Although he was calm, I could feel his anger and hurt. Also, he’d called me Alexandra, something that was never a good sign.
“I think, I do.”
“Nope.” He eased off of the desk. “I don’t think that there’s anything else that we need to say to each other. Actually, I know that there’s nothing else that we need to say to each other.”
“E, I’m sorry—”
“Alexandra, you don’t need to explain. You don’t need to apologize. You don’t need to do anything. As far as I’m concerned, you made your choice.”
“And what does that mean?” I wanted to move closer to him, but everything about his stance told me to remain where I was.
“It means that I’m done with this. I’m done, Alexandra. We’re done.”
My heart resonated. “Ethan, you can’t do this.”
“I can’t do this?” His eyes flashed. “You can accept a proposal right in front of my face, but I can’t make the choice not to live on the sideline anymore? Alexandra, I don’t wait for anyone and I waited for you. Months. All I ever wanted was for you to be mine, but apparently it was too much to ask. I even tried to leverage in my mind that it would cause you a great deal of stress to choose me over your family’s wants, but I was never going to be it for you Alexandra. I was probably just fucking experimental.”
A second squeeze went off in my chest. “Experimental? Ethan, how could you have ever been experimental if you helped to mold me into the woman that I always wanted to be? You think that this was just some temporary shell that I stepped out of, just to step back into when it was all said and done? Ethan, I love you.”
“I love you too,” he replied without even the slightest twitch on his face. “But, it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Hell, if we followed your grandmother’s theory, maybe this,” he gestured between our bodies, “isn’t even real. Maybe all it’ll take is time and we won’t even have feelings for each other any—”
“That won’t happen,” I blurted out. “Ethan, a life without you isn’t a life that I want.”
He pointed to the ring on my finger. “Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem to be the choice you made.”
I started to say more, but he brushed past me to the door.
“Oh, and you should contact the consulting agency about assigning someone else to your position,” he added.
Then, he left me with that. With those words. He left me standing in the middle of the room feeling weak and undone. Inside, I felt totally destroyed, my organs eviscerated. At that point, I couldn’t even find where my heart was, or rather yet, used to be.
“Alle?”
I turned around and for the first time, felt the hot tears on my cheeks. Gia was shaking her head at me. I knew that she’d come back here to scold me and tell me to throw Roderick’s ring back into his face, but he didn’t deserve that either. Like I said, he was obnoxious, but not malicious. I was the only person wrong in all of this. I’d shucked my responsibilities due to fear. In truth, I never really grew. I was like Midas, except everything I touched turned into “fucked up.”
“I’m not here to yell at you,” she said, crossing the room. I fell to my knees before she could catch me, my abs clenching as I convulsed in agony. She knelt with me, tilted my face up to hers, and swiped her hands across my cheeks.
“Alexandra, for the first time in my life, I don’t know what to say,” she offered. “I don’t know what to tell you, and I don’t know how to make it better. So, I won’t say anything. I’ll just hold you. Is that okay?”
I barely got out a nod and she pulled me into her arms. My tears saturated her shirt and I locked a grip onto her body.
Chapter Twelve
* * *
Ethan
I was crumbling. Pieces of my sanity tumbled from me every day. I did what I could to hold on for my patients and students, but being at home alone would always eventually prove itself to be an unyielding type of torture. It was as though someone had ripped my soul from my body, blanketed it in lighter fluid, and then carelessly tossed a match on top. This was the feeling that I’d spent years trying to avoid, but I’d willingly walked right into its fiery pit. None of the textbooks on my shelf knew a damn thing about dealing with it, so I went to my other shelf every evening: the one that held the good bourbon.
Alexandra’s replacement had come swiftly and I’d assumed that seeing her empty office would offer some sort of closure, but it just brought with it another granule of pain.
I ignored her calls, texts, and emails. I’d thought about blocking her number altogether, but then was somehow able to convince myself that it would be a bitch move. In reality, I still held out a modicum of hope that I would get the call or text that would pull me out of my depression. The one that said that she’d called everything off.
Tayler and Kellen had already called and offered to come “spend some time” with me, but I declined. I wanted to wallow alone.
To add insult to injury, their entire wedding escapade had been turned into a reality TV mini-series. Thankfully, however, no one that I knew seemed to be watching it and if they did, they didn’t mention it to me. Once the entire fiasco was over, I planned to bury myself between the legs of someone that would never rise above the level of baseless. Then, I wanted to get on with my fucking life. Yet, every time I thought about the day I’d wake up and not be drenched beneath this perpetual cloud of agony, something inside of me still insisted that Alexandra was it. No matter what, anyone who came after her would fail to subsume her shadow.
At the office, although I tried to hide it, everyone could sense that something wasn’t quite right with me. Then, I would randomly feel a reassuring hand on the shoulder from one of the nurses or overhear them talking about my change in attitude before I rounded the corner and they scattered like roaches.
