by Cal, Sarah
Brian ran the tips of his fingers down her arm, from her shoulder, where she wasn’t hidden under the covers. She let the touch happen, but had to swallow back bile.
What had she done?
The very thing she had told herself countlessly she never would again. She had done something stupid.
Then, Emma felt angry. It only lasted for two seconds, but it was so strong her whole body shivered with it. She wanted to blame Brian for this, like she had mostly blamed him for the affair. But the anger burned out because she realized quickly she couldn’t. She had stopped Brian to ask him if he was sure of what he was doing. Why hadn't she asked herself that? The first time she had thought to about someone other than herself, and it was backfiring on her.
If she had assessed the situation instead of losing herself in the moment, none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t be lying there, regret pooling in her stomach, the aches in her body growing uncomfortable to the point she felt she needed to take a shower in the next minute to wash it away. Because temporary fun was usually proceeded by consequences, and Emma didn’t think she was up to facing any right then.
Because he was still touching her, even though it was just with the tips of his fingers, Brian must have felt her shiver. He must have mistaken what it was for, though. He let loose a low chuckle, filled with masculine satisfaction, and Emma had to bite her tongue so she wouldn’t snap at him. He thought she was reacting pleasantly to his touch.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
"You know, I thought we'd had our last night together. I told you last time it had been an escape for me. It was a bit more than that, though."
He ducked his head to kiss when his fingers had just left her shoulder. Emma had to hold herself still so she wouldn’t flinch away from him. She would have to reject him if he was looking for more. She bit her lip, a little worried about how she would do that. She didn’t want to make him feel even worse than he had when he decided to approach her. Her mood swings weren’t his fault, and he didn’t need to be subjected to them. She was going to have to break it to him gently, in a way that he understood so he wouldn’t search her out again.
Something else she hadn't thought about. She could just be hurting him more, all because she was selfish and one track minded. She hadn't considered it, because all he wanted was sex, but what if he really expected more from her? She was throwing him back into the old frame she'd thought of him in, the old stereotype, even though he'd shown her in their moments of true interaction outside that he was so much more than that. Emma felt ashamed for compartmentalizing him for her own purposes.
Brian seemed to misinterpret her body language again. His hand moved so he could touch her lip with his thumb. She reached for his hand, removing her lip from behind her teeth, but he just caught her hand and squeezed lightly.
Dammit! I keep doing everything wrong!
No matter what she did, lost in her thoughts, Brian seemed intent on reading it the wrong way. How was she supposed to push him away gently after she'd gone along with him so eagerly?
"I don’t think I ever told you how much I enjoyed our time together. Do you know that Kellen kept herself so busy, we didn’t even have a sex life for a while? Nearly a whole year. There were a few months, around when the baby was conceived, but even months after she gave birth, nothing."
He sighed, rising up on his elbow, lying on his side with his chin braced on his fist. He didn’t seem to mind that he was having a one-sided conversation. Even if she could have, what would Emma have said? Definitely nothing that he would want to hear. The things that Merry said about her rose in her mind, and Emma had to swallow around the sudden lump in her throat.
Could she really say that her sister had been completely in the wrong now?
"I'm glad that we're starting back up again."
Emma let her eyes close at those words. Emma didn’t have the heart to tell him right then that she didn’t want it to happen again.
She cursed herself in her head. Like Kellen and Brian breaking up wasn’t enough, she just had to keep messing things up. It was an easy assumption for Brian to make. Emma had gone along eagerly without a thought to the consequences, as usual, and now it was time to pay the price. There was no way she could endure Brian thinking they were together now, because they could never be. She should have left this in the past, like she had intended to.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, Emma heard Chase's voice out in the hall.
"I'm back from running an errand in town. Where is everybody?"
Dammit!
She hadn't thought about Chase at all. She didn’t even know he had left the house. Why hadn't she heard the front door open, or heard his footsteps in the stairs? He was right in the hallway...
Emma panicked, knowing he was about to walk in on her and Brian. There was no time to do more than bolt upright and hold the sheets up over her chest so he wouldn’t see her naked. Brian didn’t seem to have a problem with it, lying on his side with the covers pooled at his waist, his legs were even bare from above the knees. Brian must have heard him like she did, but he remained lounging on his side, head turned toward the door.
She wished she could run and hide. Maybe jump right out her window, but it was too late to move and not be seen.
The door swung open and Chase's face fell completely when he saw the pair of them in bed together. There was only one way to interpret what they could have been doing, and Emma wanted to curse herself again, seeing that look on his face.
Chase mumbled something, an excuse that Emma wasn’t sure was entirely verbal because she didn’t hear any actual words in the sound. He was stumbling back from the door, and she had to clench her fists in the sheet she held over her chest so she wouldn’t reach for him, knowing it would expose her. For the first time in so long, she felt her face burn. If she had a mirror, she would have seen the blush warming her face as she burned with shame. Chase left the room in a hurry, not even completely closing the door.
