by Bethany-Kris
“Trying. It’s … complicated. I wanted to blame them.”
“Your parents?”
Catherine nodded. “For the shit that happened way back when, you know what I mean? When I figured out they knew what I had been up to, I was pissed because I thought had I just known, I wouldn’t have needed to hide and lie my way through the depression from the assaults and all of that.”
“But?”
“They’re not to blame. I can’t blame them because I made a choice not to speak up, and I was the one who didn’t ask for help. How could they know I was drowning when I wasn’t screaming for help?”
“You called them liars,” Cara said.
Catherine wished her father could have held a little bit of information back when he talked to Cara, but apparently he couldn’t.
“Aren’t they?” she asked.
“Aren’t you?” her therapist threw back.
“I don’t know why they didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t ask, Catherine. You didn’t ask them anything. You accused and blamed. You shouted and left. Children who throw tantrums might have behaved better, to be honest.”
“Okay, that’s enough with the child comments.”
“I have more,” Cara said as she stood up, “but I’ll refrain.”
“Thanks.”
“You can stay longer, if you like, but I don’t think you should. You need to go home, Catherine, and learn how to handle things that make you uncomfortable. Learn how to work through them on your own. You have spent your entire life acting as the ideal daughter. You have avoided confrontation. You lied your way through relationships with people who love you. You’ve done these things simply so that you could pretend to be happy while keeping everyone else around you happy, too.”
“Yeah,” Catherine agreed, “I have.”
“Going home and dealing with it doesn’t have to mean going to them, either. You don’t have to talk to them until you’re ready. Actually, I think you should wait until you’re rational and won’t lash out or run when you’re told something you might not like. It’s okay to need space.”
“Sure.”
“However, when you do talk to your parents …”
“Yeah?”
Cara smiled. “Apologize for being a hypocrite. You do not get to call someone a liar when you’ve built your entire world on lies, Catherine.”
Damn …
Cara was right, though.
This was exactly why Catherine came here.
Catherine tossed a piece of popcorn drizzled with chocolate into the air. It fell back down into her waiting mouth.
“You are home, then?” her mother asked. “Cara called to let us know you had left, but I wasn’t sure when you would get back.”
She didn’t even look toward the phone on the floor as she replied, “Got home this morning, actually.”
“Could I come—”
“I would rather you didn’t, Ma.”
“Okay,” Catrina said quietly.
Catherine felt like shit for refusing her mother, but right then, she didn’t know what else to do. She was trying to take Cara’s advice, after all.
“I need some time, and then I’ll come over,” Catherine explained. “We can talk.”
Catrina cleared her throat, and the speakers crackled from the volume of being on speakerphone. “All of us, or …?”
“Daddy, too.”
“Good.”
“Is he very angry with me?” Catherine dared to ask.
“Because you left without a word?”
“I mean, yeah.”
“No, he isn’t angry,” Catrina said with a sigh, “but he was very worried.”
“Sorry.”
“Michel mentioned stopping by and checking on you, if you were going to be home. He didn’t say for sure, or whatever.”
“All right.”
“We’ve all made a lot of mistakes, haven’t we?” her mother asked.
Catherine’s hand froze as she was about to toss up another piece of popcorn. “I lied a lot, Ma. The rest of you just went along with it, I think. I’m still settling myself with the fact I can’t be angry at others for doing exactly what I do to them.”
“If you want to meet up or anything …”
“I’ll call you, Ma,” Catherine promised.
“All right, mia reginella. I miss you, Catherine. Don’t stay away for too long.”
“I’ll try not to.”
With a quick goodbye, her mother ended the call. Catherine didn’t even bother to reach over and shut off the screen on her phone. She let it blank out itself. On her back, she stared up at the ceiling of her apartment, and tossed another piece of popcorn into the air.
The knock on the apartment door made her miss the piece as it fell back down.
It hit her in the eye.
“Ow,” she mumbled, rubbing at the spot.
She figured it was just her brother—her mother said he might check on her, after all.
“The door is open,” Catherine called out.
She still didn’t get off the floor.
She quite liked it down there.
Like meditating, it was calming and familiar. She could think without chaos. She could hear through her own noise.
It was not Michel who came into her apartment.
Catherine turned her head to side to see Cross closing the door. She had known that he was aware of her address only because he told her so. She didn’t ask how he knew, though.
“How did you get inside my building?”
“Pressed a bunch of buttons. Someone let me in.”
“Huh.”
At the sight of her on the floor, his brow furrowed and he tipped his head to the side.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Catherine tossed a piece of popcorn, caught it, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “Thinking.”
“On the floor.”
“Yep.”
“With … popcorn.”
“It has chocolate drizzled on it,” she defended.
“Oh, well, that makes it okay, and not at all strange.”
“Don’t judge me. We all have our things. This is mine.”