Even my grandfather had sensed it and although he didn’t ask me outright, he’d still said, “If it was meant to be, it will be.” He was more optimistic than I ever could have been as nowadays, whenever I even thought about Alexandra, everything was in the past tense.
I also had a tendency to randomly zone out, as I was doing now while my grandfather eyed me and waited for my next move in our third game of checkers. Truth be told, I had more mastery in the game, but I played with him simply because of how happy it made him to continuously “beat” me.
“Did you contact her, Ethan?” he asked, moving his piece around on the board.
“Who?” I watched his move. “Alexandra? No, I told you that I’m done with that.”
He snickered. “Interesting use of the word ‘that,’ son. I raised you better than to talk about women like they’re objects.”
“I’m sorry,” I offered.
He stroked his chin. “But I wasn’t talking about Alexandra. I was talking about your mother.”
My mother’s envelope was still burning a hole in my desk at work and I’d forgotten about it in the midst of my drama with Alexandra. “No,” I replied.
He moved another piece. “I think you should. I believe I’ve had that letter for some time now.”
“What could she possibly have to say to me?”
I pretended to be strategizing about my next move, but in reality had no idea what I was doing. I could barely concentrate.
“Plenty,” he answered. “She’s your mother, Ethan. Don’t you think she’s entitled to have her say? You were very young when everything happened so maybe you don’t remember things in exactly the right way.”
“So, why don’t you enlighten me?” I finally moved my piece and he shook his head.
“It’s not my place. Want to know what I think?”
I didn’t answer as that question was always rhetorical in my grandfather’s case. He asked it constantly and never expected a response. The other person, however, had to be completely prepared to hear his opinion.
“I think that part of the problem you’re having with Alexandra has to do with your mother.”
“
Hardly,” I shot back. “My situation with Alexandra was completely different from my situation with my mother. I messed up by even entering into a ‘relationship’ with Alexandra without first waiting for her to end her previous one.”
“But what if she was just trying to protect you?”
I cackled a laugh. “Protect me? I’m a grown man, Gramps. I don’t need to be protected from anything.”
His lips wrinkled, revealing the weaker side of his face. “Most grown men have boy’s hearts.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Maybe she was trying to protect you from her uncertainty. Or maybe she wasn’t completely sure that you’d offer her the security that her family has given her for the past twenty-some odd years.”
He hopped a couple of spaces on the board and picked up one of my pieces.
“I could have taken care of us both,” I grumbled. “I would have taken care of us both. I would have been there for her no matter what her family tried to throw her way.”
He leaned back, folded his arms, and smiled. When he didn’t add anything further, I decided to break the silence.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He continued to smile. “I just like the way you said that, is all.”
I returned my attention to the checkboard. He’d taken a few more of my pieces in what I was almost certain were illegal moves.
My grandfather’s penchant for breaking the rules was one of the main reasons I’d yet to win a game against him. That and the fact that I never played to win.
“Read the letter, Ethan,” he insisted.
“And then what?”
“And then, maybe go see her. She’s your mother.”
I leaned back, mimicking his folded arms and heavy perusal. “Go to the women’s prison?”
“Nope. Your mother got out some years ago. You should go see her where she lives now.”
A nurse passing by caught my attention, and I nodded slightly to let her know that everything was going well and that my grandfather was still lucid. Games usually kept him with me much longer than casual conversation did, and I attributed it to the need to use more of the strategizing aspects of his brain.
“She’s out of prison?” I asked.
“That’s what I said.”
“So, why hasn’t she tried to contact me?”
He chuckled. “She has, son. That’s what the letter is for. She sent it to me to give to you, but I figured that it would take a while for you to be ready.”
“Gramps—”
“You have nothing to lose, Ethan. Just read the damn letter and don’t argue with me about it. Now, I want to go for a walk since I’m about to beat your butt for the hundredth time in this game and by George, it’s not as gratifying as it used to be.”
I stood, pulled his wheelchair from the table, and turned toward one of the facility’s designated walking paths. “That’s because you cheat. You know that right?”
“Who are you?” he suddenly asked. “Where am I?”
My heart sank and I crouched in front of him. Then, he broke out into a round of raucous laughter, slapping his thigh in merriment.
“Are you serious right now?” I asked with a half-smile. “A dementia fake-out?”
He shrugged as I continued to push the chair. “When you get to be my age son, sometimes being colorful is all you have.”
-----
Alexandra
Like in an old southern black and white film, we were sitting in my parents’ backyard gazebo “necking” and rocking on the wooden swing. The feeling of Roderick’s lips on the side of my neck did absolutely nothing except turn my stomach. Our hands clasped between our bodies felt like the inside of an oyster shell. It took a considerable amount of effort to stop my face from contorting into a grimace that would match what I was feeling inside, especially since there was a camera directed at my face and had been every day since the engagement. It had been Roderick’s second surprise: he was starring in a reality TV show mini-series that followed his campaign progression and our upcoming nuptials. A similar offer had been made to Gia when it was revealed that she was marrying Eli, but she’d vehemently declined. Of course, I wasn’t as strong-willed.
