by Elena Armas
“There you are.” I heard the voice again. Even softer now. Relieved.
As I blinked slowly, my vision started to return in flashes. Deep blue eyes. Hair as dark as black ink. The hard line of a jaw.
“Lina?”
Lina.
There was something funny about that voice calling my name. The one everyone called me.
No, not everyone.
I blinked some more, but before my eyes could focus on a fixed point, I was lifted in the air. The movement was slow, so gentle, that I barely noticed it at first, but then we started moving. And after a few seconds, the motion was enough to send my head spinning again.
“Mi cabeza,” I said under my breath.
“I’m sorry.” I felt the words rumbling against my side, becoming aware of how my cheek was resting against something hot and hard. Something with a heartbeat. A chest. “Just stay with me, okay?”
Okay, I’ll stay. And I burrowed into the chest, ready to lose myself to the exhaustion rocking my body.
“Eyes open, please.”
Somehow, I complied. I let them fall on a shoulder that looked terribly familiar as we moved. And gradually, my vision eventually cleared. My head, no longer whirling, locked back on my shoulders. The sweat on my skin cooled down.
My eyes roamed around as recollection of what had happened spilled down my mind. I fainted, for not eating enough. Like a total dumbass. Sighing, I looked up, my gaze zeroing in on a chin that stretched into a jaw that was topped by lips that were pressed tightly.
“Aaron,” I whispered.
Blue eyes met mine for an instant. “Hold on. Almost there.”
I was in Aaron’s arms. His left arm around my legs, hand spreading on my thigh. His right one around my back, his long fingers splayed across my hip. Before I could delve into that or on the comforting and amazing warmth emanating off him and into my skin, he was putting me down.
Confused, I looked around me. My gaze stumbled upon that horrible, disturbing framed piece of art of a kid with huge eyes. I had always hated it, and I knew exactly where it belonged. We could only be in Jeff’s office. He was the only person I knew personally who didn’t find that frightening.
My ass settled on a plush surface, and my back followed, resting on something that felt a lot like a pillow. I placed my hands on my sides, noticing the fabric beneath my fingers. Leather. A sofa. Jeff had one in his office. It was one of those leather settees that looked all pretentious and classy.
Aaron’s palm brushed my face again, and my attention returned to him. He was close, really close. Kneeling on the floor in front of me. His touch was comforting, but his expression didn’t match the soothing quality of his fingers against my skin.
“Do you want to lean back?” he asked, an edge on his voice.
“No, I’m okay.” I willed my voice to convey the strength I wasn’t feeling. His eyebrows draw into a scowl. “You look so mad.” It was an observation that should have been kept as a thought probably, but I guessed that, given the circumstances, I wasn’t in the disposition to be picky with what left my mouth. “Why are you mad?”
“When was the last time you ate, Catalina?” His scowl deepened, and he shifted on his knees, straightening his back. I watched him pull something out of his pocket.
I grimaced. “Lunch? I think. Maybe more like brunch because I didn’t have time to get breakfast, so I just had something at around eleven.”
His hand froze midair in front of me, allowing me to see that something he was holding. It was wrapped in white wax paper. “Jesus, Catalina.” He shot me a look that would make anyone else cower. One that would definitely help with his soon-to-be new position.
But even if my tank was literally empty, I wasn’t anyone else.
“I’m fine, Mr. Robot.”
“No, you are not,” he shot back. Then, he very carefully placed on my lap what I already knew was a delicious Aaron Blackford homemade granola bar. “You fainted, Catalina. That’s really far from being fine. Eat this.”
“Thanks. But I’m okay now.” I looked down, my gaze getting acquainted with the gifted snack one more time. With shaky hands, I snatched it. Unwrapped it with clumsy fingers. “Do you always carry these on you?” I hesitated, my stomach complaining for some reason.
“Eat, please.”
So odd, how he could say please and make it sound like a threat.
