by Lux, Vivian
I had slain a dragon for her.
I felt like a fucking conquering hero.
But it still didn't feel right.
The chill night air had settled into the silent car, stiffening my legs. I tried to shift them quietly, get the blood moving again.
I wasn't quiet enough. Scarlett's eyelids fluttered, and she stretched her arms out in front of her.
Then she turned and looked at me.
"You're still here." She smiled. Then she looked out the window and her face fell a little. "We're still here."
"I didn't want to wake you."
She blinked three times, her lashes resting heavily on her cheeks. "I had odd dreams," she said blearily.
"Want to tell me?"
"You were there."
I smiled, throwing the car into drive. "That made it a good dream, of course." I grinned.
"Of course," she echoed, smiling. "We were kids again, here, on this block. But...it was now. You were on tour, and I was writing, and we were making plans to meet up after...oh geez, I forgot what it was already, some kind of function." She grinned at me and licked her lips a little. "You were wearing a tux. I remember that part very clearly."
I pulled a disgusted face, and she laughed.
"But it was good, because," she huffed out a sigh, "because, well, we were making plans."
I swallowed as we pulled up to a red light and turned to look at her. She was twining her long fingers around each other. "What kind of plans?"
"Ones...ones for the future. Whatever comes next."
I was nodding already. "Plans. We can make plans, Scarlett. Let's make some, right now."
"Go somewhere? Together?"
"Just the two of us."
She sat back and pulled a face. "It'd be nice to just be...real with you. Without all this tour weirdness and homecoming sadness and all the shit we have done to each other. It'd be nice just to be your girlfriend and have you be my boyfriend. I wish… I just wish I was someone else. Someone without all this…shit in my past." She looked up at me, pleading soundlessly for me to understand. "Then…then we might have a chance, both of us, to be happy together. If we were able to just be normal teenagers in love back then."
"I thought about that," I answered after a moment. "Believe me, I have. And some days I even wished it too. But then I think," I reached over and smoothed the hair away from her face, "and I think, if you had a different past, would you be the same girl? Because I don't want that hypothetical Scarlett. I want the real one. The one I'm sitting next to right now."
I grimaced. There was still an ugliness there, sitting between us, unsaid. A grimy window I still couldn't see through no matter how many times I tried to wipe it clean. I knew what it was... "Scar," I said, turning the wheel and taking us on a loop past the hotel. She widened her eyes, wondering why I was taking us eastbound on the 90, but said nothing.
Which was good because I had some shit I needed to lay out.
"I'm going to tell you something I don't really like about myself right now." I was grateful to concentrate on the road. It was almost impossible to look her as I spoke. "But it's true, and I'm tired of hiding it."
I heard her take a breath, but spoke over her. I needed to say this. "When I met you, Scarlett, I fell in love with you immediately. But loving you and being with you are two different things, and after a while, I realized I loved the only part of you I could see."
She made a confused noise as I clarified. "You were a project for me. Something I could fix, make whole again after wishing for a love like that my whole life." I looked over at her and saw her eyelashes flutter in the morning sunlight, and I knew she knew what I meant.
She was thinking of my absent mother and my overworked father.
I was too.
"So, I loved the Scarlett that was in my head, the one that if I loved her in just the right way, I'd be the one to save her from herself. I'd be a hero." I chuckled ruefully. "And how fucking selfish is that? I didn't want you to grow and thrive on your own because I wanted to be the reason for it."
I swallowed back the hard, ugly knot that threatened to choke the truth away and pressed on. "I have to wonder what I would have done if we stayed together back then. Would I have kept you caged up in my heart, thinking you were this fragile fluttering bird?" I looked over at her, stock still and ramrod straight, her elegant neck held high like a queen's, and felt like such an idiot for ever thinking she was fragile. "You're not. You are anything but, honestly. And now that you're flying free, I find that I still love you, but it's not the same."
She looked at me, stricken, misunderstanding. I held up my hand. "It's not the same, and for that I am so fucking glad," I choked out. "This isn't a solution. There's nothing to fix here." I slid my hand over and twined my fingers with hers and brought them up to my lips, kissing them hard for a second. "There's only us."
She took a deep breath. "Keir, I need to tell you..."
"No," I shook my head. "You don't. That's what I'm saying. You don't need to tell me anything. Leaving me like that? You did me...did us, a favor. You made it so I could be here, in this moment, loving you for who you are now, not for what I could do to save you."
I looked over at her one more time, her head held high, her smile curving quietly across her face, and love walloped me over the head like a fucking hammer. "Let's go be a couple. Tomorrow. Today. Grab your shit and I'll buy some tickets. The tour is over, baby, but we're just getting started."
Chapter 36
Scarlett
He kissed me at the curb. I looked up at him, delirious with love and lack of sleep, and wondered if this was all a dream.
"Not a dream," he whispered, brushing my hair back and kissing me again.
"I didn't even know I said that out loud," I murmured. "I feel like I'm floating."
He chuckled and patted me on the bottom. "Go get your suitcase, Scar," he said.
"I need to sleep," I yawned.
"You can sleep on the plane."
