“Shall we?” He held his arm out, and I hesitated before taking it.
“You are a complicated man, Fin Herald. Every time I think I’ve figured you out, you prove me wrong,” I said as we walked. I was self-conscious about my outfit, but no one was staring at me. Once again, people were too busy thinking about their own trials and tribulations. Occasionally people glanced at Fin, but that I understood. He was just one of those people. Sure, he was sexy, but it was what rippled under the surface that drew eyes to him.
I didn’t ask about the phone call as we walked into a small sandwich shop. We were going to have to eat and run so I could get to my next exam, but I wasn’t all that hungry anymore. Still, I ordered a turkey sub and Fin got the same but with bacon.
“You’re shutting me out again,” I said, swallowing and wiping my mouth.
He didn’t contradict me.
“I just wish I knew why. What you’re avoiding. Is it something to do with me?” I knew if I said that, it would get a reaction out of him. I was right. He might know how to push my buttons, but I was learning how to push his.
His eyes snapped up from his sandwich and then narrowed. “Why do you think it’s about you?” I didn’t, but now I knew that it wasn’t. So that narrowed things down just a tiny bit.
“Just asking,” I said, and we finished our sandwiches in silence. Fin walked me to my next exam, and I shut thoughts of him out so I could focus.
He waited for me, but this time when he came out, he wasn’t on the phone. Just staring out the window.
For someone who wasn’t even thirty, he looked ancient. Like life had chewed him up and spit him out already middle-aged.
“I’m done,” I said, and he looked at me, but he was far away. “Want to come over? We can order in and just . . . talk.” Going back to my place probably wasn’t the best idea since I had the feeling he was going to try and get me to take my clothes off to distract me from actually talking about what we needed to talk about. But I was going to risk it. I couldn’t stand this limbo we were in.
I’d been so excited to see him and now everything was a mess.
“Sure. Sounds good.” He gave me a quick smile and took my hand as we walked out of the building. I hailed a cab and got in before he could protest, dragging him with me.
What was it going to take to get through to him?
“Hey,” I said, grabbing his chin and turning his head toward me with force. “Look at me.” A ripple of shock went through him for a moment and then heat blazed between us. Oh. I wasn’t counting on that.
“We’re going to go to my place, we are going to drink coffee with French vanilla creamer, and we’re going to talk. Got it? Good.”
I didn’t wait for him to answer before I let go of his face and stared out the cab window. Maybe I needed to take a leaf out of his book and be a bit more direct.
He exhaled shakily next to me, and I tried not to turn around to see what his expression looked like. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of the cab ride.
Sure, I was jerking him around, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t done to me already. Our relationship was complicated and sometimes turned on a dime. I was just glad I was the one doing the turning this time.
I climbed out of the cab before he could open my door and hold it for me, and led the way up to my apartment. After I unlocked the door, I held it for him. He walked in and I shut the door behind us.
“Sit on the couch,” I said in my best imitation of his commanding tone. I walked to the coffeemaker and filled up the pot. Fin watched me for a second before moving toward the couch and sitting down, looking over his shoulder at me as if to say “See? I’m a good boy.” I got out the creamer and set it down next to the two cups.
The tension and . . . something else grew thick between us, like fog.
The coffee finally started brewing, dripping into the pot. I poured us both cups and added the creamer, stirring it in and walking the short distance to the couch.
He took the cup I offered him and held it.
“We’re going to talk,” I said. “Or else I’m going to end this. We’ve been stuck in this place where you don’t trust me, and I’m afraid to lose you so I let it go. Not anymore.” I hoped he couldn’t see my shaking hands as I held the coffee cup.
Fin studied me for a long time, his eyes flashing back and forth from dark to light, almost like he was having an internal battle with himself. I watched him wage it and knew this was his battle. I couldn’t fight it for him, as much as I wanted to.
“What do you want to talk about?” he finally said in a quiet voice.
“I want to know what that phone call was about. I want to know why you live under your father’s thumb. I want to know if you feel like a prisoner, beholden to his whims and wishes. And I want to know if you think you’ll ever be free.” They were all loaded questions, I knew that. I also didn't’ think I was going to get answers to all of them right now. But hopefully we could start a conversation and keep it going. I hadn’t even asked how long he was going to be here or when he’d have to go back. Or if he would.
He sipped his coffee slowly then set it down on the coffee table, making sure to use a coaster.
“I don’t know if I have all the answers you want. Mostly because I don’t know them myself. I knew this day would come. I hoped it wouldn’t, but we’ve been moving toward it for some time. It kills me not to share everything with you, Marisol. To not open up and tear my heart out and leave it at your feet for you to do with what you wish. I never thought I would feel that way about someone, but I hadn’t met you yet. I want you to be all the things you want me to be. I want to be a good man for you, the best man, because you deserve it. You deserve everything.” His anguish came out in his words. I believed him, but he needed to do something to prove it to me. Because otherwise, they were just words. Yes, they were words I wanted to hear, but they needed something behind them, something solid to hold them up. Without that, we had nothing.
