The Difference Between Somebody and Someone (The Difference Trilogy Book 1)

by Aly Martinez

  “Torturing her with it is more like it.” He leaned in and used his hand to curtain off his mouth, but he never lowered his voice. “But the dogs are getting fat off the scraps she sneaks them when she thinks I’m not looking. So I guess it’s working out for them.”

  Katherine giggled and Tim stared down at her, pure awe-struck love painting his face. If I weren’t so damn relieved to know that true love did exist, I would’ve been jealous.

  “It was good to see you, Remi. Don’t be a stranger. But if you’ll excuse me, I need to steal my bride away from you for—”

  Hyperaware of his wife, his words faded into nothingness as her head snapped up.

  “Twenty-seven,” she gasped.

  Aaron and I turned, following her gaze to the man walking through the double doors.

  My hand came up to cover the safety pin holding up the strap on my dress as Mr. Tall, Dark, and Nice Ass walked into the room. My lips curled into a smile only seconds before my stomach dropped.

  The Sky High judgment wasn’t the only case happening in the courthouse that day. When I’d literally slammed into him outside, I hadn’t considered why he was there. It explained his attitude though. Then again, I had elbowed-jacked him in the face. That was enough to dim even the sunniest disposition.

  I watched as his long legs carried him through the crowd, but his head stayed down even as people tried to stop him.

  I tapped Aaron’s foot with the toe of my high heel and whispered, “That’s the guy who gave me the safety pin.”

  “You met Bowen?” Katherine asked, clearly not giving the first damn that she had eavesdropped.

  “Briefly out front. Why do you sound so surprised?” I kept my gaze locked on the navy suit stretched across his muscular frame as he backed into the corner on the far side of the room. He retrieved his phone from his back pocket, but his thumbs never touched the screen. It appeared that he was using it as more of a Do Not Disturb sign than anything else.

  Katherine rolled forward to share my view of him. “Bowen Michaels is something of a mystery. Word is that when Sean Meyers reached out to him to say thank you, he didn’t get much more than a chin nod before Bowen slammed the door in his face.”

  “Wait. Why was Sean thanking him?”

  Shaking her head, she shot me a bored glare. “You’d know if you read more than the subject line of my emails.”

  “Hey, I…skim.”

  She cut me a side-eye. “Bowen saved Sean’s family after the crash. They were pinned under a big piece of debris, still trapped in their seats. Bowen somehow flipped it off them. Mom, dad, two young boys. An entire generation survived because of him.”

  “Wow,” I breathed. “That’s…incredible.”

  “Yeah, but Bowen didn’t want any part of the recognition. I’m shocked he showed up today.”

  I slanted my head and stared at his thankfully still-flawless profile, his jaw hard and his lips tight. Intrigued even more now than during our brief interaction. “Is he local?”

  Katherine didn’t have a chance to reply before Aaron gave my arm a warning yank.

  “Good Lord,” he said, “can we sit down already. I’m about to peel out of my skin here.”

  Immediately, I spun to face him. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  Okay, fine. Beading was generous. Sweat dripped down his temples.

  “Okay, okay,” I soothed. “Sorry. I got distracted.”

  “Thank you,” he rushed out, his shoulders falling with relief.

  But still, even as I walked toward a thankfully open spot in the back row, I couldn’t help putting my chin to my shoulder to steal one last glance at Bowen.

  Less than an hour later, Sky High Airways settled to the tune of fifty-six million dollars.

  It still wasn’t enough.

  Bowen

  One month before the plane crash…

  I smiled to myself, setting my briefcase beside the table next to the front door. As expected, my small three-bedroom ranch was a disaster, but that was a big part of why I was smiling. It had been too long since she’d stayed with me. I understood why—fucking hated it—but understood nonetheless. Though having her there was the only time my place ever truly felt like home.

  Prominently on the coffee table, standing tall in the center of chaos, was a card with a watercolor heart painted on the front.

