by Tracy Wolff
Instead, she’s here. She’s pale and frantic and more than a little frazzled, but she’s here. For now, that’s more than enough.
“Aria.”
“Sebastian. I need you to—”
“And I’m out of here.” Ethan pops out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box—probably PTSD from the last time Aria came bursting into a room and announced that she needed me to fuck her.
But unlike last time the two were in a room together, Aria actually notices him. Her eyes go wide and she steps back. “I can come back later—”
“No!” Ethan and I say at once.
“It’s fine. We were just talking.” I reach for her hand, pull her into my body. “Aria, this is Ethan Frost. Ethan, this is my girlfriend, Aria.”
Her eyes widen at my use of the word girlfriend, which I completely understand. Partly because we haven’t talked about what we are to each other yet and partly because girlfriend seems like such an insipid, ridiculous word for what Aria is to me.
For the fire that rages between us whenever we get within ten feet of each other.
For what we are, and what we have.
“It’s nice to meet you, Aria.” Ethan holds a hand out. “Sebastian’s told me quite a bit about you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” she says faintly. She looks even more confused, if possible. It’s obvious she recognizes Ethan—hard not to when he’s known far and wide as one of the most visionary men on the planet. It’s just as obvious that she can’t imagine why he and I would be talking about her.
“I’ll be going now. But Chloe and I are in town for a couple more days. Maybe the four of us can have dinner one night.”
“I’d like that?” It comes out sounding like a question. And she still hasn’t blinked.
Poor Aria. On top of everything else tonight, meeting Ethan just might be too much. I decide to nip things in the bud before they get even more awkward. “Thanks for coming up, Eth.” I start ushering him toward the elevator. “I’ll text you tomorrow and we can meet to discuss the necessary plans.”
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” he mumbles to me as the elevator slides open.
I just lift a brow. “You are the one who said you were out of here.”
“Because I was afraid of what I might overhear if I stayed.” He grins. “Your girl seems to be the kind who knows exactly what she wants.”
I flip him off again, just as the elevator doors swoosh shut.
When I turn back to Aria, she’s staring at me with a cross between consternation and concern.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I ask, crossing to her. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I feel like a total dick. She just spent an hour with Dylan’s mom—there are probably more things wrong than she can even begin to name.
But she’s here, I remind myself. It’s a start. More than a start, really.
“I’m having a flashback to this afternoon.”
They aren’t the words I expect to hear from her and I grin before I can stop myself. “Yeah?”
“Was Ethan Frost in your office when I…” Her voice trails off.
“When you came in demanding that I fuck you? Pretty much, yeah.”
“Ethan. Frost.”
“Yep.”
“Ethan—”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. He heard me—”
Despite the situation, despite how fucked up everything is, I can’t help but laugh. But that’s Aria’s gift. She can always get to me, always reach me, no matter how dark my mood or how bad the mess is.
“Ethan’s one of my best friends. Trust me when I say he knows I have sex.”
“I propositioned you in front of a stranger. And not just any stranger but E—”
“Yeah. Ethan Frost. I get it. Are we going to spend all night rehashing it or are we going to talk about why you’re here?”
“Oh, right.” She shakes her head, pulls herself back together. And when she looks at me, her eyes are liquid, luminous and more loving than I have any right to expect. “I’m sorry about Janet. When she’s drunk she’s pretty incoherent.”
Fresh guilt swamps me, pulls me under as it meets up with the ocean of remorse, of culpability, that I’ve been drowning in for ten long years. “Is she drunk a lot?”
Aria winces, looks like she’s trying to temper her answer. Which tells me everything I need to know. Fuck. I cross to the window, stare out at the bright, bright lights. And try to forget all the reasons I hate this place. All the reasons I hate myself.
“It’s not your fault.”
I laugh, but this time it’s not what anyone would call a happy sound. “Did Janet tell you that?”
“Janet didn’t tell me much.”
“That’s surprising. It used to be her favorite story to tell.”
“I wanted to hear it from you.” She comes up behind me, wraps her arms around my waist and presses soft kisses between my shoulder blades.
“Yeah, well, it’s not a story I like telling.”
“The hard ones never are.” She strokes my stomach softly, her fingers tracing the waistband of my jeans. “Doesn’t make them any less worth hearing.”
I close my eyes, relax into her touch. If I concentrate on the feel of her hands, her lips, her lush breasts pressed against my back, maybe it won’t hurt so bad to think about Dylan. Maybe I won’t feel so out of control.
“Tell me,” she says, her breath warm against the back of my neck.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“I think you need to.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t. But it doesn’t make my reason for needing to know any less compelling. You’re hurting, Sebastian. You think I don’t know that? You think I can’t see it in the way you hold your body? Can’t see it in the way you try not to breathe too deeply? What Janet said is destroying you and I don’t like that. I may not have known you as long as she has or know you as well as Ethan does, but I know you, Sebastian Caine.” She turns me to face her then, puts a hand right on the middle of my chest as she stares up at me, her eyes and heart so wide open that it feels, for a moment, like she’s pouring herself deep inside of me.
