Pieces of Eight (Mad Love Duet Book 2)

by Whitney Barbetti

  In the back were stacks of paintings waiting to be re-hung, so I grabbed them. It wasn’t my job—it was the responsibility of the person who had the last showing, but I needed something to do. Not working at the bakery meant there was a buildup of restless energy waiting to be set loose.

  I catalogued each painting, making sure they were all there, and then carried them out to the hooks that were designated for each one. Some of the paintings were small—postcard sized—while others were nearly the size of me. Naturally, one of those Mira-sized paintings required a step stool in order to hang it where it belonged.

  After double checking that the wire on the back of the painting was strong enough, I lifted it and hung it while on my tiptoes. My calves stretched, and I imagined my toes like anchors, holding me still as I precariously wobbled until the painting was secure on the wall.

  Lowering my feet flat, I felt that brief, stomach-emptying sort of supreme terror when I realized that there was more air under my feet than stepstool.

  Arms flailed, heart skyrocketed to my throat, and then, in an instant, my arms stilled and my heart calmed and my feet were still walking on air but a warm hand was pressed against my tailbone, holding me.

  I closed my eyes and swallowed. I knew exactly who it was.

  “I didn’t want you to fall,” he said. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

  My hands gripped the step stool handle in front of me and I arched enough to remove Six’s hand from my spine before taking the five steps down to ground level.

  I waited a full three heartbeats before looking up at him—which wasn’t as impressive as it sounded, because my heart was galloping like a mother fucking racehorse. From the near fall and from him.

  “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “There are only so many gallery co-ops on this side of the city.” He met my eyes briefly and looked away, taking in the rest of the room. “I took a chance.”

  In his black slacks and black dress shirt, he looked every bit the dangerous, tempting person he’d been thirteen years earlier, when he’d walked me to my apartment door for the first time, when I’d wanted him to follow me in.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.” I thought my fuck you text had sufficed, but I should’ve known better after dear old Vicky’s phone call. “What are you doing here, specifically? I’m not interested in how you found me—you had three years to find me.”

  “Well, you weren’t planning on catering my upcoming wedding then.”

  “And I’m not planning to now.” I snapped the stool to it’s folded up state and stepped behind the desk, tucking it away for the time-being. “I was pretty clear with your fiancée about that. Guess it’s hard to hear when you’re that dense.”

  A tick formed in his jaw, but his eyes didn’t change. “That was low.”

  “Yes, well, some things don’t change, do they?” I leveled him with a look. “But then, some things do.” I glanced meaningfully at his hair, then paused on his shirt and his pants.

  “You look different too,” he said, reading my mind. “Your hair…”

  I wasn’t self-conscious, but I had a sharp worry that my hair looked like I’d jammed a fork into an electrical socket.

  “It’s short. And tame.”

  “And?” I put my hand on my hip and looked at him with all the impatience I could possibly hold. “In case you forgot, you are engaged. To be married. Probably shouldn’t be commenting on how another woman looks.”

  He stepped up to the counter and I willed myself not to back away. One muscled arm leaned on the counter as he looked harder at me. “Are you really sober? Completely?”

  “Yes,” I said with a hiss. His eyes moved to my arms and I laid them on the counter. “No more scars, either.”

  “What’s this?” He pointed to the semi-colon.

  “Life goes on,” I told him dispassionately.

  “What about endings? The Mira I knew believed in endings.”

  “She still does.” I pulled away, pretending to be busying myself with filing paperwork, but I just ended up ‘filing’ paper from the scrap. “I have a lot to do,” I said, remembering my mom would be arriving any minute. “So feel free to leave, if you’re just going to stand her dissecting me.”

  “I’m not dissecting you.”

  I lifted my head and braced my hands on the scrap paper. “What do you want, Six? What do you fucking want from me?”

  “I’ll start off with the easiest request. I want you to not cater my wedding. It’s a reasonable request.”

