Crush (Tainted Love Duet #2)

by Kim Karr

  Although frightened, I wouldn’t let him see it. Instead, I jerked away. Even with tears in my eyes I refused to look anywhere but at him. In his face I saw many things, and I think he might have even had a tear in his own eye. We stared at each other until that one tear slid down his cheek. When I finally looked away, I wondered whether he was crying over my mother being gone or being stuck with me.

  It was the only tear I ever saw him shed.

  The shrill ring of my phone startled me. Tiny flicks of hope bloomed beneath my skin as I practically skidded for the purse that I’d thrown onto my bed. Fumbling to get it out, I couldn’t help but think I had been wrong about Logan. My hands were shaking as I looked at the screen. The name Michael, not Logan, was what flashed before me. And just like that, all of my hope diminished. But then, what had I thought? That it was Logan, and even though he’d cleared out of my life, he’d miraculously changed his mind?

  And what, that I was going to be okay with that?

  The thought weakened my knees because yes, I would have been.

  “Hello,” I answered as I sat on the still tangled sheets where Logan and I had lain a mere twelve hours ago.

  “Elle, hey, are you home?”

  Five seconds of silence.

  “Elle?”

  I composed myself as best I could. “Yes, I am.”

  “Great. I just picked Clementine up from Erin’s and she’s been asking for you.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Where’s Heidi?”

  “I thought I told you. She quit. She was moving her things out today and I thought it would be best if we weren’t around.”

  Concern for Clementine made my chest tighten. “Why? What happened?”

  “It just wasn’t working out. The live-in thing isn’t for me. I have someone new starting Monday. I know it’s last minute, but it is Saturday. Any chance you haven’t eaten yet and would like to come over for a late dinner? We can talk about it then.”

  The rain had kept me from taking Clementine on our Friday afternoon walk so I hadn’t seen her since Wednesday, and I did miss her. Besides, getting out of here wouldn’t be a bad idea. I tried to control the tremble in my voice. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t eaten. Dinner sounds great.” I had absolutely no appetite, but I did have a need to see Clementine. She was the only stable thing in my life.

  “I’m about ten minutes away from your place. I can pick you up.”

  “That would be great. I’ll be ready.”

  “And Elle, if you haven’t arranged to purchase a new vehicle yet, you can take the Mercedes back until you do.”

  Although I knew better than to rely on anyone but myself, I also knew right now that I shouldn’t turn it down. “I’d really appreciate that, Michael, but this time I promise it won’t be for long.”

  My hands were still shaking when I hung up the phone. Heartbroken, I absolutely hated what was happening in my life right now. It felt out of control. For so long, it hadn’t been. For so long, it had been just the way I’d planned it. Right now, I felt like that teen under my father’s rule—lost and alone.

  Soon enough I’d have saved enough money to make a down payment on a car and could stop relying on other people. Depending on others never ended well.

  How had I ever allowed myself to become dependent on Logan? I was stronger than that.

  Moving quickly to avoid letting my feelings take over, I hurried downstairs and grabbed some clean clothes out of the laundry room. I think I was in a state of shock over Logan leaving me, because what should have been sorrow was beginning to feel more like rage.

  When Charlie left me I had been sad. Right now I was mad.

  Coward!

  I’d thought I knew Logan. I’d thought he was different. That he really, truly loved me. Me. But I had been wrong.

  Staying away from here for a couple of days would probably be best. And I knew Michael wouldn’t mind. If I were alone, I didn’t know what I’d do. Thoughts of hunting Logan down and telling him how I felt were top on the list, though. His father’s and Molly’s were two more-than-likely places he’d be. But a psycho ex-girlfriend was nothing I wanted to be.

  No, I’d leave things the way he did.

  Silent and broken.

  Tossing some extra clothes into a bag was all I needed to do. I’d left toiletries at Michael’s from my nights of staying over before Logan.

  Beep. Beep.

  Compartmentalizing my anguish was something I knew how to do well. I drew in a breath and headed for the door. Whenever I went to Michael’s I had to leave Logan behind, and this time would be no different.

  The cool night air felt good on my skin but as I walked toward Michael’s car, I just couldn’t let go of Logan. I told myself to squelch the sadness that was looming over me. He was gone. The faster I could accept that, the better off I’d be. Still, I couldn’t help but remember how I thought he was different. How I thought he loved me in a way no one ever had.

  That our love could conquer anything.

  Mindlessly, I opened the door.

  “Mommy!” Clementine shrieked as soon as she saw me.

  All things Logan disappeared as panic set in. With my heart in my throat, my eyes darted to Michael.

  He was shaking his head. “Clementine, Daddy told you, that’s Auntie Elle. Your mommy’s in heaven.”

  “Mommy,” she called again, waiting for me to turn around and greet her.

  My eyes were still on Michael as I got in and closed the door. “She keeps referring to you that way. I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to get her to stop.”

  It was odd, but a feeling of relief coursed through me and I turned around. “Hi, silly girl.” I clutched her kicking foot. “I missed you. How are you today?”

  Sputtering sounds escaped her throat and my broken heart felt a little more whole at the pure excitement this little girl felt at seeing me.