“Tell me,” she says again.
And because I don’t have a choice, because she needs to know even if I need not to tell her, I do. And hope to God I’m not destroying everything between us that I’ve spent the last few days trying to build.
Chapter Three
Aria
Sebastian is shaking. I’m not sure he realizes it, but he is—there’s a fine tremor running through his whole body and it’s ripping me to pieces.
I want to tell him to forget it. That he doesn’t need to tell me. That I don’t need to know. But it wouldn’t be the truth. Because whatever he’s keeping inside him, whatever happened with him and Dylan and Janet, is tearing him apart. I know the signs, have been living with them myself for fourteen months. The fact that he’s been living with his secret for ten years…I can’t imagine what kind of damage something like that does.
No wonder he’s a control freak.
“I’ve known—” He starts, but then breaks off before he can say anything important. Pulls me closer still, then rests his cheek on the top of my head.
We’re so close now that I can feel the frantic beating of his heart against my own, can feel his trembling inside myself. “It’s okay, baby,” I tell him. “I promise. There’s nothing you can tell me that I can’t handle.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” It’s true. There isn’t much I haven’t seen, haven’t heard. Sebastian doesn’t understand that because he doesn’t know who I used to be. But it’s true nonetheless. Short of telling me he murdered Janet’s son in cold blood, there isn’t much that will shake my belief in him.
He nods, and this time instead of pulling me closer he pushes me away. Shoves his hands in his pockets. And gazes out into the night.
“I first met D
ylan and Janet when my father still owned the Tuscany. Janet worked there—she was one of the housekeepers who handled the top four floors. The high roller suites, you know. And my family’s suite.
“My mom died when I was five so for most of my life it was just my dad and me. And, if you’ve worked here long, you know he’s not exactly the parent of the year type.”
His tone is flippant, his eyes carefully blank, and it’s that care that infuriates me. Because I can read between the lines, can hear all the things he doesn’t want to say. My dad might be a monster when it comes to those outside his family, but he always tried to be a good father to my sister and me. And the Carlo debacle notwithstanding, he pretty much succeeded at it, too. Somehow I can’t see Richard Caine caring about anything but where his next dollar comes from.
“So Janet used to bring me treats. A homemade chocolate chip cookie one day. A lollipop another day. A coloring book every once in a while. I wish you could have known her then. She was always smiling, always laughing. So in love with the world, and with Dylan, that every day was an adventure.
“She used to bring Dylan with her when he had a vacation day or when her babysitter fell through. She’d hide him, so that her supervisor never knew he was there. But I knew. He’d peek around her cart and sometimes if my nanny wasn’t looking, we’d play for a little while. Legos or action figures, whatever he brought with him or I had lying around.
“This went on for a few months. And then summer came. And I don’t know if Janet’s daycare fell through or what, but around July she started to bring Dylan every day. I had a new nanny, one who didn’t realize my father had a strict policy about my fraternizing with any of the staff, so on days when I wasn’t at some camp or lesson, she would let Dylan hang out in the suite with us.”
“How old were you?”
“Six, I think. It was the summer before first grade, so however old that is,” he answers with a shrug that tells me his mind is far, far away from the mundane question. “We got to be friends, and soon Dylan was coming down to the pool with the nanny and me. I’d beg for him to come when we went to the arcade or the movies and more times than not, she let him. I don’t know if Janet was paying her something on the side or if she just did it because she was kind and she knew how lonely I was…either way, it only took a couple months for Dylan and me to become inseparable. By the time my dad found out a few years later—when that nanny went on to a different job—the damage was done. Dylan was my best friend.
“Dad tried to put an end to the friendship, and I think he figured when the Atlantis opened and he moved us over here, that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t. Because by then we were old enough to walk a few blocks on the Strip by ourselves. We’d get into all kinds of trouble—not bad, just mischievous. You know the kind. Dylan was great at finding trouble—it was his idea to dye the fountains at the Bellagio different colors and to go skydiving off the top of the pyramid at the Mirage. And it was his idea to change the music during one of the follies shows from their normal stuff to hardcore rap.
“To this day, watching the showgirls pretending it was perfectly normal to be trying to high kick to a rap song is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Though I was pretty sure the production manager was going to kill us.
“In high school, Dylan got a scholarship to the private school I attended. It was the first time we ever had a chance to be around each other every day and at first it was great to have my best friend at school with me. We tried out for the basketball team together, hung out together after school, even our girlfriends were best friends.
“But sometime around the middle of freshman year things got weird. I mean, a lot of the guys drank or smoked weed, but Dylan started doing some pretty hardcore drugs, just to see what they were like, he said. Before long, he was drunk all the time, constantly getting into trouble that I had to bail him out of. By junior year, he was a mess. He lost his scholarship, had to go back to public school.
