by now that I’m awake and I heard him. He doesn’t try to clarify his statement of explain himself because he knows he doesn’t have to.
I remember what happened in the stairwell Friday night.
“What didn’t you tell me?” I angle my head back to look at him when I say it and am rewarded with a frown aimed at the ceiling and I’m suddenly sure I don’t want to hear his answer.
“Because I told myself it didn’t matter.” He says it to the ceiling, still frowning. “Because I told myself it was never going to happen again but…” The frown on his face smooths out and he swallows hard like there’s something stuck in his throat. “But then it did and I… I didn’t want what happened to get mixed up with the rest of it—what happened to you after. I wanted—”
“I love you.” I say it quick, like I’m ripping off a band-aid and as soon as I do, the frown settles itself into his face again.
“Delilah…”
The way he says my name, the way he fills it full of doubt and trepidation pushes me away from him until I’m sitting up, knees drawn tight against my chest like a shield. “I know I said I didn’t want to talk about it and I know you think I’m crazy…” I risk a look at him, turning my head to rest my cheek on my kneecaps. “Maybe you think I’m lying or just playing with you but—”
“I don’t think you’re lying,” he says in that same quiet tone. “I think you might be confused and I don’t think the fact that this keeps happening between us is helping you keep things straight in your head.”
“So crazy.” It makes me laugh. Kind of breaks my heart a little. “You think I’m crazy.”
“I didn’t say crazy.” The frown on his face morphs into a scowl. “I said confused.”
“Confused?” I don’t like the sound of my own voice. I sound desperate. As crazy and confused as Gray thinks I might be. “What’s there to be confused about?”
“I saved you, Delilah…” He sighs, lifting a hand to scrub it across his mouth like he’s trying to smother the sound of it. “I stopped something really fucking bad from happening to you and I think maybe you’ve confused gratitude with something else. Maybe let it get mixed up with curiosity. Maybe a little infatuation.”
“So crazy, confused, grateful, and infatuated.” I lift my hand and tick them off on my fingers one by one. “That’s it? That’s what I’m feeling here—I’m not in love with you. I’m just a hot, rich girl mess and you’re just the poor, unfortunate soul who got swept up in my bullshit.” I drop my knees away from my chest, digging my heels into the bed to push myself across the mattress because I need to get away from him. “Thank you, Gray—” I launch myself off the edge of the bed, aimed at the open bathroom door. “Thank you for saving me. Thank you for explaining my own fucking feelings to me. I don’t know what I’d do without—”
He's there before I can take more than two steps across the floor, hands wrapped around my shoulders to spin me around and hold me in place but that’s as far as he gets. He just stands there, his mouth half open like he doesn’t know what to say. How he got where he is now. Finally his shoulders slump and his mouth snaps shut on a head shake that says it all. He’s the one who’s confused. He’s the one who doesn’t trust what’s happening here and knowing that takes the fight right out of me because I have no one to blame for that but myself.
“Nik proposed to me on New Year’s Eve,” I tell him, reaching up to push his hand off my shoulders and he lets me. Lets them fall away from me to slap uselessly against his thighs. “He took me to Paris on the royal family jet. We stayed at the palatial estate of some French nobleman. He had the Eiffel Tower closed down for the night—gourmet dinner. String quartet. Fireworks. Ring from his grandmother’s own private collection of priceless jewels—it was perfect… camera-ready, from start to finish and do you know what I thought about as soon as I saw it?” I take a step toward him, chin kicked up so I can look him in the eye. “I thought about you—what happened between us the night you gave me this shirt.” I reach up and pinch it, showing it to him. “I thought about how you made me feel… like maybe I was more than just some dumb party girl with a trust fund. Like maybe you actually saw me and what you saw mattered.” I drop my hand and sigh. “And I knew that if I said yes to Nik, I’d never get another chance to feel that way again. I’d never get another chance to kiss you and the thought of that was unbearable.”
“Delilah…” This time when he says it, he looks broken. Sounds broken too but I don’t care. I’m not stopping. I’m not backing down. Not running away. Not until this is done. Until it’s said.
“What happened between us happened six years ago. Lasted less than a minute but it was enough to change the course of my entire future.” I shake my head. “It changed me and if that’s not love then maybe you’re right—maybe I am crazy—because it sure in the hell feels like love to me.” I take a step back, away from him and shake my head. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe I’m not the crazy one here? Did you ever stop to ask yourself why hearing me say I love you makes you think I am?”
This time, when I turn away from him, Gray lets me go. He doesn’t try to stop me. Just lets me close the door between us and that kind of breaks my heart too.
THIRTY-FIVE
Grayson
ONE SECOND, I WAS LYING THERE, LETTING myself get lost in her—her soft skin pressed against mine. The perfect way my hand fit against the curve of her hip. The fact that maybe this was real. As real for her as it is for me—and the next I’m rejecting all of it the second she says it out loud.
I love you.
And this time she didn’t throw up walls. She didn’t minimize what’s happening between us. She didn’t deflect. She didn’t protect herself. She looked me in the eyes and asked me the same question I’ve been asking myself for days now.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe I’m not the crazy one here?