Cross hummed under his breath, and took a step forward. “Is this like the time I came out in the morning to find you sitting on the pool table meditating?”
“Kind of.”
“I see.”
He took one more step closer.
Catherine pointed at him.
“You stay right where you are. I told you, I’m thinking.”
He hesitated in his next step. “What does that have to do with me coming closer?”
“When you’re near, I can’t think at all. I don’t think. You make me go stupid in my head.”
At his frown, she quickly added, “It’s okay, though, because I don’t mind. Most of the time. Right now, I actually need to think. Work through stuff. Face issues I have created.”
Cross made a face and said, “That doesn’t sound like something you would say at all.”
“It’s not. Cara said it to me. She’s right, so I’m … doing what she said.”
“Who is Cara?”
Oh.
Yeah.
Catherine hadn’t explained that bit to Cross.
“Well, she’s a friend,” Catherine said, watching Cross with wary eyes as he took a seat on the floor. Way across the room from her. He didn’t move once he sat down, except to shrug off his jacket and toss it aside. “Now she’s a friend, I mean. She used to be my therapist. A couple of months after my suicide attempt my father called her in for me. I felt better talking to her—safer, I guess—because she comes from the same life we do.”
Cross scrubbed a hand down his jaw. “Cara … as in, Cara Rossi?”
“You know her?”
“I met her husband when I was a teenager traveling with Wolf. I’ve run them guns when they bought a few shipments from Chicago.”
“Huh,” Catherine mused. “Small
world.”
“Not really. All these crime families are just interconnected in more ways than most people know.”
She looked over at him again.
He looked damn good—relaxed, cool, and unbothered—in dark wash jeans and a faded Tee. He grinned at her when he caught her looking, but Catherine didn’t turn away.
“Pretty sure I said I would call you when I was ready, Cross,” she pointed out.
“It’s been almost two weeks. I’m tired of waiting, babe.”
“Oh?”
“Someone let me know your car showed up here, too. You were gone.”
Catherine’s gaze narrowed. “You’re having me watched?”
“No, someone just checks in occasionally. You have an enforcer from your father to watch you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“That’s what I’m offering,” Cross shot back.
“Ass.”
“You know it.” Cross kicked out his legs, and hooked his Doc Martens one over the other. “I assume if you were talking to Cara, you must have made a trip over to her side of the border.”
“Sometimes I just need to hear it from her, even when I already know what she’s going to say. She tells me it like it is.”
“Does she?”
“She might as well have told me to stop acting like a child,” Catherine muttered.
“Were you?”
“Probably. I do that, or rather, use child-like tactics to avoid confrontation. Everyone else around me simply avoids creating conflict with me because they’re scared of what might happen to me if they do.”
“Like you’ll fall back again,” he murmured.
Catherine picked at her manicured nails. “Yeah, like that. They don’t get it, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m allowed to be angry, sad … or whatever else I want to feel. Not everything I feel is going to be on the good side of the spectrum, and that’s okay. If I avoid feeling any sort of emotional upset, then I never learn how to handle how I react to it. That, more than anything else, is what could trigger me.”
Catherine propped her arms behind her head like a pillow. “Besides, I do have spells. I have days where I don’t want to get out of bed, when I’m tired for no reason, and when I just feel like … dark in my heart. It comes and it goes. I deal with it, though, as it happens. When it happens.”
“Before, you didn’t deal with it all.”
“Nope.”
“Cara was good for you, then?” Cross asked.
“The best.”
“I can go, you know, if you don’t want me to be here.”
Catherine eyed him with a smile. “I thought you were tired of waiting on me to call.”
“It’s your life, Catty. I don’t need to be forcing myself into it when you don’t want me here.”
“I want you,” she whispered, “and sometimes I want to run away from you.”
“If you do run, could I chase you?”
Cross asked the question so flippantly that it almost made Catherine laugh. Still, she could see how serious he meant for it to be, despite his light tone.
“Yeah, you could chase me, Cross.”
“Good to know.”
“And … stay,” she added.
“Sure, babe.”
“Hey, do you remember that time we had a fight with flour and I kicked your ass?”
Cross scowled. “That was not how I remember it going down.”
“Yeah, well, let me have my moment.”
He waved at her. “Yes, princess, have your moment.”
“Okay, so after I kicked your ass with flour, my uncle showed up.”
Cross made a noise under his breath. “Locked my ass in a pantry like an idiot.”
“So, he totally knew you were there.”
“What?” Cross grinned at her. “Seriously?”
“There were footprints in the flour.”
Cross laughed, loud and hard. “There was, I bet.”
“We were so stupid back then.”
“Nah, Catty, we were … in love, amazing, crazy, and life, babe. We were everything that was real and good and true.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “and all of that, too.”
“We still are, you know. Or we could be.”
“Could we?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
He was.
He didn’t have to be.
Yet, there Cross sat far across the room from her. He gave her space simply because she asked him not to come closer, and no other reason. His gaze was only on her, even though this was the first time he had ever been inside her place.