  “Are you as dense as your golden goddess? I. Am. Not. Catering. Your. Fucking. Wedding.” I bit each word off with my jaw clenched. “As if I’d be interested in it, anyway.”

  “You seem awfully interested in infiltrating my life.”

  “You’re infiltrating mine,” I snapped. “You’re the one calling, texting, hunting me down to my place of work. Trust me, I want nothing to do with your perfect wedding and your perfect bride and whoever the fucking hell you are now.” I stepped around the counter, moving with purposeful steps to the back and slammed the door closed behind me.

  Bracing my hands on the wall, I took a deep, filling breath.

  I wanted him to leave.

  I wanted him to look at me and see that the old Mira still lurked under my skin. Embedded in the scars that crisscrossed my skin was the woman who had loved him with all the depth she didn’t know she possessed. A woman who had loved him with the kind of love she didn’t think she deserved, a woman who had been loved harder than one ought to love.

  Love, for me, had never made me happy for long. Love had never come without strings, without side effects. Before Six, love had made me do and say things that weren’t appropriate. With Six, love made me hungry. I was starving for attention, for affection. The best part about loving Six was that he fed my hunger as much as I demanded it, not once holding it hostage in exchange for something else. He fed me so fully with love that I was surprised my skin wasn’t clinging to my bones in my self-imposed starvation since I’d left him.

  With Six, things had been different. I’d been scared, down to my bones, of loving him, of what it would do to him, to me, to us. But even if I had had the power to, I couldn’t have stopped it.

  And here he was, back in my life, but he didn’t have anything to offer me. Anything to satiate my hunger, my thirst. He’d made gold-encircled and diamond-topped promises to a woman who was nothing like me. A woman who was his fucking ten, when I’d been, at best, an eight.

  In the back bathroom, I splashed water over my face to cool down the nerves. I didn’t want to already be worked up when my mother showed up. The mirror showed my red face, bright eyes, and hair that was tame. He’d been right about that. My reflection also revealed the t in fight, backwards for anyone who looked at it but in the mirror, it was in the right direction. The tattoo was for me, solely, and looking in the mirror was when I needed the reminder the most, so it made sense to have it backwards for everyone else.

  I plucked at the collar, concealing the word from view, and opened the back door to the gallery. I had a gut feeling he’d stuck around, but had hoped he’d left anyway.

  The hope was dashed as I caught him standing in front of a painting—the painting—he’d pulled from behind the desk. It was the woman, wrapped by the love serpent. The painting I created the night we moved into our home.

  He didn’t see me at first, watching him take the painting in. I had no doubt that he recognized it, and I wondered what he thought, about it being on display for all eyes to see. The woman looked a bit like me, sure, if you looked at her with drunk goggles. Her face was blurry but serene—the focus rested solely upon the snake that squeezed around her body, and the hand that protectively held it.

  I could still see myself as that woman, still believe in that feeling. Even more so now, having been removed from Six as long as I was. The serpent had wrapped around me, had threatened to squeeze the life from my limbs, but now that I was fr
ee of it, I missed it. The suffocating, intoxicating, mind-numbing freefall of love.

  When I looked at Six, I could still feel its remnants. I thought I’d been emptied of love when I left him, but that wasn’t the case at all. The love was there, tucked away, dormant until awoken again. And as I stared at the lines of his back, the back I’d memorized over many sleepless nights, the love flooded in painlessly.

  The sound of the bell over the door pulled my attention from him.

  It was a woman, in a wool, taupe-colored trench coat. Her glasses were larger than necessary for her face, a face that had been kissed by a scalpel under the hands of a steady surgeon more than once. Her black hair was sleek, curled at the ends under her chin.

  Anxiety chased the love away as she approached, her heels loud on the concrete floors.

  Her companion stepped through the door behind her and in an instant, my legs went numb.

  13

  When my mom drove her car off a bridge with us inside of it, there was a brief moment where things went from good to bad, that moment of limbo between the two worlds. From one emotion to the next, in a span of less than a second. It was that discombobulated emotion that had filled my throat with terror.

