Back To The Start Box Set: Five Full-Length Novels

by Aly Martinez

  Shit. It was early.

  With sleepy eyes, I looked to the bathroom, but the light was off and the door was open. Jude’s bag was still in the corner across the room, so he hadn’t gone home. Not that I thought he would have without telling me, but it was one more place I could strike off my list of where he could be.

  “Jude,” I called as I crawled out of bed and headed to my bedroom door.

  Maybe he couldn’t sleep and went to watch TV?

  When I got to the hall, the only light came from my tattoo room.

  Smiling, I didn’t think much of it as I started toward the door, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and attempting to smooth my unruly morning hair down.

  “Honey,” I whispered, pushing the door open wide.

  My stomach dropped immediately.

  Jude was sitting in the middle of the floor, my books strewn haphazardly around him, pure and utter torture contorting his gorgeous face until he was almost unrecognizable.

  “What is this?” he whispered, motioning to the books.

  All at once, it felt like my chest was caving in and my heart was exploding, breaking into a million shards, ravaging me without ever escaping.

  I slapped both hands over my mouth and shook my head tightly, embarrassment flooding my system.

  “Jesus, Rhion. What the fuck is this bullshit?” he asked roughly.

  I recoiled but didn’t answer.

  As he pushed to his feet, I fought the desire to forcefully drag him from the room, board the door up, and never look back. I didn’t care that it was only those books that had helped me survive the first year after the fire. Nor did I care that it had taken me nearly four years and countless hours of thankless work to write them. I would have happily abandoned every last page if it could have erased the look of disgust from his face.

  “They’re…they’re nothing,” I stammered, backing away.

  Rage flared in his eyes as he stalked toward me. Through clenched teeth, he seethed, “Don’t you fucking dare start that nothing shit again. You don’t get to play that card. Not now. Not fucking ever again.”

  “You’re scaring me,” I admitted, throwing a hand up to stop him.

  “Good!” he boomed. “After the shit I just read, it’s time you realize I’m a goddamn man, not some fictional character you created in that perfect little la-la land you so obviously inhabit.”

  Okay. That hurt. A lot. Especially because it had come from him.

  But, for those first few years after the fire, I couldn’t say he was wrong. I had been struggling, and yeah, losing myself in la-la land had been easier than facing the reality about my life.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  He threw his hands out to his sides and then let them slap his thighs as he dropped them. “Oh thank God, because for a minute there, I thought you had rewritten the night of the fire fifteen different ways. All starring me. All starring you. But not one thread of truth to be found. Yet, somehow, I end up fucking you in every goddamn one of them!”

  I blinked and began worrying my necklace. “Okay, so maybe it is what you think. But it’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “It is as bad as it looks! The night of the fire was a fucking nightmare! It changed my entire life. But, somehow, you’ve romanticized it into the night you met your soul mate, and here I am, standing in your fucking apartment, falling in love with you like it was a goddamn prophecy.”

  I winced but kept my chin held high. “You don’t have to be a dick about this. You could allow me to talk.”

  “Talk?” He scoffed. “Right. Since you’ve been so fucking good at that over the last six weeks. Maybe I should just ask Johnson and Leo about this since they seem to be the only ones who answer any of my fucking questions about you.”

  “That’s not fair! I’ve told you everything recently.”

  “Everything except the part about making up men who actually fucking saved you!”

  I took a giant step forward, stabbing a finger into his chest. “You saved me!”

  His gaze became pained, but his anger never subsided. “Stop fucking saying that! I’m not a goddamn hero. You fell, Rhion. Because of me. I was drinking and not thinking straight. It almost cost you your life.”

  “Almost,” I countered. “I’m not dead.”

  With a sweeping arm, he bent and scooped one of the books off the floor before sending it flying across the room. “I’m not like those men you wrote! Jesus Christ, Rhion. I didn’t jump on top of you when the house came down! I fell! Like a drunk fucking idiot. Three more steps and we would have been out of the way, and I fucking fell!” He picked another book up and sent it sailing. “Write that in your little fucking books!”

