“Miss,” came a voice from nearby. “Miss, are you okay?”
I looked at the doorman, who was walking toward me. Apparently my sway was quite visible. When I blinked, a tear ran down my cheek, which seemed strange because I, oddly, hadn’t realized I was crying.
I tried to smile, but another tear leaked from my other eye. “No, I’m fine.”
He stopped in front of me, taking my forearm as though he didn’t really believe I was fine at all.
I shook my head as I studied his kind eyes. “I don’t want to be here.” It came out nearly a whisper.
He looked terribly confused by my behavior. “We can get you a cab,” he offered.
I stared at him blankly. When I turned to look down the street, my focus became blurry as I tried to see through the tears. I turned, looking in the other direction then too, and my breath came out in a defeated sigh. I closed my eyes, feeling my warm tears turn cool on my cheeks as a breeze brushed my skin.
And I imagined walking away.
I imagined walking down the block, around the corner, across Lakeshore Drive. I could be at Oak Street Beach in less than ten minutes. I could be on the dark, deserted beach away from this life, and I could keep walking straight out into the water if I wanted. I could let it carry me away into the dark, far, far away from this place. I could even let it drown me altogether, and I wasn’t really sure I cared either way because the fantasy made me feel powerful regardless.
“Miss,” he said again.
“Hmm?” I turned back to face him.
“Shall I call for a cab?”
I glanced down the block again, staring at the path my fantasy went and knowing I wouldn’t take it. I finally shook my head. “No.”
He studied me concernedly, his brow still furrowed.
“I have a reservation.”
Chapter 13
Keegan
“WHAT
do you mean she’s working in Chicago?” I barked at the poor girl who’d made the mistake of answering the phone at Gabe’s sorority house. I didn’t have Gabe’s number, and I’d resorted to looking up the number for her house.
“I
mean
she’s working at her restaurant job,” the girl bit back. Her tone said she thought I was the world’s biggest fucking idiot. “She’s been gone for hours.”
I glanced down at my watch. It was seven-thirty. Fuck.
“Not sure when she’ll be back.” Her voice was taunting me now.
I was staring out the large living room window of my Trump Tower loaner, and my eyes suddenly lost focus on my view of Navy Pier in the distance. My breath left my lungs. I tried to hide it. But my lips were twitching, my throat was constricting, and I couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe. I cleared my throat, trying to keep my shit together.
“Do you have her phone number? I really need to get in touch with her.” I clenched my hands, my palms getting sweaty.
There was no way this woman who didn’t know me but seemed to dislike me regardless was going to give me her number, and just as expected… “Sorry. Can’t do that.”
I forced my eyes to refocus as I struggled to regroup. “Can you…can you just call her for me? You can give her my number. Can you just…?” I was panicking. I pressed my fist to the window, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply.
She didn’t answer for a moment.
“
Please
,” I begged. “This is really important.”
She inhaled deeply. “Fine.” She sounded angry.
I was silent as I waited.
“Gabrielle, it’s Casey. So, there’s some…guy…”
“Thank God,” I muttered quietly under my breath. She was clearly calling Gabe from her cell phone, and my heart hammered as I waited for more.
“What’s your name?” she suddenly asked me, her tone all annoyance.
“Keegan Lauri.” My voice was rushed, nearly chasing after the girl in desperation.
“Keegan.” Her voice was more distant when she was talking to Gabe.
I nodded stupidly, finally calming down marginally.
“He says he really needs to speak with you. His phone number…” She was silent for a second. “Dammit,” she cursed angrily. “What’s your phone number?” She was talking louder in my ear again. She repeated the numbers as I gave them to her. “Okay. So bye.” She didn’t actually seem to like talking to Gabe any more than she liked talking to me. “You still there?”
“Yeah…yeah. So she’s going to call me?”
“How should I know? It was her voicemail.” And then she hung up on me.
“Fuck!” I yelled, gripping my cell phone so hard my fingers ached.
I don’t really recall walking back to the shower, stripping out of my clothes, or stepping into the large walk-in. I stood under the water, my hands fisted and braced against the wall. I couldn’t seem to uncurl my fingers, and my jaw was as tight as the tension in my hands, my arms, my stomach, damn near everything in my body.
