She’d sent him home before that second could stretch any further.
Or at least, she’d thought she’d sent him home. Instead, it looked like he’d escaped. Let himself free so he could unleash this story that Namrita relayed, dark eyes full of sorrow, just after dawn: the contents of the flash drive leaked, blame heaped on Sofia for the reveal, Aish and John somehow left blameless for the theft. Sofia had actually been shaking her head in the doorway, no, he couldn’t have...there’s no way he would have...when she’d first seen the box, made in the fifteenth century and purloined from another part of the house by a little girl who hated her pink room, sitting on the floor out of its hiding place in the dresser.
He’d had so much time in her room before she’d shown up. She wondered how many of her private spaces he had searched—her office, her suite—before finding the box.
She’d trusted him in all of them. Her craving for him once again had made her peel off restraint and skepticism so she could warm herself with his fire. The shock that she’d done this to herself—again—left her dispassionately cool as she sat in the ashes.
She felt nothing as she heard a winery door open, turned to watch Aish take huge strides toward her office, her brother and two of his men hustling to keep up. Carmen Louisa, Namrita, and Henry had been keeping silent vigil by her desk. Henry moved to stand in front of her. She could just see Aish over his shoulder.
He looks terrible, she thought before she put her hand back against the glass and soaked in the cold.
He was in old jeans, a dirty long-sleeve shirt, and flip-flops. His black hair was standing on end. He appeared to be going for the insanity defense; she felt sorry for whoever had to sit next to him on the plane.
He jerked her door open and got out, “Sofia, I didn’t do this—” before her brother and another guard caught him by the biceps.
“Not a fucking word,” Roman growled. She turned around and watched them walk him into the room, shove him down on the couch.
Aish’s eyes, black and sparkling, never left her over Henry’s big shoulder.
Namrita and Carmen Louisa looked equal parts furious and ill at ease. But her PR representative walked until she was standing directly in front of Aish. “Mr. Salinger, what do you intend to do once you leave the Monte?”
“Leave?” he shot back. “Fuck you, I’m not leaving. You can drag my ass out and I’ll be on the next fucking plane back because I did not do this!” His shout was equal parts madman and beast and Sofia watched Carmen Louisa wrap her arms protectively around her waist.
He needed to play out his little melodrama; the least Sofia could do was limit his audience.
“If everyone could give us five minutes,” she said evenly.
Four people turned in shock and started arguing with her as Aish dropped his face into his hands and started muttering, “Fuck, thank God, yeah, just five minutes, thank you, just give me...”
Sofia put up a hand. “Now,” she commanded, and the room went quiet.
Standing behind the couch, Roman put a hand on Aish’s shoulder and said, “You keep your ass on this couch. If I see you going for her, I will kill you.”
Namrita shivered. Not one person in the room thought he was talking in hyperbole. But Aish stayed focused on Sofia. “I won’t, man, I promise,” he said fervently. “I don’t want anything from her she doesn’t want to give.”
Sofia felt the frown on her face, the line he used to try to soothe, before she cleared it away and raised her chin. The people who loved and protected her, the people she’d let down, left her office. They closed the door behind them but hovered, talking quietly in a clutch, just outside the glass.
The reality that everything turned out just as bad as she knew it would by letting him back in her life felt like a calming straitjacket as she looked at him. What had she ever been afraid of, in looking directly at him? His ardent stare and jumping jaw and white-knuckle grip on his forearm were the histrionics of a rock star used to making enough drama to satisfy millions of screaming fans.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Sofia said, standing away from the glass wall and sliding her hands into the pockets of her oversized pants. “You came here to manage the rumors and save your career. And...that’s right...‘soak in that Spanish air.’ Bravo. You got everything out of this month you wanted.”
“Sofia!” he spat, like the shock of it could drown out her words. “That’s not true. I don’t know where that motherfucking flash drive came from!”
She smiled, exhausted, and ran one hand through her hair. It probably looked as crazy as his. “You don’t know that it came from my room, where you had plenty of time to look for it. You don’t know that it came out of a box that you clumsily left out of its hiding place. You had no idea what was hidden on it although you left me quickly enough so you could review it and then send it on.”
“Left you?” he squawked. Sofia pinched her leg inside her pants pocket; why had she said it like that? “Sofia, I didn’t want to leave you. You asked me to leave! I wanted to stay wrapped in you all night. If it was up to me, we’d still be tearing up that stupid princess bedroom.”
She ignored the crackling in his eyes, the ugly anguish on his face, the way he gripped the edges of the couch so he could keep his promise to her brother. “Where’d the fuck you get that drive? Why did you keep it?”
Sofia noiselessly breathed through the hot jolt of emotion that question caused.
When she’d discovered the secret inside her, she’d listened to Aish’s performances over and over again in her San Francisco hotel. The addict going back for her fix.
She’d kept it in her treasure box like the addict who believed she’d recovered, who believed she was strong enough to keep something on hand. Just in case she needed a hit.
How Aish must have laughed when he’d sifted through the other items in that box—the torn condom wrapper, a corner of a pizza box, the pick he’d been using the night he declared he loved her. Or, more likely, he hadn’t recognized those items at all.