“Can that be enough for today?” I asked, caressing my stomach. “I’m not feeling too well.”
The producer’s eyes fell to my hand. “Yes, of course. But, just out of curiosity, do you two plan to start a family pretty soon after the wedding?”
My stomach did a full gymnastics routine, backhand springs included.
I hopped off of the swing and made a beeline towards the house without looking back. I was pretty sure that, at any moment, I would have either a complete breakdown or panic attack. The pressure of conformity was weighing even heavier on my shoulders than ever before and now added to that was the fact that I no longer had Ethan in my life. It was like having my heart ripped out by rusty barbed wire, every single day, in a never-ending purgatory-like existence.
The minute I entered the house, my father grabbed me by the elbow and looked over me with concern. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you sick? Do you need me to call the family doctor?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m just a bit tired and stressed out with all of this.”
I waited for him to say that he would take care of it, and that it was more important for me to be healthy than to put on a good show — basically, for him to act like my father instead of a dictator — but his eyes only continued to assess me.
“Okay,” he replied. “Go upstairs and get some rest. You will come back to it later.”
I gave him a forced smiled and journeyed upstairs to the room that, once upon a time, had been my sanctuary. It was eerily unchanged so stepping across the threshold felt like a time warp. The walls were painted in neutral colors and held several expensive oil paintings that had been gifted to the family. All of the furniture was made of stained, dark brown wood with antique accents, and the patterns on the sheets reminded me of something that could be found in a more mature woman’s room. Yet, they perfectly matched the etching and styling on the mirror, vanity, and other accessory pieces. Frankly, the room screamed of someone who feared stepping outside of the box.
I felt a presence in the doorway and turned around to find Grandma Evelyn standing across from me, that same solemn, apologetic look from the fundraiser on her face.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
I sat on the bed and folded a leg underneath my body. “It’ll get better with time.”
She touched the tips of her fingers together in a rhythmic pattern. “Better, yes. I guess.”
“But since you’re here,” I began, “can you explain what Daddy and Gia were talking about at the fundraiser? The sangria-like punch thing that you brought for me and Ethan. What was that about?”
Her shoulders tensed. “Nothing, really. Just some old tales.”
“Will you still tell me?” I moved over on the mattress and she slid into the space next to me.
“Well, I’ve already told you about the concept of being a sensitive, haven’t I?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Well, the hardest part about being a sensitive is not being able to steer people in the direction of their match. I feel and witness it every day, people with matched energies, but sometimes they don’t even glance in each other’s direction because of one reason or another. Men are generally more open than women; women often protecting their emotions behind fortified walls. Other times, it’s more trivial. For instance, I overheard a woman complaining about the brand of a man’s jeans once, but the pull between her and that same man was extremely strong. It nearly devastated me to know that if she’d been able to see past something as insignificant as his outfit, she would have experienced a love like none other.”
She caught my confused frown and chuckled. “It sounds like sorcery, doesn’t it?”
“Honestly, yes. A bit,” I replied.
“Well, think about it
like this. At some point and time, humans had to communicate without words. We had to make decisions based on instinct and never had the luxury of being able to talk ourselves out of something. What I’m talking about, it has a little bit to do with that.”
I mulled over everything that she’d said up to that point. It wasn’t something that I was likely to believe, but it made for an interesting story.
“So, what you’re saying is, there’s only one match per person?” I asked.
“One true match,” she clarified. “There are couples who are lukewarm and can maintain a pretty basic relationship. Their attraction is more mental. They can find contentment with each other, but they won’t have the yearning passion of a true match.”
As I studied her face, I realized that she believed everything that she was saying. It made me question why I didn’t. People believed in the concept of soulmates every single day, so how was this any different from that?
“Are there any people that are completely unsuited to each other?” I asked.
She covered my wrist with her hand. “Yes.”
“And are those the people who quickly get divorced?”
“Not always. Sometimes these people adapt and change to their surroundings. They end up living in misery, but many times are able to convince themselves that everything is fine.”
I began to nod again. “And this is how you see me and Roderick.”
My mother walked up to the bedroom doorway and smiled proudly at me. She’d been giving me that same smile ever since Roderick’s proposal.
“No,” Grandma Evelyn replied. “Not you and Roderick.”
I looked up at my mother. Her hair was in a neat French bun and her makeup, as usual, was professionally done. The smile on her face stretched and failed to reach her eyes, and the turtleneck sweater that she was wearing, though fashionable, seemed to be choking her.
“Honey, the wedding designer is downstairs,” she announced. “Plus, the camera crew is waiting for you. They need you to start considering different venues. I was thinking either the Mazarin, the Omni, or even the Windsor.”
Fated: An Alpha Male Romance Page 17