I stared at the tile in front of me and tried to control my breathing, but when the anxiety built too high, I finally hit the wall, letting the pain radiating out from my knuckles distract me from the panic. I didn’t have a clue what to do with myself. I wasn’t even sure I could handle driving myself to Milwaukee to wait for her, but the idea of being in the city, knowing she was there somewhere with another man, was going to drive me insane.
I dressed quickly, running my hands through my hair, and five minutes later, I walked out my door. I knew it was stupid. It was absolutely irrational. But what I also knew was that finding her here in Chicago was impossible, and I needed to be somewhere that I knew she eventually would be.
I drove north toward Milwaukee.
The drive was as maddening as the last two hours of my life had been, and when I pulled up to the curb in front of her house, it was nearing eleven. The lights in her house were all on, and I bounded up the steps, ignoring the tremor in my fingers. This was hands-down the stupidest, most pointless thing I’d ever done, but I paused for only half a second when I reached the front door before ringing the bell.
The door was pulled open by a dark-haired girl who smiled at me flirtatiously for a moment.
“Is Gabe here?” I knew she wasn’t, but I still had to check.
The smile didn’t fall from her lips as much as it morphed into a scowl, and the wide eyes narrowed in apparent hatred for me.
“Let me guess. Keegan? So you’re stalking her I take it?”
I sighed as I shook my head in annoyance. “Is she here or not?”
“No,” she spat out angrily. “Just like I told you on the phone.” And then she slammed the door in my face.
I stared at the door for a minute before walking back to my car. It was the most helpless feeling in the world. And driving here had proved to be just as pointless as I knew it would be. Oddly, when I sank back down to sit in my driver’s seat, it never occurred to me to leave.
I just sat there.
People walked by, a few heading up the steps to Gabe’s sorority, a few others passing on by to another one of the large Greek houses on this street. All of them eyed me suspiciously. I didn’t really care. My hands just gripped the steering wheel. I’d glance at every person passing, hoping it would be her, but it never was, and after a while, I even accepted that it wouldn’t be her. But I still looked at every passing face. It went on and on endlessly, second after second, minute after minute, until it turned into hours and the street quieted down and the rest of the world fell asleep.
My mind was pricking with images of men—men like David, men like any man in the world, nameless, faceless men—doing things to her, things I didn’t want any man to do to her but me. I didn’t have the right to be her only man, her only kiss, her only touch, her only anything. But the fact that I wasn’t felt so incredibly and disturbingly wrong at the moment.
It was a strange feeling, this notion that I was dying even while I was doing nothing. And that notion didn’t pass. My mind kept snapping back to this reality as if it was somehow attached to me by a rubber band. It pummeled me over and over and over, rising up like a wave of pain and then calming for the briefest moment before cycling through my mind again.
The torture went on, and I just sat there.
And the entire time it felt as though something inside me was dying.
It was nearly three in the morning before something caught my attention again—emerald green. The fabric swished as the woman walked. The large trees overhead shadowed the woman’s face from the light of the streetlamps, but the green of the skirt kept swishing back and forth, catching in the brisk night breeze. The gait was lazy, exhausted, maybe just defeated, and I focused on the figure growing closer with every step.
It wasn’t until she stepped out from underneath the shadow of a tree and I saw the red of her lips that I knew for sure it was her. Her hair was bone straight, blowing across her face. She was moving too slowly, as though she was in no hurry to get where she was going or perhaps even dreading to get there. I knew something about that feeling.
My hands shook as I reached for the door handle, and when I stepped out of the car, I inhaled deeply. I’d been going insane for hours, and in that moment, I blamed her for every last second of my insanity. There was no sugarcoating just how close to snapping I was. I rounded my car, stepping up on the sidewalk, and I stared at her. I couldn’t possibly look inviting.
She stopped walking when she saw me, pausing thirty or so feet down the sidewalk. Her eyes flitted away, and her hand rose to her mouth, hiding the red. She didn’t seem to like it; I’d noticed that before. Or perhaps she just didn’t want me to see it now because we both knew what it meant.
