by Raine, Meli
“What? Yes. Fine.”
“You’re flushed. Are you feeling faint?”
My pulse throbs between my legs. The touch of my bra fabric against my nipples is torture. Shivers take over every inch of my skin like a tsunami storming the shore, pushing up into my veins, sending wild memories of sex and Silas’s scent through every nerve ending I possess.
He possesses me, even when I’m not in his orbit.
Footsteps, loud and swift, and a shadow covers the right side of me. A hand touches my elbow.
“Jane?” Duff’s rough voice shakes me back to a semblance of normalcy. He glares at Lily. “What happened?”
She glares back. “She got a little woozy. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” I ask, confused, struggling to pull myself together while ignoring the untamed impulses setting my body into overdrive.
“Like I would ever hurt you.”
Duff is a sentry, an emotionless protector who won’t be affected by her.
“Please tell me he’s not your boyfriend,” she pleads in a voice so unlike her friendly demeanor.
“No. He’s not.”
“Whew.”
Duff gives her a cranky smirk, looking more like an eighteenth-century pirate than a twenty-first-century agent. “Why, sweetheart? Relieved I’m single?”
“You wish.”
“I’m fine.” I don’t want him here, interfering with my bubble. Before I can find the right words to make him leave, he just does. Magically, he slips back out to the small area on the sidewalk, this time sitting on a small bench surrounded by geraniums.
“Who is that? Your bodyguard?” she jokes.
“Yes.”
All laughter disappears from her face. “Whoa. Really?” Compassion fills her features. For a brief flash, she looks like a younger version of my mother. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what your life is like.”
“Trade you,” I say with a laugh.
She remains serious. “We could. You look enough like me.”
“If this were a Hallmark Channel movie, we’d do it, wouldn’t we?” I smile at her.
Glancing at Duff through the big picture window, she gives me an uncertain look. “I’m pretty sure your life is more like a Lifetime ‘woman in peril’ movie. You know. The kind where the guy she trusts most in the world turns out to be her biggest danger.”
If Lily had kicked me in the stomach she couldn’t have hurt me more.
Shame fills me. It’s an instant horror that takes over the body. I have no control over it. My mind can’t rationalize it away. Hormones and chemicals released by cells inside me with no external directive flood all of my receptors. My skin crawls. My eyes flitter and jerk, darting left and right as I try to take in visual input and put it neatly in a category where it belongs, store it in short-term memory so I can take in the next piece of sensory input.
Overloaded circuits shut down.
But humans aren’t circuit boards.
Instead, we take it and take it, the pile-on of overload reaching critical mass until we go mad.
Madness is a form of self-preservation.
Madness makes systems protect themselves.
Madness is the most elegant of all entropies.
And madness is the end game for people who overload others.
I’m not mad. Insanity would be a welcome break from it all, but that is not my fate.
“Let’s get you a nice table display. How about purple, yellow, and white?” Lily’s trying to do what I do. Establish normalcy. Unlike so many others, she’s not doing it from a position of panic or denial. She’s not being fake to cover the horror of who I am and my reality.
She’s being kind.
And in my world, that is almost transgressive.
“Irises? Lilies?” she asks, making fun of her own name.
“You’re the expert,” I tell her with a shaky smile. “Why don’t you pick?”
Her eyes light up. “Really? Because customers never say that. They always want me to put together terrible combinations.”
“I don’t want to be just any customer. Go for it.”
For the next ten minutes she hums and putters, checking in for short questions and zipping off, her constant energy a happy sight. It’s like watching a hummingbird drink nectar. Lily lightens my world for these few minutes and I’m grateful.
I’ll also be back. Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy flowers. It can buy time with Lily and her indefatigable charm.
Whirlwind Flower Chick appears suddenly with a breathtaking explosion of color squeezed into an enormous vase in the shape of –
“Is that a unicorn?” I ask, agog.
“YES!” She looks like Buddy the Elf meeting Santa at the mall. “Isn’t it just so perfect?”
“For a five-year-old,” I say slowly, imagining little Kelly’s face if I come home with this.
“We all have inner five-year-olds. Color is young. Color is happiness. Unicorns are sparkly happiness, so even better!”
Leave it to me to find the only flower shop in the entire world with Lisa Frank working in it.
“Lily, that’s a bit–”
“GORGEOUS!”
“–much.”
“No,” she says firmly, as if she’s my best friend and I need to be put in my place. “No, Jane, it is not a bit much. It is muchly much. It is outrageous and bold and over the top and it sings color. That is why you are taking it home with you. And I won’t take your money, so you can’t say no.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a gift.”
I eye the supernova of flowers with great skepticism. A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth in spite of myself. It is definitely muchly much. You cannot look at a unicorn stuffed with golden sunflowers and daisies and big, purple spider mums and not grin.
“No!” I protest. “Of course I’m paying for it.”
“Your money doesn’t work here,” Lily says, her voice officious and endearing. “I mean it. Spend a day with that happy blossom party in a unicorn and I guarantee you’ll be back for more.”
“You just referred to a bunch of flowers as ‘a happy blossom party.’”
