by Malcom, Anne
“You’re not allowed to do that again,” I whispered, holding her hand.
I could do that now, since she was awake, breathing on her own, talking.
She grinned. “I don’t plan on it, babe. Kind of sucked.”
She was smiling, but new and horrifying shadows lay behind that smile. Ones that weren’t there before. I wanted to kill that fucking sicko Eddie. For putting her through this in the name of love.
Love was killing her actor ex, stalking her, attacking her bodyguard, kidnapping her and then shooting her in front of Killian.
Love had a lot to fucking answer for.
“Promise me you won’t get shot again,” I demanded.
“She’s not getting fucking shot again,” Killian growled from his space at her side. Now that she was awake, he left for short periods of time to do the things he’d considered optional while she was in her coma. Eating. Bathing.
He slept in here, with her, no matter what the doctors said. But this was more of a hotel room than a hospital room, with plush sofas and entertainment units.
Fame and money could buy you a nice hospital room. It could not buy survival.
Lexie squeezed my hand. “I won’t get shot again,” she promised.
I glanced to Killian then back to her.
And prayed that was a promise that she could keep.
Because I didn’t think either of us would survive it.
* * *
“You’re leaving?”
I jerked at Wyatt’s soft voice breaking through my hard thoughts as I zipped up my overnight bag that had been residing in the guest room while I’d been sleeping in Wyatt’s room.
I slung it on my shoulder, it somehow felt heavy though it only contained a handful of clothes and toiletries.
“Yeah,” I said, turning. “Lexie’s gonna be okay. And that means that my world goes on. I’ve got an apartment to get back to. A job.”
Wyatt’s face was unreadable as he watched me walk toward him, brows furrowed, arms crossed. He looked too fucking hot for his own good, hair mussed, all in black, tattoos, all...Wyatt.
I’d always thought he was hot. I had eyes, for goodness sake. But there was something different about looking at him now after these three days. Something that we’d awoken sleeping with each other. Something I had been trying to ignore for years.
He didn’t move from the doorway when I approached.
“Are you gonna let me past?” I asked.
“Are you gonna talk to me?” he replied.
I folded my own arms. “I am talking to you. More specifically asking you to move so I can get home and water my plants.”
“You don’t have plants.”
Fuck. I hated that he knew this kind of shit. I always lied to men when they tried to get me to do things I didn’t want to do. Stay the night. Swallow. That kind of thing.
But Wyatt wasn’t exactly trying to get me to do something I didn’t want to do by keeping me in this room, in this house, in front of him.
I wanted to be here.
That was the problem.
“Well, I have to get home and water myself.”
“We have water here, flown in from New Zealand, Sam won’t drink anything else. It’s the one and only pure thing he imbibes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well I like my dirty L.A. tap water,” I snapped.
The corner of his mouth turned up. “We’ve got that too.”
“No, you rich and famous people have different water than us commoners,” I said.
Something changed in his soft, teasing gaze. Something hardened. Turned serious. “You’re not common, Em.”
It hit me, his soft tone. Hit me right in the place that had begun storing the nights in his arms, the days holding his hands. Now that Lexie was alive and things started mattering again, Wyatt mattered. I wondered if he’d always mattered and it took a gunshot to see it.
“Wyatt,” I said, my voice not soft or anywhere near a whisper. “You need to let me past.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Because making my life difficult is now one of your hobbies again?” I asked, forcing myself to keep my tone sharp.
“Because if I let you past, you’re going to go back to your life, put up those walls and pretend this didn’t happen and I don’t want you to do that,” he said instead of teasing me like was our norm.
I froze. Then I desperately put up those walls he’d just described. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I replied. “I’m going to forget these three days ever happened, that I had to spend seventy-two hours thinking about Lexie dying.”
He flinched. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything.”
It was the truth.
In this moment I knew fucking nothing.
His expression darkened. “You know something changed between us.”
“No, I know that we both were dealing with one of the most fucked-up things in this world so we decided to look for something else to fuck up. And that’s what a conversation about us is...a fuck up,” I lied.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he hissed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do know that I’m not falling in love with you,” I said. “Love turns people into fools.”
“Babe, we’re all somebody’s fool.”
I chewed my lip, when did he get so fucking deep? When did he get so perceptive? When did I start feeling this for him?
“What’s between us has been there since the start,” he said, answering my internal question. “You’re not gonna treat me like some stranger you occasionally talk to on the phone again.” His voice was decisive like it had been when he held me in his arms on a hospital floor. But this wasn’t a moment when I thought about Wyatt holding me on hospital floors, or in his bed.
This was a moment to forget that.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said. “We are best at being strangers in that sense. Life turns strangers into lovers. People who give each other everything, even dominion over each other’s state of mind. State of sanity. But life only gives for a while. Then it takes back the love, turns to people into strangers again. In the most brutal of ways, this love drains out like blood from a wound. Until it’s a separate entity from the two people. A withered, dried up and ugly corpse. If we do this” —I motioned between us— “we’re going to be strangers again one day. We’re going to have to go through the process of decomposition, that painful and fucking horrific process. So you’ll excuse me if I want us to stay strangers—in that sense of the word. For both of our sakes.”
