“Is that...a challenge?” she asked, need stampeding through her, mixed up with something a lot like terror, but not because she was afraid of him.
She was far more worried that, really, she was afraid of herself.
“You’re going to hold on to the headboard again,” Charlie told her in that voice of his that was nothing but command. “And this time you’re not going to come until I tell you to. That’s the challenge.”
He dropped his head down next to hers, and the look on his face made her heart skip a beat. Then kick in so hard she was surprised he couldn’t see it.
“You wanted real, Maya. You wanted the truth.” Charlie’s blue gaze set her on fire, but she wasn’t sure she’d even started to burn. Or if she’d survive it. “Let’s see how much you like it.”
CHAPTER TEN
MAYA WOKE UP in a panic, as if she’d had a bad dream.
But if she’d been dreaming, she couldn’t remember about what.
Her heart careened around in her chest, her skin felt clammy and she could hardly manage a full breath. She squinted at the clock on the bedside table, certain that it would be the dead of night. But it was one of the long, dark mornings this time of year, and somehow the fact that it was a new day and yet still so dark made her...shiver.
Then again, maybe that had more to do with the way Charlie was sprawled next to her in the big bed, taking up more than his share of room on the mattress.
She wanted to curl into him. She wanted to bury her face in his chest, feel his heavy arms around her and let him make her feel safe again—
But she couldn’t let herself do that. Because she knew she would wake him up if she touched him, and he would see that she was losing it, and the very idea of that made her heart beat faster and her throat feel tighter.
A sob, trapped in her chest like some kind of time bomb, threatened to break free.
And Maya couldn’t have that, either.
She eased herself over to the edge of the bed, then rolled out of it, expecting her body to react to that much movement after the night she’d had. Expecting to feel twinges, little pulls or scrapes, instead of...the strangest feeling that suffused her from head to foot. As if she was lit up with something too bright to contain.
It didn’t make sense.
Charlie had turned her inside out, with an intensity and a deliberateness that made her knees feel weak. He had taught her things about herself that made her shiver all over again, just remembering.
He had taken control of her in so many delicious ways that she was surprised she’d survived it. But maybe the real truth was that she hadn’t. She felt like ash. She was charred straight through, waiting for the faintest breeze to blow her away.
Her heart was still kicking at her like it wanted out of her chest. She couldn’t breathe. And looking at the impossible, sculpted beauty of the big hard man sprawled across her bed made her...weak.
She made her way across the bedroom in the dark, carefully stepping over the shoes she’d thrown on the floor last night. Once she made it to the washroom suite, she eased her way inside and gently, carefully closed the door behind her. Then she stood there, her back against the door and her heart hammering at her, as if something was chasing her.
Maya stood there for a long time. Until her feet grew so cold against the tiled floor beneath her that she could feel the chill of it climb up her calves. When she pushed away from the door, she felt older, arthritic, as if the force of whatever panic this was had aged her immeasurably.
The funny thing was, she believed it.
She’d thrown her clutch on the washroom counter when she’d stormed into the room last night, and she moved over to it now, unclipping it so she could pull her mobile out and scroll through her notifications.
There were several voice mails from her parents’ house phone and individual mobiles, but she didn’t need to listen to them. She could feel their cool disapproval of her choices from across the world and knew exactly what they’d say. That they were disappointed that she hadn’t risen to the occasion and shown her mettle as a Martin should.
They would have shown her the same frozen disappointment if she’d ever, say, gotten a bad grade in school or made a scene in public. Not that she’d ever dared do either one of those things.
Her sister had moved on to text messages:
Ethan is not cooperating. He insists he needs to talk to you, personally. Please advise.
Maya waited for that familiar rage to sweep through her again. That deep, comprehensive fury at the man she was supposed to be married to right now that had been keeping her aloft all this time. But it was gone. And the room it had taken up inside her was filled with that brightness...and its matching panic.
She knew why. The why was out there in her bed, fast asleep, beautiful and golden and capable of making her body sing like some kind of celestial instrument only he knew how to play. He’d proved it again and again.
But she had spent these weeks secure in her anger and she hadn’t spared a thought for what might wait there on the other side of it. A different kind of grief, maybe. For the life she had thought she would be living by now. The life she and Ethan had built, one conversation and goal at a time, year after year...
A life she not only didn’t want any longer but couldn’t imagine how she’d ever wanted.
That thought felt slippery and treacherous. She slid a hand over her own chest as if that could soothe her poor heart.
Maya hadn’t understood how black-and-white her world was—and always had been—until she’d come to Italy. Or how gray her emotions were, or the sex she’d had was, until she met Charlie and he’d turned her inside out.
Now the colors were too bright.
And there was no pretending that she could go back. Not to the life she’d left behind in all those embarrassing wedding-day pieces. She wasn’t the same person whose wedding had been canceled in such a humiliating fashion.
