by Lindsey Hart
I’m a mess. I know that.
But I can’t stop thinking.
Thinking about Aria. Thinking about the sounds she made next to my ear. How my skin burned when she touched me. How her touch did things to me…things I still don’t fully understand. Her image is like a brand burned onto the inside of my head. Onto my traitor of a brain. The ol’ grey matter…it’s a bit of a bastard. It won’t let Aria’s piercing blue eyes, the tenderness, the passion, the heat, the hurt—it won’t let any of it go. My balls are also real bastards. My dick is in on operation Destroy Lucas.
Aria is beautiful. She smelled good. Sounded glorious. Tasted divine. It’s more than that, though.
It was after. After the physical. Beyond that, when I glimpsed her spirit. That’s what I can’t forget.
I resist the urge to let out a pretty pathetic whimper of pain, and instead, reach for the remote. My fingers curl around it, clutch it to my aching chest, but I don’t do anything with it. I let the sports reruns keep playing. Highlights that I don’t see. Even if I changed the channel, I still wouldn’t see it.
Something rips through the house. A sound. A creepy, weird, shrill sound. The hair on the backs of my arms stands on end, and I leap from the couch, knocking over the glass of stale soda and upending pizza boxes. Slices of pizza fly all over, soaring high in the air and coming down with dull splats of cheese, sauce, and extra meat. They litter the floor, and it’s all I can do to pick my way over them as I stumble towards the source of the sound. My doorbell.
I’m halfway to the door before I realize that I’m so exhausted, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. I rub my eyes to clear the black and white spots dancing in front of them and stifle a yawn. A quick glance at my phone, which I pull out of my back pocket, confirms that I did indeed doze off. It’s after midnight.
So why the heck is someone out there ringing my doorbell?
No one called or texted me.
Even though the hair on my neck stands up again, this time because I’m fully awake and confused about who or what is on the other end of that door, like a bad horror, at midnight, I march forward and open it anyway. Because you know…I’m really not that bright when it counts, I guess.
Or maybe I just sensed who would be on the other end.
Aria.
I blink. The white spots flare behind my eyes for an entirely different reason. I feel strangely tired and exhilarated all at once.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt out. “I thought you were in Denver.”
“I was.” Aria purses her lips.
She’s gorgeous. She’s also the most casual I’ve ever seen her, at least as far as what she’s wearing. She’s got on yoga pants and a pullover sweater. Still. All of her finer assets are very well defined. She looks amazing. God. Better than that. When my eyes finally make my way back up to her face instead of taking in her tight bottoms and her loose, but equally sexy top half, I realize she also looks tired. Her hair is pulled into a loose bun at the top of her head. She hardly has any makeup on, and there are purple smudges underneath her eyes and tiny lines bracketing her lips. They don’t detract from her beauty one bit.
My heart trips over itself. The hedgehogs go wild in my stomach.
“Uh—do you—why…why are you here?”
“I was hoping to come in for a few minutes. To talk to you about something.”
“What’s that?” I realize I’m still holding onto the door. Blocking it. I don’t step back. I don’t open it up. I don’t let her in. Aria Watson might not be a creepy thug with a twenty-four-inch knife sent to butcher me in D-grade horror movie style, but she’s still dangerous. She might even be more frightening.
“I—er—wanted to go over the investment. That I offered. I—uh—I’m doing up the books. I need to account for it. Make the transfer. You didn’t give me your information yet. I—uh—well—actually, that’s all bullshit.” She closes her eyes and clutches her hands at her sides.
This might also be the most discomposed I’ve ever seen her. Shadows flit across her face. Shadows that have absolutely nothing to do with the unwavering streetlights and silent street just beyond my doorstep. The night is totally quiet.
“You know what? Fuck it. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because Cassie told me that you were miserable all week. She said you were hurting, and it drives me insane to think about you in pain, especially because it might have something to do with me. Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I don’t know. I—I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay.”
