Leo stalked out of the office and he looked pissed. I raised my brows at that. The two of them were confusing as hell. Was I stepping into his territory or was he stepping into mine? I shrugged my shoulders and continued to smile at my crowd.
“This is for all you single people out there,” I said into the microphone. “Let me see you get down to it.”
The crowd roared as I played a song about break-ups and letting go with the background of a famous tribal beat instrumental. My blends worked out much better than I anticipated. I had finally figured out how to pull out the vocals from the original song and add it to an existing instrumental.
My head bobbed to the beat as I watched a girl break it down in the middle of a circle of people who cheered her on. I laughed as she tried to make a come-hither action at a guy. I thought about the time Aria had owned the dance floor with Leo and shook my head once again. Why did my thoughts always end up with her?
I finished out my set to cheers from the people and a handful of backslaps from my fellow DJs.
“Yo,” Parker stood at the bottom of the stage as I made my way down.
“Ready to beat it?” I asked as I struggled with my equipment. Clay grabbed the other end of my duffle and helped me drag the stuff out to the parking lot. I noticed that the TT was still here which made me curious.
“Where’d Aria go?” I frowned.
Clay shrugged. “I saw her get into a cab which is why I assumed you were using the TT tonight.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Maybe she’s gone to Leo’s apartment.”
“They a thing?” Parker asked as he leaned against his pickup.
I shrugged.
“No,” Leo answered and gave me a sour look. “We are not a thing.”
“She stayed over at your apartment the other night and you showed up to leave her laptop,” I said with a raised brow and hoped to hell that I did not sound as accusatory as I felt inside.
“I asked her to stay because I was too beat to make the drive all the way to Brooklyn to drop her off,” Leo laughed without humor. “I backed off from her after you walked in on us.”
“I have no claim to her, man,” I held my hands up even as the words tasted sour on my tongue.
“Claim or no claim, she is on a destructive path,” Leo sighed. “As much as part of me wants to be the one she comes to, I’m not up for all the emotion that comes with it.”
I looked away from his truth. I knew that Aria was searching for something, anything that could make her feel whole again. It was what I did with Paisley if I was being honest. I knew I needed to help her like Emma said to me. I would only heal until I helped her.
“So where’d she go?” I asked.
“Probably looking for someone to give her a fix of danger and unattached fun,” Leo said angrily. “My guess is she’s gone to the last place that got her into trouble.”
“Where?” this came from Parker.
“Blue.”
Whatever I expected to find, Aria on the dancefloor with some fancy suit was not it. She had her eyes closed and her bottom lip between her teeth. Her Allure shirt was gone and all she wore were jeans that reached over her belly button and a crop top that I assumed she wore under her t-shirt.
Her body moved with the beat which excited the suit behind her even more. He touched her with a familiarity that made my fists clench. His head was at the bend of her neck and shoulder where I wished I could put my lips. I needed this man the fuck away from her.
I stalked forward. Neither of them saw me coming. He didn’t even realize that a threat was near until I pulled him off her.
“What the—” he stopped abruptly after one look at me.
Aria looked at me and then looked at him and sighed. “I’m sorry about this.”
She did not wait for either of us to respond, instead, she stalked off the dancefloor and headed out the entrance. I pursed my lips and gave the suit one last long look before I followed her out. I watched as she halted when she saw that Parker and Clay were leaning against his pickup.
She waved. “I guess everyone is here to see the Aria meltdown, again.”
“They are not here to witness anything,” I gritted. “They followed me out here because this isn’t a good part of town for me, let alone you, to be in.”
I nodded at them and they both gave her a hug before getting into the pickup and leaving. I watched Parker stick his beanie head out the driver’s side window and give me a look that warned me to be gentle with her.
I don’t think Aria needed gentle anymore. She needed to catch a wakeup call. I got into the driver’s seat of the TT and waited until her tantrum was over and she made her way into the passenger seat. I started up the car and sped down the roads until I was on Brooklyn Bridge. This was our neutral ground.
“What are we doing here, Dasher?” she sighed and leaned against the backrest of the seat.
I swerved the car to the right and parked across one lane, the bumper of my car almost touching the pavement. She screamed and jerked forward. I pushed my way out of the car and then pulled her out. I pushed her against the bonnet and stared down at her.
“Do you enjoy putting the people who care about you through this?” I shouted at her and ignored the way she flinched. “Did you think, for one second, if that guy was dangerous and did something more than have sex with you… did you think about what you were going to tell your parents?”
Her face drained of color.
“Or your sister who is preparing to start a new life all the way across the world?”
She looked away from me but I dragged her gaze back to mine with her jaw roughly between my fingers.
“Or what about your friends or me?”
She pushed me off her. “You don’t get it! You don’t get the pain that I feel inside of me. You don’t understand how badly I want to forget everything that plays in my mind like a fucking loop!”