Brian laughed it off, but Emma for some unknown reason felt guilty.
Chapter 25
She didn’t want to, but Emma knew she had to talk to Chase about what he saw. She dressed up and left Brian on her bed. Hopefully, when she came back, he would have gotten a clue, dressed up and moved to someplace else. She looked around for Chase and found him sitting outside back.
He was seated on the back porch, shoulders slumped, head ducked down, his whole form looking dejected. Emma saw him, read his body language and hesitated. He probably didn’t want to talk to her, but she just had the urge to explain.
Why did she even have to do this? Why was this affecting Chase like this? Before, he had hated her affair with Brian, she knew he was happy when she told him it was over between them. But for him to see them like that, it should have been hard. Only, he wasn’t angry like she had expected. She hadn't thought he would be so hurt by it to show it so visibly.
After some more hesitation, she stepped closer and carefully sat down beside Chase. He didn’t move, or in any way acknowledge she was even there, and that hurt. He didn’t usually ignore her like that, and she was at a loss for what to do.
What was she even going to say? This was one of those situations where a planned speech would probably go over better. But even if she had the time, Emma didn’t think she could do that, give Chase a pre-planned speech, especially when she wasn’t even sure what was wrong. He deserved better than that from her.
"It was just a one-time thing," she said quietly, for lack of something better to say.
Chase was still for a moment, and she wasn’t sure he had heard, if he had any intention of listening to her. Then he huffed out a laugh and leaned back on his hands.
"Why do you feel the need to justify yourself to me—we're not a couple."
Emma bit her lip on the words that wanted to come out. She looked down at her hands, twisting and untwisting her fingers together. When had she been this awkward around Chase? The last sh
e could remember was back when they first met and she was trying to figure out why he kept talking to her. She'd never really had friends so when she heard Chase considered her one, she hadn't known how to act.
Even when he confronted her about the affair with Brian, she hadn't felt like this.
"Maybe," he murmured, his voice soft, making Emma look up, "it's because you know how much I love you."
Emma went still. Her breath caught in her throat. She thought back to when she'd been considering a relationship with Chase, before everything started going wrong—she met that woman, then Merry was out on the streets. She had put it out of her mind, thinking Chase would never feel that way about her. It was why she had never considered him as a romantic partner before her grandmother mentioned something so she couldn’t help but think about it. But he had just confirmed it.
And when she thought about it, it wasn’t exactly impossible. Emma knew they acted like more than just really close friends. They slept in the same bed every night since the lights went off, they ended up cuddling more often than not. Chase was somehow always touching her. She liked it, it was comforting, but when she thought of it, he was always the one to initiate the closeness, she just never moved away from it.
But love? She knew Chase cared for her, but did Emma even believe in love? As maudlin, and dramatic, as that sounded, she had given up on her dream of marriage and building a family of her own for that reason. But this was Chase. He wouldn’t say anything he didn’t mean. If he said he loved her... even though it was in a roundabout way and not direct, then he meant it.
Emma... wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Especially after what he had just seen. She clenched her fingers together until her palms hurt and felt the sting of tears in her eyes. Her regret at what she'd just done tripled.
She wanted to apologize, but would he take it well? She didn’t think it was the best idea, but what could she say to something like this after she had hurt him in the worst way possible without knowing what she was doing? If he truly felt about her the way he just said, then Emma had been hurting him for a long time without realizing it, and him walking in on her and Brian was the worst part of it all. Hell, she might as well have been leading him on.
"I don’t know what to tell you, Chase, but it's probably not anything you want to head. I don’t know my feelings at the moment, with my life seemingly in turbulence. I swear I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Chase. If I had known, I would have made so many choices differently."
He shook his head, but he turned his head away so he couldn’t look at her, and that hurt her.
"Let me know once you've figured out your feelings."
"It's not so easy a thing, Chase. There's too much going on I don’t even get enough time to think. I'm spending time at home now, but I still have community work I'm supposed to be doing. Not to mention watching Merry and Janice’s condition. My life isn’t easy, Chase, I'm not sure I can handle even more stress on top of everything else I need to worry about."
She bit her lip to stop herself from talking. She was going too far, making excuses that Chase would take seriously. She just wanted the guilt to go away, even knowing it wouldn’t be that easy. And it wasn’t like Chase didn’t know the situation. Considering he spent more time at her home now than she did, he had probably seen it more than she had, even if he hadn't been around it long enough to realize just how bad things were getting.
Chase sighed, but he still wouldn’t look at her. "It's not like I don’t know, Emma. I've always known, its why I've never tried to tell you before. I didn’t know how you would react if you knew. But with things as they are, maybe I should move back to my flat."
Emma felt her breath hitch again, and she snapped her head in his direction. But he was still looking away so he couldn’t even see her in his peripheral vision. His statement sounded like a threat, and Emma wasn’t sure if she should take him seriously, or if he was just trying to hurt her by saying it. She couldn’t see his face so there was no way to know.