It’s getting harder and harder to deny that I actually might be.
Yeah? Maybe you’re not crazy, pendejo. Maybe you’re just a coward.
Turning away from the door she closed between us, I make my way back to the side of the bed. Bending down to pick up my borrowed sleep pants, I pull them on with the intentions of leaving. There’re a dozen bedrooms in this place. I’ll find one and just—
Bending over again, I snap up the tabloid she was reading when I walked in. It’s still open to the timeline she was talking about, the one that hits the Hurricane Delilah highlights, starting with her Lady Godiva routine in Central Park and ending with last night’s club fire. Pictures of her dancing on tables and being detained by airport security. The time she got pulled over and busted for possession and sent to rehab. Always with an audience. Liz and Jordy Cramer lurking in the background. Vanderhoff egging her on. The rest of her fake friends laughing at her antics. There’s only one picture in the entire line-up where she’s alone—no one but Rivers who’s helping her into the back of her limo. It’s a picture some paparazzi snapped of her that night—our night. The night I pulled her off that stripper pole and carried her out of the club. The night she kissed me.
What happened between us happened six years ago. Lasted less than a minute but it was enough to change the course of my entire future.
I’d convinced myself she was drunk or maybe high. That she didn’t remember it or that if she did, it was something she dismissed as a joke. Something she laughed and rolled her eyes behind my back about with her friends. The picture I’m looking at tells a different story.
I see myself on her.
Her mouth swollen from the crush of mine.
Her cheeks flushed with desire.
The soft skin of her neck pink and abraded from the brush and scrape
of my beard.
My shirt skimming her knees, covering her thighs, and even though I can’t see it I know she’s aroused. That I’d been touching her between them only minutes before. That she’d moaned my name and begged for more.
Even though I see all of that, it’s not what knocks the wind out of me. It’s not what nearly sends me to my knees. What almost destroys me is the look on her face as she’s being hustled away, across the alley and into the back of her limo. Looking back, over her shoulder at the open club door I’d just shoved her through in a desperate attempt to get away from her. Like she’s looking for someone to save her.
Like she’s looking for me.
Jesus Christ.
Before I know what I’m doing, I’m across the room, standing in front of the closed bathroom door. It’s quiet. No running water. Nothing. Like maybe she’s just sitting in there, waiting for me to go away.
Well, she’s going to have to keep waiting.
“I was born in Mexico City.” Leaning against the door, I sigh because I don’t even know if she’s listening to me. If she even cares. If she even realizes that I’m telling her things I’ve never told anyone—not even my own brothers. Somehow, not knowing makes it easier. Make it possible to say the rest of it out loud. “I had parents—a good family. My parents met in college and they were wildly in love. My mother came from a wealthy family. She majored in music and art history and my father went to university on scholarship to pursue his master’s in business and finance—two completely different people but they loved each other. Made it work.” I don’t know why it’s important but as soon as I say it out loud, I recognize the truth in it. That by all accounts, my parents didn’t belong together. They never should’ve worked but they did.
“After college she taught piano at The Conservatorio Nacional de Mùsica and my father was hired as an analyst at the largest investment firm in Mexico City—within ten years, he was one of the firm’s four vice presidents and the front runner for CEO when the time came for his boss to retire.” I look down at the picture in my hand. At the smiling family on a white, sandy beach. “Somewhere along the way, they had two kids—me and my sister, Camilla.” Saying my sister’s name out loud hurts because I haven’t. Not for a very long time. “Camilla was three years older and fierce—everything about her. Everything she did.” Remembering her, the way she was, makes me smile, even though the memory is threatening to cleave me in two. “She used to carry me around, even after I was too big and my feet started to drag on the ground every time she tried to lift me—I hated it.” Shaking my head, I laugh a little. “She was so protective of me…” Something sharp and heavy breaks off in my chest. Lodges itself in my throat and I swallow it whole, half expecting to choke on the bulk of it. “My father got his promotion and my mother made tenure in the same week, so they took us on vacation to celebrate. We took our nanny with us so my parents could have time alone…” I sigh. Feel my shoulders sag a little under the weight of what comes next. “Our third night there, she woke me and asks if I want to sneak out and go get some ice cream, just the two of us. I said yes… but I woke Camilla up to brag. When I told her we were going for ice cream without her, she demanded to be allowed to come along—threatened to wake my parents if we didn’t take her.” Sometimes I wonder if she knew what was happening. If she knew and insisted on coming along so she could protect me if something went wrong. “She kidnapped us.”
A split second after I say it out loud, I hear her—a sharp, breathless gasp on the other side of the door and it flips me around. Has me reaching down to grip the doorknob to keep her from using it to open the door between is. “Don’t.” I press my forehead against the door and squeeze my eyes shut. “Just… wait, okay? Let me get this out before you…” The doorknob in my hand goes slack and I realize she’d been holding it too. Trying to use it.
“Your nanny kidnapped you?” Her voice is muffled by the door between us, but I can still hear it. The comprehension in her tone. A connection being drawn between what happened to me and what happened to her.
