by Chloe Cox
Irony is a bitch.
But anyway, as I’m heating up the pan for the duck six years later, with Harlow right over there, slicing veggies like old times, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about how Harlow told me herself that she wanted Dill back more than anything else in the world, that she wanted her baby brother.
Or maybe I’m just thinking about all that because it’s the only thing that makes me feel like less of an asshole. It’s like a shield, the only thing that can protect me when I look at Harlow and see how much I hurt her by leaving the way I did. The only thing that can protect me from how much it hurts her now, that I can’t tell her why I left. That I can’t give her the answers she needs.
As if on freaking cue, Alex Wolfe calls me.
I hit the ignore button and throw the duck on.
“You hungry?” I ask.
“Starved.”
“Good.”
We sit down in silence, and I can’t help but watch her, beautiful as always. Maybe it’s all the thinking I’ve been doing, but I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t not give her something.
“I wasn’t kidding, you know,” I say to her. “About proving it. That I have proof that I never stopped thinking about you.”
She looks up sharply, but doesn’t say anything.
I say, “That proof, it’s on the way.”
“Big talk,” she says, and takes a sip of wine.
“Lo, I know I’m not really out of the dog house,” I say. “Why’re you being so nice?”
Harlow looks up, grins. “I could say the same with this spread. When did you learn to cook?”
“I’m serious, Lo.”
She looks down, and for a moment I see that it’s all still there. The hurt, the anger, the confusion, the frustration. It hasn’t gone away. Then she just shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I think I’m just tired of being hurt, of all this stuff. It’s tiring. And it’s easier for right now to just…not. I know how to be around you like this.”
Yeah, I know what she's talking about. There’s something familiar about this. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.
“For now,” she says again.
I nod. That makes more sense to me. I smile at her and say, “I can wear you down slowly, no problem.”
Lo pauses almost imperceptibly, cutting her meat. I know exactly what she’s thinking about. I’m the only man on the planet who could know what she’s thinking about. Her seventeenth birthday dinner didn’t end when she told me what she wanted more than anything else in the world. We ordered out quick Chinese food and put it on fancy plates, eating and laughing, sitting across from each other exactly like this, stealing looks at each other, each of us wondering the same kinds of things. I know, because she told me later, that she’d been wondering what it would be like to kiss me.
And then, at the end of the night, she took my wrist in those delicate little fingers of hers. She tugged on me. I remember that still; it was such a gentle thing, but I just somehow…knew. I gathered her up in my arms and held her close to me, right against my body, and just held her. Breathed her in.
Christ, I wanted her so bad.
And I knew she wanted me, too. The way her hands slid up my back, the way she leaned into me, the way she buried her face in my neck. I could feel it.
But I also knew how fragile she was. Could feel that, too. How scared. She wanted me and was scared of it at the same time. I was safe to her, the only person in the world that was safe. So I kissed her softly on the neck, then on the cheek.
And I said, “I’ll always be here.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Another thing I'll always remember, right there. Later she told me it was like we wore each other down slowly.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long before she was ready. Before we both were. But I would have waited forever, and I would have done it with a smile on my face.
That’s what she’s thinking about now. What we’re both thinking about as she looks up at me, her hair framing her beautiful face, her eyes big and open, her mouth so soft it’s all I can do not to run my tongue along that bottom lip. I’m thinking about how that was the day we both knew it was going to happen. And then when it did…holy shit.
I’ve lived on the memory of her for five years.
My eyes trail down her long neck to those collarbones again, and then to her perfect breasts, and I’m thinking about how they used to peak just when I’d blow on them.
I’m thinking about how I could get her to come so sweetly with just my hand.
I’m thinking about what it felt like to bury myself inside Harlow Chase, look into her eyes, and feel her come all around me.
Yeah. I’m definitely ok with wearing her down slowly, if that’s what I have to do.
Harlow recovers first, breaks the stare. She takes a sip of wine and clears her throat, trying to play it off like we weren’t both just thinking about it.
“When did you get so ruthless?” she says, pretending to look shocked.
I don’t even miss a beat.
“Five years without you,” I say.
chapter 11
HARLOW
I feel like I’m slowly waking up from a dream. The better my ankle feels, the closer I get to full consciousness. These past few days with Marcus living in my house—sleeping right by my bed—have been utterly surreal. I haven’t had the energy to stay constantly mad at him. It’s almost just been easier to recede into a past that made sense, with him around like this, than it has been to deal with the present reality.
Except the facade is cracking. I can’t pretend I don’t want him. I can’t pretend I don’t spend every second in his presence in an amped up state of sexual frustration. I can’t pretend that even while I’m so turned on, just by the way he gets up to clear dishes (seriously, what is that), there’s this constant worry tearing at the edges of my perception, this reminder that there’s ugliness coming. There’s terrible things underneath all of this, things I don’t want to feel.