  And it was that emotion that had me grasping for a wall, for fucking anything, when I met the eyes of a man I’d never expected to see again.

  “Mirabela,” my mom said, and Six watched her movements with the tiniest bit of shock on his own face. He looked between me and between my mom’s companion with no small amount of trepidation, but I could hardly dissect the emotions playing on his face when my mother was feet away, nearly embracing me, her perfume enveloping me, suffocating me. Each step felt like the advancing of a tempo in a concerto, with my increasing heartbeats and the volume of her footsteps rising as she came closer.

  Before I could fully register my surroundings, her hands were on my shoulders and she leaned in, powdered face beside mine. A flash of brown hair flew in front of my eyes and as it dissipated, I looked beyond at the man who’d come in with her.

  “Oh, you look good, Mira,” she said, and she turned to her companion. “This is your step-father,” she said, reading one bracelet-clad arm toward him. “Clay.”

  My stomach clenched painfully as the man stepped forward. Of course, I already knew him. “Clay.”

  Six stepped into view at the same moment, coming right up behind Clay. I was in a wind tunnel, my past and present spinning around me so fast that I couldn’t connect the dots.

  “William?” my mother asked Six, and then my knee did buckle, albeit briefly enough for me to regain my footing. “What are you doing here?”

  I was staring at him, waiting for the moment that it would all click for me. When Six’s eyes turned regretful, I took a fool, shaky step back from my mother. “You know him?”

  My mother looked between Six and her husband, and then back to me. “Yes…” She rubbed her lips together and seemed to be giving a lot of thought to how she’d answer. “I hired him for a few things.”

  I took another weak step backwards until my back was against a cool, blank wall. I gripped onto it with all my might. “A few jobs?”

  She laughed, and while she may have looked different from the woman I knew as a child, that fucking laugh was exactly the same. “To find you, mostly.”

  “To find me.” I whipped my head to Six. “To find me?”

  “Yes, of course. You weren’t answering your phone for months at a time, and I didn’t have time to fly in and babysit you.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if I should be well apprised of the situation I had just found myself in. She looked at Clay, the man who had been seeing Emerald Dress, the man I’d baited at a hotel lounge one night and then back at Six. “I hired him for other things as well.”

  Clay looked confused himself, a faraway kind of stare on his face, like he was trying to place me. I looked vaguely familiar, I was sure.

  I couldn’t speak. My head ached, my throat burned. My skin blew up with goosebumps as the reality came to me in blinding clarity.

  Clay is my mother’s husband.

  Clay is a cheater.

  I helped Six catch him, twice.

  Six lied to me.

  I almost broke up my mother’s marriage.

  For the second time.

  And then:

  Six was hired to find me.

  Six lied to me.

  Six lied to me.

  Was any of it real?

  The night we met, he’d run into me outside of the bar. He’d put me in his car, a woman he didn’t know, had fed me, returned me safely back home.

  He’d gone to the bar a couple nights later, to…what? Check on me?

  The questions were stacking up faster than I could track and I turned to Six with all the betrayal I felt, deep in my heart. “You fucking asshole,” I said, but the words sounded monotone, emotionless. The exact fucking opposite of how I was feeling.

  “What? How do you know him?” my mother asked, and I turned to her, wondering how the fuck I could do this now, have this reunion with her and pretend like the last thirteen years of my life hadn’t just fucking shattered at my feet.

  Something was happening to my body. My fingertips went numb as cold traveled up my arms. It was as if I’d just been dropped into sub-zero temperatures.

  “Holy fuck,” I whispered but, at least to me, was deafeningly loud. Everyone winced, except Clay, who was still studying me, trying to place me.

  Six turned to my mother. “You hired me for a job. I met her.” His words were short, simple.

  “Before or after I hired you to check on her?”

  “I met her after you hired me.” His answer was terse.