  She was what I needed.

  Michael pulled away and a piece of my heart was left on the curb.

  “So how’s business?” he asked. “We haven’t talked much lately. It’s keeping you pretty busy, I take it.”

  The boutique was the other bright spot in my life. “Business is booming. I can’t believe how people have taken to the idea of the finest things in life. To be honest, I’m having a hard time keeping the shelves stocked. I’m trying to buy up as much inventory as I can.”

  The rain started up again and he took the corner with caution. “Not a bad problem to have.”

  Everything with Michael seemed more at ease tonight. Our conversations were slowly getting easier with each passing day, like they had been before that night that changed everything. The night he, in the most roundabout way, told me that if I didn’t help him I’d be banned from Clementine’s life. Stress had a way of impacting people, though, and maybe he hadn’t meant it the way it came across. He was obviously worried about his daughter. And for good reason. Understanding that, and even though I knew I had to stay on my guard, I was happy things felt more back to normal.

  “What do you think?” he asked as he pulled into his garage.

  I blinked, realizing I’d tuned him completely out for most of the ride.

  He laughed. “I thought I lost you somewhere on the highway. I was talking about dinner. I picked up everything I need to make chicken stir-fry.”

  I raised an impressed brow. “You’re cooking?”

  “Yeah, it’s been a while since I turned the stove on and I felt it was time. Erin fed Clementine, so if you want to give her a bath and put her down, I’ll start chopping.”

  Something felt off about this. I hoped this wasn’t a date and I’d misconstrued what he’d meant by dinner. Grabbing a bite to eat was one thing, but Michael cooking for me felt like something else.

  “Elle, are you sure everything is okay?”

  I plastered a smile on my face. “Yes, it was just a long day. That’s all.”

&nb
sp; “If you’re too tired, I can take care of Clementine.”

  Realizing it sounded like I didn’t want to, I spoke quickly. “No, I’d love to put her to bed.”

  He opened his door. “Great, I’ll grab the groceries. You grab her.”

  Before he questioned my behavior anymore, I did as he said.

  Whenever Clementine spent the day at Erin’s, she came home exhausted. Nap time there was spotty, and she was used to getting her full two hours each and every day. Without complaint she let me give her a quick bath. She usually liked to play in the water, but not tonight. Within twenty minutes we were in the rocker in her pink fairy-decorated room and I was reading her Goodnight Moon.

  The sparkle on the walls was supposed to look like fairy dust and every time I was in here, I wondered if my sister had come up with the idea. In a way, it looked like dandelion weeds blowing in the wind. I’d never asked Michael about it. Sharing that part of my past was too intimate. I already knew he was very unaware of what Lizzy’s and my childhood was like because when I first arrived in Boston, he asked me if my parents had heard from my sister. Lizzy hadn’t even told him our mother had died.

  “And good night to Clementine,” I said, putting our special spin on it as I tried to reel in my scattered thoughts.

  She clapped.

  Closing the last page of the book, I hugged her tightly. “I love you,” I told her.

  She wrapped her little arms around me in a hug that melted me. She was what I needed to help ease the ever-growing gap in my chest. Logan’s abandonment of me was starting to settle in, the anger wearing off, and grief becoming a screaming wound opening deeper and deeper.

  After a long while, I brought her to her crib and settled her beneath a blanket. “Good night, sweet girl,” I whispered and kissed her, not once, but twice.

  Her eyes were closed before I even backed away from the crib and I had an overwhelming urge to go bury myself under the covers and go to bed myself, but I knew I couldn’t.

  Quietly, I tiptoed down the hallway. The house was old, but all the rooms had been remodeled with a distinguished elegance. Michael had owned the house for a few years and although I’d never asked, I was certain it had been decorated before my sister moved in. With its parquet wood floors, white walls, and different shades of blues throughout, it looked like something out of Martha’s Vineyard.

  My sister had been more wild child. The sixties “peace, love, not war” was her philosophy. Her drug use went along with her disposition. It was just who she was. How she rebelled, I used to think, but maybe it was more how she coped.

  As I passed Heidi’s former room, something about its disarray caught my attention. This room had navy drapes and a white bedspread with blue doves embroidered all over it. It was typically kept neat, as was every room in the house. Today it was anything but. The bed was unmade and the blue-and-white striped carpet was thrown back. I found that strange.

  Inside the room, it was apparent that Heidi had left in a hurry. The drawers were all pulled open. And as I glanced around, everything seemed slightly disheveled—not just the rug or the dressers, or the bed, but the closet door was wide open, with hangers on the floor.

  I kicked the rug back into place, and that’s when I saw a yellow piece of paper in the wastebasket. It was from the type of pad Michael used all the time. With a quick glance behind me to make certain I was still alone, I uncrumpled it. It read, Pick one. Below those words was a web address: www.evanmarks.com.

  That was all.

  I’d never heard of the site.

  Didn’t know what it meant.

  But I’d seen the words before in Michael’s ex-secretary’s drawer.

  I was curious and continued to glance around looking for something else.

