by Leisa Rayven
“Ethan …”
I move forward and try to hug him, but he takes a breath and steps back.
“I gotta go.”
“What? Where?”
“I need to get out of here for a while.” He starts to walk away.
“Ethan, wait.”
He stops but doesn’t turn around.
I walk around him and put my hands on his chest. He looks at me then, but his eyes are cold.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Just … don’t.”
“What?”
“Shut down.”
He stares at me, and for a moment I think he’s going to slip into his usual mode of deflect and deny, but the fatigue I saw earlier lingers behind his eyes.
He sighs. “Taylor, you don’t understand. The way I am …” He shakes his head. “I don’t mean to shut down. It just happens.”
“Yeah, well, don’t let it,” I say as I rub his chest and feel the muscles relax a little. “Did you even consider that you might actually benefit from having someone who’s there for you? Who’s willing to listen?”
“You really don’t want that job.”
I sigh in frustration. “Dammit, Ethan, can’t you just trust that I like you? That I want to be there for you. Support you or whatever. But you have to let me.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me like I’ve requested he jump out of a plane without a parachute.
“Please don’t freak out,” I say.
“I’m not,” he says, but his body is rigid and tense.
“Such a liar.”
“Look,” he says. “Needing things … being needed … only ever leads to disappointment.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“But it usually does.”
I stroke his frown lines. His expression softens, but only a little.
“I just need some time to cool off,” he says. “I’ll see you at the party.”
He steps around me and walks away.
Just when I thought we were making progress.
THIRTEEN
NOT CARING
Present Day
New York City
Dear God. He’s in my apartment. Like, in my apartment. Not only that, he’s wandering around, looking at my stuff.
Having him in my formerly Holt-free Sanctuary is making my skin prickle with heat.
This is the place where Tristan and I have talked about him. Where I write angsty-emo vitriol in my diary night after night. Where I’ve brought countless men who always ended up having his face. His hands. His body.
And now he’s here. Pulling off his jacket and laying it on the couch. Turning to look at me with a small, nervous smile. Showing me that no matter how many men I bring back here, he’s the only one who truly looks like he belongs.
Dammit.
How did this happen? Why did I let it?
Today’s rehearsal was a crapfest. Ethan was nailing his characterization, while I was still flubbing simple lines. When Marco invited us out for drinks afterward, I didn’t miss how he finished only half of his spritzer before leaving us alone. Subtle.
He may as well have hired a skywriter to say, “Sort out your shit with Holt and stop ruining my play.”
Even though I turned down his invitation to have Holt replaced, I’m still having trouble being completely open. So I vowed to try harder as I stayed with Ethan and drank.
When Holt offered to walk me home, I figured it might help us bond.
My mistake was letting him walk me up to my apartment. He’d practically put his neck out trying to see inside when I opened the door, and when he flat-out asked to come inside, I was unable to say no.
So now, here we are—him wandering around my living room, and me watching like he’s an exhibit in a zoo.
He examines my book collection and smiles as his fingers settle on my dilapidated copy of The Outsiders.
“I haven’t read this in a while,” he says, and pulls it out, then leafs through it. “I’ve missed it.”
“I thought you read it every year.”
He gives me a smile before placing it back in its slot. “Yeah … well … I gave my copy to some chick. Haven’t gotten around to getting a new one yet.”
The day he gave me that book, he was so proud. A birthday present I’d never forget, given to me by a perfect boyfriend.
Pity the boy who gave it to me didn’t really exist.
I hear the front door lock click open, and Tristan’s booming voice calls down the hallway.
“Cass? You here? I’m taking you out tonight, and ‘no’ isn’t a word I’m accepting. Get out that hot black dress with the low back. I want to show you off.”
The hallway closet slams as he puts away his yoga mat, and the look on Holt’s face screams, “You didn’t tell me you lived with someone. Especially not a man.”
Tristan walks into the room and freezes when he sees Holt. Just like dogs in the street, the two men size each other up.
“Hello,” Tristan says coldly before giving me a dark look. I shrug as he turns to assess Holt with narrowed eyes. “From the pictures Cassie showed me right before she burned them, I’m guessing you’re Ethan Holt.”
Holt bristles, but with more grace than I’ve ever seen from him, he composes his face and holds out his hand. “That’s right. And you are?”
I roll my eyes as Tristan steps forward to face off with Ethan. He’s only an inch taller, but the black tank he always wears to yoga class shows off his stupidly ripped physique.
He ignores Holt’s hand and says, “I’m Tristan Takei. I live here. With her.”
“I see,” Holt says and drops his hand. “Nice to meet you, Tristan. Cassie didn’t tell me she lived with someone.”
“Maybe she thought it wasn’t any of your business.”
Testosterone is thick in the air, but before I can explain I don’t have a live-in lover, Tristan grabs my arm and hisses, “Cassie? I need to speak to you in the kitchen,” and drags me out of the room.
When we get into the kitchen he turns to me, fury on his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Tris, calm down.”
“I’m calm.”
