One Day (A Valentine Short Story) (7 page)

He gave me a smile, but it was the first smile he’d given me that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m aware.”

Feeling cold and tense, and very much awake all of sudden, I froze as I watched as he climbed out of bed. As he pulled on his underwear and his jeans, I said, “Are you okay?”

Having never slept with a man on the first date before, I had to wonder, with dread in my gut, if this had been a one-night stand and only I hadn’t known it.

Liam stopped to look me directly in the eye as he buttoned his fly. “We need to talk.”

The dread spread through my whole body and I quickly shuffled out of the bed, ignoring the ache between my legs and the twinge in my muscles from sexual overuse. Uncaring of my nudity I picked up all my articles of clothing off the floor. I could feel Liam’s eyes on me, but unlike last night it didn’t make me want to throw him on the bed and have my wicked way with him again.

Once I yanked on my final piece of clothing—my turtleneck—I snatched my purse up off the floor.

Liam frowned. “Where are you going?”

“Well this is the brush off, isn’t it?”

He scowled, looking pissed. “No, it’s fucking not.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, astounded that this man could make me feel more vulnerable then any of the men I’d dated for much, much longer than a day!

Waiting as he shrugged on a T-shirt and a flannel shirt, I tried to imagine what on earth we needed to talk about. If he wasn’t giving me the brush off, and he wore protection, then I couldn’t think what could be responsible for the serious little crease between his eyebrows.

He gestured to the bed as he stepped toward me. “Sit?”

I did so and Liam sat close beside me, our legs touching.

His continued silence was driving me nuts. “Are you planning on saying anything anytime soon?”

Heaving a sigh, his nod was somewhat reluctant. “Do you remember I mentioned a woman who upended my life before Valentine’s Day?”

The dread intensified. “Yes,” I drawled slowly.

“Well…” he rubbed a hand over his short hair nervously, “It was kind of this Valentine’s Day.”

“Explain,” I bit out, feeling my blood start to burn with anger as I guessed at his meaning.

“I’m engaged.” He cut me a soulful, searing, apologetic look as if that could somehow soothe the emotional punch he’d just thrown to my chest. “I mean, I was engaged.”

“Are or was?” I snapped. “Two different things.”

Liam flinched. “Was. I mean… Her name is Fiona. We met three years ago. I thought we were happy… until a few weeks ago she told me she fucked her colleague. Multiple times. On different occasions.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to feel sympathetic because I was still reeling from this knowledge. Knowledge he could have imparted on me any time in the last twenty-nine hours!

“She still wants to marry me but I… I told her I needed space. That’s why I’m on this camping trip.”

Hurt, deep, wrenching hurt cut across my heart. “So am I revenge?”

“God no,” He gripped my hand, but I snatched it away from him and took my whole body with it, crossing the room to put much needed distance between us.

I stared at the door, wondering how it was possible to hurt this much over him.

“Hazel, I never expected to meet you.”

“What does that even mean?” I whispered.

“That we have a connection.”

I whirled around, glaring at him. “You had sex with me multiple times last night. Never once did Fiona, your fucking fiancé, cross your mind?”

“No.” He stood up, his expression hard. “Not once. I was caught up in you last night. And you can’t tell me you weren’t just as lost in me.”

“But I don’t have a fiancé.”

He scrubbed a hand down his face and groaned. “This is so messed up.”

“You could have told me about her at any point yesterday. It’s not like we didn’t talk. In fact… I’ve told you some things I haven’t told anyone.”

“I know. I just… I just wanted to keep you for a while. I thought if I told you, you’d take off.”

“I would have,” I agreed. “Because I don’t know you, Liam. Not really. Who is to say that you’re not just a player?”

“I’m not.” He strode over to me and gripped my biceps, pulling me into him. “You know I’m not. I’ve never done anything like this before. I wasn’t planning on it—”

“Just happened,” I finished, the words bitter.