I’d also known this was coming. The two of us stood together on a path that forked. We could either go one way or the other, but we could only choose one way and we couldn’t go back. And we might not choose the same path.
He licked his lips. “To answer your first question, the call was from my father, but I think you figured that out already. He’s wondering where the hell I am since I left without telling anyone where I was going. Except Carl, of course. I took a red eye and didn’t think about anything else but getting to you. He’s been trying to call me for hours, and I finally had to pick up. He’s not happy, which is an understatement. He thinks I’m throwing my life away over a woman. Although, he didn’t use the word ‘woman.’ I don’t want you to know what he called you.” I had enough of an imagination that I could probably figure it out.
I’d met Fin’s father and Fin had introduced me using a fake name. But I should have known that his father wasn’t an idiot. He probably knew exactly who I was and what I was doing there. You didn’t get to be the head of a multi-billion dollar international PR firm by being an idiot.
“He knows who you are, of course,” Fin said, as if he was following my train of thought. “He knew right away. You’d met before, hadn’t you? You didn’t tell me that.” No, I hadn’t told him that because I was dumb enough to think his father wouldn’t remember.
“Yes, once, for a brief moment at a charity event. But I honestly thought he wouldn’t remember.” Fin nodded, accepting my explanation.
“I understand that, but you don’t know him like I do. And I wish you would have told me that. Then I would have told him who you were. By giving you an alias, I gave him reason to think I was trying to hide you from him, which made him all the more interested in you.” Crap, this was partially my fault.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Fin put his hand up to stop me. “It’s not your fault. I should have been more open with you about who my father is and what he’s like. Or I never should have let things get this far. Whatev
er decisions that have gotten us here were the wrong ones. I’m sorry for putting you through all this.”
It was almost a slap in the face. Yes, I wasn’t particularly happy about our current circumstances, but that didn’t mean I wanted to take it back or undo everything.
Deep down, I believed that whether we ended up together or not, being with Fin was worth it, at least for me. He’d put passion and danger and fun and excitement back in my life. Even if we ended things, I was going to take that with me. No regrets.
But knowing he had regrets cut me.
“Do you wish you’d never met me?” I asked. He hadn’t gotten to the other questions, but I needed this answer.
He looked at me for a long time, brushing some of my hair behind my ear.
“No, Marisol Everly. I don’t regret knowing you. Not for a second.” That was what I needed to hear.
He cradled my face with one hand and sighed. “If there’s anything I regret, it’s that I wasn’t what you needed. Not from the beginning. I wanted to be, but there are things standing in my way.”
“Like what?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. I just wanted him to keep touching me and saying the things I wanted to hear. I wanted him to take me to bed and make love to me slowly and then hold me, letting me rest in the crook of his arm, listening to his heart.
I wanted him to wake me in the middle of the night, his eyes dark with lust and order me to lie on my stomach. I wanted him to take me from behind, spank me, do what he wanted with me. I wanted him to use those things I’d found in his closet.
I wanted everything from him. Everything.
“My father. My past. My dark tendencies. Take your pick.”
“But I don’t care about those things,” I said.
Fin shook his head sadly. “We both know that’s not true. Or else you wouldn’t have given me this ultimatum today.” He was right. We both knew that. He let that sink in and went on.
“To answer some of your other questions, I live under the power of my father because I don’t know any other way to live. This is how it’s always been. Yes, it’s hell, but it’s comfortable. It’s safe. If I went out on my own, I don’t know what would happen. He might be a monster, but he’s the monster that I know. And he has money and connections, and he raised me to be dependent on him. It might not be fair, and it isn’t right, but it’s the way things are. I indulge my need for control in other ways, and he looks the other way. Until you.” His eyes were so intense I almost had to look away.
“There’s another reason I’m . . . beholden to him. Something only he knows and that I’ve never told anyone else. Something I vowed I would never tell anyone else.”
I knew it. I knew it. There was something else holding him to his father. A secret. He seemed to have more of them than most people.
“Would you tell me?” I asked, hoping beyond hope that he would. I wanted him to trust me. Needed him to trust me. We had to have a foundation of trust or else our relationship was built on nothing and would crumble.
Fin took a deep breath.
“I killed someone.”
We both sat there for what felt like hours. Hours. I don’t even know if I breathed. I had not expected that. If I’d had a thousand years to think about it, I never would have come up with that.
“So there it is,” he said, his voice shaking. Hell, his entire body was shaking. I reached out to him and pulled him close as he quaked. He was scaring me, and I had no idea what to do. How did I comfort him?
I settled for holding him and rubbing his back as he shook.
“I can’t believe I told you that,” he said, almost laughing. “And the only reason my father knows is because he was there.”
There when he killed whomever he killed? I definitely needed some details here before I could actually begin to process this.
It had to be a misunderstanding. Fin wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t. I knew that, without a doubt. He wasn’t.