“No, you’re not. Your chakras are flying around like fireworks.”
“You don’t believe in chakras.”
“Yeah, well, if I did, that’s what they’d be doing. Chill.”
He glares at me for a few seconds before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Then he lets it out slowly and sighs. “Okay. I’m calm … ish. Now, answer the question.”
“I’m not doing anything. We were hanging out.”
“Hanging out doesn’t involve bringing him back here. You know very well that when you bring a man home, it’s for one reason, and if you think you’re going to jump back into bed with him—”
“I don’t! I’m not. I was a little tipsy. He walked me home.”
“You’ve been drinking, and you let him in here?! For the love of Krishna! It’s a wonder I didn’t find you giving him a damn lap dance! You know that if you’re within twenty feet of an attractive man when you’re drunk, they’re likely to be stripped naked and humped in record time! Let alone your handsome ex who you’ve never really gotten over!”
“Dammit, Tris, would you please keep your voice down?!”
He exhales again. Nothing ruins his equilibrium faster than the idea of me regressing to my old ways.
I touch his arm. “Do you honestly believe that a couple of weeks of him being decent is going to convince me he’s no longer an emotionally defective asshole? Even I’m not that naive.”
“I’m not saying you are, but that man is your Achilles’ heel. If he asked you to sleep with him right now, would you even be capable of saying no?”
My whole body blushes. “Tristan, God … that’s not what he wants.”
“Bull. I see how he looks at you. If you gave the word, that boy would sex you up ten ways from Sunday.”
I run my fingers through
my hair. “Tris …”
He sighs and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Look, sweet girl, I know this whole thing is difficult to navigate, but you have to remember everything we’ve talked about. Boundaries. Respect. Honesty. Emotional availability.”
“Are you referring to him or me?”
“Both. Don’t be blinded by your hormones. I can’t watch you go through all that heartache again.”
He pulls me into a hug, and I sigh. “Thanks, Tris.”
“You’re very welcome.” He pulls back. “But I just have to do one more thing before I can leave you two alone. You might want to look away, because this will be embarrassing.”
Before I can stop him, he steps around me and strides back into the living room. Holt is sitting on the edge of the couch, but he stands when Tristan enters.
“Okay, you,” Tristan says, pointing at Holt’s face. “I’m going to say this once, so listen up. I spend a good portion of my waking hours trying to find calm in this world and be at one with my serenity, but I love this woman more than pretty much anyone else on the planet, so if you hurt her, in any way, I swear by mighty and powerful Buddha that I will not hesitate in ending you. Do you understand me?”
Holt glances at me before nodding, and I’m surprised to see that his face shows not fear but steely determination.
“Yeah, I understand you, Tristan. But just so you know, hurting her is the furthest thing from my mind. I know I’ve been an idiot in the past, and I have a lot to make up for, but I intend to see this through to the end. Whatever that may be. So you’d best get used to seeing me around, because I’m not going anywhere this time. Do you understand?”
Tristan stares at him for a moment before relaxing his stance, a look of surprise on his face. “Well … good, then. You have a pretty face. If you treat her right, I won’t have to ruin it.”
I suppress a smile, because in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve only seen Tristan get this alpha-male once before, and that was when a guy he was dating called Gandhi a “grandstanding hypocritical uber- pussy.” It took Tris a long time to find his serenity again after he punched the guy in the face.
He gives Holt one last evil eye before clapping his hands together and saying, “Okay, I need to shower. You two behave yourselves while I’m gone.”
Tris departs, leaving Holt and me facing each other awkwardly.
“So … yeah. That’s Tristan,” I say. “He lives here and apparently threatens my ex-boyfriends. Would you like some wine?”
“Fuck, yes,” Holt says, and follows as I head into the kitchen.
I grab a bottle of red and pour two overly generous glasses. I hand one to him and take a large mouthful of mine before leaning against the counter.
“So, Tristan’s kind of protective of you, I take it,” Holt says.
“Oh, you picked up on that?”
“Yeah, a little. It’s not often I’m threatened by a scary-tall super-fit Japanese dude. Can’t say I enjoyed it.”
“He’s only half Japanese. And he’s not usually like that, but I guess seeing the Antichrist in his house pushed him over the edge.”
He laughs and rubs the back of his neck. “Well, I’m just going by Satan these days, but if you want to be all formal about it …”
“Can I call you Lucy?”
“Huh?”
“Short for Lucifer.”
“Oh, sure, but only when we’re alone. I can’t have you calling me that in front of my evil minions. They might laugh and … well … that would just hurt my feelings.”
We head back into the living room and sit on the couch.
“So, you and Tristan. Are you guys”—he looks ill when he says the word—“together?”
I almost laugh. “No.”
“Have you ever been?” He looks at me way too intensely as he waits for my response.
“No. I don’t have the … uh … necessary equipment to satisfy Tristan.”
He looks at me blankly for a few seconds as my words seep into his wine-clouded brain. Then a virtual lightbulb goes on behind his eyes.