"What plane?" I teased him. "You literally just came up with this idea twenty minutes ago."
He whipped out his cell. "Just give me five minutes, baby, and I'll have a world tour booked for us."
I yawned hugely. "I don't want a world tour. I just want to lie on a beach somewhere."
His eyes widened. "In a tiny bikini? Okay, yeah, world tour canceled. One beach vacation, coming up."
"Just like that?" He already had his phone against his ear. "You're just going to pull this out of your ass?"
He waved his hand impatiently. "Don't I always fix things?" He paused. "Yeah, Keith, hey!" Then he covered his phone with his hand. "Go get your shit, and by the time you come back down again, I'll have it all settled." He kissed my forehead. "I'll be right here when you get back." Then he took his hand away. "Yeah, I know it's early, Keith. That's why I pay you the big bucks..." He chuckled, then walked away into the lobby bar.
I smiled. He was fixing it. Of course he was. I yawned again, dreams of quiet beaches and shirtless Keir already filling my head, and turned to walk unsteadily to the elevators. The colors and textures swirled together, everything tinged with the unreality of a dream. The people that passed me seemed untethered to the ground, floating by like balloons.
The feeling of floating persisted all the way up to my room, the hallway lengthening and shortening with each step like a great beast breathing in and out. Everything was strange.
Which was why it didn't bother me that the door to my room was open until the second after it closed behind me and I stepped all the way in.
And saw he was waiting.
"How?" I bleated.
Then I pressed my lips tightly together.
Kevin turned slowly, ever so slowly, almost casually. Like I had interrupted him from his normal daily routine.
He acted like he fucking belonged here.
He turned around and faced me. He was so familiar with that face I had once considered beautiful. Now I wondered how I could ever have
missed the evil that lurked behind his eyes. Cold. Reptilian. The eyes of a monster.
Those monstrous eyes stared down at me without a care in the world.
"How what, Scarlett?" he said, blithe and casual. Just an innocent question from the man who left bruises on my body. With his voice so casual, I almost mistrusted myself.
The second I saw him, old Scarlett rose to the surface, meek and mild and accepting. Why are you overreacting, Scarlett? He's just asking a question. It's nothing.
I cleared my throat. "Why are you here?" I felt like I was frozen, a statue.
He stood up and slid closer to me. I could smell him now, the same aftershave he loved to slather himself in. I had convinced myself it smelled sexy at one point, ignoring how it made me sneeze.
My eyes watered. I blinked once, two times.
"I was worried about you," he said, his voice soothing. "Your new apartment—it's not safe. I knew you were being silly with that place, but I was ready to let you have your tantrum." He slid over to the bedside table and turned the alarm radio on. The blaring, static noise made me cringe. "But when you ran off without telling me where you were going?" he shouted over the noise. "Then I knew I had to do something." He stalked over to the open window and shut it.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, but I could not have said why.
Keep him talking, a voice in my head piped up. Think. You need to think. Keep him happy, let him talk about himself while you think. That'll make him happy. You need to keep him happy.
"What do you have to do?"
He looked at me, and for a flash I saw hatred in his eyes, like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, but he quickly masked it with a sloping smile. "Bring you home again. Where you belong. With me."
"Kevin... I—I broke up with you," I whispered.
"What was that?" he asked, calling over the din of the radio.
I gritted my teeth. "I broke up with you!" I shouted.
He huffed a little. "Yeah, and I'm not going to lie, that hurt my feelings, Scar-Scar." He slid around the bed and knelt down, rummaging underneath the bed. "You really shouldn't have done that." My heart started pounding. "It was really stupid and selfish of you." He smiled blandly over the top of the bed. "When I talked with your mother, she agreed with me. Told her you were in Buffalo, and she cried. Did you know that? I can handle your selfishness, I'm used to it. But to make your own mother cry like that?"
The alarm radio blared on, deafening. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straighter and goosebumps marched down my arms. Fear, a nameless terror, was taking hold of me. I could hear pounding on the walls, someone shouting for us to turn it off, but I couldn't hear what they were saying over the noise. Who could hear anything over a din like this? I couldn't hear anything.
The closed window. The blaring radio.
I can't hear anything but the radio.
No one could.
No one will hear you.
Kevin stood up, the knife glinting in his hand.
My mind started racing.
Keir is waiting for me. I'm supposed to be meeting him so we can run away together.
Again.
I'm not going to be there.
Again.
Reality filled my chest like ice water, but my mind still refused to grasp what was happening. Kevin was going to kill me, and all I could think was, I have to go meet Keir. He's waiting. I can't do this to him again.
I reached behind me and closed my fingers around the door handle...
But I was too slow. Kevin swung out, a vicious snarl curled across his face, and the blade sang through the air. I ducked under his arm, throwing myself forward as I wrenched the door open and landed on my knees with a scream. "Help!" I shouted over the noise of the radio. "Help!"
Kevin looked down at me, startled. I knew why. I’d never called for help before. He didn't expect this. He expected me to quietly submit while he carved my heart from my chest.
Keir is waiting for me.
"Fuck you!" I screamed instead, lashing out a vicious kick to his shin.