“What happened?” I asked, and he pulled back from me.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” For the first time since I met him, he looked and sounded like a little boy. A scared little boy who was forced to grow up and see things he wasn’t supposed to see. What kind of adult could you be when you didn’t have a childhood? What kind of person would that make you?
I didn’t know, but I wanted to. I wanted him to tell me everything. Every little dark bit. To expose him and strip him bare and let the light in. If I believed in nothing else, it was that Fin wasn’t a bad person. He wasn’t broken beyond repair. He could be redeemed.
“You need to talk about it. How old were you?” We could start there. Something told me if he started talking about it, the words would come out whether he wanted them to or not. You could only keep a secret like that caged for so long before it broke free.
“Thirteen,” he said, so quiet that I almost didn’t hear it. Thirteen? He had done this (I refused to think of it as killing until I heard the whole story) when he was a child. A boy. An innocent. And his father had used it against him.
I snapped. Something broke in me and roared in my soul. This was beyond anger. This was rage. If Fin’s father walked in right then, I didn’t know what I would do.
Now I was the one shaking, but for a different reason.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as gentle as possible for Fin. I didn’t want him to know about what was happening inside me. And I didn’t want him to think I was angry with him when the truth was the opposite.
“He was my friend. My only friend. His name was Eduardo. He was one of the maid’s sons. He was fifteen. Sometimes my parents would let him do chores around the house for extra money. His family was dirt poor and his father was an alcoholic that beat him, his mother, and all his siblings. They were trying to raise money so they could leave him and start a new life.” His words were halting at first, but as he spoke more, they came out just as I thought they would. Almost slurred together, because he was speaking so fast.
“This one day, he was acting odd. I saw him hide something under a chair in the study and then he went out to mow the lawn. Of course I was curious and went to see what it was.” He took a deep breath, like he’d came up for air and was preparing to plunge under the surface again.
“It was a gun in a brown paper bag. I never found out where he got it. My father had a gun collection, but he would never let me touch them. They were kept in a locked case, and I had a fascination with them. So I took the gun out of the bag and started messing with it. I pointed it out the window. It never occurred to me that it might be loaded. I should have . . .” He trailed off and I could figure out what happened next, but I needed him to say it. I didn’t move, didn’t speak so he’d continue.
“And I pointed the gun out the window and pulled the trigger. I wasn’t aiming at anything, but I hit Eduardo. Right in the head. He was killed instantly. I remember going out and staring at him. At the blood and his brain matter all over the place. My father was the one that found me, and the one who took care of it.” Took care of it. Like it was a pesky little problem. I could just imagine.
“He paid Eduardo’s mother off and made the problem go away. And for that, I owe him. For the rest of my life I’ll owe him.”
There it was. The ultimate secret that Fin had guarded from me. I could feel it. This was the one. And he’d finally broken himself open and showed it to me. I struggled to find the right words to say.
“So what do you think of me now, Marisol? Knowing I have blood on my hands?” His voice was hard like he was daring me to say something.
He wanted me to call him a murderer. It was easier that way. It would just confirm all the ugly nasty things he thought about himself already.
I’d never really understood him, but I was starting to. Fin hated himself. Really, really hated himself.
“It wasn’t your fault, Fin.” I predicted his reaction, and I was right.
He laughed and shook his head. “You think too highly o
f me, Marisol. And you’re blinded. I killed someone and I got out of it. If I was anyone else, you’d say I belonged in jail.” That wasn’t true.
“Don’t tell me how I feel, Fin. Don’t tell me how I think, because you don’t know. You’re determined to see the worst in people because you see the worst in yourself. It’s so much easier that way.”
He jumped to his feet and his face got red. “It’s not fucking easy, Marisol. I live with this shit every single day and it’s not easy. I used to wonder if I should continue living at all. What do you have to say to that?” I tried not to react. He was baiting me. Trying to make me fight with him.
“I know it’s not easy, Fin. But that one moment in your life doesn’t have to define you. Your father, the real monster in this situation, has spent years warping your mind, making you believe the worst. But no matter what you tell me, I’m still going to be here. I’m not running, no matter what.”
It wasn’t until I said those words aloud that I knew the truth. I’d been waiting for that one secret, that one thing that would make me run. That would make me hate him, or despise him.
But it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything he could tell me that would make me run.
Because I was in love with him.
My revelation hit me much harder than Fin’s truth, and I nearly gasped. How had I not seen it sooner? I’d been denying it and denying it, but I couldn’t anymore. I loved him. It didn’t make sense, but I did. I was in love with this complicated, controlling, damaged, handsome, infuriating man.
Fin took my silence for horror.
“Yeah, exactly. I knew this would happen. Now that I told you you’ve decided that we can no longer be together. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.” He raked his hand through his hair and started pacing.
“No! No, that’s not it at all. I was just thinking.” About the fact that I’m in love with you, I didn’t say.
“Thinking about what?” he asked, turning around.
I licked my lips. If I told him I loved him at this particular moment, I didn’t think it would go over well. He was too angry and too worked up.
Deep Surrendering: Episode Seven Page 2