She needed to wrap the cold around herself tighter to stop the slide back to that stupid, stupid girl who assumed he had any emotion for her.
She gave him a bland smile. “Since you’re not going to fess up and I’m not going to answer your questions, I don’t see any reason for us to...”
“Sofia, ’cause, fuck, look, if the reason you took that drive was because you wanted songs, I have a million songs for you.” His fervent eyes, his big body, was straining toward her as he kept himself on the couch. “‘In You’ wasn’t my big secret; all the songs were. Every song I’ve ever written is about you. Or, at least, I thought they were. I’ve been figuring out since I’ve been here that I was writing them for me and what I wanted you to be. I came here wanting you to be that girl from ten years ago. But you’re too brave and smart and strong for the mold I was trying to fit you into. Sofia, I was wrong.”
Aish gripped his knees like he wanted to get down on them and beg. “I was wrong for believing I had to trade you in to have a music career. I was wrong for never contacting you to tell you that. I was wrong for thinking a bunch of songs could do the hard work I needed to do. I was wrong, Sofia,” he said, banging his chest. “Nobody else. Just me.”
There was a crumbling wall in the village plaza, the last remaining limestone rocks of a medieval barrier that once protected the young hamlet of the Monte del Vino Real. Sofia called upon those ancient rocks now to leave her impenetrable against the arrows Aish was shooting.
What he saw on her face made Aish grip both big hands in his black hair.
“Why would I write all those songs if I was just planning to fuck you over?” He huffed a breath like he was running. “There are a lot of ways to screw you that don’t include being haunted by you every time I pick up a guitar. Ten years, Sofia, and every single, lazy song was the hope that you’d give me a second chance.�
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Elbow deep in the work of her winery, Sofia had finally allowed herself to enjoy what she hadn’t heard in ten years: his deep, melodious voice, his smart and lusty turn of phrase, the American pop and soul rhythms now imbued with the global chords she’d introduced him to. She’d given herself sips of his talent while she was surrounded by walls her ancestors built and she’d fortified.
But she’d dismissed the lyrics like echoes, unwilling to reflect on what the recognizable words and phrases of their love affair meant in his songs. Verses might have nudged their way in, and she might have hummed them in the repetition of winery work.
She’d shaken them off every time.
It was time to shake him off now.
She took two steps back and rapped her knuckles against the glass.
Aish jerked like she’d shot him as her brother instantly turned and put his hand on the door handle.
“Fuck, oh fuck, no, Sofia, c’mon, c’mon okay...” and he was wrenching at the snaps of his dirty shirt as her brother opened the door and Aish was wrestling out the fabric and tearing it off his arms, and then getting up to his knees on the couch, still on the couch, stretching out his arms and saying, “Look, Sofia, please, please look, you don’t have to love me, but please look, know I wouldn’t do this to you, please...” and Sofia put her hand up to stop her brother in the doorway.
Aish was shirtless in front of her and what she’d denied herself in the dark—in trying to ignore his existence and then insisting he cover up—was right out in the open. He was low-slung pants and endlessly long, muscular torso and veiny, work-hardened arms and frantic energy, circling awkwardly on the couch so she could see the entire story of his full torso tattoo, covering him from wrists to collarbones to hip cuts and across his incredible back.
As he babbled, “...don’t owe me anything, I know, just please, know, why would I do all this if I wanted to hurt you, just please, believe that I only came here to help...” she saw a thin, forlorn skeleton, wreathed in a single flame, up the left side of his back, reaching across a nautical map, across tormented waves and broken guitars and an empty pizza box to a vineyard paradise on Aish’s front, fruitful and fertile in black ink, surrounding the constellation over his left breast, the constellation of la Osa Menor, the Little Dipper. The grid of nautical map and ocean covered his arms, along with a multitude of compasses whose arrows all pointed North. But the compasses were all turned so that North was directed right towards his heart.
Over his heart, at the tip of the constellation, was a brilliant, bursting North Star. It was a flame of a million colors, the only color in all the black ink of his body.
His body told the tale of a lonely burning man reaching across the ocean and sky for his estrella.
Forever. This would have taken forever. Years, a thousand hours in a chair, and a million hours of aftercare. When she’d staggered away from his body a decade ago, he hadn’t had a drop of ink on it.
“All this time, you think you’re not essential, Sofia? Look at me, look around you, look what you’ve done for your people. Even the queen, she doesn’t ignore you. She torments you for your attention. They all need you, but they can go fuck themselves because I need you more.” His mouth twisted into a grimace of desperation. “You’re essential to me, Sofia, and you have been every hour of every day since I left you.
“I never forgot, Sofia.” Still on his knees, Aish was her supplicant. “I never gave up hoping.” He turned his wrists up to her, looked willing to bleed. “You’re my first love. You’re my last love.”
His eyes were black sparkling pools. “You’re the only woman I’ll ever love.”
Sofia covered her mouth with a hand, her other arm wrapped over her stomach.
She began to laugh.
The door opened. She saw that her friends were coming up behind her wide-eyed brother.