“What else is a bunch of properly balanced flowers in a unicorn vase?”
Good point.
“Lily, this is a business–”
“I’m giving it to you as a freebie. A taste. Besides, if you pay for it, you’ll ask me to change it, and I don’t want to mess with perfection.”
I look at the arrangement again.
“It’s like someone took a glitter bomb, portions of a Harold and Kumar movie, and added an FTD commercial,” I tell her.
“NAILED IT!” she cheers, clapping.
Giggles bubble up inside me and spill out. The sound is familiar and old at the same time. “It really is, ah... stunning.”
“If it makes you laugh, it did its job.”
“Oh, it’s making me laugh.”
“Then good. You got what you need.”
What you need.
Silas is what I need, but in his absence, this will do.
She puts the monstrosity in a large bag with a solid bottom, carefully, craftily fitting it in. The stirring scent of flowers feels like I’m truly breathing for the first time. All the air in my lungs is so fresh, so fevered. Each deep breath brings me back into my own skin.
Lily grabs me for a klutzy hug and looks me in the eye. Her face is a beaming ray of light. An old movie from the 1990s, one of my mom’s favorites, floats into my memory. Sliding Doors.
I am staring at the person I could have been in an alternate universe.
“I know once you’re home with your very own unicorn arrangement, you’re going to be so happy. Goofy fun is underrated, Jane. Be silly. If you can’t be a little fun with flowers, when can you be?”
Duff raises one eyebrow and looks at her through the window like she just suggested we perform a seance for a dead pet.
“Thanks,” I reply, starting to wonder how a person
could be so optimistic, quirky, and unflaggingly happy all the time. I guess if such a person exists–and Lily certainly does–she should work in a flower shop.
Or on the set of a Judd Apatow film.
As I start to walk back to the apartment building, the weight of the flower arrangement becomes increasingly difficult to manage. Duff is a few feet behind me, and before I can stop to adjust my grip on the bag, he swoops in, taking the handles with a masculine grace that doesn’t match his exterior.
A whiff of cologne tickles my nose, the scent unlike any I typically enjoy. Every part of him is inscrutable, closed off and barricaded. He’s a cipher.
I get the sense that’s intentional.
Back at my apartment, Duff leaves the large bag on the floor. I look at my dining table. Mine.
Smiling as I extract the flower arrangement from the bag, I give it a place of honor. Later, I will cook dinner for Silas. We’ll eat and catch up on the day, laughing and sharing secrets, and then he will take me to bed and peel back another layer of my armor, showing me more of myself.
That’s my assumption.
Within hours, I’ll be proven very, very wrong.
Chapter 14
Another morning of no coffee scent.
And, as I sit up in bed, my reflexes jerky with surprise, no Silas.
“What?” I gasp, covered in chenille, the burgundy cloth like cold skin against my body. I leap to my feet in a panic, confused and disoriented, trying to reconcile a lack of Silas and a lack of a bed with my half-awake state.
I turn and find a strange man staring at me.
He takes one step, then a second, eyes wide with curiosity, lips parting to speak.
I scream.
He lets me.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” the man says, his voice accented. Something Eastern European, the kind of voice actors in old Dracula movies used to have. It doesn’t calm me.
At all.
“SILAS!” I scream. “DUFF!”
“My name is Romeo Czaky and I work for Drew Foster.”
I stop screaming.
“Romeo?” I squeak. “Your name is Romeo?”
Dark eyes with lashes so plentiful, he looks like he’s wearing eyeliner, probe mine, the eye roll well practiced.
“Yes, Romeo.” The R rolls slightly, enough to sound silky, like a cat’s purr. “It is a common name.”
“You’re–you’re from the agency?”
“I am.”
“Where’s Duff?”
“He had to step out.”
“And Silas?”
“I do not know. I am only scheduled to relieve Duff.” He says the name like the U is pronounced “ew.”
My pulse is beating so hard, it feels like I’m shaking the wall I lean against. “How do I know you’re not lying?”
“I have been here for the last four hours, Ms. Borokov.” Unlike Americans, he says the V like an F. “If I wanted to harm you, I had my chance.”
The calm way he delivers such chilling words has a hypnotic effect on me. He’s right. He could have killed me in my sleep. He didn’t.
Therefore, I trust him.
Strange thought pattern in a functional life, I know.
Dysfunction is all I know. When you live in a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctional is functional.
“Okay. But why am I asleep on the couch?”
“Ah. Duff said you were waiting up for Gentian.”
“He never came here?”
“No.”
“Maybe he’s next door.”
“Ah, no. I can confirm that he is not.”
I frown. “Where is he?”
“I do not know.”
“But you know he’s not next door?”
“I’ve been instructed to give you that information.”
Oh, please. Here we go again.
“What other information can you give me?”
“What do you want to know?”
“All of the information you’re not supposed to give me.”
A sneaky smile appears, only there for a second. Romeo sets his mouth to a firm, tight line. “You know I cannot do that.”
“No. I don’t.”
Surprise flickers in eyes the color of hot chocolate. “You don’t?”
