Jay blinked, and part of him softened unwillingly when a tear slid down her cheek. “You have no idea how hard it is for me to do what you’re asking me to do.”
“To, what? Fuck me? Love me?”
She shook her head and started to turn away, but he stepped into her path.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry. But if you want a future with me, you need to understand: I’m not a boy anymore—I play to win.”
“You did win,” she said hollowly.
“I didn’t win shit, Jay. You fuck me in the dark. You have to come to me in the light where I can see you. Whereeveryonecan see you. I want people to know you’re mine. You’ve owned me for years—body and soul. I’ve been a slave to your fucking ghost.”
She stepped back from him, gripping her throat. And then she turned and fled, her skirt kicking up in a swirling cloud as she took the steps to her room two at a time.
The door slammed behind her, echoing hollowly in his chest. Nicholas drew in a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and beganputting away the mostly-untouched food. His eyes kept flicking to the staircase, involuntarily tracing the path she’d taken as she’d fled from him once more.
It felt like she’d taken his heart with her.
???????
You have to come to me in the light.
Jay hefted her suitcase off the baggage carousel with more force than necessary ignoring the pain that flared along her shoulders. A man in a business suit gave her a look she ignored.
The moment she stepped off the plane, she had felt the blast of the cold bay breeze through the gaps of the jetway. It whipped through her curls, filling her nose with the familiar briny scent of the cold Pacific ocean, detectable even over the caustic burn of jet fuel.
Just like that, her brain was inundated with thousands of half-forgotten memories. Lying about why she couldn’t have her friends over so they wouldn’t see the pole in the living room. Constant feelings of envy when they would go over to each other’s houses, attended to by their very normal parents, and feeling infuriated that she would never, ever be able to reciprocate.
Waking up in the cold apartment alone, hoping her mother would remember to bring home dinner and terrified that she wouldn’t come all.
The way the men at the Beat and Tease stared.
The predatory eyes of those men in the strip club had followed her throughout childhood, threatening a violence she could never properly put to words until her stepfather had laid it out for her in very stark terms just five years later. Then, she understood far too clearly.
I’ve been a slave to your fucking ghost.
She gripped her wrist, feeling the phantom weight of a bracelet that had doubled as a manacle. Nicholas’s mother’s diamonds had been that heavy, too, when he’d fucked her in them.
Her heart began to pound as she walked fast down the terminal, dodging the slow-moving people around her as she wheeled her suitcase. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie, and yet she kept catching people staring. Looking at her—almost as if theyrememberedher.
But the city didn’t remember anyone. It paved right over you with all of that concrete anonymity. That had been its appeal when she came here almost ten years ago. She had wanted to lose herself in the hustle and bustle of the crowds, to find a place where she could forget the bad things that had happened to her and just fuckingmove onwith her life.
But instead, the path she had been running on had dead-ended to Nicholas, and he had brought her back to the same beautifully gilded hell from which she’d been trying to escape.
I’m home, she thought, staring at a mural of the familiar cityscape painted on the wall. The Transamerica building, Russ, St. Regis, and Jasper. She knew their shapes and silhouettes by how they pierced the sky, but looking at it no longerfeltlike home. It no longer felt like anything.
There was a French word,jamais vu, for when the familiar began to feel alien. Jay, as she turned from the mural and made her way back out to the street, thought of how many times she had spent breathing this very air, and wondered why it tasted so strange on her tongue now.
I grew up, she thought sadly,and it grew on.
In the past, she would have simply taken BART home fromthe airport—their station was right there—but Nicholas had given her cash for a cab, and heading down the dark, concrete enclave of the taxi stand, she was glad for the extravagance. Remembering the purse snatcher who had attacked her on her way to work, Jay held her bag and suitcase tighter.
One of the taxi drivers had his lights on and the ID prominently displayed. Jay leaned into the open window and asked if he’d take her to the address of her old apartment.
“Sure thing,” he said, popping the locks on the door.
She looked at her phone while the driver loaded her suitcase into the back. Nicholas had already sent her a message.It says your plane landed. Are you through customs yet?
He was tracking her flight? Oh, who was she kidding? Of course he was.