She straightened her shoulders before she started walking again. I watched every step she took to close the space between us until she was standing in front of me, staring at my neck. Her face was expressionless, but her shoulders were defiantly straight.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” I said it quietly, but my tone was cold and loaded with every ounce of pain the last eight hours had inflicted on me. After sitting in my car half the night with a long fucking loop of images in my mind of what Gabe was doing, I couldn’t muster much more than cruelty.
I stared at her lips and watched them tremble and twist into a sneer, and before my mind could even register what had happened, I felt the sting of her hand on my cheek. The pain seared into me, even as the hurt, if not devastated, expression on her face burned into me too.
My breath escaped me as my hand lifted to my cheek.
I scoffed, but it was shock more than frustration, and the moment she turned and started to walk away, I panicked, reached out, grabbed her wrist, and stopped her still. She pulled her wrist angrily away, shaking and twisting her arm to rid herself of me. But she didn’t leave once she was free of my hold. She stood in front of me, staring at me as if I was a monster, and her lips quivered as her eyes filled with tears.
“You know,” her voice trembled out, “sometimes I think it’s easier to be with those men than it is to be with you.”
My jaw clenched tightly as I stared at her.
“They’re so simple, uncomplicated. They can’t hurt me. They can’t make some cruel off-the-cuff remark like you and cut me to the bone.” Her lips continued to quiver as she studied me. “They don’t get to make me cry.” She brushed a tear from her cheek as it fell. “They can’t truly touch any part of me that really matters.
You
”—It came out on a rush of breath, trailing off into nothing for a moment—“hurt.”
My chest was tight as I looked at her. “Yeah, well you do too.” My voice was quiet.
Her brow flinched in confusion, and she gaped at me, shaking her head subtly. She really didn’t get it. I’m not sure why I was shocked by that revelation, but I was. She just didn’t fucking get it. She couldn’t get it because, in her mind, there wasn’t enough worth left in her to matter to anyone, including me.
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to sit for hours imagining all the ways you’re being fucked by another man?” I reached into my pocket, pulling the two condoms out, and I threw them at the ground between us. “Imagine for a moment how pathetic it feels to be the man carrying these around because, at the end of the day, I’m willing to take pretty much anything I can get from you—a look, a touch, a kiss…
God
, a kiss.” My voice was the one breaking then. “I came here knowing you’d been with another man. But I was desperate to be inside you anyway because being close to you is the only way I know how to cope with this.” I shook my head, letting out a huff of breath. “Don’t think for a moment you’re the only one who gets to hurt.”
Tears were running down her cheeks as she looked at me, and the sight was agonizing, agonizing and satisfying at the same time.
“Wanting you”—I shook my head, my throat constricting as my eyes glossed over—“hurts,” I choked out. “It’s one of the most painful things I’ve ever endured.” My lips trembled pathetically. “It hurts like hell. So if you need to hit me again, go ahead because it pales in comparison to what
this
feels like—knowing I’ll stay and watch you do it again and again and again like a broken record. God, you’re so
fucking
broken.” I was silent for a moment, but then I shrugged. “But I’m still here.”
She covered her eyes with her hand, and her shoulders shook as she cried. I watched her, feeling her pain, her sadness, her shame, her disappointment. But I couldn’t take this away from her, and I finally looked down at the ground, shaking my head.
“If you want me to go…if it’s easier for you…then I’ll go,” I whispered. “Because I don’t want to be the thing that makes this life harder for you than it already is.”
I stooped over, picking up the condoms and shoving them back in my pocket. She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the ground between us. Her lips still quivered as though the tears were going to fall again at any moment. I didn’t know what to do. There were things I likely still needed to say, and I’d, without doubt, said things I shouldn’t have said.
But I didn’t know what else to say at this point.
“I’ll be here if you need me.” I nodded, wishing, if nothing else, that she’d look at me. But her eyes remained focused on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry about what you heard Sunday morning. I wish I could make you understand why I said it, but it doesn’t matter.” I shook my head, giving up. “I don’t want to hurt you, Gabe.”