It’s not like my broken heart has been magically healed. It’s more like I’ve drugged it into submission. And now it’s coming down off that high.
It really doesn’t help when he insists on inspecting my ankle.
“Have you tried putting weight on it?” he asks, holding my leg gently.
“I can kind of limp around,” I say. I sound tense not because it hurts when he touches me, but because it sends shimmering heat up my leg, right to my core. “It’s not so bad, actually.”
Marcus is silent a moment, looking down at my ankle as though that’s the most important thing in the world. He knows that as soon as I can walk around freely there’s no more reason for him to stay here. And whatever it is he wants from me, he apparently hasn’t it gotten it yet.
Was there ever a real reason for him to stay here? If I’d put my foot down, metaphorically speaking, Marcus would have left. But I didn’t. I let him stay. I put myself through this.
I am at war with myself. I have needed something this easy for so long. For years. Nothing has been easy, not since Marcus left, and just being with him is so, so easy. So damn safe.
As long as I don’t think too much about how badly he hurt me. And as long as I don’t think about the future, when he’ll inevitably choose something else over me again, when he’ll hurt me all over again. If I let him.
I close my eyes and try not to think about how my skin feels electrically alive, just being in contact with his. I’m about to speak when he beats me to it.
“You heard from Dill?” he asks.
My eyes shoot open and I see him staring back at me as if this is actually important to him. We’re sitting on the couch again, in the middle of a Die Hard movie marathon while it pours outside, another one of those summer storms. I’m waiting for Shantha to get back to me about how the initial publicity for the fundraising event at the bar is going. The idea is to get the neighborhood organized, raise enough money that we can attrac
t some real press, put some pressure on the zoning board. Maybe if we make it too expensive and too annoying to continue the developers will go somewhere else. It’s my only shot to save Dill’s home.
And Dill doesn’t even know what’s going on. He’s in love with his programming camp, totally oblivious to everything else. I didn’t even understand half of his last email—it’s like it was written in actual code—but I can tell when the kid is happy.
And I have Marcus to thank. Partially, anyway.
“Yeah,” I answer him finally. “He’s having a blast.”
Marcus smiles like the freaking sun. “Good.”
He still has his hand on my leg. I don’t want to move it. I want to just continue to feel his hands on me without having to take responsibility for that particular decision or deal with any of the consequences involved.
It’s not the sex that makes me uncomfortable. God no. It’s the closeness. The real-but-fake intimacy. Like we’re playing house. Like we’re getting way too comfortable with each other, like I’m forgetting how he’s capable of hurting me.
I figure someone who can ruthlessly leave you with no explanation once can do it twice. No explanation, no way to understand it. No guarantee he won’t just do the same thing again. So no forgiveness. Definitely no forgetting.
“Hey, you ok?” Marcus asks me.
He’s worried. He doesn’t have the right to be worried about me. I take my leg back, move down to the other side of the couch.
“I’m fine,” I say. It’s a lie. I feel like the storm outside is just a mirror image of what’s happening inside me, like my skin is just a thin layer preventing a freaking hurricane from ripping through my life, making all sorts of bad decisions, falling in love with ghosts all over the place.
That’s how I have to think of him. The ghost that haunts my life. The ghost I need exorcised.
“You hungry yet?” he asks.
I can’t believe he learned to cook. It’s like he found his one flaw—besides the disappearing thing—and was like, oh, I’ll just go take a class and become a world-class chef. No big deal.
Ok, for food made with his current skills, I can maybe let some things slide. Temporarily.
“Maybe,” I say, narrowing my eyes.
He’s grinning.
Then he gets up and lifts me up in his arms, totally inappropriate, totally crossing boundaries left and right, and it gets me to laugh anyway. Actually it gets me to scream and giggle, and I bat at his shoulders as he sets me down.
“Smile occasionally or I’m going to have to tickle you,” he says.
I can’t help but smile back at him. Whenever he smiles, it’s absolutely infectious, and he’s giving me the full Marcus smile now, trying to get me out of my funk. The thing is, he’s beautiful. It take a real physical effort not to let my hands linger on his hard chest, not to feel the grain of his muscles through the thin material of his white t-shirt, not to press myself against him. He smells incredible.
“You’re all talk,” I say, and push him toward the kitchen.
Marcus stops, gives me the one-eyebrow raise. “Oh really?”
And now this feels dangerous again. Already. I put my hands on my hips, covering up how I have to put all that weight on one leg, and narrow my eyes.
“Then where’s your super special proof, Marcus?”
The air changes. Sparks between us. Jesus. I’ve done it. I’ve brought up serious stuff. I think I’ve been avoiding it, even though I said I was going to ask him all these questions, just because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I’m still not. Like, really, really not. But he said he had proof that he never stopped thinking about me, that he never stopped caring. Of course I want to see it.
“That’s fair,” Marcus says. He looks at me seriously, imploringly. For all the world an honest guy trying to make good. I have to remind myself…what? Not to believe whatever he says next? Then why do I want to?