“It’s a common thing in Mexico—people are kidnapped every day.” It’s true. Children are taken. Loved ones are ransomed. Almost everyone who can afford it carries K&R insurance and my father was no different. He carried policies on all of us—but Lottie wasn’t after money. “She worked for us for three years—almost as long as she’d worked for the Los Zedos drug cartel.” Letting go of the knob, I turn again, letting myself slide down the length of the door until I’m sitting, knees bent and slightly drawn, forearms braced on the bend of them. “Los Zedos was smaller than some of the other cartels but smart. Vicious. As soon as my father’s boss began whispering about retirement, they planted her in our family. When my father was promoted, they came to him and explained that they’d had an arrangement with his predecessor and that as CEO of his firm, it would be his responsibility to continue that arrangement.” I feel the corner of my mouth lift in a sardonic smile. “He respectfully declined.”
“They wanted him to launder their money—” She says it carefully, like she’s trying to understand. “And your father told them no.”
“Yes.” I nod, a convoluted mixture of pride and anger swirling inside me, bouncing around inside my skin like a tornado. Because of course he told them no. My father was a good man. An honorable man and if he’d agreed, maybe been a little less honorable, Camilla would still be alive. “He told the head of the Los Zedos Cartel no, that he would not be laundering their annual billions in drug money—and then he just… took us on vacation.” I still don’t understand. How he thought it was all going to play out. How he could be so blind and stupid as to think that they’d just let him walk away. I don’t get it. Twenty-five years later, I still don’t get it. “The nanny turned us over to Los Zedos and demands were made—you’ll do as we say, or your children will die.” My hands squeeze themselves into fists for a moment like I’m trying to stop it from happening all over again and I have to force myself to relax. Let go. Because it’s already done. I couldn’t stop it from happening then and I can’t stop it now. “They cut off my finger—the one with my father’s baby ring on it—” I lift my hand and look at the place where my left pinkie used to be. Half of it is gone. “to send back with the nanny as proof that they had us and an incentive not to involve the authorities.”
“Oh my God.” Delilah whispers it like a prayer. A second later the door is opened between us and she’s there, sinking to her knees next to me, her face pale and drawn with grief and shock. “Gray…”
I shake my head at her because I can’t listen to her tell me how sorry she is. How horrible it must’ve been. I can’t because it wasn’t horrible. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember any of it.
What I remember is screaming.
Blood.
Neither of them my own.
“When it happened, Camilla…” That sharp, heavy thing in my belly shifts around. Threatening to gut me where I sit. “she was so protective of me. Too protective. She just started screaming. Charged the man who took my finger and he killed her. Just shot her—once, in the face, like he was swatting a fly.” I can’t look at her when I say it, but I don’t have to. I can hear it, the grief and shock I saw on her face, fluttering in her throat and I do my best to ignore it. “Standing over her, he nudged her with the toe of his boot and looked at the nanny. We didn’t even want her. We only wanted the boy. You fucked up and brought her here. You can get rid of her.” I can feel it rising, the swell of rage that washes over me, years old and impotent, every time I think about it. “They had no plans to take her. It was just me they wanted because I was the son—the only son—and that made me more valuable in their eyes… you want to know something funny?” It’s not funny. None of this is funny but when I look up at Delilah, she nods anyway. “If it’d just been me, if all they’d done is take my finger and send it to him in a box, my father probably would’ve simply done what they asked to get me back and he probably would’ve kept on doing it to kee
p me safe because he loved me—but they killed Camilla. They killed her and dragged her away and left her to rot somewhere.” I shake my head, swallowing hard against the bulk of that hard, sharp thing inside me when it tries to slice its way up my throat again. “My father didn’t just love Camilla. He adored her. She was his entire world—her and my mother were his reason for being and when they killed her, Los Zedos destroyed themselves. After they released me, my father laundered their money through his firm for a year, keeping meticulous records of every penny… and then he took those records to the DEA and turned them over and offered his testimony against them in exchange for US citizenship and new identities for him, my mother and me.” I feel it again—anger and pride because what my father did was too little too late. “We moved to Boston when I was six. My father worked at a car wash. My mother cleaned houses and gave piano lessons to rich kids on Beacon Hill.” I don’t tell her that they hung every one of their broken hopes around my neck. How heavy they were. How hard they were to carry. That when the died, I put them down and turned my back on them. “They died in a car accident two years later. They died—lost everything, including Camilla—because I woke her up to brag. She was there because I wanted to rub it in that the nanny wanted to take me for ice cream and not her.” It’s something I’ve never told anyone before. Never admitted and I’ve told Delilah twice now. “I put her there. I’m the reason—”
“No, you’re not.”
I look up from the hand I have clenched in a fist to find her face inches from mine, still looking at me but that soft, wounded look is gone. In its place is a look of absolute certainty and she pins me to the floor with it and a firm shake of her head. “You didn’t put her there, any more than you put me where I am now.” She reaches for me. Takes my hand and pulls it loose so she can lace her fingers between mine. “You were there too.” Her thumb strokes the side of my pinkie—the one they took—before she tightens her grip on my hand. “You lost too. You lost your sister. Your home. Your parents and you had to face all of that alone but none of it is your fault.”