  I might have carried the majority of the scars of that night, but it was clear he was hurting—worse than I ever had. While the flames had long since been extinguished for me, they still burned hotter than ever inside his conscience, and it shattered me.

  I reached out for him only for him to deny the contact.

  “I wasn’t injured though,” I told him. “Because of you. The how doesn’t matter. It just mattered what happened,” I said evenly, unwilling to match his intensity.

  He laughed, but it held no humor. “Jesus Christ, Rhion. What actually happened was I gave you bad advice, I nearly got you killed, and…” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And you write bullshit like smelling my cologne and having it soothe you? It was whiskey, sweetheart. Not fucking cologne. And we didn’t talk after the fire. There was no, ‘You’re real, Butterfly,’ because as I watched you screaming and writhing in pain, unable to form a coherent thought, I prayed to any and every fucking god in the universe that you weren’t!”

  I shrank back, but he kept talking.

  In paragraphs.

  Horrible, heartbreaking paragraphs.

  “And…that shit at the hospital, where I was all gorgeous, strutting in to see you? That never happened! I was laid up in a hospital bed with a broken leg, cops and attorneys swarming around me as they debated if I was going to be arrested or not. And, when I finally did try to see you, they wouldn’t fucking let me! All I got was an eyeful of you pinned to a fucking cross as Peter Higgins’s bodyguards rolled me out in a wheelchair because I couldn’t even walk.”

  I flinched because my conscience blazed like a bonfire. Bile crept up my throat, choking me. “I’m sorry.”

  Intertwining his fingers, he rested them on the top of his head. “You’re sorry? You’re fucking sorry? For what, Rhion? Wishing I were a better man than I actually was? Then I’m fucking sorry too, because I have wished that every damn day for four years.” He stormed past me.

  My heart lurched, as I spun to follow him.

  “That’s not why I wrote those books! I wasn’t trying to make you a better man,” I informed his back.

  He didn’t reply as he marched into my room and began shoving his stuff into his bag.

  I snatched a shirt from his hand. “Stop and listen to me.”

  He let me have it and moved to his shoes lining the wall on his side of my bed. “I’m not interested in half a story tonight, Rhion, which is basically all you ever give me.”

  My chin jerked to the side and I gasped, “Are you calling me a liar?”

  He laughed, taking his pajama pants off before pulling a pair of jeans on, “Nope because that would require you to actually tell me things. You just flitter through your life, bullshitting anyone and everyone so they can’t get to know you. You kept this shit a secret for almost two goddamn months.”

  And that was when I exploded.

  Throwing his shirt at him, I shouted, “I did tell you! And you didn’t fucking remember!”

  He stopped the furious packing and snapped his head in my direction.

  “Friday night,” I whispered. “When you showed up at my apartment, I told you everything. How I’d spent four years wishing I could thank you. How I’d never stopped thinking about you. How I’d written books about that night because I hated the way
everything happened after it. And then I kissed you, but not because I had some obsession with the characters I’d written in those pages, but because you were better.”

  He screwed his eyes shut. “Better. Right.”

  “Yes. Better! You told me you were sorry. Profusely. You held me as though you were trying to fuse our bodies together. You hugged me tighter than anyone in my entire life. And then we started talking, and yeah, I knew you were drunk, but you made me laugh and it didn’t hurt for the first time in years. You told how much you’d thought about me. How you wished you’d been able to save me. And, moreover, you seemed to really believe it when I told you that you had.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did! If you want to roll in your guilt about that night for the rest of your fucking life, I can’t stop you. We disagree on the night of the fire—wholeheartedly. But you cannot argue with me about what happened after that. The memories of you and those books were the only things that got me through the first year. You gave me hope that heroes were real, Jude. And, back then, when my days were so filled with pain both inside and out, I really needed something to believe in. Make fun of it. Call me crazy. Whatever. I honestly don’t give a damn. But it happened, Jude. That is not fiction. That is real life, and I won’t stand here and let you take that away from me. You. Saved. My life.”