  My chest swelled with hope that it was her reluctant agreement to go to the rehabilitation facility her doctor had suggested. The same place I’d taken out a second mortgage on my home to be able to pay for. The same place we’d fought about for hours the night before—me yelling, then apologizing. Her yelling, then crying. It was a vicious cycle for us. I’d let it go when she’d finally agreed to stay the night—small victories and all—but the conversation was far from over.

  Maybe at some point during the day, she’d come around to the idea of going. Ninety days wasn’t that long. I mean, it would feel like an eternity without her, but time wasn’t a factor as long as she got the help she needed.

  Secretly, I knew I was fooling myself, but hope had become my drug of choice.

  Plucking the thick card stock off the table, I drew in a deep breath. The smell of freshly baked brownies—or cookies, or whatever-the-hell concoction of deliciousness she had been baking all day—filled my nose. For a woman who had burned grilled cheese the first time she’d cooked me dinner, she had developed a real flair for baking.

  It was one of the few things she enjoyed. And let’s be honest, during the ultimate battle of trying to claw our way up from rock bottom, a marshmallow-graham-cracker brownie was a nice reprieve every once in a while.

  “Baby, I’m home,” I called down the hall.

  Like the worst guard dogs in history, Clyde and Sugar finally realized that someone else was in the house and went nuts, barking and slipping on the wood floor as they raced down the hallway. Clyde was a brindle purebred mutt while Sugar was a black teacup poodle with the temperament of a Doberman. If either of them were ever going to put up a fight, you could bet your ass it would have been Sugar. Though Clyde appeared to have some Great Dane at the deep end of his gene pool, so he’d at least look intimidating while he invited a serial killer in to play ball.

  Tucking the card under my arm, I squatted down to pet them. “Hey, guys.”

  Oh, and yes, Sugar was a boy. Sugarbear Thadius Michaels to be exact. Sally had had quite a few drinks that night. I had just been so damn happy to see her laughing that she could have named him Princess Pineapple and I wouldn’t have argued.

  As I gave Clyde a scratch behind his ears, Sugar bounced off my legs, his paws leaving mud on my khaki slacks. I shouldn’t have gotten frustrated, but they were new pants and I’d slept exactly three hours the night before. When it came to Sally, I was past the point of what was considered creepy anymore. Staying up and watching her sleep was my favorite pastime—my only pastime.

  At least she was sleeping.

  Breathing.

  Not in pain.

  Her mind was still for the first time in weeks.

  “Oh, come on, Sug,” I grumbled, pushing him away as I tried to brush the dirt off my pants. While I loved the hell out of that crazy dog, he was still a puppy and I shuddered to think where he had found mud in the house.

  Looking back, I’d have given my entire life—past, present, and future—for it to have actually been mud. However, there was no mistaking the crimson-red blood smeared across my thigh.

  My heart stopped as I frantically scooped the dog up, begging and praying to any and every god in the universe that he’d cut his paw or broken a toenail. Anything that would’ve made the blood his—and not hers.

  See, that was what made hope a drug. After two previous suicide attempts, combined with our fight and her overall deterioration that had led up to talks of an inpatient treatment facility to begin with, it being her blood was the most likely conclusion.

  But hope clouded reality. It made me believe that anything was possible.


  Like maybe she was feeling better.

  Maybe I was jumping to conclusions.

  Maybe the woman I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with would stop fucking trying to die.

  All hope was gone when the blood on Sugar’s black fur covered my arm.

  I didn’t remember putting him down or dropping the card.

  Nor did I remember sprinting down the hall.

  I shouted her name. I was sure of it.

  At some point before I reached the bedroom, I dug my phone from my pocket and dialed nine-one-one.

  As much as it destroyed me, I’d mastered the process of finding her like that.

  She might not have wanted to stay, but I would have done anything to keep her.

  “Fuck!” I boomed as I entered the room, finding her curled into the fetal position on the bed. My bed. What I had hoped would one day be our bed. The white sheets were covered in blood. My every nightmare playing out in front of me—again.

  And just when I thought my scarred and tortured heart was unable to break any more, pain from the explosion in my chest rocked me to the core.