“Things went downhill after that. He OD’d at the beginning of senior year and I gave Janet the money to get him into rehab. He got out and went right back to drugs, right back to alcohol.
“By this time he was gambling, too. In back alley poker places, online, wherever he could. He was also fucking everything that moved—which, whatever. But he wasn’t safe about it. Caught a couple different diseases through the years. Addictive personality, the therapists and rehab counselors called it. If there was something he could become addicted to, he managed it. Booze, drugs, sex, gambling. Didn’t matter what. As long as it was fun, he was all in.”
Sebastian closes his eyes, lowers his head, rubs the back of his neck. He looks so lost, so tormented that I want to tell him to stop. To tell him it’s okay, that he doesn’t have to do this. But he does—for himself more than for me—and the last thing I want to do is cut him off now that he’s so close to the end. So close to where everything went wrong.
I reach for his free hand, lace my fingers through his, and squeeze. Not hard. Just enough to let him know that I’m listening. To let him know that I’m here.
He doesn’t open his eyes, but he squeezes back, which is more than I was expecting.
“I helped him out with all of it. Gave him money when he was broke, took him to the doctor when he needed treatment. Paid off his bookies and the mob when the gambling got out of control. Basically, I was his enabler. If he got into trouble, he knew I’d fix it. If he needed money, he knew I’d give it to him.” He shakes his head. “Christ, what incentive was there for him to stay clean when I kept bailing him out?”
“You were a kid yourself. You were being a friend.”
“I was being a dupe. I was letting him get in deeper and deeper and doing nothing to stop it.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
He laughs, but there’s no mirth in the sound at all. “That doesn’t make it not true.”
“Sebastian—”
“Don’t,” he tells me. “If you want to hear the story, I’ve got to do it now. I don’t have the heart to go over all this shit again later.”
Because I know exactly what he means, I nod. But that doesn’t stop my need to hold him. To let him know how much he means to me. I don’t say a word, but I do lift his hand to my mouth. Do press soft kisses to his fingers and the back of his hand.
“He went to rehab again in the middle of senior year. He was in bad shape and it was kind of a do-or-die situation.”
“You paid for it again.”
“I got the first part of my trust fund when I turned eighteen, so it was no big deal.”
“You paid for it,” I repeat again.
“Yeah. I did. And this time it seemed to take. He finished senior year, managed to graduate. I was going to Harvard in the fall while he was enrolling at UNLV, but still. It felt like things were finally back to normal, like we were both on track. Summer was good. He stayed sober, toed the line.”
“And then you went off to college.”
He nods. “And then I went off to college. And he fell off the wagon. Within a month I was getting calls begging me for money to stop some guy from beating him up. I paid, because I didn’t want to see him get hurt, or worse. We’d talk after and he’d promise me that it was the last time. That it would never happen again. Except it did. Over and over again. More with the gambling than the drugs—he’d definitely switched addictions. But he was drinking heavily again, too, and shit was falling apart all over the place. And I was going broke trying to keep up with his gambling debts.
“When I got home the summer after freshman year, I barely recognized him. He was twenty pounds lighter, looked ten years older and he was jittery—like constantly-jonesing-for-a-fix jittery. I’d never seen him like that before. Even with the worst of it, he’d always had some semblance of control before, but this time it was different. He was…gone. I couldn’t find him inside the addictions. It was almost a relief to go back to school.”
He turns away from the window th
en, turns away from me. Instead, he paces over to the couch where he’d been sitting earlier and picks up his discarded glass of scotch. He tosses it back, downing the whole thing in one long swallow before walking to the bar to refill the glass.
“Do you want something?” he asks, glancing at me with raised eyebrows and a relaxed expression that belies the story he’s in the middle of telling. It could be the alcohol, but I tend to think it’s an act. Especially when it registers that his hands are still shaking.
“Water would be good,” I tell him, fighting the urge to cross the room and fling myself at him in an effort to take even a modicum of his pain away. I want to ask what happens next, to get him talking again so it can be out there. So it can be over and he won’t have to talk about it anymore.
But I understand stalling techniques—I use them often enough with the therapist I see every week. He’s taking a break, focusing on something else, because he’s gearing up for the hard part. The part that will tell me just why Janet felt the need to call him a murderer.
He pours the glass of water, brings it over to me even as he drains his own glass. “By the time I was home for winter break my sophomore year, we had grown completely apart. Dylan wanted nothing to do with me, and honestly I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to do with him, either. He’d changed so much I couldn’t recognize the friend I used to have.
“When we talked he was always high, when we went somewhere he was either high or trying to get high. After my first couple days at home he stopped answering when I called and then I stopped calling. It just seemed easier.” He runs a frustrated hand over his face. Repeats, “Easier.”
“That’s normal, you know? Growing apart from your childhood friends as your lives and interests change. It’s nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Is that what happened to you?” he asks, and his gaze is laser bright again. “You just drifted away from your friends?”