Despite her bullshit. Despite the barriers she threw up, her behavior, and her faults. Despite her, he was still there.
Waiting on her.
Wanting her.
Everyone had a better half.
Cross was most definitely hers.
Catherine did not deserve this man.
Not like she was.
“Cross?”
“Yeah, babe?”
“I haven’t said it, but I love you.”
“I know,” he murmured, “and I don’t need you to say it.”
“I’m sorry that I’m kind of awful.”
“You’re not awful, Catherine.”
“I am, sometimes. Especially to people who love me. Sometimes I don’t know why, and other times, it’s just habit. I’m trying to be better, though. I am.”
Cross swallowed thickly. “I know, Catty.”
“So yeah, I love you.”
“Promise?”
She laughed. That was supposed to be her line. She didn’t mind the change.
“Always, Cross.”
One of Cross’s favorite memories with Catherine was the weekend he had snuck into her house when they were just fifteen and seventeen. He spent two days in nothing but boxer-briefs, listening to Catherine read Romeo and Juliet in her underwear.
They could have been making a similar memory, except …
“Holy fuck, this is the most boring shit I have ever heard,” Cross grumbled, scrubbing a hand down his face.
Catherine instantly stopped reading from her law textbook. “I know, right?”
“What are you even doing with that garbage?”
Her green eyes danced with mirth beside him on her bed. He could figure out a dozen better ways to spend their night together other than her reading text from that terrible book. Like the fact she was already half naked, and so was he.
“Well,” she said, “I thought that maybe if I became a defense attorney, that would add four to the family. Don’t all crime families need good defense lawyers on their side?”
Cross eyed her, and chuckled. “Babe, that’s what we hire people for when we don’t have one on hand. Good lawyers that actually know what they’re doing and enjoy their job.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Catherine, you’ve rolled your eyes three times in one paragraph. I watched you.”
She pressed her lips together in an effort to hide her smile. “So?”
“You don’t even like what you’re doing.”
“Again, so?”
“You’ll make a terrible lawyer, babe.”
“Cross!” She flung her arm and smacked him hard in the shoulder.
“Hey!”
“You don’t get to tell me I would be terrible at anything. Not when I haven’t even tried. Thank you very much, you ass.”
Cross sighed while dragging his fingers through his hair. “I can’t help that it’s true, Catty. Yes, you would be amazing at pretty much anything you enjoy and actually want to do. It kind of seems like this is neither of those.”
She scowled, and then hit him again. “Shut up.”
“Okay, that’s twice, so now you’re going to have to owe me.”
“Worth it,” she said under her breath.
Smartass.
Cross snatched the large textbook from Catherine’s hand, and threw the
piece of shit across the room before she could even protest. It was so heavy that he felt the impact of the book hitting the floor from ten feet away on the bed.
Catherine stared at him. “I have a thing due next week, you know. I’m supposed to be reading so I know what to … I don’t even know.”
“Oh? What kind of thing?”
“Not really sure at the moment.”
“You’re not a very good law student, either.”
Catherine shrugged. “I kind of hate it.”
Cross nodded. “Yeah, I figured.”
She reached over and pushed back the longer strands of hair that had fallen over his eyes. Then, her palm rested warm and soft against his cheek.
“I don’t even know what I want to do,” she admitted quietly.
“You’ve got time to find out.”
“Do I really, though? I’m twenty-five. I’ve been in college since I was eighteen. I basically hate it and everything about it. So what, do I live off my trust fund for the rest of my life because I can’t find direction?”
“You have time,” Cross repeated, “and because you’re luckier than some, you have the funds to support yourself until you do figure it out, Catherine. You shouldn’t feel guilty because you have money. What are you going to do with it, let it rot?”
“Well—”
“You can’t actually take money with you when you die, okay. Sure, you can line your grave in gold, and rest in the most expensive silk, surrounded by Italian marble, but what good does that do?”
Catherine rolled her eyes. “No, I know that.”
“Then what exactly do you plan to do with it all?”
“I do spend money.”
“Really, where?” he asked. “Because you live in a decent neighborhood in a pretty basic apartment, although it’s better than most, and I guess you do have a new car. I’m not sure where else you’re actually living, babe.”
Catherine’s gaze narrowed at him a second before she pushed off the bed. Cross propped himself up on his elbows, and watched her as she disappeared into a closet. Without warning, stuff started coming from the closet and landing on the foot of the bed.
Cross’s gaze skipped over the items—designer bags, clothes, shoes, and more. Gucci. Dolce & Gabbana. Prada. Louboutin. Marc Jacobs. Valentino.
Catherine came out of the closet with a whole armful of red soled heels. Sparkly. Black. White. Leather. Pointed toe. Open toe. She dumped the Louboutin heels onto the floor, and then turned around and went right back into the closet.