  Footfalls on the stairs alerted me that Michael was coming up. Tossing the paper back into the trash, I began to straighten the bed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I pretended to be startled and grabbed my chest. “Oh, you scared me. Sorry, my OCD kicked in. Heidi seems to have left a mess. I thought I’d straighten up a bit.”

  Michael stepped inside the room and glanced around.

  My heart was pounding.

  His eyes landed on me, and for a moment I thought he might have seen how perplexed I was by the way Heidi had cleared her things out, but then he shoved a drawer closed. “She wasn’t the neatest houseguest.”

  I tugged the corner of the bedspread. “No, she wasn’t.”

  He was behind me, his arms around me reaching for the spread. “Another reason she didn’t work out,” he whispered in my ear.

  I smelled liquor on his breath. Images of my father came to mind, and I tried not to shudder as I ducked out from under his body and made my way to the other side of the bed to straighten it.

  Michael walked toward the door and stopped just short of it. He held out his hand. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”

  After a few seconds of silence, I stepped toward the dresser, not him. “Let me just finish.”

  He let his extended hand drop. “Traci will take care of this mess when she comes on Monday. You know she lives for cleaning.”

  Even though I forced myself to laugh, he wasn’t wrong. Traci, Michael’s housekeeper, certainly did love to clean. She spent more time here than she needed to. I think she preferred to be here during the day than at home. Her husband worked long hours and she was home alone a lot.

  Michael stood at the door and waited for me to pass him. As soon as I did, he closed the door behind me. “Did she go down okay?”

  The hallway was wide. Shaped like a square, it had six doors. Four were for the bedrooms, each with its own bathroom; another led to the attic, and the last to a terrace that overlooked the backyard. I glanced toward Clementine’s room. “She was exhausted. Poor little thing fell right to sleep.”

  “I thought she might. Erin didn’t give her much of a nap.” His hand went to the small of my back as he guided me toward the stairs I needed no help locating.

  Each step I took, it remained in place. By the time I got to the first step, I considered grasping the doorknob to the attic because the walls were beginning to blend into the floors. I wondered how much longer I could hold my breath.

  The answer came soon enough when his hands shifted. “You feel so tight.”

  My breath was still in my lungs.

  His fingers began massaging into the knots that had to be spreading throughout my entire back by now. This was the time to tell him to please keep his hands off me. That I wasn’t interested in him in any way other than as a friend. Yet, I knew I had to be careful. Do it with tact. He held my future with his daughter in those hands.

  “Michael,” I tossed over my shoulder, very unsure of what I was going to say and how I was going to tell him that not only was my heart in a thousand shattered pieces right now, but I wasn’t the least bit attracted to him.

  The smell of something burning wafted through the air and had him rushing by. “Shit, I must have left the rice on.”

  Relief whooshed through me.

  I was wrong—things weren’t back to normal between us.

  A very unsavory feeling struck when I began to fear this might just be the new normal.

  DAY 32

  LOGAN

  It was hard not to wonder what would have happened.

  If I hadn’t gone to the beach that day twelve years ago, if Emily hadn’t looked so innocent wearing shorts and a T-shirt when all the other girls were wearing bikinis, if I would have left when the guys wanted to leave, or if I would have just listened to them and not gone after her.

  The problem was, in the parallel version of my life, everything would be different. I probably would have ended up like most of the guys I went to prep school with, James excluded. Unhappily married with two small kids, having dreams about girls on their knees and blow jobs that never came, and then waking up next to a Stepford wife in training who closed her vagina after her last pregnancy.

&
nbsp; In this alternate future, I wouldn’t be sitting here staring up at the green-painted steel frame of an empty bunk in a place that smelled like perspiration and disinfectant for two fucking nights wondering about what might have been.

  I also wouldn’t have met Elle.

  So fuck the might-have-beens.

  Deal with it, McPherson, I found myself saying. I was talking to myself now. But then again I had no idea how long they were going to keep me, and I had to find a way to keep my sanity because I really felt like I was going insane.

  It’s not as if I didn’t know the law inside and out. I was well aware of my rights. None of that mattered in here, though. I was stuck with no communication to the outside world and no one knew where the fuck I was. I was about ready to lose my mind. I wanted to claw my way out of here so I could get to Elle. I couldn’t even think about what must be going through her head.

  The South Bay House of Correction was a place I’d been to almost as many times as the Nashua Street Jail, yet I never knew they had an isolation wing for possible terrorist-linked inmates.

  And here I sat.

  Minutes ticked by.

  Hours.

  Days.

  It had to be Monday morning by now. How much longer were they going to keep me here? The weekend was one thing, but how could they keep me under wraps during the week? Then again, I was in isolation in some unknown wing God knew where deep within the prison walls.

  I closed my eyes and tried to push the ache in my heart out of my mind. I had to think. Use my head to get them to let me use a phone. Bribe the guards if I had to. Patrick’s goon squad had to be off duty by now. I might have a chance with a new crew.

  “McPherson,” one of the guards called as he opened the door. “Get up.”

  I did. I was done resisting. It wasn’t getting me anywhere.

  Sure enough, new guards had taken over and none of them seemed to know or care who I was. They were just doing their job. I did the best I could to be whatever the hell it was I was supposed to be.