"I don't understand?" I laughed sarcastically. "What happened to you, Aria? You had your heart broken. Too fucking bad! That doesn't give you a reason to behave like a whore."
The sting that followed, I definitely deserved. I shouldn’t have made light of what she went through. I was tired though. I was tired of walking around on eggshells with her.
"How dare you?" she asked with fat tears rolling down her red cheeks. I wanted to look away from her, instead, I stared deep into her eyes.
“Do you feel good when you get home, Aria?” I asked as I crowded her space. “Do you feel clean when you scrub them off you until your skin is raw?”
Her expression fell with each word that I muttered and the tears in her eyes no longer held themselves back, instead, they fell in rapid succession.
“Yes,” I gave her a sour look. “Yes, I do understand because I have been through all that you are going through now. I have reduced myself to nothing and then I brought myself back up because I met you.”
She blinked at me with confusion.
“You gave me that fancy speech about not being judged and someone who understands,” I ran the backs of my fingers along her cheeks. “You are not the only one who understands, Aria. I do too. More than you realize.”
“Then why do you keep judging me?” she frowned at me.
“Because I know that although it makes you feel good for a few hours and maybe even a few days, the gravity of your mistakes always come back to haunt you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Aria
I felt like crap the next morning. I walked into the kitchen to find Susan sitting at the breakfast table and reading a newspaper dated 2008.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she toasted a coffee mug at me.
“Morning Susan,” I walked straight to the pot and began making my own cup.
I slid on the barstool next to her.
“Dasher is gone.”
I closed my eyes. I knew after last night he would probably leave. My heart hurt really badly at that thought. I felt the tears fall over the blurriness in
my gaze. I sipped my coffee which was tinged with salt water from the tears that fell onto my lips.
“I meant that he went to get breakfast,” she smiled at me.
I looked at her stunned and confused all at the same time.
“If you love someone, Aria, you must tell them,” Susan warned me.
I shook my head. “I’m not in love with him.”
“You are attached to him,” she nodded. “You latched onto him because you needed someone to fill that void. You wanted someone to cause you the pain that you have been accustomed to.”
I stared into the distance taking whatever my schizophrenic neighbor had to say. It was amazing how much it made sense.
"You are used to having people in your life that you go above and beyond for, you are also used to people hurting you at every turn," she nodded as if she made some breakthrough herself. "You are putting yourself in these situations to feel familiar because the one person who made you feel that way is now gone."
I stared at her with amazement until she let out a loud laugh and skipped around the apartment and almost flew straight into Dasher. He gave her a roll of his eyes and stepped aside for her to leave. He took one look at me and concern colored his features.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I feel like an idiot?” I said with a sheepish look.
“You are an idiot,” he agreed and laid a bagel on the counter for me and dug into his one. He grabbed my coffee mug and took a sip of it.
“You and I are going to take a drive today,” he said. “You surprised me last weekend with your parents. I feel like I should return the favor with something equally as important.”
“I thought you were not a fan of your family,” I said around a mouthful of bagel.
"Didn't say I was taking you to visit my parents," he said and finished up his bagel. "Dress warmly."
I watched the street signs and the buildings pass by as Dasher drove. I snuggled deeper into my leather jacket. It was cold today. Winter was making its appearance. I knew I had a lot to answer for after everything that happened last night. I didn’t exactly owe anyone an explanation. I just owed myself the courtesy of figuring out what I wanted to endure in my life.
New York was a beautiful city. Not in the touristy and television show way, but in the true grit of the city. The old buildings and the busy sidewalks gave off the raw beauty of the city. The true beauty of the city lay not within the fancy suits and skyscrapers, but in the smell of the exhaust and hotdog stands at the corners of the roads. The beauty was in the old building with the paint peeling off and the wrought iron fences.
My heart sunk as Dasher turned into Marble Cemetery. A sense of somberness filled the air rapidly. I hesitantly got off the car and followed Dasher down the pathways. I looked at the various names as we passed them. I briefly wondered how they died. Was it their time? Were they good people? Did they live life to its fullest?
We came upon a fenced area that seemed to be a family plot. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw the Camden name engraved on the top of the little mausoleum looking building. He opened the gate and gestured for me to enter first.
I walked inside silently, careful of where I stepped. I saw a few slabs were outside of the mausoleum and these slabs did not have any Camden named people. Dasher kneeled in front of a slab which said EMMALINE HAWKE.
I kneeled next to him and looked at him questioningly.
“This is Emmaline,” he swallowed. “She was my twin sister.”
Dasher
Every part of me hurt as I said those words. Every part of me died as I started telling Aria my story.
"Our father was the brother of David Camden," I swallowed. "He married my mother when she was just sixteen. She was an amazing woman. She had Travis at the age of eighteen, a few years later she had us too. My father was killed a few years after our birth."
Aria looked at me in that way that I had come to rely on, without emotion. She simply listened. Without judgment and without pity.