  A female dispatcher spoke in my ear. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  With long strides, I hurried to her side and immediately checked for a pulse. It was faint, but a surge of adrenaline cleared the fog of fear from my head. “I need an ambulance. Fourteen-eleven Millstone Drive. My fiancée… She tried to kill herself.”

  There were going to be more questions. Her name. Her age. How she was injured. Where she was located in the house. How long ago it had happened. Only some of which I had answers to. None of those answers would save her.

  But I could.

  And no matter how much she hated me for it, I always would.

  Dropping the phone, I got to work, desperate to save the other half of my soul.

  “Don’t you fucking do this,” I snarled, more angry at the world than at her.

  Popping every button, I stripped my dress shirt off and wrapped it around her wrist, tying it as tight as possible before repeating the process with my undershirt on her other arm. “You promised me!” I raged, lifting her hands over her head to hopefully slow the bleeding until help could arrive.

  Her breaths were shallow, and she was a terrifying shade of gray. Ghostly. If I was being honest, she’d been a ghost of the woman I’d fallen in love with for months.

  My heart rattled my ribs as it pounded at a marathon pace, but it was the soul-crushing emotion in my throat that took my knees out.

  As I sank down onto the blood-covered bed beside her, a boulder of grief settled in my gut.

  What if this was it?

  What if she didn’t survive this time?

  Tears I’d long since given up on trying to control rolled down my cheeks. “Goddamn it, you promised me. Do you hear me? You hold on because I am not done yet,” I choked, barely able to get the words out. She needed to hear it, or more realistically, I desperately needed it to be true. “You are not allowed to leave me. Not like this.”

  The day we’d met, I’d thought it was fate. She was perfect. Her laugh. Her chaos. The levity I felt in her presence. It took approximately an hour for me to fall in love. Deep, unwavering, life-altering love. The kind that burrows into your bones and rewrites your DNA.

  But maybe the only thing that had been truly fated about our relationship was the fact that I had been destined to lose her from the start.

  Remi

  “Please tell me this is a joke,” I said. My father’s rickety office chair let out a loud creak as I leaned back and lifted a napkin with a handwritten IOU.

  His thick gray mustache did little to hide his sheepish smirk. “What? Kenny always pays.” He cut his gaze off to the side and mumbled, “Eventually.”

  “Which is never.” I dug a manila file stuffed full of similar paperwork from his desk drawer. “And Allen?”

  He harrumphed and rested his crossed arms on his round belly. “He’s between jobs.”

  I paused and leveled him with a glare. “Heather?”

  “Give me a break, Remi.” He paced from one side of his tiny office to the other. “I don’t see you complaining when I feed your boys for free anytime they show their faces around here.”

  “Mark and Aaron are family. Meanwhile, Heather told the entire school I had herpes after Mom left.”

  “You still holding grudges from well over a decade ago?” He sliced me with a disappointing scowl, making me shrink in the chair.

  “Well, no… Not exactly.”

  “Since high school, she’s had two girls and married an alcoholic who has no problem spending his rent and grocery money on booze only to come home and make her pay in different ways.”

  I winced, immediately feeling guilty, and my father didn’t miss it.

  “So yeah,” he said. “Last I heard, you don’t have herpes, but she does have some serious issues. If I can give her and her girls a hot meal and a safe place for a few hours, I don’t give a damn if she can pay the tab or not.”

  God, I loved my dad. Yes, even in the middle of a grade-A scolding. He’d always had such a kind and generous heart. Perhaps not the best head for business, but he made up for it in other ways.

  Resting his hand on my shoulder, he stared deep into my eyes. “Talk to me, Remi. What’s really going on in that head of yours?”

  Instinctively, I shrugged him off. “Nothing.”

  It wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the truth. I’d been off for days. I attributed it to the finality of the settlement, but putting the past to rest should have come with relief, not anxiety.

  He slanted his head. “You sure? Aaron said—”

  “Aaron?” I rolled my eyes. Of course they’d been talking. While he was my ride-or-die most of the time, Aaron was one hundred percent a snitch when it came to my dad. “If you want to worry about someone, your informant hasn’t slept in almost a week.”