He says, “The guy who has the files that I need to prove to you what I’ve been doing the past five years was out in California on another job. He said he’d be back in town this week with all the files. He won’t send that kind of thing over email, says it compromises him. He’s kind of old school.”
Wait. What the hell?
“What files? What are you talking about?”
Marcus frowns. “This is why I didn’t bring it up. Think of it as a partial record of my activities and interests for the past five years.”
“‘Think of it as?’ So then what is it really?”
Marcus stares at me. Silently.
“Were you checking up on me?” I ask. “Like, spying on me? And you have a record of this?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I say softly.
I’m not even mad. I suppose eventually I’ll be mad. Maybe if I saw what he’d actually done, I’d be mad. But right now I’m mostly just marveling at how incredibly weird it is that Marcus would have disappeared from my life like I didn’t matter at all, and yet all this time he’s had someone checking up on me.
Marcus runs a hand through his black hair, turning it into a disheveled, sexy mess, and looks at me with those mesmerizing, earnest eyes.
“I don’t know,” he says simply. “When it comes to you, everything is just… You’re what’s wrong with me, Lo. Simple as that.”
“Marcus, I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“There’s no reason you should. It’s pretty weird.”
I just stare at him for another moment. And this is where the fact that we know each other so well comes in. Because I watch him, and I can see everything he’s feeling on his face, as if he was narrating it to me himself. I can see it in his body language, the way he leans against the doorframe, the way it looks like invisible rope is the only thing holding him back, like he wants to be where I am, close to me. He’s in pain. This is what it looks like when Marcus Roma feels pain because he thinks I’m feeling pain.
I am just totally dumbfounded.
And I have to sit down, because of this freaking ankle.
“You ok?” he says, rushing forward while I hobble back to the couch, muttering under my breath.
“Just resting it,” I say.
He stands there, silently. And then all of a sudden Marcus is down on his knees in front of me, and I’m trapped. Even if my ankle was healed, I don’t think I could move. Just looking at him, looking at those eyes, that face—no woman could tear herself away. Even one who really, really should.
“Lo.”
“Marcus, please don’t.”
That closeness, that dangerous closeness, the way he’s almost touching me right now, the way I know he can look into my face and see what I’m feeling, too—I can’t do that right now. Because the feelings I’ve been fighting are coming up to the surface. The fact that I never got over him, the fact that I still love with him, the fact that I can’t look at him without wanting and hurting at the same time…he’ll know it all.
And if he knows it, I might have to admit it. I might have to deal with it.
Am I ready for that?
What if the answer is that I still need him? That no matter what, I will never get over him? That I will have to feel this way forever? What if I finally allow myself to ask the question, and that’s the answer?
I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. He looks into me—into me—and I know he sees it. I know he feels it. I’m on the cusp of breaking, of overflowing completely with five years’ worth of emotion, when the doorbell rings.
Thank fucking God.
Well, that’s my first reaction. My second reaction is, “Who the hell is that?”
Because it’s raining outside, still. I mean, the weather is terrible. No one in their right mind would be out right now.
Unless it was an emergency.
Here’s the thing: I am still a little nervous around police officers. Anyone official, really, anyone in a uniform, especially if they’re coming to my door
unexpectedly. Like if they have news? It’s never going to be good news. It’s a pretty reliable way to put me on a hair trigger for a panic attack.
I mean, it’s understandable.
And I’ve been thinking about Dill. And this is the first time he’s away from me since I got him back, and I haven’t talked to him, and the only reason I haven’t been out of my mind worrying about him is that Marcus has been making me crazy instead.
So my third reaction is to panic.
I push myself off the couch with all the force I can muster, needing to get to the door and see who’s got something so important to tell me, and Marcus is there. He’s holding me up, studying my face.
I fall back as soon as my ankle touches the ground, wincing.
“Just because you can walk doesn’t mean you should,” he says. And before I can yell at him, because, goddammit, I need to know who’s at the door right now, Marcus picks me up—again—and starts to carry me to the door.
“This is ridiculous,” I say, even as I’m starting to hyperventilate. It feels like a genuine panic attack coming on. It can’t just be the doorbell. It has to be all the stress from the past few days, all the unresolved tension with Marcus, making my threshold lower.
“Dill is fine,” Marcus says calmly. “They wouldn’t come to your house if something had happened. They would call. Dill is fine. This is nothing. Probably just a neighbor whose power went out. Lo, look at me,” he says.
We’re just a few feet from the door, but he’s looking at me with those calm, soothing eyes, and he’s saying my name again. He’s telling me the one thing anyone could tell me to get me to calm down right now, and it’s working.
He is exactly what I need right now.
Why does it have to be him?
“Lo,” he says again. “It’s ok. Dill is fine.”
“Ok,” I say, feeling my heart rate slow down while my lungs start to work again. “Ok, you’re right. Ok.”