Kevin roared. "You stupid! Fucking! Bitch!" he bellowed, stabbing wildly with each word. I threw my arms up to protect my neck, shielding my face. The blade lashed out, and I felt the sting. Blood streamed from the gash in my forearm...but I did not scream. It wouldn't have mattered, no one would hear me. But I didn't scream.
And I did not cry.
If he wanted me to cry, he was going to have to try harder than that.
Kevin had no idea how to fight. And even after four years together, he never knew I had it in me. He never thought to consider that I grew up the youngest of three brothers. I never showed him the fight that lived inside of me because I never thought I was worth fighting for until now.
Keir is waiting for me.
"Help!" I screamed again. I swung upward, hoping to connect with his groin, but he jumped backwards, his big body slamming into the door, closing it tight.
The sound of it slamming shut sent chills up my spine. He now stood between me and my only path to escape. I looked around wildly, but there would be no time to make for the shut windows, and even then I was twelve floors up. The radio drowned out my calls for help. I could try calling 911, but I'd be dead before they even started driving.
Kevin knew this too. Some of the tension drained away from his face, and he relaxed. The casual arrogance took hold again.
The radio blared on and on, a garbled burst of static nonsense that sounded just like the noise in my head.
Kevin smiled a gross parody of a loving smile. "That was a good show, Scar-Scar." He glanced from his bloody knife to my bleeding arm. "I'm actually really proud of you."
He stepped away from the door, one step closer to me. I turned to run for my life.
Chapter 37
Keir
After the fact, I always wondered what would have happened if I had insisted on going upstairs with her. After all, Scarlett didn't have a good track record of meeting me when she said she would. Surely I could have called Keith while I waited in her room. Tell him who to call, whose palms to grease so we could be on the charter jet within the hour while still keeping her in sight.
I could have taken the fucking five minutes to walk her to her room.
But I was so damn eager to get everything fixed right then and there that I couldn't even take the time to go up with her.
I was complacent, comfortable...and also damn eager to get on with it. Our new life together. I had her again, after all. Everything I had known about our history had started over again, a new page in the book of Scarlett and Keir. I was acting like fucking Rane, forgetting that the past had consequences. I was so ready to just move on with my favorite girl at my side that I just nodded and did what I always did.
I told her I would meet her.
I sent her upstairs and didn't think anything of it. Instead, I went to the lobby bar and finished my call with Keith. He was pissed about it, I could tell, and I guess I didn't blame him. He sounded hung over from last night's afterparty, but I knew he'd get the job done.
I hung up and turned to greet the bartender. He looked at me, then looked again, recognition fighting with disbelief.
"Bourbon. Whatever you've got. It's a celebration," I told him.
Then I turned back to stare at the elevators.
The lobby bar had at least three screens that I could see from where I sat low in my booth, and one of them was showing preseason football on satellite. I sipped my drink and watched the Bills quarterback get interviewed. I idly wondered how much longer Scarlett was going to take. She'd laugh at me, drinking and watching the Bills. You can take the boy out of Buffalo...
That's when I decided to go get her.
It was just a passing thought that I'd like her company. I'd like to see her laugh.
Only ten minutes had gone by, but maybe on some subconscious level I was trying to make up for letting five years pass. I slid from the booth, feeling a little relaxed, a little
wobbly from lack of sleep. I blinked sleepily and stretched, scratching like a bachelor, and then I headed to the elevators.
Once I started moving, Rick and Caleb slid into view and fell in step behind me. I hadn't even noticed they were there. "You guys should be ninjas," I complained as they followed me into the elevator.
"Nah, boss. You're the ninja," Caleb grinned. "Slipping away like that. Don't pull that shit again until after our paychecks for the tour clear, okay?"
"Sorry, man, I had shit to do. And how many times do I gotta tell you not to call me that?" I grumbled. A headache was starting to collect at the base of my skull.
"We're security, boss," Caleb grinned, emphasizing the hated word. "We’re not too bright."
"Probably gonna have to tell us at least ten more times," Rick echoed.
I rolled my eyes as the door slid closed. The car moved smoothly upward.
To this day, I don't know what it was that I heard. Maybe I didn't hear anything. Maybe I just knew...somehow.
The chills that marched up my spine sent actual goosebumps over my skin, and the hair at the base of my neck stood up. Panic flooded my mouth with the bright, warm taste of copper.
"You guys packing?" I choked, nearly gagging on the taste of pennies. My stomach roiled. I had no idea why I was asking that.
"Of course," Rick said, confused. Caleb nodded and lifted the hem of his T-shirt to show his holster and 6mm.
The feeling of terror mixed with adrenaline surged higher the higher we climbed. "Get them out," I ordered.
They obeyed without question, slowly moving their hands to their pieces.
The doors slid open on the twelfth floor. There was a loud burst of static, a radio stuck between stations. Rick looked at Caleb right as the piercing scream hit our ears. "Help!"
"Fuck me, that's Scarlett!" I shouted, and broke out into a dead run down the hallway.
"Which room, which room?" Rick shouted behind me. The noise of static grew louder, but not as loud as the roar in my ears.