“So, you came all the way from Denver to ask me that?”
“I guess I did, yes.”
“Have you ever thought about calling? Texting?”
“I like to keep extremely personal interactions to a minimum over technology. I knew you wouldn’t answer me properly over the phone. Or at all.”
“You’re right. I have my phone turned off.”
Aria glances inside past me and raises a brow. “Did you have an accident in there? It looks like a pizza and soda explosion happened.”
I nearly shrivel up with embarrassment. Not only is there pink soda sprayed all over the living room and dripping down the hall and the couch, but there are also pizza booby traps all over the floor, and empty boxes…oh right. And I probably stink. Because, you know, pity-parties and not showering are kind of a smelly combination.
“Are you going to let me in, or do I have to stand out here and talk about really personal, embarrassing crap on your doorstep so anyone who’s up having a midnight snack can hear it?”
“You could always turn around and leave and save us both.”
Aria slowly crosses her arms over her chest. She pushes up her boobs so I can’t help but look there, but also lets me know, with that determined gesture, that she’s not going anywhere.
“Right. I should have known better. Common sense and Aria Watson don’t go hand in hand.”
“No. They don’t. Which is why I’m here in person. After literally catching yet another flight across the country. I’m here instead of sitting back in my friend’s comfy cabin, sipping on wine and gossiping about girl things. I’m here because I have zero common sense where you’re concerned, Lucas Dawson, and I never have.”
“If you’re going to make more confessions of undying love—”
“What if I am?” Aria’s brow rises sharply. Straight into her blonde hairline. I want to sink my fingers into her hair. I want to pull out that messy bun until there is no more bun, and it’s just a wild, flaxen mess.
I’d like to do a few more things too…
Make some other wild messes.
My dick surges to life. My balls are definitely on board with wild messes too.
A few fleeting images stampede through my addled, sleep-deprived, confused, traitor of a brain. Aria at fourteen. Standing in the kitchen looking lost, her face consumed by her huge blue eyes, right behind Cassie, who was trying to explain to our parents why she brought her mysterious friend home from boarding school. I thought she looked like a stray cat. A feral, stray cat. A much more grown-up version of Aria, at eighteen, by the pool wearing a little, skimpy red bikini, her head thrown back in laughter, her blonde hair tumbling all over the place. Aria at twenty-two, helping herself to a glass of milk and a few cookies out of the cupboard at three in the morning when she and Cassie got back from some bar they’d been to. She didn’t know I was housesitting for my parents while they were away on vacation. Aria at our family holidays, birthday parties, Christmases even. Aria throughout the years.
The point is, Aria’s been a fixture of my life, in one annoying way or other, since she was fourteen. I was twenty. It’s been fifteen years. She’s literally been in my life for a decade and a half.
I don’t know when it happened.
When I started noticing her.
Obviously, it was long after she was legal. Jesus Christ. Give me some credit. I think it might have been that night I caught her stea
ling that milk from the fridge. Cassie and I were housesitting. Obviously, Aria didn’t know I was there. She nearly jumped out of her skin when I walked into the kitchen behind her. She was dunking a chocolate chip cookie into a tall glass of milk. Her hair was undone, a wild storm of blonde. Her eye makeup was smeared. She looked, for a fleeting moment in the light spilling through the kitchen windows, completely unguarded and wrenchingly beautiful. She looked like a nymph in that kitchen. One with a predilection for chocolate chip cookies and milk. After the bar. At three in the morning.
Maybe it was then. Maybe it was later. During the many holidays she spent with our family. One of the many times she happened to be at the house at the same time. The many, many times.
Fuck it, I have no idea when it happened, but I’ve been fighting it for a while—the growing attraction I had for her. The way I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
I passed it off as being pissed off. I’d think about how annoying she was. How arrogant and bratty and entirely insufferable as a person she was. I’d come up with any excuse I could to try and dislike her. She didn’t make it very hard. Every single time we had to talk to each other, it was always a sparring match. A battle of wits. A tangling of our minds, and maybe…maybe our emotions too.