She wouldn’t mind, if that was all it was. But if he really meant he would leave, Emma might just cry and beg him to stay.
"You don’t have to do that," she said urgently.
"But you don’t really need me here, do you? I was just staying here to look after your family while you went out, right? So now you have someone else—"
"Just stay," she insisted. "Chase, I'm not going to replace you with Brian. I'm pretty sure he would rather stay away from my sister and my grandmother. I'm only letting him stay because he had nowhere else to go. What happened... just now wasn’t meant to happen. And I'm sorry that it did, more than you can know."
Chase still didn’t look at her, and Emma felt her heart clench in her chest.
"Look, I'll sort myself out and let you know what's happening. Just please don’t leave."
He didn’t say anything, and they spent some time in silence. Emma wasn’t sure what there still was to say. She didn’t think Chase was ready to speak with her. She stayed until she couldn’t stand it anymore and got up to head back inside.
Emma was shaken. So much more than she had been recently at all the crap that had been happening to her. She couldn’t lose Chase. Through everything that had gone wrong in her life recently, from hating her job, to hating herself in the affair with Brian, to everything that had come since the crash, having Chase was what got her through all of it. If he left, Emma wasn’t sure she could take it anymore.
Chase always knew what to do, what to say, to calm her down. If he was gone, she would lose that, and Emma wasn’t sure it was something she could survive.
Emma realized she needed to speak to Brian. He was probably getting the wrong idea as well, and instead of running away, she had to face it head on. She headed back upstairs and found him still in her room. He was partially dressed, and when he saw her walk in he smiled.
"Hey—"
"We need to talk," she said blandly, cutting him off.
The smile dropped, and he frowned. "Emma? What's wrong?"
"I'm not interested in carrying out our fling—I just wanted some comfort before. Don’t even try and tell me you didn’t want the same thing, because I'll know that you're lying. But that is all it can ever be."
"Does this decision have anything to do with Chase?"
Emma stilled in surprise. Even Brian had seen something, where she hadn't? She wasn’t sure how that made her feel. But that he had done what he did, knowing... Emma sighed. She wanted to be angry at him, but would it be fair? She was partly at fault, a big part.
"I'm not sure," she said honestly.
Brian scowled and looked away. He grabbed his T-shirt and pulled it on. "You should stop dangling us both on a string and make up your mind, then."
Emma scowled back at him. As if he had any room to talk. He still had a wife, he had kids—he couldn’t see them because he had the bright idea to start an affair because his marriage was so unsatisfying, and he was still interested in going at it instead of trying to win back his way into his house so he could get back to his children. Brian had no right to criticize her when he had done so much wrong himself.
"I have about you—I'm not interested. I told you before I wanted to end whatever there was between us, and I meant it. I thought we were in agreement the last time we talked about it. You have more important things to think about besides sex, Brian. The moment was a weakness for both of us. It ends there, or we'll both be doing more harm to ourselves."
He stood with his jacket in hand, staring out the window and breathing harshly. Emma crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to budge on this. If he wanted to be angry, that was his problem. Getting involved with him was a bad idea, it was an even worse idea doing it again.
"Then I'll get out of your hair and leave."
Emma held onto her anger for a moment longer, and then released her breath in a gust. "You're welcome to stay since you have nowhere to go—we're still friends. We just have to figure this out without... this, or the times bef
ore, getting in the way. We've done it before, and honestly, I like you more as a friend than as anything else. Just keep your hands to yourself and we'll be fine, okay?"
He sighed and sat down on the bed, hands clenching his jacket in his hands. "I don’t have much of a choice."
He did. He could have gone back to living in the streets and risk getting hurt and going hungry. He just didn’t want to make that decision. But Emma didn’t tell him that, instead she left him to brood.
Emma realized two of her friendships were in jeopardy because of unwanted feelings. Feelings weren’t her forte, and she had no idea what to do about it.
Chapter 26
Emma was woken by Merry screaming in the night. She was still for a second when she heard it, and then she was throwing herself out of bed.
She rushed to her sister to try and calm her down. There was nothing to see with, and she bumped into something and hit herself more than once, but she barely felt it in her urgency. When she got into her sister's room, she headed right for the bed. She knocked her knee against it in her rush, but she sat on the bed and reached for Merry.
"Merry! Come on, you have to stop, there's nothing wrong! It was just a nightmare!"
Her sister fought her when she tried to touch her, but Emma ignored it. It would have been a problem if Merry was asleep. Emma had come to realize waking someone suddenly from a nightmare was a bad and sometimes dangerous idea. But even without seeing, Emma knew Merry was awake. She smacked, and scratched with her blunt nails as Emma tried to wrap her arms around her. Emma could feel the damage her sister was doing, and she persisted. But Merry was inconsolable.