"She tried her very best to take care of all three of us but eventually the stress of it all caught up with her and she had a stress-induced heart attack."
I remembered what it was like to walk into the kitchen and find my mother on the floor shuddering and staring at me with helpless eyes. I stood there not knowing what to do with the 911 operator continuously trying to get me to tell her what was going on. I watched my mother take her last breath as Travis stepped in.
“The three of us were taken in by my father’s brother,” I curled my lips. “The Camden’s couldn’t have children. So when eight-year-old Travis and 3 years old Emmaline and Dasher were thrust into their lives. They seemed happy."
I closed my eyes tight as I recounted the events that led up to Emma’s death.
"As much as we were grateful for the new kind of life we were given, we all started to change drastically. While Travis rose up the ranks and became David's right-hand man in business, I pursued my career in music. Emmaline was lost and still deciding what she wanted to do with her life. She was a strange person, even up until her last moments, she was never that girl that partied or had any friends. In fact, Travis and I were all she had."
Aria shuffled to sit flat on the ground and crossed her legs as she played with a blade of grass. I saw from the corner of my gaze that her eyes brimmed with tears. She knew where this was going.
I turned away from her grave. “Emma had come home a little early from an interview the day that David had a few of his business associates at the house for a poker game. In David’s defense he thought we were all out for the day, he was apparently fucking his wife in the next room when his three business associates stumbled into Emma’s bedroom while she was undressing.”
“Stop,” Aria gripped my fingers.
“He couldn’t hear her screams over his own wife’s cries of pleasure,” I hiccupped as the sob broke free. “No one was there for her. When Travis and I got home, David was on edge and Lisa was in tears. I knew by looking at them that something was entirely wrong. Travis and I bolted into the bedroom and found Emma lying on the bed still in her ripped underwear and her body bruised. My sister had blood between her legs. They ripped her apart. She was one of those rare twenty-four-year-olds that decided to wait for marriage.”
“Travis had left that night, the bastard just up and left me to deal with our sister all by myself. Instead of being with her at her time of need, I started in on David and Lisa. I let them have it in a drunken rage,” I sucked in a deep breath holding onto Aria’s fingers as I said the final words. “I stumbled into her room to see how she was doing and found her hanging from the ceiling fan in her room. The worst part was that she used one of my cables to do it.”
We sat in silence as we both took in the gravity of the situation around us. I pictured Emma standing there next to us with a peaceful smile on her face, almost as if she wanted me to finally tell someone her story.
“The days that followed were rough. Travis came back and flew up the ranks of Camden Publications and took it to a height that even David couldn’t have. He refused any of Emma’s inheritance and gave it to me instead. Although, now, he wants to take that away from me.”
“Why would he do that?” Aria frowned.
“I think its David’s doing,” I shrugged. “So I have to figure out what to do with three million dollars which happens to be the inheritance that came from her death. The other half which is her trust fund automatically belongs to me because I am her true blood relative besides Travis.”
“That’s simple then,” Aria smiled at me. “Take your sister’s inheritance and open up a foundation for rape victims.”
“There are like a million of those foundations out there,” I shook my head, even though it would’ve been a true tribute to her.
“Dasher,” she caught my gaze. “There can never be too many help centers for rape victims. Each one has something different to offer.”
“Leo is right,” I chuckled and th
rew an arm around her shoulders. “You come up with amazing ideas.”
“I know I’ve been a bitch,” Aria said. “I know that what I have been through isn’t as huge as what you have been through. The problem is that I don’t know why or how to get myself out of this funk. One day, I hope I can be as strong as you.”
“I’m not really that strong, Aria,” I looked at her with nervousness. “I care about you more than I should, there are times when I want to throw caution to the wind and just be with you—”
“I wouldn’t want to be with you when I haven’t fully healed, Dasher,” Aria touched my face. “You deserve someone who can stand by you and be there when you need her. You don’t need someone who breaks down at the mere mention of her ex or even a song that plays on the radio. You need someone whole enough to keep you going.”
I knew what she said made sense. That was, after all, the reason why I tried not to pursue her. Aria had to heal herself before we even began to think about being anything other than friends. I knew that.
“By the way,” I piped up as we were turning into Kent Street an hour later. “My problems are not bigger or smaller than yours. There is no competition. Your problems matter just as much.”
“I don’t know,” she bit her lip with a half-hearted chuckle. “A breakup with a douche seems really small compared to the death of a twin sister.”
I saw her wince as she said it. It didn’t really hurt as much. It was almost as if I needed to talk about it in order to feel a little lighter.
“It is a loss all the same,” I answered, switching off the car. “I lost a person and you lost your heart.”
Chapter Fifteen
Aria
I stared at my Facebook page in confusion as the six message requests stared back at me. I designed one cover for one seemingly unknown author and suddenly there were six requests from a few authors whose books I had been a fan of asking me to do a cover for them.
The Wreck of Our Hearts Page 10