  His face pinched together in agony as he whispered, “Do you even know why I call you Butterfly?”

  An ugly feeling sprouted in my stomach. I didn’t. It was just something I’d heard him yell the day he’d been removed from the hospital.

  And butterflies were beautiful.

  Weren’t they?

  He hooked his bag over his shoulder and opened his eyes. “Because, when you were up on that ledge, you looked like you were desperately trying to catch the wind before you died.” He pointed at the door—toward the tattoo room. “In…” His voice caught, and it felt deep inside me. “In your books, you wrote that I called you ‘my beautiful Butterfly.’ But, Rhion, there was absolutely nothing beautiful about that moment. It was the most horrifically tragic thing I had ever witnessed.” He took a step toward me, sliding his arm around my waist and dropping his forehead to mine. “It’s not a compliment. And the only reason I call you that now is to remind myself that I’ll always be one blink away from losing you again. Tonight. Reading those books, knowing who you wish I were, and knowing I’ll never be that man, I blinked.”

  I swallowed hard as his words washed over me like a million tiny daggers gouging my heart out. “Jude, please,” I whispered, tears pricking the backs of my eyes.

  Reaching down, he caught my hand. Then he lifted it up to the back of his neck and then up under his hair to the thick scars on the back of his head.

  He groaned in pain as his face crumbled. “I’m not real, Rhion. Not as far as you’re concerned. Because that white knight you wrote so many fucking times. Does. Not. Exist.”

  A sob caught in my throat as I tried to jerk my fingers away, but he held them tight, rubbing them up and down the back of his skull.

  “Stop,” I begged, knowing that it had to be torturing him because it was destroying me.

  He refused to let me go and even forced me closer.

  “Stop it.” I shoved at his chest, but he didn’t budge.

  And then, all at once, he released me. As I watched him walk out of my room, there wasn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t have given to be back in his arms.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jude

  She didn’t try to follow me as I stormed out of her door—out of her life.

  I’d been right the night I’d seen her at the bar. I had no right to be a part of her future.

  But, for almost two months, I’d tried.

  And, for two fucking months, I’d pretended like there wasn’t a burning house dividing us.

  We’d talked about the fire. Not in great detail. After all, we’d both been there that night, and neither one of us was eager to go back, not even in a conversation.

  Maybe that had been my first mistake: believing that the past could stay in the past.

  The woman I went to bed with each night wasn’t that broken butterfly I couldn’t escape. She was the woman who made forgetting possible.

  I’d lied to her when I’d told her that I only called her Butterfly as a reminder that I could lose her with a single blink.

  I called her Butterfly because she was mine.

  Her scars.

  Her pain.

  Her smiles.

  Her laughs.

  Her heart.

  Her body.

  I owned them all.

  And, for two fucking months, I’d wanted to keep it all.

  But, now, after having read those books, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to look her in the eye again.

  I was a good guy. A better bodyguard. I made her come harder than any man she could ever write, and from the way my heart felt like it was rotting out of my chest from having walked away from her, I would even go so far as to say that I loved her more too.

  But I couldn’t change the past.

  And she couldn’t stop rewriting it.

  I was waving my card in front of the sensor on the elevator, impatiently waiting for it to arrive, when I heard her door open.

  “And that’s it?” she asked. “You’re just going to leave because I wrote some books about you?”

  “They weren’t about me.” Glancing over my shoulder, I saw she was wearing a little, sleeveless nightgown, a book in her hand, and her feet were bare. I dropped my chin to my chest and waved my card a few more times. “Rhion, get back inside. It’s cold.”

  “I told the cops you smelled like alcohol, you know.”