“Oh! Well, thank Christ for that. My blood pressure just lowered by about twenty points.”
I laugh and take a sip of wine, and when I look back, he’s staring at me. “I saw pictures of you guys together, you know.”
“When?”
“When I was in Europe. For the first few months after I left, my nighttime ritual was to get shit-faced drunk and google you. There were pictures of you and Tristan together when you were working off- Broadway. When I saw them … I … fuck, Cassie, it gutted me. I thought he was your boyfriend. That you’d moved on, while I couldn’t stop pining for you.”
I get a mental image of him, bottle in hand in front of his computer, seeing me with Tristan and cursing me for not being miserable. But I was miserable, even though the pictures showed me smiling.
“Yeah, well, you always did underestimate my feelings for you,” I say, and turn away from him to fiddle with the stem of my glass. “That was one of our major problems.”
“I know it sounds like a cop-out, but … I just couldn’t comprehend how you could love me as much as I loved you. It just didn’t seem possible.”
For a moment, I can’t believe what I’ve just heard. He always had trouble saying the “L” word. It was the one thing that made what we had too real for him.
When I glance over, he looks like an arachnophobe who just trumped a roomful of spiders.
“Impressed?” he asks. “Look at me go with the ‘L’ word. Didn’t even stutter.”
“It’s like a miracle, only less likely.”
Now it’s his turn to gaze at his wine. “It’s only taken three years for me to realize that not saying it didn’t help me deny my feelings. Whether or not I loved you wasn’t dependent upon a word. It was just a fact. Plain and simple. You’d be surprised how often I say it these days.”
I go back to my wine, because his face is so full of emotion that I just can’t look at it.
“Music?” I say, and head over to my iPod.
I spend a few moments looking mindlessly through my playlists before he says, “Need help? Because if you pull out any country music, I’ll be forced to mock you.”
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“What, that you once spent real folding money on a Dixie Chicks album? Nope. Never living that down.”
“Hey, there were some good songs on that album.”
“Cassie, there was fucking yodeling on that album. I’m pretty sure that album killed the stereo in my old car.”
I laugh. “You used to blare AC/DC out of that car every day. Those speakers were completely shredded. You can’t possibly blame two minutes of yodeling.”
He walks over and takes the iPod from me. “That two minutes scarred my eardrums for life. I can only speculate about what it did to my poor stereo. Now, step aside, woman. Allow me to find the perfect music for us.”
I shake my head and sit down. I’m once again struck by how surreal it is to have him in my apartment. Six months ago, it would have been inconceivable. Now he’s trying so hard to show me that he’s matured and grown. If only I had. Even now, I can feel resentment bubbling inside of me, waiting for him to make one wrong move so it can explode.
“Oh, wow,” he says with a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Don’t hate me for putting this on, but … God … this album …”
The opening strains of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey filter though the speakers, and I immediately tense.
I take another mouthful of wine.
“I can change it if you want,” he says. “I just … I haven’t heard it in a while.”
Yeah, me neither.
“It’s fine,” I say, before drinking again. The alcohol makes it easy to lie. This album was the soundtrack of so many memories, and although they’re pleasant ones, they’re also the parts of him I miss the most.
He joins me on the couch, far enough away to make it look like he�
��s respecting my personal space but close enough to make my wine- addled brain crave him closer. I lean my head back and let the music distract me.
We’re on the third song by the time Tristan appears in front of us, freshly showered and ready to go out.
He takes in the scene before him and frowns. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you two were meditating. Although I’m not sure why you’d be meditating to sex music.”
Holt squirms a little.
“Cass, are you sure you don’t want to come out with me?” Tris asks. “It’s bubble night at Neon. You could even bring tall, dark, and brooding here. Looks like he could use some bubbles.”
“No, thanks,” I say with a sigh. “I’m kind of enjoying my meditation. You should be proud.”
Tristan’s mouth presses into a thin line as he turns to Holt. “So that’s how this is going to work? You just waltz back into her life and get her to do something I usually have to bribe her with chocolate to do?”
Holt blinks at him lazily. “What can a say, man? I don’t need to use chocolate, ‘cause I’m just naturally sweet.”
Tristan looks at me in confusion, like he’s struggling with either really liking Holt or really hating him.
Welcome to my world.
“Okay, I’m leaving,” Tristan says as he frowns at Holt once more. “But Cassie? Just remember what we spoke about. I don’t want to arrive home and have to cleanse your aura of douche vibes.”
Ethan tenses. “I’ve worked very hard to rid myself of ‘douche vibes,’ but if by chance some still exist, I promise not to infect Cassie with them.”
“You do that,” Tristan mumbles as he heads down the hallway to grab his jacket. “See ya, Cass.”
“Bye.”
The door opens and closes, and Holt and I sink further into the couch.
“Call me crazy,” Holt says as he turns to me, “but I think Tristan really likes me.”
“Well, that’s one theory.”
“What the other one?” he asks.
“That he wants to tear off your head, poke out your eyeballs, and use your skull as a bowling ball.”