I took a strangled breath at the end of my tirade. I didn’t have the intention to throw all of that out there, but Wyatt turned my intentions—good and bad—to shit.
“Shit, babe,” he said, after blinking for a couple of moments. He rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “That’s cynical as shit.”
I raised my brow. “Cynics get a bad rap because they usually deliver the truth. People don’t like the truth. It never measures up to the lies they’ve told themselves about the world,” I replied. “And that’s the truth in regard to both of us, and anything you say to fight it is bullshit and you know it.”
He set his mouth into a hard line, my words and sharp tone seeming to bounce right off him. Which was bad. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out.
His eyes raked over me. “I don’t know this is bullshit,” he clipped. “I know you never fought for my attention, never seemed like I affected you. In a sea of women that clawed each other’s hair out for a me that isn’t even me, it stood out.” He stepped forward. “You stood out.” His hand brushed my hair from my face. “You stand out in a crowd of groupies, clones, and fakes.” He sighed. “But I came into this as a fucked-up kid who thought he was entitled to shit. And the fact you didn’t fight for my attention somehow got you lost in the crowd that didn’t mean shit to me.”
I shivered at the gentle br
ushing of the backs of his fingers against my cheek. The minty warmth of his breath. The fucking inferno of his body. I let myself fall into the moment. Fall into another life for a second.
Then I stepped back.
“Wyatt, if I have to fight for your attention...fuck your attention,” I hissed. “I don’t want a man who wants me just because I don’t want him like his fucking groupies do. I want a man that wants me. And it’s clear you just want a challenge. Go and learn Russian. Buy a book of Sudoku. Figure out what really happened to Amelia Earhart. I don’t care. Just leave me the fuck alone.”
And I took that moment to push past him and walk away.
He didn’t follow me.
We didn’t work that way.
Chapter Four
One Year Later
I was walking around with a little bottle of pills in my purse, it felt like I was heaving bricks. I don’t know why they weighed so much, they were fucking tiny, maybe because the key to curing loneliness was rattling around inside the plastic bottle. If not the cure, then a viable, government approved method of numbing the pain.
That’s what we were all doing, anyway. Trying to figure out a way to numb the pain. I used to pride myself on the fact that I weathered the pain. That I handled it without binge eating, alcoholism, drug addiction or any other kind of life ruining vice.
But pride cometh before a fall and all that.
Not that I had a fall, per se.
I didn’t shave my head and attack a car with an umbrella or anything.
There was just a moment, in the dark and suffocating silence that only three in the morning can offer when I thought I might just fall off the face of the earth. When I prayed that I’d tumble off the bed into a big pool of nothing because I was so fucking exhausted of everything.
The feeling of helplessness, of all-encompassing doom, was something I’d been hiding from, pretending wasn’t there. But alone in my bedroom in the middle of the night, I couldn’t hide from my own sorrow anymore.
And it terrified me.
Fucking terrified me, the kind of desperation I had for it all to be...over.
I wasn’t suicidal or anything like that.
I wanted to live.
I had no fucking clue how.
Hence me heading to the doctor, swallowing my pride—it scraped every part of my throat bloody as I did so—and asking for the pills that were now in my purse.
I expected her to ask me questions, to suggest a therapist, to discuss alternate ways of managing this feeling. But no. She barely blinked and wrote me the script, the appointment slotting neatly into the allotted fifteen minutes. I wondered how many people were walking around with a cure to the loneliness disease and were creating some other kind of epidemic.
I had expected to feel lighter knowing that I didn’t have to carry around that feeling. But the pills seemed heavier than my problems.
Because the pills were evidence of the fact I couldn’t handle my problems on my own.
I’d been walking to my car, concentrating on that weight, when my phone buzzed in my purse. I picked it up on instinct, I was a fucking cliché of my time, walking around with my phone attached to my hand and mood stabilizers in my purse, pretending I wasn’t pining over a rock star.
It was an email about a piece I’d been looking for. I should’ve smiled at this email, considering it meant a big commission that might even be enough to pay off almost all of my mortgage. It was another step to the life that I’d told myself would make me happy, that would break the chains of my past. But it seemed with every step away from the life I’d grown up in, those chains got tighter.
I fired an email back, booked tickets to Italy and then scrolled through Instagram, playing further into the cliché. I was addicted to looking at people trying to make their lives look perfect. I stopped in my tracks with the image assaulting me. Though I didn’t need to, I looked at the whole sequence of photos.
It was Wyatt. I followed trashy news accounts because I was a masochist. I pushed him away. It was my choice. But now I stalked his socials like some kind of heartbroken girl he’d cast aside, looking for crumbs of a life he was making without me. And it was then I realized that I would take crumbs from Wyatt and call it a feast while a whole fucking cake from anyone who wasn’t him was little more than a famine.