“Jeez.” I took a bite. Then, I spoke with a mouthful—because who cared? He had literally just picked me off the floor, white-lipped, sweaty, and on my way to dramatically passing out—“I said I’m okay.”
“No,” he thundered. Pinning me down with a warning. “What you are is a dumbass.”
I frowned, wanting to be upset but agreeing with him. He didn’t need to know I was on his side.
“Stubborn woman,” he muttered under his breath.
I stopped chewing, making an attempt to stand up and stomp out of that office. He stopped me with oddly gentle hands on my shoulders.
“Do not test me right now.” That damn scowl was back with a vengeance.
I gave up under the soft vise of his large palms and let my body fall back.
“Eat the bar, Catalina. It’s not nearly enough, but it’ll do for now.”
Feeling the ghost of his hands on the skin covering my shoulders, I shivered. “I’m eating. No need to boss me around.” I averted my eyes and resumed chewing, trying not to think of how much I wanted those palms back on my skin. Or those long and big arms around me. I needed the comfort. My body felt stretched too long, my skin chilled, my muscles overworked.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I nodded, not looking up. I simply limited myself to chowing down the snack.
Only a few moments later, Aaron was back. All determined strides and stiff back. “Water,” he announced, dropping a bottle on my lap. He placed my phone beside me too.
“Thanks.” I unscrewed the lid, chugging down a quarter of the bottle.
When I was done, I looked up again. Aaron was standing in front of me now. Still looking all angry and bunched up. I let my gaze fall off his face, feeling extra tiny, sitting there while he towered over me.
“So, I guess this will be your office soon. I hope they let you redecorate.” I eyed the horrible painting behind him.
“Catalina.” The way he said my name held a warning.
Ugh. I was not down for a lecture.
“That was so stupid. Not eating, risking hypoglycemia when the whole building is deserted. What if you had lost consciousness and no one was around to find you?”
“You were here, weren’t you?” I answered, still not looking at him. “You are always here anyway.”
A noise came out of his throat. Another warning. Don’t give me that shit, it told me.
“Why are you not eating?” His question felt like a punch, right in my stomach. “You always, always used to have something in your hand. Jesus, you used to pull pastries out of your pockets at the oddest and most inappropriate times.”
That had me looking up, meeting ice-cold eyes. I had; I was a snacker. That was part of the problem, wasn’t it?
“Why are you not doing that now? Why haven’t you done that for the last month? Why are you not eating like you usually do?”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I clasped my hands together. “Are you calling me a—”
“Don’t,” he hissed. “Don’t even try it.”
“Fine.”
“Tell me,” he insisted, his gaze hardening like stone. “Why are you not eating?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” My breathing quickened, every word costing me more and more effort to spit. To admit the truth. “Because I want to lose weight, all right? For the wedding.”
He reared back. Appalled. “Why?”
Most of the blood that had left my head earlier rushed back. Awful timing. Just like everything else about my life. “Because,” I breathed out. “Because that’s what people do before an important event like that. Be
cause I want to look my best, as much as you won’t believe it. Because I’d like to look as amazing as I possibly can. Because, apparently, I have been going around, stuffing my face with pastries twenty-four/seven, and my body has definitely been storing it. Because I just … did it, okay? What does it matter?”
“Catalina,” he said, and I could hear in his voice how disconcerted he was. “That’s … ridiculous. You’ve never been like that.”
Did he think I couldn’t possibly want to … look beautiful?
“What, Aaron?” I whispered, not finding my voice. “What is so ridiculous exactly? Is it so hard to believe that from me? That I’m like that? Like I care about how I look?”
His throat worked. “You don’t need any of that goddamn shit. You are smarter than that.”
I blinked.
Then, I blinked some more. “Did you just say goddamn shit? At work?” I lowered my voice. “In Jeff’s office?”
Now that I thought of it, he had dropped a few bad words earlier, hadn’t he?
Looking down, he shook his head, his shoulders falling with something that looked a lot like defeat. “Jesus,” he breathed out. “Fuck, Catalina.”