Unbidden, I think about that day at the lawyer’s office. When I was barfing up rotten sushi into a recycling bin, and Aria was there. Slowly, gently, soothingly stroking my back. She took me home. Risked me barfing in her crazy expensive car. She wasn’t disgusted. She…cared. She was worried.
“That’s right.” Aria, apparently, can read me like a freaking open book.
I don’t want to be a book. I want to slam the covers closed. Because I’m afraid she’ll reach in and read things I don’t want her to read. That she’ll grab the pages from the inside and tear them out. Even worse, that she’ll take a look inside and find it a let-down and throw the disappointing book in the fire to be done with it. I’m scared she’ll move on to another more exciting, prettier, less antique, more exotic book.
“Nothing is right,” I snap. I want to shut the door, but my arm won’t cooperate. It sticks there uselessly, my fingers curling like deadweight around the edge.
“Lucas…” Aria’s eyes shoot to my face. My hand falls limply away from the door to hang by my side like a wet noodle. “What I feel for you—it’s not—that is…it’s different. You’re different. You’re always going to be different.”
“That’s scary, Aria, coming from you.” My pretty rude attempt at a joke falls flat.
Aria inclines her head to the side, studying me. “I guess it is. More than a little. Anyway. Are you going to let me in? I’ll sweeten the deal by offering to clean up that mess for you.”
God. Only Aria freaking Watson would make me an offer like that. Only she would come up with that. Only she would fly all the way to Denver and back in one day to ask me if I’m doing okay. She can see I’m not. She must have known I wasn’t. Cassie must have blabbed, and here I thought I had her fooled. I thought I had everyone fooled. Even. Myself.
“Lucas? I’m pretty much telling you that I…well…that I have feelings…” That word scrapes out, grating over a tightly closed up throat. I get it. I get why Aria sounds strangled like that.
Turns out, I might know what she’s talking about.
Turns out, I wasn’t fooling anyone.
CHAPTER 13
Aria
Lucas doesn’t move. He doesn’t open the door, grace me with a smile, or tell me to get the heck inside. He doesn’t frown at me either. He doesn’t tell me to take a hike or laugh in my face. He doesn’t yell at me to shove my feelings where the sun doesn’t shine. He doesn’t do anything.
Which is bad.
Really bad.
His face is impassive. Placid. Does he truly not feel anything at all? Some kind of emotion would be better than nothing.
I’ll admit this is not the best Lucas has ever looked. He’s wearing grey sweats and a black t-shirt. There may be a pizza sauce stain on the sweats, on the left thigh. They might also be rumpled. His hair might be mussed, and he might look like he hasn’t slept in a week. A strong odor might be wafting out the door at me.
However, I don’t freaking care.
I devour him anyway. Every single time I’ve seen him, even though it’s been a decade and a half since that first monumental shift in my world, it is like the first time. Every single time I want to go right up to him, wrap my arms around him, lean in, and breathe deeply. I want to taste him. I want to touch him. I want to be like glue. I want to test the capacity of my lungs and voice because I want to shout it out to the whole world that I want to be pathetic. I want to be all the things I swore I’d never be. I want to need. I’d be okay with being pathetic for Lucas. With needing him. With becoming soft and gooey, if it was his soft and gooey.
“I’ve tried…” I can’t stop the flow of words. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should. Either way, it’s not happening. They just pour right out. “I’ve tried to stop, Lucas. I’ve tried to purge you out and wash you away. I can’t. Every single time I see you, it’s like the first time all over again. I keep falling. Harder. I keep wanting you. More. I have all the strange physical sensations. I keep aching. I thought that after a decade and a half, it would have quit. It hasn’t. It’s only gotten worse. It’s so much more than physical now. I know we are complete opposites. We’re like the sun and earth—all mixed up in each other’s orbits whether we like it or not. All those times I’ve seen you, all those tiny stolen moments, I’ve compiled them away. I’ve clung to them even when I know I shouldn’t have. This—right now—it’s not a fraction of anything. It’s not partial. It’s not stolen. I’m here. So please. Either send me away for good or tell me to come in and clean up that mess all over your living room.”
