After saying our hellos, we went downstairs for lunch, all of us sitting in our customary places from when I’d lived there. I took a seat next to Chloe and was surprised by how natural it felt to do so. It made me feel like I’d never left. Apparently, even here in New York, among Matt’s new family, I had carved out a little place for myself.
“Are you still having frequent headaches?” Mia looked at me with concern as she sipped her water. Anna moved around the table, making sure we were all content with our meals, while Logan and Alyssa bickered about something I didn’t understand.
“Yeah. My doctor says it will just take time to fully recover from the trauma I experienced.” I smiled reassuringly at her and glanced around, waiting for Neil to make an appearance.
Where the hell was he?
On one hand, I wanted to push our meeting off for as long as possible. On the other, I had an enormous desire to see him again.
For a fleeting moment, my brain played a trick on me, making me think I could sense his musky scent in the air. I knew it was only a bizarre hallucination, though. A figment of my own imagination.
“Did they prescribe you any medications?” Chloe asked. I snapped out of my musings and turned to look at her.
“Only on an as-needed basis.” I only used the painkillers when my headaches got particularly bad.
“It was an incredible stroke of luck that the hematoma was completely reabsorbed. The brain is one of the most delicate parts of the human body and—” Matt stopped when he heard the front door slam.
We all jumped.
Decisive footfalls told me exactly who had just arrived.
Neil burst into the dining room, and the moment I saw him, I stopped breathing.
He looked furious.
His black sweater only highlighted how his chest was heaving in time with his labored breath. His light-wash jeans, on the other hand, clung to his stiff, solid legs. Neil was capable of communicating so much with his body and, as he loomed over the room with every inch of his more than six-foot frame, he radiated anger without ever saying a single word.
We all stopped what we were doing. All eyes were fixed on him, and it was only then that I noticed the purple bruises that punctuated his face around his lower lip and one eyebrow.
They looked like souvenirs from a fistfight.
What had happened to him?
Despite his beaten-up appearance, I felt an untamable yearning inside me, a fire that consumed my skin.
He was beautiful, even like this: angry, exhausted, and all in disarray.
Especially his mind.
In fact, the disarray was mostly in his mind.
He approached us in a few strides, and I felt the urge to flee like a coward because I knew something bad was about to happen.
Neil stopped and went still, just watching us. Then he held up a notebook in one hand.
“Who fucking ripped up my drawings?” His powerful, livid tone made us all flinch.
With a grunt of rage, he ran a hand over his face and through his chestnut hair. He looked confused, pained, and unstable.
Extremely unstable.
“Neil, what are you talking about?” Mia was the first to get up the guts to talk back to him. None of the rest of us could because, just then, Neil seemed capable of anything.
“Who fucking ripped up my goddamned drawings?” He repeated the question with such a frightening anger that it made my blood run cold. I could see the tension in his body, and so could everyone else. None of us knew how to handle this. Neil, meanwhile, looked at each of us in turn, then at the table generally, not focused on anything in particular.
It seemed like his brain was somehow unable to process the things his eyes saw.
This whole time, I had kept still, determined not to move a muscle.