Wow. “All this swearing,” I said while I tried to search his face for whatever was going on with him. “I don’t think my ears will ever recover, Blackford.”
One of his hands went to the back of his neck. His head fell back, reminding me a lot of that moment I hadn’t been able to forget. When he had followed that with wonderful laughter. When he had smiled freely. As brightly as one could smile. But he didn’t do any of that now. He just gave me a tug of his lips, tiny little wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.
“You are cute,” he said matter-of-factly. “But don’t think you can play that card now. I’m still mad.”
Cute? Cute as in cute or cute as in small and funny and something you smiled at with fondness? Or perhaps cute as in—
I stopped myself. Closed my eyes for an instant, so I would just stop thinking.
“Are you feeling better? Think you can stand?”
Opening my eyes, I nodded my head. “Yeah. No need to carry me around again.” Although the lurch in my chest at the thought reminded me how comfy I had been up there. “Thanks.”
“I can if I—”
“I know you can, Blackford,” I interrupted him. If he offered again, I might take him up on it. “Thank you for doing it earlier, but I got it under control.”
He nodded, stretching out his hand in front of me. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll grab your things and get you home.”
I didn’t reach out for it with mine. “I can—”
“Cut it out, will you?” He stopped me. God, we both were so freaking stubborn. “Now, you can let me walk you out and drive you home”—he paused, like a total drama queen—“or I can carry you out of this building and into my car myself.”
Holding his gaze, I lifted my hand and held it in the air, just a few inches away from his. I measured his words. Assessed my thoughts. Vaguely ignoring the way I’d love nothing more than to see him trying option number two. And what was far more disturbing than that was, I didn’t think it was for the pleasure it would bring me to fight him on something like that.
“Fine,” I said, wrapping my fingers around his as well as I could, considering the size difference. “No need to get your panties in a bunch, Blackford.”
He sighed. But then he pulled me up, doing something with our hands. Something that somehow changed the positions of our palms, which were now against each other.
A flutter took flight in the middle of my chest. And as we exited the office, I realized it’d soon no longer be Jeff’s, our boss. This would become Aaron’s office.
Soon enough.
Which should have been reason enough to immediately drop his hand and run in the opposite direction. It should have been enough to stop myself from welcoming the warmth of his palm or letting him take me home.
It should have. But ironically, I hadn’t seemed to be listening to a whole lot of should haves lately. So, what was a couple more?
“Hello?” A distant male voice stirred me back to life.
Un poquito más, I silently begged as I fought to fall back into oblivion. Un ratito más.
“I’m Aaron.”
Aaron?
Eyes shut and every thought sticky and heavy, I halfheartedly tried to make sense of what was happening. Why was Aaron’s voice sounding right beside me? I wanted to go back to sleep.
I vaguely recognized the characteristic dull vibration of an engine. Am I in a car? A bus? But we weren’t moving.
A dream. Yeah, that made sense. Right?
Confused and overexerted, I buried deeper into the warmth of my bed and decided I didn’t care if I dreamed of Aaron. It wouldn’t be the first time anyway.
“Yes, that Aaron.” The male voice was no longer distant. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he continued. Every word bringing me more and more awake. “She’s asleep right now.”
I felt a featherlike caress on the back of my hand. And my skin flared back to life. Feeling way too real for this being a dream.
“No, everything is fine.” Aaron’s baritone texture reverberated through my ears, and I found a weird comfort in recognizing it. “Okay, I will tell Catalina to call you back.” A pause. Followed by a chuckle. “No, I’m not one of those. I love meat. Roasted lamb in particular.”
Meat. Yeah. That was something I also loved. We should eat meat together, Aaron and I. My mind wandered away for an instant, thinking of juicy and crispy lamb and Aaron too.
“Okay. Thank you, and likewise, Isabel. Bye.”
Wait. Wait.
Isabel?
