After a bit of a pause, Cyndi leaned in closer. "Can I talk to you?"
I looked at her face, loaded with makeup and the reddest lipstick that ever existed adorned her lips. I smiled again, a little less awkwardly this time. "Sure," I said and got up to go with her.
She led me outside the dance area, until we could only hear m.u.f.fled beats. She took me to the upstairs floor. We were standing in an area where there were rooms, in a line, like a hotel. We stood in the hallway and talked in hushed voices.
"I missed you," Cyndi said.
"Cyndi-"
"It"s okay, you don"t have to say it back."
"Why did you bring me here?"
"The thing you hired me for," Cyndi said. "I just wanted to thank you for that. I was really in need of money back then. Your check was a big help."
"Cyndi, you can always come to me for money."
"I know," Cyndi said. "But I prefer earning my money."
"I know that."
"I just wanted to know if it worked."
"It did."
"Good. So, you"re with someone?"
"It"s complicated."
She smiled. "Isn"t it always?"
"I guess."
"Are you here for someone?"
"I"m just here for the drinks," I said.
"No one comes here for the drinks, Thorne."
"I do."
"Suit yourself," she said, and walked up to me, kissed me on the cheek. "It was nice running into you."
"Same here."
When she left, I was finally able to go back to my friends. "That Cyndi must be a lot of fun in bed," Mark said the moment I claimed a seat on our booth. "Maybe I could hire her next."
"She"s not going to come to you," Jonah said. "Everyone knows Cyndi has the hots for Ryker!"
"Jonah, please..." I tried to say but he wouldn"t stop teasing me.
"Oh come on," he said. "Admit it! You make them fall in love with you and then you break their hearts. That"s your M.O. isn"t it?"
His words made me angry and I wanted nothing more than to shut him up, but then I realized I couldn"t shut up every person who thought that way. My reputation was what it was, I couldn"t change it. It was too late. If they thought I was some man-wh.o.r.e with zero attachments then I should just let them think that way.
No one cared about the truth.
I watched Cyndi walking past our table to go to the men on another booth. They smiled at each other and then Cyndi sat with them, started drinking with all three. I should have felt something at this, but I felt nothing for her anymore. And that was a good thing, I told myself.
It was a very good thing.
Because what I really wanted, was to have Elena here with me. That was the only thing that made sense anymore. But she didn"t even know I had all these feelings about her. She didn"t want anything to do with me. I needed to show her somehow, that I wanted her not because of some temporary attraction but because I knew who she was, and I knew she was perfect for me. But I had to stop thinking that way because she would not care for me much when she found out who I was, that I frequented bondage clubs. It was a secret I hadn"t even confided about in most friends, let alone a girlfriend. Even if we did end up going out at some point, there was no way I could tell her about all this. She would end up hating me and that was the last thing I wanted.
ELENA.
The rain is pouring down, heavy, and there"s nowhere I can find shelter. I keep glancing at the people pa.s.sing by and they all have huge umbrellas, but they won"t lend me a little bit of shade. And then I see Nick, and I know it"s him but he has this menacing expression on his face, as if he is going to turn into a bizarre creature or something, and he scares me so I run. But between the rain and the people, and their huge umbrellas, it is impossible to get away from him until someone grips my arm and pulls me away. Afraid that it might be Nick, I try to steal a look at the face, even though I don"t want to...
...and I am left looking into a pair of soft, blue eyes.
"You don"t have to run away," he says.
And then he smiles.
And it"s beautiful.
It takes away some of my fear.
"Let me help you," he says.
I"m afraid that Nick will catch up to us and I can do nothing but fear his approach, but then the blue-eyed man just holds me and kisses me...
I got the same feeling I used to get when I had been fantasizing about movie stars too much, and ended up seeing one of them in some odd fantasy that my brain conjured up while my other senses were asleep. Only this time, it"s him. The dream had so overtaken me I forgot his name...
...Thorne, I remember then.
The sight of his offering a hand to shake, of stifling that cigarette, it all came back, and so did bits and pieces of the dream. One part of me was so embarra.s.sed I didn"t even know what to say. The other one wanted to resume that dream and go back to sleep, because that kiss was kind of hot. And then, I heard the phone on my nightstand, vibrating away and I picked it up before it ruined Penny"s sleep on a weekend, my third week away from Nick. When I saw the phone and saw the same texts, I felt a certain amount of disappointment. Nick, who could barely wake up before four in the evening on weekends was now awake, at ten in the morning, and calling me as if the world was about to end. And suddenly, I had the urge to read through his messages. In retrospect, it might have been a bad move.
I don"t know if it was the effect of the dream, or the messages themselves or some strange wave of nostalgia that brought tears to my eyes.
