“I’m sorry,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice low and even. I didn’t even know what exactly I was apologising for—the kiss or . . . everything else.
Alyssa sighed and closed her eyes. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have slapped you.” She paused. “God knows you deserved it”—she sighed—“but I still shouldn’t have done it.”
The thing I couldn’t explain to her was that my lips burned more than my cheek. They wanted to taste her once more, to claim her again. Her mouth became a beacon for me, drawing the attention of my gaze.
“When?” I asked after a minute of silence, forcing my eyes to meet hers rather than stare at her lips.
“When what?” she asked. Her voice was quiet and cold. Tired.
“When are you leaving?”
“If I decide to go, it’ll be after graduation, next February.”
“That’s the reason for this trip, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I’ve got to decide whether the London branch is right for me. That’s why I was in Sydney; I’ve spent the last week in that office.”
“Then how long are you in London for?”
“About the same, I guess. I’m anxious to get home as soon as possible though, especially if I’m going to be moving away for good. There are things I need to get sorted out.”
“Like?”
“Like, none of your goddamn business,” she snapped.
“Sorry.” She’d practically just cast me aside and proved that she had a life that I wasn’t a part of, and it made me want to know more. Moving to London was a far bigger dream than she’d ever had before. Despite how desperate I was for more information, I didn’t want to press her and piss her off.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s hard to explain, but I just don’t think I’m ready to let you into my private life again. Not when you’ll waltz off into whatever party will have you, to throw down with whatever random chick you can find, as soon as this plane lands.”
“I don’t have to,” I said.
She paused, even her breath stopped for a time. “You don’t have to what?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“I don’t have to waltz off to any party. Or throw down with any random chick. All I’ve got going on over there is a key to an apartment. That’s it. I’m free to do anything I like.”
“And?”
I didn’t know how to answer her “And?” but I knew I didn’t want this leg to end like the last one. I didn’t want whatever it was we had developing between us to end so soon. I wanted to extend our time together for as long as I possibly could. “And, well, maybe we can go out to dinner while we’re both in London?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head slightly. “You want me to go on a fucking date with you? After everything you’ve done?”
“No,” I said but only to stop her from shutting me down. It was exactly what I was asking. “Not a date. Just two old friends catching up.” Maybe from there, I could figure out some way to get her out of my head.
“I don’t think so, Dec. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get involved with you again. I—I don’t know if I can.” Her voice was brittle, like the thin ice I was no doubt treading on by even asking for more time with her.
“I understand.” Her words shattered me. I didn’t understand any of my emotions anymore, but I knew pain when it sliced through my heart. I fixed my eyes on the seat in front of me—desperate not to let her see how deep her words had cut. My lip may have quivered as tears pricked my eyes.
“Fine . . . a drink,” Alyssa said and I turned my head toward her. She had her eyes closed and looked pained.
“What?”
“I’ll go out with you for a drink, one drink, once we get off the plane. But that’s all. Then I need to be on my way so I can live the life that you left me to.”
“That would be nice,” I said. One drink was at least a start.
We fell back into silence again. After a few minutes Alyssa put her headphones on and concentrated hard on whatever was happening on the TV in front of her. I felt myself drifting off to sleep again. It had been so long since I’d had good, natural, uninterrupted sleep, but something about the airplane made it almost easy. Perhaps I needed to fly more often.
CHAPTER NINE: PANICKED
BY THE TIME I woke again, we were only about five hours out of London. I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or disappointed by that fact. The one thing that struck me was how amazingly comfortable I was. More than I’d ever been on an airplane. More than I had been in a very long time in general if I was being honest.
It took me another second to realise that my arm was wrapped around a sleeping Alyssa, and my fingers rested on her hip. Her head rested on my chest, and her shoulder was tucked into my underarm. In fact, her whole body was turned toward me and her arm draped across my stomach. The position left her fingers brushing across my thigh, and dangerously close to my now raging hard-on. My head turned toward her, leaning against her hair, and every breath filled me with the comfort of her presence.
It was clear just how dangerous the position was. How the fuck did we end up like this?
I carefully tried to extract myself without waking her but failed miserably. At the worst possible moment, when my hand hovered just near her boobs, her eyes fluttered open. She took a second to take in our position, and my hand at groping level, and sat bolt upright. Her hand connected with my face for the second time in less than six hours.
“What the fuck, Dec?” she snapped.
“Fucking hell, Lys,” I hissed back at almost exactly the same time.
“How the hell do you expect me to react when I wake up with your paws all over me?”
“You were all over me!” I protested.
“Yeah right,” she said. “As if I would come near you with a ten-foot pole.” A small smirk crossed her lips.
“I wouldn’t want you near me with a ten-foot pole,” I joked. “That would fucking hurt.”
She chuckled. “You know what I mean. There is nothing that I find attractive about you.”
“Come on, just admit it . . . you want this.” I ran my hands over my body.
She blushed, even as she shook her head.
