But I don’t care. I don’t care if rage burns a hole in my heart, if it burns bright until I’m in my grave. I won’t forgive Pen, I won’t forgive Fi, and I won’t forgive myself for not seeing through the two of them.
“Do you remember when you were small and you kept blowing out Kieran’s candles before he could get to them?” she asks with a laugh.
“Vaguely,” I reply, though I suspect it’s simply that I’ve heard the story so many times. “Kieran should have decked me.”
“He loved you too much,” she says. “He finally just put his arm around you and said you could do it together.” There’s fondness in her voice, rather than pain.
I called because I was worried abouther.As it turns out, I’m the only one of us who can’t quite moveon.
• • •
Bex leaves the following morning, which I only know because the company booked her flight. Somehow, London feels a little emptier without her, though it’s not as if I’d have seen her were she still here.
I try to fall back into old routines, but nothing is quite right.
My flat, far nicer than Rick and Jessie’s home, just seems lackluster. Ditto the office, the dinners out. I see my friends again but the whole evening is tense, plagued by moments of irritation and old grudges—Bryce making mild threats, and Peter essentially trying to blackmail me into giving him a job in his most charming Peter way.
I think of Bex calling Bryce a prick to his face, telling Lars I decapitated the baby. It’s probably the only time I smile all evening.
Maybe it’s just some kind of trauma response, Stockholm syndrome, but I miss that moment of wondering what the fuck she’ll say next. I want to see her face light up as she laughs, probably at my expense, and I want the fizzy buzz of laughing along with her when I’d intended to act annoyed.
I want a lot more than that too.
But even if I was willing to ignore her father’s final words to me—I hope to God neither of my girls ever brings you home—and the fact that I’ve dug myself into a hole with my personal life, one I may not be able to climb out of, I cannot ignore the fact that she is precisely what I’ve sought to avoid for a very long time. She is someone I could lose myself in, and for my mother’s sake and my own, I refuse to take that risk.
I do what I’ve always done when I’m not sure how to deal with my life: I work longer than anyone else, I drink more thananyone else, I hit the gym harder than anyone else. And by the time I land in Newark, I’m finally together again.
I call after I land. “I was going to come straight there but I wanted to make sure it was, er, a good time.”
“Come over,” she says. “I don’t actually love being here alone. Though you’re not likely to be much of an improvement.”
I laugh, unwillingly. She’s already fucking doing it. She’s already charming me, enticing me, seducing me, and she isn’t even trying.
I can’t wait to get there, and I suspect I should be staying almost anywhere else.
• • •
An hour later, she’s standing in the frame of the door, fresh-faced and glowing, wrapped in a blanket.
“Welcome home, darling,” she says. “I made a roast.”
My brows raise. “Youmade a roast?”
She grins. “No, of course not. But I was trying to think of something a TV wife would say. It was either that or ‘The police came today; why did they need your hard drive?’ ”
Inside, the house looks even more faded than it did the last time I was here, as if Bex is sucking the little light it had away and keeping it for herself. She removes the blanket around her shoulders and I wince. She’s wearing shorts that might actually just be underwear and a crop top. “Dress code, Bex,” I growl.
She picks the blanket back up with a sigh. “You are not instituting a dress code in my home.”
I raise a brow as I look around. “Do you seriously expect me to believe you consider this place home?”
She flops on the couch, the blanket parting just enough to give me a flash of her inner thigh. “Wow. You’ve been here two seconds, and you’re already randomly insulting me. It’s a new record.”
“I’m not insulting you,” I reply, perching on the chair across from her. “I’m saying that I don’t understand why the fuck you’re still here.”
Nothing changes in her posture, but I sense the change in her anyway, a certain stiffness in her smile. “I’d think you’d approve of the fact that I’m still here, Mr. Frugality. And thank god I didn’t go splash out on a fancy apartment since you were running our business into the ground all winter.”
“Bex,” I groan, and a grin flashes across her face.