Lucas still doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t do anything. He’s seemingly unmoved by the impassioned speech I just made. I glance behind me to check if any of the neighbors heard it, but the lights are still off in all the surrounding houses.
“What does my sister have to say about this?”
I snap my head back around. Jesus. I wasn’t prepared for that. “Uh—well—she was shocked. Pissed. Shocked some more. Pissed some more. I think she’s still shocked and pissed, but we hugged it out. It’s pretty hard to do more than that when I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next five minutes.”
“So you confessed what happened to my sister and Rin, got in a heated debate about it, probably told them off in your usual obnoxious way, realized you couldn’t be your usual obnoxious self because they’re your best friends, and they know you better than that and can see right through you, still tried to be obnoxious, came to some kind of agreement since Cassie does, for some unfathomable reason, love you, and since you’re like a junkyard dog with an intruder’s leg in its mouth who won’t let go of what you truly want, she sent you on your way with her sort of blessing and with the hopes that you’ll somehow salvage this so we can both go on with our lives in some way or other?”
“I think,” I say a little breathlessly because damn, that was incredibly insightful and also delivered in the sexiest of husky tones, “that might have been the most I’ve ever heard you say at one time.”
“It’s an unfortunate by-product of having you around. I always say more than I mean to.”
“Do you feel more than you mean to as well?” It’s bold. I know. But seriously, it’s almost one in the morning, and I’ve been standing out here for what feels like ages. I’m either going in there or leaving.
Those green eyes hit me hard. When have they ever failed to hit me like that? Oh right. Never. As usual, they’re staring straight through me, a little unfathomable themselves. My gut clenches up. I was listening to it when I decided to come here. Trusting it. Hoping against hope.
Maybe my gut was wrong.
Maybe trusting your gut instead of going with common sense is a very, very bad idea.
I’m in the middle o
f berating myself, swearing internally at my own foolish hopes and my untrustworthy hunches when Lucas clears his throat.
“You seriously want to come in and clean up my living room?”
My hands clench and unclench reflexively at my side. I can count the number of people on two fingers who truly know me. Rin. And Cassie. They’re the only two people on this planet who have ever heard or seen the genuine me. I’m about to add a third, which is terrifying and risky. I don’t normally do terrifying and risky. Ever.
“Yes. I seriously do.” And there’s the truth. I say those words with utmost sincerity. I open myself up, ready for the jabs and the hurt, the sting of rejection I know is probably inevitable.
Turns out that sometimes when you kick a wasp nest, you get lucky and don’t get stung.
“What about me?” Lucas asks smugly, and I can tell he’s trying not to smile. I know, in that very second, I was right. My gut wasn’t such a bastard after all, and my instincts weren’t all out of whack. “You want to clean me up too?”
“No.” I shake my head firmly.
“No?” Lucas’s brows knit together.
“No. You don’t need cleaning up. You’re perfect. Sparkly and shiny or puking up bad sushi, you’re perfect. Freshly showered or smelling like a pair of week old, dirty socks, you’re perfect. You’ve always been perfect, Lucas. Whatever happens after this minute, I hope you know that.”
I watch his fingers tighten on the door. Literally. They shift. Curl at the ends. Turn a little white around the nailbeds.
“Well then,” he says softly, his voice husky and hushed. The kind of voice that does all sorts of wild things to my insides. “I guess, if that’s the case, you should come in.”
I left everything in the car before ringing the doorbell. My bags. My purse. My phone. I did make sure it was locked, and right now, I just have my keys clenched in my left palm. I don’t go back for anything. I don’t need any of it. The only thing I need is Lucas.