Holy fuck! ”You do, don’t you?” I asked incredulously. Then I realised I was seriously close to another slapping, and I definitely didn’t want that. If her hands touched me, I wanted it to be for altogether more pleasurable reasons.
She managed to rein her blush in a little and controlled her slap-happy hand for the moment. “Been there, done that. Not interested in an encore. Especially not with all the other guests you’ve had lately.”
I raised my eyebrow at her words, which contradicted the look in her eye as her gaze roamed my body as if seeing me for the first time. “I seem to remember you saying to me once that you planned on doing it a lot.”
Part of me wondered whether I secretly wanted to be slapped by Alyssa again. I was certainly going the right way about it.
“Who says I haven’t?” she said with an almost innocent look on her face.
Fuck, she’s a sex goddess.
My mouth went dry as I pictured her in various positions, but then I recalled that other fucker and had to stop the image when he invaded the visions. Seeing that would do nothing more than make me hurl. An ache built in my chest and my hands quaked. I wanted to demand names, addresses and phone numbers of every man she’d been with after me so I could hunt them down and kill them.
“It may surprise you to learn that you’re not the only man on earth.”
It was hypocritical considering how many women I had been with—I couldn’t even begin to tally numbers—but the thought of anyone else being with Alyssa that way made my fucking blood boil.
“You mean that fucker who took you to Queensland Raceway?” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I thought about them.
“What?” she asked. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. “How do you even know about that?”
“I saw you.”
Her brows pinched together and she wiggled on her seat. “You saw me? When?”
“After qualifying. Before the first race. I saw both of you, getting food.” I couldn’t work the accusing edge out of my voice; not that I tried too hard. “And you looked pretty fucking comfortable in his arms.”
She chuckled. “Trust me, there’s nothing going on between Flynn and I.”
Flynn. That’s the fucker’s name, is it? I recalled her dreamy words on the earlier flight. She was fucking dreaming about him with me sitting right next to her! Motherfucker!
I thought of his lips touching hers and my fingers curled into a fist. “Sure, it looked like nothing.”
She burst out laughing. Her whole face lit up with a smile brighter than any she’d worn since I had the fortune—misfortune?—of sitting next to her. “Declan . . . he’s gay!”
“What?”
“He’s just a really good friend that I met through uni.”
I shook my head. Her statement didn’t make sense, not with what I’d seen. “But he kissed you.”
She raised one eyebrow. “If you think that was a kiss, I think you need to brush up on your bag of tricks. Here I was with the impression you were some sort of sex god or something.”
Maybe you should show me what you regard as a kiss. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words even though they danced the tarantella on my tongue. I’d already been slapped twice, and I didn’t really want to try for a third . . . Do I? “If he’s just a friend, how the fuck did he convince you to go to a race when I couldn’t the whole time we were dating?”
She bit her lip and it was clear she didn’t want to tell me something. She nestled back into her seat, facing the front of the plane once more. “Umm . . . he’s into all that car crap too. He helped me out a lot; taking him to a race was the least I could do.”
There was something more, I knew it. Even with the years that had gone since I’d last spent any time with her, I could read her expressions like a fucking book. I was about to ask her to clarify, but the cabin crew interrupted with a meal for each of us. I’d missed the last one because I was asleep, so I was famished. Even airline food was acceptable in my empty-stomached state.
By the time I’d finished talking to the flight attendant, Alyssa had slipped her headphones back on and the conversation was over again for a while. While I ate my meal, I thought about everything that had happened over the last day. How much information I had learned, but how much more she still seemed to be hiding. Then again, it wasn’t like she owed me anything at all.
Except her company for a drink like she promised.
When I’d finished, I glanced over at Alyssa just in case I could get her attention, but she’d started an in-flight movie. Instead of talking to her, I watched as she smiled and laughed at what was on the screen. She really was as beautiful as ever, maybe even more so now she’d grown into her curves. I thought about all the shit that had happened between the night in the hotel and the last time I saw her. The night we’d sat side-by-side at our picnic table as I’d said goodbye. I hadn’t allowed any room for negotiation and didn’t let her say anything that might convince me to stay. After I’d shattered her heart, she slapped me and stalked off into the night.
I hadn’t seen her again.
Until Queensland Raceway. Until the dude I thought must have been fucking her, but was apparently just a friend. Would the last five races have ended differently if I’d known that piece of information? I dismissed the thought as soon as it came into my mind. That would mean I felt more for her than I allowed myself to, and that couldn’t be right.
“What are you thinking about?” Alyssa’s voice was soft beside me. I didn’t even realise her movie had finished, or maybe she’d just grown bored with it.
I didn’t see any point in lying to her. She’d be able to see through me as clearly as I could her. “You.”
“Why?”
“I was just thinking about all the fucking mistakes that drove us apart.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I thought Josh attacked me because you asked him to. I never even realised he thought . . .” I couldn’t even say the words. How could he ever think I’d rape her? “I just thought it was your way of telling me you didn’t want me anymore.”