“I know you refuse to tell me. Not that you’re unable to.”
He’s underestimated me. He’s realizing it right now, in real time. My advantage is slim and narrowing by the second. Not an enemy, not an ally, Romeo is just another guy in a suit with defensive training and better electronics than most of the bad guys. He probably served in some country’s military forces, like Drew and Silas, and now he’s doing private security for people like me.
He’s seen and not heard.
Like I’m supposed to be.
“I am only following orders, Ms. Borokov,” he says apologetically, but the glint in his eye betrays him. This is a game.
I turn away, impolite and impatient. When he’s on my detail, Duff humors me, never giving more than he is allowed, but he always respects me. This guy is a whole different world. For the first time since I’ve lived under constant surveillance, I’m uncomfortable with my guard. Not worried he’ll do anything improper–I wouldn’t stay in the room with him if I had an inkling of that.
But I don’t like being treated like my demand for information is cute.
I grab my phone and check messages. Three death threats, one rape threat involving shoving dynamite up me and lighting it on fire while I’m tied up, two spam texts for refinancing student loans and two personal texts.
Be back when I can. S
and
Jane, I know this is weird, but can you meet me somewhere today to talk?
That text is from Mandy.
The room spins.
Who’s next? Is Jenna going to tag along? With Tara dead and the news in a tizzy over me, I can’t even pause long enough to absorb it all. The trip to the flower shop was a breath of fresh air. Literally. And now Silas is gone, I’ve got a condescending ass for a guard, and Mandy wants to see me?
Sure, I type back, anger making me rebellious. When? Where?
Not in a bar bathroom, she writes back.
I gasp at her brutal honesty, the dark humor too soon, too coarse. My focus shifts and I’m back in that copper-filled ladies’ room, Tara’s blood draining out of her, my shoes soaking, my horror rolling out in real-time seconds as I watch someone I once cared for dying before me.
Three dots on the screen, and then one word.
Sorry.
That’s a first. Mandy, Tara, and Jenna never apologized to Lindsay. Never said a word to me after the attack nearly five years ago. Never acknowledged my existence after Lindsay went away.
Never.
And now Mandy’s apologizing for a distasteful joke? How about apologizing for ruining Lindsay’s life–and now mine–with her lies all those years back?
For what? I type back. Poking her is stupid.
I don’t care.
Can we talk? In person? she writes. Please?
For Mandy to cough up a please means whatever is going on is bad. Really, really bad.
Only in public, I say back.
Outdoors? she replies. At the big park by the beach?
Our town is small enough to have only one major park near a beach. I know exactly where she’s talking about. It’s perfect, all open space, no corners or closed doors.
Yes, I answer.
In an hour? she asks.
I look at the clock. I slept in later than I expected. It’s just past ten. No wonder Silas isn’t–
Oh. That’s right.
He never came home last night.
Jane? the text says.
Noon, I say.
And then I turn off my cell and go take a shower.
It’s a quick one, my skin still smarting from the tiny scabs that are starting the healing process. A fast, hot shower helps, and once I’m dressed and go to make some coffee, I find myself pleas
antly surprised by a guard shift change.
Silas is sitting in a folding chair at my dining table, admiring my unicorn.
“Where have you been?” I ask, coldly contained as I make a full pot of coffee. I might be angry at him, but I would never deprive the man of caffeine.
“Working.”
“All night?”
“Since when did you start playing twenty questions?”
“Since you didn’t come home.”
“Home? Is this my home?”
“No.” I’m flustered and spill coffee grounds all over the floor. “It’s mine. And I–” My breath catches in my throat as if it’s snagged on a loose nail, a jutting splinter, a sharp branch on a crooked tree. The path to Silas is riddled with obstacles. One of the biggest is that I don’t know where I stand.
Client?
Lover?
Friend with benefits?
“You what?” His voice drops to a hush as he steps forward, the shadow he casts like a dark warning, a twin self with sinister motives. Willing myself to stay put, I wait until he closes the gap between us, hands at his side, eyes tired but watching me with a growing hunger.
“I don’t know what this is,” I admit, too tired to try to play games.
“This?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
He’s taller than me, chin tipped down, and as his breathing picks up I can feel the barest edge of his hot breath as it reaches me, so diluted, it has no meaning. Nothing he says, in his words or with his body, tells me what I want to know.
Need to know.
Can’t bear not to know.
“Yes, us,” I reply, chin jutting up. “What are we?”
“Human.”
“Silas.”
His head tilts, just enough to show me how much emotion he’s masking under the calm exterior. “What do you want us to be?”
“Whatever it is, I want clarity.”
“How do you define clarity?”
“It sure doesn’t involve conversations like this.”
“You’re defining it by what it isn’t, Jane. But I’m asking you to tell me what it is.”
My chest is ready to explode. The crosswinds inside me are too swift, too strong, too hard to fight. “Are we together?” I reach up and finger the necklace he left for me. Not missing a beat, his eyes catch the movement, widening.
One finger touches my cheekbone, sliding down the plane of bone, looping the necklace chain. “As a couple?” His voice makes me shiver.