“Don’t.” He pressed his forehead to mine, and I hated him for the way I wanted to sway into his hold. “It doesn’t make sense… but you know me. And I know you.”

It didn’t make sense. But up until two minutes ago I’d been thinking the exact same thing. But this was reality. Not some fucking fairytale insta-love story.

“Are you going back to her?”

Liam pulled away and nodded slowly, every nod cutting me deeper. “To talk things out with her. You and I… This is crazy, right? We’ve known each other a day. I’ve known her three years. It would be unfair not to… I mean… what I mean is… fuck,” his gaze darted to the alarm clock on the bedside table. “We need to check out. Grab your stuff from your room and meet me downstairs. We’ll go somewhere and we’ll talk this out.”

Go somewhere and talk? About what? About how he was going back to his fiancé? There was no need to talk about that, other than to have him say sweet things to me so he didn’t feel like a shit when he left.

I nodded numbly, not wanting to argue about it.

Falling for a guy after a day.

What a moron.

Once I was outside his door I moved fast. At superspeed. All I needed to grab was my still-packed rucksack, and I nearly tripped downstairs as I fled with it on my back. My room was charged to my card so I didn’t waste time on that. Liam could check me out. It was the least the bastard could do!

Adrenaline flooded me. I was shaking as I hurried out to my camper van and threw my rucksack inside. With one quick glance back at the inn, the tears started to fall down my cheeks. Fury and hurt surged through and I wanted to scream.

I jumped into the driver seat, and I probably left rubber marks, I reversed so hard and spun so fast out of there.

I glanced through my tears in the rearview mirror and saw Liam run into the car park shouting after me. He dropped his rucksack and started kicking the hell out of it. Just as I was about to disappear out of sight, he fell to haunches with his head in his hands.

And then I was gone.

“Fucking Valentine’s Day,” I sobbed.

***

Three months later

My life had changed epically since I met Liam Brody.

Sometimes I couldn’t even believe it.

To begin with, I’d never felt as lonely as I did than when I drove back to Glasgow and returned to my family and friends. How could I tell them that by some absurd twist of fate I’d met a man, fallen in love, and had my heart broken all in one day?

It sounded ridiculous even to me.

But my chest ached constantly. I cried at romantic comedies, and not happy, joyful mushy kind of crying. No, I cried hateful, envious, bitter tears and then threw stuff at the television.

Nothing made me excited. There was a pall over my days.

Friends commented on it. Johnny took one look at me and said my aura had splotches of black in it, whatever that meant. Even the answers in my column had become so pessimistic and depressing that my editor had to give me a warning to “buck up my ideas or find myself out on my arse without a job”.

That was actually the moment that saved me.

I did need to buck up. Liam Brody was not going to do this to me! No man was! I had a life to get on with.

The first thing I did was talk to Johnny. My brother was the most enthusiastic man on the planet. How he’d ended up with his fiancé, Marie, a woman who apparently didn’t know her cheek muscles could move into what we humans called a smile, I had no idea. Anyhow, his enthusiasm for my career change was exactly what I needed.

While Grant was extremely concerned when I quit my job and put my small two-bed house on the market, Douglas was impressed with my take-charge attitude. With mixed reviews from my big brothers, I had to shut their opinions out for once and just go with my gut.

Johnny had gotten a friend to create my website “Ask Hazel” for free, and I got a deal on all the maintenance charges. He was also using his contacts to spread the word about it, and I’d already gotten a lot of shares on my opening article, enough to receive my first lot of emails from people asking for advice.

They were strong starting emails. One was about a woman who was a recovering alcoholic. She’d married a recovering alcoholic. Recently his son from his first marriage had died in a car crash, and he’d started drinking again. She loved him but she couldn’t seem to get through to him, and was afraid of losing herself in the process. It was a tough one to reply to, but that’s what I needed. The challenge of really helping someone who desperately needed help.