I LOVE YOU. I KNOW I"VE BEEN AN a.s.sHOLE. I DON"T KNOW HOW TO LIVE ANYMORE ELENA. I NEED TO SEE YOU. ONE MORE TIME. PLEASE.Plenty of other statements like that, most of them asking me to come up and meet him someplace. It didn"t have to be private; he just wanted to see me, one last time. A request that sounds genuine enough. Only, I had a vague idea how it was going to end. I had been dreading this. I felt like if I even so much as see his face again, I might give up on hating him, and I might get carried away in the torrent that is my ex-life with him. It"s the last thing I wanted to do but that fear is still there in the back of my mind, and I can"t help but feel a lot less angrier at him for what he did. I knew I was supposed to hate him for what he did for the rest of my life, and I should have accepted that he wasn"t going to change, not ever, but that stupid, odd voice inside my head kept screaming otherwise. Suddenly, I was remembering the good times we had, how romantic it was when it began. I remembered all the nice things he had done for me. Two days ago, when I started drinking a little more than usual, I actually got to wondering if it would be okay to just continue my life with him, and just get used to his faults in order to get my hands on the good stuff. And there is good stuff, a lot of it, I a.s.sure you. Enough to make me think that way, obviously.
But it"s times like these, when you have to figure out whose side you"re on: his or yours.
I almost ended up texting him a response from all the confusion, but I held myself back with a lot of effort. When Penny woke up I told her. "Nick says he wants to see me one last time."
She just stared back at me for a second, as if she was trying to say aright and you"re telling me this why"?
"I can"t avoid him for the rest of my life," I said, somewhat unsure.
"You don"t have to," Penny said, wisely enough. "Just until you know you"re over him. Just until the healing has begun and you"ve moved on. When you don"t have any of those left-over feelings."
"I don"t think that"s going to happen."
"It will Elena," she said. "It has to. There is no other way to do this. He"s not right for you and you know it. You"ve been doing so well without him so far. There"s no need to complicate matters by agreeing to see him." My eyes were still glued to the message until Penny confiscated the phone. "Don"t let some random feelings of mere empathy for an ex, ruin your life. It"s not love. Love is a bond built on mutual understanding, loyalty, and affection. Not on the fizzling embers of f.u.c.ked up relationships."
"I just keep having this urge to see him again, even though I also want to gouge his eyes out."
"I"m not saying it"s easy getting over seven years of your life with him, and I"m not saying it"s going to happen in one day. It"s stupid to expect that it will. I"m just saying, until you"re in a better frame of mind to figure things out, it"s best to just stay away."
Penny made a lot of sense for someone who had never been in a long-term relationship. Maybe that was why. She wasn"t ready to sacrifice her life for someone who wasn"t worth the effort. Perhaps she was right to wait. And as Penny likes to say, marriages and long term relationships are delusional ancient concepts anyway. She said statistically, most people do things not because they want to, but because something"s been programmed into their heads. I don"t always agree with her but it"s worth thinking about.
"Men like Nick don"t want marriage," she said. "They just want the illusion of marriage. What they really want is to be f.u.c.king a new woman every night, without their wives asking where they were. They love having a woman they can come home to, but they don"t want the responsibility or the effort that comes with it. They might think they have evolved and that they don"t treat women the wrong way, but they are still just figuring things out. Personally, I think they need at least another century to realize how they can correct this stupidity."
"Just because Nick"s a bad apple doesn"t mean I don"t believe in the inst.i.tution of marriage, or love."
"You can believe what you want, Elena. I"m just saying, that"s not Nick. Maybe someone else, someone who believes in love and marriage the same way you do, but it"s not Nick and you know it. Why else would you have walked out on him eight months before you were supposed to get married?"
I knew there was a part of Nick that wanted to get married to me, and another part of him that just wanted to be the single guy forever. I knew for a fact that he cared about me in some twisted way, but I knew I was not the only woman he ever wanted to be with. He liked to think that he did though and that was what complicated things for us. But the truth is I had never once felt that pa.s.sion from his side, the kind of pa.s.sion his words claimed he had for me.
He has never looked at me that way...
...the way Thorne was looking at me.
Okay there, I said it.
I knew I had only met him once, and I knew it was silly, but standing there, in the rain, inside the diner, and afterwards, there was something in the way he was looking at me. It was different than what I was used to with Nick. And that was why every time I felt Thorne"s eyes on me, I think I started to feel like maybe I deserved more than what Nick was giving me.
That there was more to life and love and romance than Nick was capable of.
THORNE.
Lane was on the couch, watching television when I entered the loft. It was late evening; I was exhausted from a hard day at work trying to sort things out with an obnoxious client. When I went to sit on the couch, Lane handed the remote to me.
"Am I still getting the silent treatment?" I asked.
He said nothing.
I switched to a channel showing a wildlife doc.u.mentary, something about boars and lions.
"I ordered takeout," Lane said. "If you want I can heat it up for you."
First sentence in two weeks! "Thank you," I said. "That would be nice."
He got up and went over to the fridge and I could hear him putting things in the microwave. He brought back to the couch two plates of something that looked like fish and two cans, a beer for me and a soda for himself. I was too hungry to care, so I took up a fork and placed the strange objects in my mouth. An odd burst of flavor coated my taste-buds. "This is good," I said, my mouth still masticating the food bits.
Lane grinned. "I knew you"d like it," he said.
"So what have you been up to?"
"Not much," he said. "I was out with a friend."
"Female friend?" I pried.
"Yes, it was a female friend."
"Ahh."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," I said. "So what did you and the female friend do?"
"We watched a movie."
"Which one?"
"I don"t remember," he said. "But it was horrible."
"Sorry."
"What about you?"
"I was trying to sort things out," I said. "This client is the worst. No one else can deal with her so I have to. I wouldn"t wish her on an enemy."
"Not even Walters?"