Maybe you were never that person, a voice inside her suggested.
But that kind of heresy made her entire life some kind of sick joke, didn’t it? And the notion that might very well be true only made it harder to breathe.
Maya moved farther into the rambling washroom suite that was larger than the dormitory room she’d lived in with Lorraine a lifetime ago. She made her way to the huge, dramatic bathtub that was perched in the big arched window, offering a view—by day—of the patchwork, pastel quilt of ancient buildings stuck to the side of the steep hills and the beautiful stretch of the sea beyond.
She climbed into the tub and sank down into it, not minding at all that it was dry and it was too dark outside to see much more than the lights and the suggestion of the water, far below. She felt as if she was in some kind of cocoon, tucked up and safe from the world.
Or maybe the truth was, simply, that she felt safe here. That was what Italy—and Charlie, if she was honest, and maybe mostly Charlie—had done for her. And it wasn’t until she had started to feel that remarkable sense of safety that she’d truly understood how deeply unsafe she’d felt for most of her life, in a variety of ways. And with just about everyone she knew.
But that was a breakdown for another time.
Right now, she needed to clean up her own mess.
She swiped her phone open, found Ethan’s number and hit the button.
The phone rang and rang. It only occurred to her that it was after midnight in Toronto—long past Ethan’s preferred bedtime, since he liked to rise at 4:30 to get his run in every morning before work—when she heard the fumbling noise that suggested he was picking up his phone from the nightstand.
“Do you know what time it is?” Ethan demanded, his voice thick and annoyed, and Maya could picture him perfectly. He would be scowling, his eyes even more bleary than usual without his glasses on. His dark hair would be standing straight up and his jaw would be rough.
She waited for a wave of regret to crash over her. Longing, maybe. Yearning, despite the likelihood that he wasn’t alone in that bed they’d picked out together.
But all she felt was a kind of soft sadness.
“I beg your pardon, Ethan,” she said crisply, the way she might in a fractious deposition. “Is it inconvenient for you to talk to me now? It’s obviously very important to me that your convenience take center stage here.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Now he sounded aggrieved. “For fuck’s sake, Maya. You really are making this harder than it has to be.”
“Out of curiosity, how hard do you imagine something like this ought to be? Is there a certain level of reaction you would find acceptable, under the circumstances? Am I allowed to react at all? I’m guessing not. Because—and correct me if I’m off base—I suspect it’s possible that you don’t like being so clearly and inarguably in the wrong.”
She heard a sound like a sigh—even more aggrieved than before, which she would have said wasn’t possible—and a faint clattering noise that she knew was Ethan fiddling around on the table beside the bed for his glasses.
And maybe because she could picture it all so clearly, as if she was standing in the corner of the bedroom herself, Maya knew she didn’t want to go back to that condo. Not even if Ethan removed himself. She didn’t want to live there, surrounded by so many ghosts of a life that would never happen. Not to mention, though she couldn’t hear another person, she was sure he was sharing that bed—and the couch and the soft rug in the den and God knows which other surfaces—with Lorraine. She had to assume they had been sneaking around in her home for some time.
Which meant Maya could never touch anything in it again.
That notion might have hurt her before. And then made her angry, because who didn’t prefer a little spurt of righteous anger to the pain that lay beneath it? But today she could hardly muster more than a shrug.
“You want to hurt me. You want to punish me. I get it.” Ethan actually sounded self-righteous, she realized. As if he saw himself as the victim here—and more, wanted to be the victim.
It should have made her furious. Instead, she wanted to laugh.
And instead of gulping that strange urge down because it was unseemly, she...let herself laugh.
At him. And better yet, unapologetically.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ethan.” She wasn’t sure that was true. She didn’t want to actively cause him pain, maybe, but she doubted she would work too hard to keep from smiling should karma catch up with him. “And I think we both know that the life you’ve chosen is punishment enough.”
“If that’s meant to be another nasty little dig at Lorraine, you should know straight off I won’t allow it.”
“Good to know.” She was sure he could hear the way she rolled her eyes, and she was fine with that, too. “I’m not being unkind when I point out that the smooth, easy life you always claimed you wanted? That’s not going to happen. Whether you stay together or don’t, you’ve chosen a roller coaster.”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Ethan was using that fussy, offended voice that, once upon a time, had made her wish that she could do anything at all to solve whatever the problem was. And she usually had.
But that was the old Maya. The black-and-white, rule-following Maya, locked away in all that gray.
“The funny thing is, I do understand,” she told him, in the spirit of some generosity that she couldn’t have named if her life depended on it. “I wish the two of you could have handled this better. Not left me at the altar, for example. But I understand.”
It was the greatest gift she was capable of giving, here in the run-up to a Christmas she’d imagined would be very different. But it was a time for forgiveness and grace, if she was capable of it. She was surprised to find she was.
And she knew it would have been impossible even twenty-four hours before.