  I sighed, wishing I had opted for the stairs before she’d had the chance to catch me. “Yeah. I know.”

  “And that you told me to go to the roof.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms, desperate to scrub the memory away. “I know that, too.”

  “And that doesn’t make you a little mad?” Her voice got closer until I could feel her warmth at my side.

  “No! Because it was true!” I boomed, turning to face her.

  She didn’t flinch as she stared up at me, emotionless. “You risked your life and I paid you back by throwing you under the bus? Come on, Jude. Even you, all consumed by regret, have to see how fucked up that was.”

  “No, Rhion. It never crossed my mind to be pissed at you. The cops asked you questions, you gave them answers.”

  “Yeah. You told me that on Friday night, but I still struggle to believe it.” She slapped the book against my chest. “Because I spent the last four years regretting things too. Every day, I wanted to thank you. Every day, I wanted to say I was sorry. Every fucking day, I wanted to change the fact that you saved my life and I fed you to the wolves. So I did. Read it again, Jude. And, if you never want to see me again, fine. But, just so you know, I didn’t make you a different man. I made me a different woman. In those pages, I wasn’t weak and terrified, crying and broken, barely surviving.” Her face turned hard. “In those books, I was a beautiful fucking butterfly, and I refuse to allow you to make me feel bad about that.”

  The book fell to the ground at my feet as she turned and walked back into her apartment.

  I blinked as the door quietly closed behind her.

  Jesus. Christ.

  Weren’t we a fucking pair?

  That one night had ruined both of us. We’d been living worlds apart but still sharing a common guilt. Mine was for what I had deemed failing her. Hers was for what she had deemed failing me.

  The only difference was she’d done something about fixing it—even if it was fiction.

  I’d spent a lot of sleepless nights rewriting the fire in my head.

  In my version, I’d scaled that house like Spiderman, carrying her to safety, burn-free.

  Sometimes, the house still fell, but we watched it from across the street, breathing clean, fresh
air, her secure in my arms.

  I’d never been drinking.

  We’d never been injured.

  And I’d always saved the day.

  Minus the part where we fell in love and rode off into the sunset, my version wasn’t all that different than hers.

  But there was an integral difference between our two stories.

  When I’d mentally rewritten mine, I had known the truth.

  With as much shit as I’d given her over the last few weeks for not being forthcoming, I’d been holding a secret for over four years.

  And it ate me away. As silly as it sounded, I’d spent my whole life dreaming of becoming a cop. Swooping in to save the day. Making the world a safer place. But, much to my surprise, wearing a badge hadn’t made me a hero. Nor did putting a uniform on change the man who wore it.

  It was time she knew who I really was—even if it meant losing her.

  Snagging her book off the ground, I turned and headed to her door. I scanned my card and pushed it wide only to come to a screeching halt when I found her standing not three feet away, hope filling her eyes as she nervously chewed on her lips and toyed with her necklace.

  She’d been waiting. Knowing I couldn’t leave. Not like that. And I’ll be damned if that didn’t stir something inside me—and make me regret everything that much more.

  “I was leaving you,” I announced, the confession singeing the tip of my tongue.

  She smiled weakly and took a step toward me. “But you came back.”

  “I’m not talking about tonight.” Emotion lodged the words in my throat. I gripped the back of my neck so hard that pain radiated down my back. “The night of the fire. The scars. I told the cops that, when you fell, it sent flames toward me and I turned away on instinct before rushing in after you. But it was a lie. I was leaving you. I didn’t run into the fire after you, Rhion. I was on fire and running away. You caught my ankle and I was struggling to pry your fingers off me, fighting you with every step, in order to escape the flames that had engulfed my back. I guess, in the process, I somehow managed to drag us both out.”

  I stopped talking and stared down at the floor, unwilling to meet her gaze. I couldn’t take seeing the revulsion that I was positive would be etched on her face. God knew it lived and breathed like a creature inside me on a daily basis.