Isabel as in my sister, Isabel?
More confusion tugged at my still-foggy mind. I felt one of my eyes flutter open. I wasn’t in my bed. I was in a car, which was immaculate. Obsessively so.
Aaron’s car.
I was in Aaron’s car. Not a dream.
And … Isabel. She had called me earlier today, hadn’t she? And texted me. And I had ignored all of it.
All at once, the events of the last hours snowballed down my mind, overwhelming my half-functional brain.
No. My eyes blinked fully open, and my body sprang up.
“I’m awake,” I announced.
As I whirled my head from one side to the other, my gaze stumbled upon the owner of the car I had been napping in. He passed both his hands through his hair, looking as humanly tired as one could.
His head turned in my direction. “Welcome back,” he said, looking at me strangely. “Again.”
My heart squeezed. Why exactly, I didn’t have the slightest idea.
“Hi,” I managed with my scattered brain.
“Your sister called,” Aaron told me, making my whole body tense. “Five times in a row,” he added.
I opened my mouth, but my tongue didn’t work through the words. Any words.
“It’s okay. Something about a weird text you sent her,” he explained and offered back my phone.
I clasped it, grazing Aaron’s fingers very briefly.
Feeling Aaron’s gaze on me, I checked on the text. God, it was intelligible. Alarmingly so.
Aaron continued, “Then, she went on about the seating or the tables, I think? Maybe something about the napkins too.”
I looked over at him, catching one of his hands shooting to his hair again. The muscles on his arm flexed, and my still-sleepy eyes seemed to be absorbed by that motion and that motion alone.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have picked up,” Aaron said, bringing my gaze to his face once more.
“It’s okay,” I admitted, shocking myself. “If she called me at three or four in the morning, Spain time, that meant she was genuinely worried. She would have probably sent the New York City Fire Department to my place if you had not answered.”
Something odd shone in his eyes. “I’m glad to hear that because your phone rang and rang. And you …” He shook his head lightly
. “You sleep like the dead, Catalina.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Not even the arrival of the apocalypse—even if the very same Four Horsemen were galloping in my direction, shouting my name—could shake me awake when I was deeply asleep. Which was ironic really because Isabel talking to Aaron on the phone was my idea of a world-ending event.
My eyes widened with a realization.
Aaron had talked to my sister. He had mentioned meat. Roasted lamb. Which was on the menu for the wedding.
The connotations of that twirled in my weary head.
“Are you okay?” Aaron asked as I silently panicked.
“Yes,” I lied, forcing a smile. “Super-duper okay.”
Aaron’s brow arched. Maybe that had been a giveaway to how not super-duper okay I was.
“I told her you were fine, just asleep. But I think you should call her back tomorrow.” He pointed at my phone. “Judging by the five-minute monologue in Spanish before I could even tell her it wasn’t you on the line, I’d say she’ll feel better when you do.” Aaron’s lips twitched in what was the beginning of a smile.
“Yeah,” I murmured, a little too absorbed by his mouth when I should have been trying to manage a crisis. “Okay.”
That smirk stretched into a lopsided smile.
Ah, man. Why did it look so good on him? He didn’t smile nearly enough.
Which was not important.
What mattered was that Aaron had talked to my sister, and she never minced her words. Ever.
“So, Aaron,” I started, the words rushing out, “when you talked to my sister, you told her your name. Right?”
He cocked a brow. “Yes, that’s what people do when they introduce themselves.”
“Okay.” I nodded my head very slowly. “And how did you say that exactly? As in, Hey, I’m Aaron.” I dropped my voice, imitating his. “Or like, I’m just Aaron. I’m no one. Hello.”
He tilted his head. “I’m not sure I understand the question, but I’m going to go on a whim and go with option one. Although my voice sounds nothing like that.”
I exhaled through my nose, bringing the pads of my fingers to my temples. “Oh, Aaron. This is not good. I’m …” I blinked, feeling myself pale. “Oh God.”