“But I told you after that that I did want you,” she said. The smiles and happiness she’d worn when she’d been watching the movie were completely wiped away. “Repeatedly. Even after you moved to Sydney, I tried to call you, but you never answered the phone yourself and no one seemed to pass on my messages.” Her voice sounded close to tears.
“They passed them on,” I whispered, leaning forward and putting my head in my hands. “I’d just shut down the part of myself that still cared about you. Maybe it was callous, but I couldn’t be there in Sydney and still be in love with you. It would have torn me in two.”
I closed my eyes as I felt her hand rubbing a small circle on my back. My tears were dangerously close again. I bit the inside of my cheek to try to hold them off.
Just as I was relaxing with her touch, the plane dropped and my stomach lurched.
Fuck. What was that?
The plane plummeted and jumped.
Fuck!
I reached for the armrests, clawing the material as I tried to grip harder. My teeth clenched together as the plane bounced again.
“Fuck!”
The beginnings of a panic attack crashed over me. My palms felt itchy and sweaty and I couldn’t breathe. The plane felt suddenly too claustrophobic and tight as it fell through the air again before leaping back up. I leant back in the chair, squeezing my eyes shut as I started to hyperventilate. I tried to open up my lungs and force oxygen in, I tried all the techniques my quack had given me for this situation, but nothing did anything. It wasn’t working. Nothing was working. Nothing would work.
Even though I recognised the start of a panic spiral, there was nothing I could do to stop it. My teeth clenched tighter, practically grinding the surface away, as I tried to no avail to breathe through wave after wave of blinding panic that threatened my hold on sanity.
“Declan?” Alyssa asked softly. “Are you all right? It’s just turbulence, and it’s stopped now.”
“Talk to me,” I whispered to Alyssa through my laboured breaths.
“About what?” Her voice was full of concern. The sound of her worry made my panic intensify. “What do you need?”
“Talk to me about anything, just say anything. I need . . . I need a distraction.” The last words came out as a high-pitched squeak. I was getting dizzy and I couldn’t breathe.
I’d done a good job of hiding the full force of my panic attacks from everyone else. Only my ex-psychiatrist knew about them. Never in my wildest nightmares would I have thought I’d have to suffer through one on a plane. In a public place no less; where gossip and lies easily started and could spread like wildfire. And with Alyssa at my side. When I could, I started to repeat my mantra to myself silently in my mind, I can get through this, I’ve had one before and I made it through then. I can get through this, I’ve had one before and I made it through then.
“I went to Queensland Raceway to see you,” Alyssa’s voice cut through my mantra and her words left me stunned.
“What?” I turned toward her, my internal monologue forgotten.
“I’ve been to every race of yours I could get to.”
I wasn’t sure if her admission was easing my attack or not. It was definitely distracting, but I couldn’t decide if it helped me—and my decision to leave her all those years ago—knowing that.
“Why?” I asked. After a moment, I realised it was definitely helping. My breathing had started to come a little easier. My heart slowed almost back to a normal speed.
“Because you were right. When you said I never thought of it as a real career, I mean. I never thought you could make a living from it, and I never went to a single race when we were together. When you left, I kind of wanted to see what all
the fuss was about.”
I shook my head. “But that explains one meeting. Why did you keep going?”
She laughed a little and her cheeks grew a little pink. “I . . . well, I found I actually enjoyed the thrill of being there at the track. Especially with Flynn. He was full of information and was always patient with me while teaching me the rules. Now we go on friend-dates whenever you come to town.” While she was talking, her eyes had taken a faraway look, as if she was reliving some memory. I wished I could see what it was. In that moment, I felt every single day of the years I’d shut her out of my life. After a moment, she chuckled and ducked her head. “Actually, he was surprised when he found out I used to date you, and a touch jealous.”
“Jealous of you or me?”
“Of me.” Her chuckle grew into genuine laughter. It fucking killed me that her smile was so genuine, real, and carefree when she was talking about that other fucker. “After the first meet, I got grilled for three hours on what it was like to kiss you and whether your body was really as smoking hot as it looks when you’re walking around with your race suit on.”
Before I could stop myself, I was laughing in response to her honesty. “I’m not sure whether to be offended or flattered.”
“Oh, you should be flattered. He’s quite the catch.”
I laughed again.
“Better?” she asked.
For a moment, I wondered what she meant, and then I recalled the reason for her admission and the conversation that followed. My panic attack. She’d certainly helped to sweep it aside. “Much. Thanks.”
She put her arm around me and guided me closer to her side. I rested my forehead on her shoulder and I breathed deeply. The proximity worked even better than her talking had. I raised my gaze to meet hers and was pulled toward her lips once more, but this time I resisted it.
Leaning back out of her embrace before the siren call of her pink pout grew too strong, I rested my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. A moment later, she pushed headphones onto my head and then my ears were full of the calming sounds of classical music. I closed my eyes as her fingertips traced gentle lines over my face. I allowed the music, and Alyssa’s touch, to calm me completely.
Declan Reede: The Untold Story (Complete Series) Page 20