It seemed I liked pain since I clicked on the bio for the full story on how the infamous Lothario had been ‘taken off the market’ by a model and lifestyle blogger.
I was neck deep in her Instagram in seconds.
She was beautiful. Blonde. Clear skin. Tanned. There were countless photos of her on beaches, holding designer purses, sitting in bars, hocking skinny tea. And she was Wyatt’s new girlfriend if various news sources could be believed.
Not that I had any right to be pissed about that.
Since I’d walked away from him a year ago, I’d made sure our boundaries were firmly back in place. I answered his calls, spoke to him, gave him shit, made sure that I didn’t betray an ounce of my true feelings.
He didn’t mention it, the confrontation we’d had. He didn’t try to pursue me anymore. It was like it never happened.
Just like I wanted.
So why did this news story fucking shred my insides?
I stopped to buy a bottle of water and swallow a pill.
* * *
Lexie: Are you back in the country yet? I was going to send out a search party. And by me, I mean Wyatt. You were meant to be in Italy for three days. Not three weeks. You missed Sam’s birthday. He says you owe him a Ferrari.
I laughed out loud at the Ferrari comment. The person next to me in the ice cream aisle gave me a judgmental look. Apparently outward happiness in L.A. was so over.
“Dude, you’re buying ice cream at two in the morning just the same as me,” I said, glancing down at his basket. “Just because you’re wearing three hundred-dollar sneakers it doesn’t make you superior to me. We’re both pathetic. Deal with it.”
He scowled at me and walked off without a word.
I put another tub of ice cream in my basket, nestling it between the bottles of wine that were already in there.
Yes, I was that fucking cliché.
Well, I guessed not super cliché, since I was only here at two in the morning because I’d snuck out of some guy’s bed that I didn’t remember the name of, after promising him I’d stay the night and have brunch with him.
I didn’t stay the night on normal circumstances, but the guy used the word ‘brunch.’ It didn’t matter how hot he was or how talented he was with his tongue, that shit was so not okay.
I balanced my basket so I could type into my phone.
Me: Officially back in the US of A. I found a good dealer, and some new clients. Plus pasta and Italian men.
I frowned, reading over the Wyatt part of the message that I hadn’t let sink in.
Me: I think Wyatt’s searches are better served looking for his dignity. I’m sure he’s left it all over the place on your tour.
I didn’t know if he was still with the Instagram model. I made myself unfollow all those stupid accounts that served only to torture me. I didn’t answer his calls and ignored his texts. So very petty of me.
As time passed, his texts had gotten more irate and worried.
More annoying.
And harder to ignore.
We all wanted the guy to chase us, after all, even when we said we didn’t. Especially when we said we didn’t. But I was trying to be healthy, and my version of healthy was taking my mind-numbing pills, eating pasta in Italy, fucking random Italian men and forgetting about one American man.
Forgetting about one of the most famous men in the world was easier said than done.
Me: I’m fine. Some of us have to work for a living and can’t field calls from a clingy rock star. Stop texting me and go smash your base. Or sleep with a groupie. I’m BUSY.
He didn’t reply to that. Big surprise.
I told myself I was glad. I thre
w myself into work. Into the pasta, men.
But I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that I didn’t check my phone far too often, stalk his social media constantly and just did all the things that were the Hallmark of the pathetic girl.
Though I wasn’t pathetic. I was traveling the world, living my dream, searching for some of the most beautiful pieces of art in the world. And getting paid an obscene amount of money to do so.
I would’ve done it for nothing.
Because art was my one constant in life. Ever since I’d taken myself on a walk and ended up at the Kreeger Museum. My stomach was empty, and my arms were cold since it was winter and Mom and Dad hadn’t bought me a jacket. I’d gone in there initially for the warmth and to try and see if they had food I could steal. I got the warmth. But not the food. At least not the kind that would fill my belly.
My empty stomach was quickly forgotten as my eyes feasted on what was scattered on the walls.
I learned it then.
What art was.
Art was an invitation to walk into a fantasy.
Dive into another world, that was made from someone else’s dreams, nightmares, angels, demons. It was past, future, and present all wrapped into one.
It was something that I got lost in.
It made me homesick for places I hadn’t been to, lives I wouldn’t live and spread a kind of magic through my bones.
I carried that magic home with me, let it distract me from the numbness in my arms, the hunger pains that clenched through my empty stomach. And every spare moment I got, I went back to that gallery, to the warmth to the worlds that awaited me. I learned about pain from art, and I loved it. I was hungry for other people’s pain, to compare it with my own, to feel comforted in the fact that people felt these ugly things but created a kind of beauty from it.
And so I carried that around with me in Italy. It was known for some of the best cuisine in the world. But it was the art, the exquisite beauty of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Museo e Galleria Borghese in Rome, that really fed me.