“Get...out,” she choked out between laughter that was getting worse.
“Sofia—” Roman began.
“Get out,” she said again, and maybe she screamed it. Who could tell between all the laughing? But they were giving each other alarmed looks and Sofia continued laughing, waving them away. “Come back...come back in a few minutes...just get out...get out.”
And they did because...because she was a grown woman who’d fucked up and she didn’t need any help getting it wrong and when they left her, she was still laughing and she could turn her eyes back to Aish and he looked green, like he looked during one of his infamous, stumbling drunks and that look, that memory of how she’d believed he hadn’t fucked around with that lead singer, set her off again, leaning back against the glass and laughing as all of her emotions broke their bonds and came roaring out—anger and despair and heartbreak and, most of all, the great irony that he believed they were a story to be written in the stars, regardless of how much he’d hurt her, when he was the worst mistake of her life.
“Never,” she gasped. Stopped. Sucked in her breath while she grinned. “I would never fall in love with you again.” It was like sucking down the finest vintage, the raw anguish on his face as she smiled into it. “I never forgot, either, Aish. I never forgot how you broke up with me in a crowded bar. I never forgot how you threw me away. And I never forgot how you left me alone in that hospital bed. I will never, ever, ever forgive you.”
The anguish fell off his face. “Hospital bed?” he said.
Him echoing it back shoved her from hysteria to pure fury. “I was nineteen years old,” she roared. “And you left me alone in a foreign country. With no one. I was terrified. I was in so much pain. They told me I might die. And you told me to handle it. You told me you had a tour schedule to keep.”
The blood was draining from his face as he shook his head and slumped back on the couch. “Sofia, I don’t...”
And, oh God, maybe he didn’t know. Too high. Too drunk. Too preoccupied. Or maybe just too much of not giving a fuck about one burdensome girl.
Astonishment blazed through her as she, too, shook her head. “You remember getting caught making out with that girl, right? Breaking up with me after you’d asked me to move in with you?” Because she remembered it in cinematic brilliance: walking in on a cloud, crashing into the darkest pit when she saw his arms around a girl, his tongue deep in her mouth. He seemed drunk, yes, but not sloppy. He’d said he was sorry, but as he looked away from her shocked tears, suggested that maybe it was for the best. Mumbled halfheartedly about John, about what he owed him, about the manager’s insistence that girlfriends made for bad rock business, that he needed to give his all to the music before he settled down.
She’d no more expected him to give up his music and its demands than she was going to give up her University of Bordeaux education. They’d figure it out. And she’d never thought him being with her was settling.
“That was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said, fervently. “I never should have—”
She steamrolled over him because she was so tired of his excuses. “Vale, stick with me, guapo. Do you remember the call, oh say, three weeks later? When I told you I’d miscarried?”
He looked at her like she’d stabbed him. “You were pregnant?”
With three words, he flattened her. She had no more righteous fury or cold reasoning, she had nothing left. He scooped her out and left her empty. Exhausted. Without even a glimmer of hope. This was the one who’d ruined her for love? What a sad, pathetic creature she was.
She’d become exactly what she despised.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head, slumped back on the glass.
“Yes, I was pregnant, and I’d planned to get an abortion,” she murmured. “I told you that on the phone. But I started miscarrying before I could, and then I went into septic shock.”
She’d been bleeding and shaking and quivering with fever when the ambulance technicians had pulled her gurney through the fancy chrome and glass
lobby of the hotel while businessmen gawked, and the noise and pain and fear had blurred for hours until the nurse in the ICU asked if there was anyone Sofia could call. It had been a blinding moment of clarity. There was no other person she needed, no other person she wanted by her side.
She’d had no doubt he would come.
“You told me it was my problem. You told me to handle it. You told me you had a tour schedule to keep.” He was making a sound, some kind of sounds on the couch. She didn’t care. “The contractions and the back pain and the fever, it all hurt so much. They said I was there for ten days; I don’t remember much until the last two. That’s when they told me that the infection had damaged my uterus to the point that I can’t have children.” He made another sound. “You told me to handle it and I did, that whole experience, all by myself. I still am handling it; you’re the only person I’ve told this much to and I imagine you’ll forget about it when you go back to your rock star life.”
He was muffled now. She looked up and saw that he’d buried his face in his hands. His muscles were shaking. She didn’t care.
“You know what, you can stay until the internship is over. I don’t care if you leave. I don’t care if you stay.”
Staring at him, half naked and ink covered and crying on her office couch was like looking at a bug on a vineyard leaf.
“You’re my first love, too, Aish,” she said, pushing herself off the glass and walking to her office door. “You’re also my last love.” She opened the glass and tossed her last statement over her shoulder. He probably wasn’t paying attention anyway.
“Because you’re the reason I’m never going to love again.”
September 28
Devonte had told Aish that he was going to have to lie to his face. But Aish hadn’t had to utter a word when his manager pounded his heavy fist against his suite door later that night. Instead, when Aish staggered to his door and threw it open, eager for whatever firing squad was behind it, Devonte took one look at him, cursed, and then strode into the room and threw his overnight bag into a corner.
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 26