My advice to the first two letters got a ton of comments and loads of shares on Facebook. People thought I was insightful, kind, but also funny. I wasn’t going to lie it was kind of an ego boost. Even better than all that was the response emails I got from the original writers, telling me that my advice helped and it meant a lot to them. It made me feel good about myself, and about what I was doing for the first time… in well… ever.

More emails were coming in, people looking for guidance, and I was feeling optimistic about it.

I’d sold my car and my house was on the market. I was hoping to sell soon. I planned on moving back to Hamilton, where I grew up. There were a few one bed flats in the area that I could afford while I tried to get my online career off the ground.

“I can’t believe I’ve let you do this to me twice now,” I groaned to my friend Shona. As part of my plan to keep so unbelievably busy I wouldn’t think about a certain American, I’d decided to let my super fit friend, Shona, take me out for morning runs with her.

Within five minutes I felt like my chest was on fire and like my legs were strapped down with weights. I hated every minute of it.

She handed me bottled water as we walked around the corner onto my street. “You just need to build up your stamina.”

I shot her a look. “Why is it necessary to be able to run a long distance?”

“What if you got followed home one night and needed to outrun your would-be attacker? Or 28 Days Later became a reality?”

“If 28 Days Later becomes a reality, I’m throwing you at the zombie fuckers to distract them long enough for me to get away without my lungs exploding.”

Shona smirked. “I love how you love me.”

I pulled my key out of the little pouch I had tied around my waist and let us into my house, stooping to pick up the mail as Shona passed me.

“Have you any fruit?”

“Some bananas, maybe,” I grumbled, shuffling through the letters. To my surprise, I found this week’s copy of the magazine I’d worked for in the bundle.

“Speaking of bananas,” Shona said as I wandered into the kitchen, “There is this delicious new intern in my office who I think you’d love.”

“Intern?” I said distractedly, throwing down the mail and pulling the elastic band off the magazine. An envelope with just my first name written on it fluttered out from between the pages.

“Yup. He’s a wee bit younger than you but I swear his arse is worth the disparity in maturity levels. Plus, rumor has it,” she held up a banana and grinned, “He’s well endowed.”

“I’m not interested,” I muttered, pulling a note out of the envelope.

“It’s been six months. That’s way too long for any woman to go without a good seeing to.”

“I have a vibrator.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Shona, shut up for a minute.”

“Very nice,” she grumbled.

I shot her a look and she frowned, coming toward me, “What is it?”

I held up the note. Scrawled in feminine writing were the words:

I thought you might be interested to read this week’s advice column.

Dear Lola

“What the hell?” Shona murmured, reading it over my shoulder.

I shrugged casually, when I felt anything but casual inside. In fact I felt as if I’d been hit with a shot of adrenaline. It was like my whole body was anticipating something, even though I didn’t know what that something might be.

Hands shaking, I flipped the magazine open to the column.

Once upon a time there was a cartoon of a girl who looked a bit like me with the words DEAR HAZEL scrawled next to it on this page. It had been replaced with a photograph of a pretty stylish redhead and the words DEAR LOLA printed above it.

Every week the most interesting problem letter was placed in the middle of the column in a colored box and printed in a font-size larger than the rest.

My heart started pounding as soon as I began to read it.

Shona began reading it out loud behind me. “Dear Lola, this letter is actually intended for your predecessor Dear Hazel. As I have no other way of contacting her, and your annoying boss wouldn’t give me her personal details or even just pass a long a message (helpful guy, that one), I thought this might be my only hope to get this to her. So, Hazel, I have to hope you still read this column out of curiosity, or rely on the kindness of your successor to maybe send you a copy. If you’re reading this, I need you to know that I’m sorry. What I should have said to you that morning was that even though I knew rationally falling for you in a day didn’t make sense, it did happen. I did fall for you. I had no intention of walking away from that. I just wanted to talk about where we’d go from here. After all I had unfinished business I needed to take care of first before I could hope to have a fresh start with you. But I wanted that. With you. And I should have made that crystal clear.