  “Thirteen years,” I said to no one but myself.

  My insides were churning. I envisioned reds and blues and blacks on canvas. But I was trapped. I couldn’t paint. I had no outlet for my feelings now, not as my entire world flipped upside-down and left me dangling.

  It was the first time the emotions inside of me were uncontrollable and unchained, without an outlet to empty them, in so long. The first time I had no way to bleed my feelings onto canvas. My hand clamped over my left wrist, the one with six lines. I felt the scars under my trembling fingers, felt the burn in my chest. Anxiety was pulling me in, pulling me down, and I had no escape.

  I’m having a heart attack.

  I can’t breathe.

  I’m drowning.

  I’m losing my mind.

  Save me.

  I vaguely registered movement, but my vision had closed to the size of a pinprick as my heart pounded so painfully loud I was sure it was finding its way out of my chest. All my limbs went cold, my bones turned to rubber, and I didn’t know I was falling until an arm wrapped around me.

  My body sagged against Six’s as he led me to a corner of the room. He wrapped me in his coat first, then fit his arms around me. The adjustment from cold to warm made me nauseated, dizzy.

  “Help me,” I whispered, my eyes closing. My legs were giving out.

  He pushed me against the wall, leaning me up against the brick. “Breathe, Mira,” Six urged. “Breathe.”

  I choked on the air. I felt the clench in my chest.

  I felt a hand on my upper chest, another on my stomach. “Take a deep breath in through your nose.” Six’s voice.

  My body resisted, and my mouth opened, but no noise came out.

  “Breathe in through your nose, Mira,” he ordered again. “Count to five in your head.”

  I did as he instructed, pulling in air.

  1…

  2…

  3…

  I let out the breath and my arms sagged. I couldn’t do it.

  “Again, Mira. Count to five while breathing in through your nose. Fight through it.”

  I wanted to fight it, to fight him, but I couldn’t. I had zero control of my body. The voices were a wall around me, closing in on me, suffocating me.

  “Breathe, Mira.” Six’s voice, again.
He didn’t yell; he didn’t shake me.

  I breathed in through my nose, one deep breath.

  1…

  2…

  3…

  4…

  5…

  “Let it out slow, through your nose. Count to five.”

  I wanted to open my mouth, to release it in a gush, but I didn’t. I exhaled through my nose, five beats before choking on another gulp of air.

  “Again. Breathe in.”

  We repeated the process so many times I lost count. At some point, he’d moved us to the ground so I was sitting, leaning against his chest. “Relax,” he said, his lips against my ear.

  With my eyes closed, he instructed me to focus on my toes. He yanked off my sneakers to free them. “Curl your toes tightly and count to five.”

  From my toes to my face, Six had me focus on clenching and relaxing muscles. I became more aware of my body, of my breaths and my heart rate slowed to normal by the time I opened my eyes.

  I felt his face against mine, cheek to cheek. But it was too painful to sit in his arms.

  “Let go of me,” I said tightly.

  “Are you going to have another panic attack?”

  I didn’t feel like myself. I’d never had a panic attack before, but I felt so emotionally unstable at that moment that I had to suppress the urge to shove him forcefully away from me. Since I couldn’t do that, I jabbed him with my elbow to loosen his arms enough for me to crawl out.

  I stood, looking between my mom who looked bewildered and Six who looked regretful. The woman who had broken me and the man who had helped piece me together. But had he? I’d been a job. That’s how I’d come into his life.

  I wanted to throw Six into the gauntlet with my mother, to tell her that he’d conned me into helping him on one of the jobs she’d hired his help for. I wanted to rage, to beat him with my fists until he bled the way I bled. I wanted to scream, I wanted to kick, I wanted to claw.

  But I was tapped out, unable to do any of those things. The anxiety was still there, as I tried to suppress the many, many moments from the last thirteen years that were now tainted by truth.

  Clay looked at my mother and then at me, still a bewildered idiot. “Do I know you?”