But Charlie had shown her what true power was and where it waited deep inside her, if she dared surrender to it.
She had dared. And Maya felt like a different person in the aftermath.
One who might be a little shaky, sure, but one who was capable of giving gifts to those who least deserved it.
So, naturally, Ethan ruined it.
“Of course you don’t understand,” he retorted, in that superior voice of his that she’d used to think was cute. Because it reminded her how smart he was, how accomplished, how successful. Today she just thought he sounded like a dick. “You don’t know what it’s like to truly love someone like this. I don’t expect you to. But the problem is, you hiding out in Italy is making things awkward for us.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth. “What a nightmare. Heaven forbid you feel awkward.”
If he heard her sarcasm, he ignored it. “There’s friction at work. You know what it’s like in the firm when there’s any hint of scandal. And your sister is hounding me day and night about selling the condo.” He let out a baffled sort of laugh. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you want to live here?”
“I hardly know where to begin with any of that.”
“You need to come home, Maya. Sulking in Italy isn’t solving anything. We need to put on a good front for the partners, as soon as possible, before they start jumping to unfortunate conclusions about our dependability.”
Maya was shaking her head at the darkness on the other side of the window before her.
“That sounds like a you problem, if I’m honest.”
“Don’t be childish, please. It demeans us both. I’m talking about our careers.”
“And somehow, I don’t think I’m the one demeaning anything. What good front do I need to put on? I’m the one who was left at the altar.” She made her voice as bland as possible. “All I have to do is put on a brave face and I’m the heroine of this story. Your road is a little rougher, I’m afraid.”
“I’m aware of the optics,” he snapped at her. “That’s why we need to do this together.”
“The last thing we did together was plan a wedding. You’ll understand if I’m less interested in joint projects from here on out.”
“This is what I’m talking about. This childishness. Who is that helping?”
“You’re going to have to rehabilitate your image on your own,” Maya said coolly. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’m sure you’ll quickly discover that no one really cares that much about your personal life. I can assure you that I certainly don’t. In fact, I would prefer to never hear about your personal life or your deep and abiding love, ever again.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand.” He sounded lofty then. Like some kind of martyr to love.
It was maddening.
Maya’s temples were pounding, and she pressed the fingers of her free hand against her forehead, urging herself not to give in to the wave of temper.
“Here’s the thing, Ethan. You and I both know that the only thing you will ever love is yourself. Luckily, Lorraine is more or less the same. And I’m sure you’ll do wonderfully together.”
“I already told you I won’t tolerate your nasty asides.”
“I think we both know that you don’t care about me, my feelings or anything else, or none of this would have happened.”
A funny thing happened when she said it that way. Out loud. Stark and matter-of-fact. And to him. Especially when he didn’t argue. It put the years they’d spent together into order. It highlighted all the things she’d told herself were just a part of a long-term relationship—one that greatly resembled her parents’ businesslike arrangement.
I don’t want to be my parents, she admitted to herself. They were as cold as a Canadian winter, frozen straight through, and she’d tasted fire now. She’d burned alive—and she liked it.
She felt free and sad at the same time. Unmoored. “Let’s be cl
ear about why you’re really stonewalling my sister. It would be inconvenient for you to relocate. That’s why you don’t want to leave the condo. Not because it has any sentimental value to you and not even because you’re trying to hurt me, somehow. Because you would have to care to do that.”
Ethan sighed. “If I’m such a sociopath, why did you want to marry me?”
“A question I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life grappling with,” she shot right back. “But today, happily, that’s one more thing that’s not my problem. If you want the condo, you need to buy me out. And if I were you, I would think long and hard about lowballing me, as I know you’re going to try to do.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m not going to play these adolescent games with you in the middle of the night. We’ll talk when you get back from Italy.”
And impossibly, laughably, he hung up.
He hung up on her.
For a long moment, Maya didn’t move. She sat where she was, her mobile in her hand, staring at the screen in disbelief.
But then something shifted inside her.
It had something to do with the glorious way Charlie had taught her how to surrender. To move into the things she feared or wanted, or both at the same time—and discover who she really was on the other side of it.
Her heart kicked at her at that, but she couldn’t think about him yet. Not quite yet.
She thought about what she knew instead. All those grays, the black-and-whites and Ethan in the middle of it, so certain that she would do as he wanted.
Because she always had.
She had been more dedicated to the idea of their perfect life together than she had been to him, personally. They had rarely fought, because there was nothing to fight about. Maya had always done that math and come up with the same conclusion. Keeping their busy, glossy life running smoothly had been her priority. Always. If she hadn’t been sure about something, Ethan would argue her into it. He would sit her down, lay out his argument and treat her like a recalcitrant jury.
And she had accepted that. She had enjoyed it, even. If asked, she would have said that it was one of the things she loved about their relationship. They were so logical. So rational. Even when things got emotional, they managed to talk their way to an equitable solution.
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