  “Damn,” he whispered, shaking his head. “How am I supposed to leave you kids while you’re still dealing with all this?”

  My stomach knotted as it had so often since he’d told me he was retiring to Miami. He’d tried to cancel the move at least a dozen times after the plane crash, but if there was ever a man who deserved happiness, it was Jack Grey.

  “First off, we haven’t been kids in a long time. Secondly, I think Crystal Dawn would be pretty upset if you stood her up now.”

  Yes. My father married a woman named Crystal Dawn, first and middle name respectively, but he never missed an opportunity to call her by both. She wasn’t a stripper. Though, if you asked me, she’d missed a pretty great opportunity with a name like that. Instead, she was a beautiful white-haired widow who carried chocolates in her purse for the neighborhood kids and thought my father had hung the moon.

  I hated the idea of losing him. Not being able to swing by The Wave after a hard day and find his smiling face milling around the dining room was going to be a tough adjustment. But I had every reason to believe Crystal would take care of him.

  He let out a loud groan and settled on the edge of the desk. “Come with us. I’m sure they have houses to sell in Florida. Condos too.”

  I lifted a handful of paper napkin IOUs in his direction. “What? And abandon all this?”

  A slow smile stretched his mouth. “That was my plan.”

  “Then who’s going to feed the Heathers and Kennys and Allens of the world?”

  He finally chuckled. “Okay. Okay. Fair enough.”

  I had no desire to take over The Wave, but I’d grown up in the burger joint. My name was quite literally carved into the back booth, and my handprints were permanently imprinted in the sidewalk. I couldn’t stand the idea of letting it close. Grey Realty kept me busy, but luckily, Mark had connections and found a full-time manager for me. Looking at the mess that was my father’s bookkeeping, I probably needed a whole team.

  “All right, old man. Let’s get this organized before you abandon me for Margaritaville. Who’s your acco
untant?”

  “Mr. Samuel,” he replied curtly.

  My mouth gaped. “What the hell, Daddy? He died, like, two years ago.”

  “Three actually.” He rose from the corner of the desk and walked toward the door. “I didn’t say he was good.”

  “Or breathing,” I smarted. “Have you been doing this on your own since then?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Oh, God, please tell me you’ve been paying taxes.”

  He hiked up his khaki pants. “I’ve been paying…some. I got a little account set aside in case they want more, but I’ll be honest, the whole tax thing is a racket. If they know how much money I made, why won’t they just tell me what I owe? Why do I have to figure it out on my own?”

  “Oh, gee. I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the law?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not behind bars yet, am I?” He pulled the door open, the loud chatter of a bustling lunch rush filling the room. “I gotta get back out there. Have you eaten?”

  And that was it. He was done talking. Welcome to The Wave: where paper napkin IOUs were currency and tax evasion was the house special.

  “Suddenly, I’m not hungry,” I replied.

  “I’ll make you a club sandwich for the road.” The door clicked behind him.

  I dropped my head to the desk. Jack Grey, with his heart of gold, was always a bit of a wildcard. Usually, I admired that about him. Now though?

  I spent the next hour trying to make heads or tails of his chicken-scratch ledgers and an entire drawer of vendor receipts. True to his word, he sent one of the waitresses in with a club sandwich—no lettuce, bacon on the side, just the way I liked it—but it was a small consolation for the shitstorm he was leaving me with when he moved.

  Remi

  It was a bad idea. I knew it the moment I saw the going-out-of-business post on Facebook. However, I also knew it was a bad idea when I got in my car, drove forty-five minutes across town, and then street-parked because the parking lot was packed. None of that stopped me though.

  I didn’t have a lot of plants—at least not by my standards. By Mark’s and Aaron’s standards, my babies were just shy of being awarded rainforest protections. They swore if I brought another one home, I was going to have to move into a she-shed in the backyard, but I was mostly sure they were bluffing. Besides, I hadn’t said anything about Mark’s pilsner glass collection on the top of the kitchen cabinets or Aaron’s million pairs of shoes that had taken over the hall linen closet. A few (dozen) plants were the least of their concerns.