by Holley Trent
Essentially, he was going to have to turn himself inside out and rid himself of all the shit that didn’t fit. Then, he could be creative again.
He’d spent his whole life waiting for other people to tell him they were proud and had wondered why he hadn’t felt satisfied when they did. It was because he wasn’t concerned enough with whether or not he was proud of himself.
* * *
“I...have to tell you something.” The following week, Bruce drew Ev down to his lap and sighed as her body received his shaft.
His breath fell out in a reflexive gust and his arms tightened around her waist.
She was so warm, so accommodating.
She put her head back on his shoulder and groaned through clenched teeth. She placed her hand on her clit and started to rock. “Now?”
He was aching from navel to toenails, needing her so badly, body straining for her. “No,” he rasped.
The connection was more important. Touching her was more important for the time being. He’d been so starved for it and he’d decided that only her skin would satisfy.
He satisfied his oral fixation with a tug of her earlobe with his lips. That made her crane her neck around so her mouth found his. Their tongues chased as she rocked up and down, squeezing him tightly in her heat. Setting fire to the short fuse in him. He couldn’t last with her. He was too impatient and wanted her so much.
Too much, maybe.
“God, I love you.”
She stilled, her ragged breathing suddenly halting altogether.
The words had tumbled out of his mouth without thought like so many other things, but he’d never blurted those before. He’d been thinking them so much, though, because he’d gotten attached because she made him comfortable and he didn’t have to try so hard to be understood. She read him in a way few others could.
Most didn’t want to try. Too much effort and they were busy.
Busy busy busy.
“Bruce—”
“Hush.” He laid a hand over her mouth and put his lips on her neck again. She tasted of salt and smelled like cherry blossoms. He’d gotten so he’d become aroused by the scent even when she wasn’t nearby. It was her signature—a dab behind each ear and beneath each wrist.
He imagined that heaven smelled like cherry blossoms.
“I need you. Okay?”
She nodded and gripped the wrist of the arm he held around her waist. She hooked her feet behind his calves and chased her pleasure on him. Up down, breathing chaotic and staggering again, body tensing with anticipation.
His burned as his toes curled into the plush carpet of her living room.
He closed his eyes and tried to linger at that place of pleasure, but he couldn’t hold on. Not when she needed him so much for this thing he didn’t have to think too hard about.
Feels good. Do it.
That was all.
He had to hurry her along, so he found that magic button, gathered up some wetness from the place they joined, and slicked it on her. He massaged her and prayed her intention hadn’t been to outlast him. Rock star stamina was a myth as far as he was concerned.
She got into the race, lowering herself on him faster and churning out moan after moan.
“Come on, darlin’, you know I can’t keep up with you.”
He kept strumming until she screamed and he’d never been more pleased to be ambidextrous. He held her tight against him until he stopped spilling and then collapsed back against her sofa cushions, taking her along with him and not bothering to unsheathe.
“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” she said after their breathing had normalized and his legs had stopped twitching. “You had something you needed to say, but I don’t think it was the confession of love.”
He did love her, and as much more than a friend, but that’s where they were for the time being. He couldn’t make new attachments until he’d sloughed off some old ones. Maybe she wouldn’t even like him when he was done.
Sighing, Ev scraped the hair back from her forehead and leaned slowly on her forearms. “So, this really is goodbye.”
“I have to go away. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Why?” Her voice was so small and lacked its usual thrum of fortitude.
He’d done that to her and it broke his heart. He’d fix everything, though, if she gave him the time.
“It’s all the attachments. The business stuff. The property and all the various investments. I tried to get my parents to help me sort it out last week but they didn’t take me seriously. I think they assume I hadn’t thought about it before now and that I’ve made a rash decision. I didn’t. They don’t get it.”
They didn’t get him.
“It’s a fucking mess. I’ve got to unwind things in South Africa. The way things are set up, I have to present myself in person and for some, remain nearby for periods of one to two weeks before I’m allowed to terminate or cash out any of the properties or investments. Imagine that times five or ten. They’re all seated in different places. I suppose my grandfather thought if it was too easy to unload that people could take it from us. He was probably too arrogant to think that one of us might not have wanted it in the first place.”
If Ev had an opinion on the matter, her face didn’t indicate what it was. In fact, he would have thought she’d completely tuned out if not for the fact that she was fondling a bit of his hair.
“I’m a grown man,” he continued, just to get the words out. “I have to do some things for myself and not wait for someone to tell me I have to. Setting my family straight, for one. We’re long overdue for some hard truths to come out between us all. I’m tired of feeling like I’m in the wrong and that they never meet me halfway. It’s just hanging over my head and I always wonder when it’s going to fall, you know?”
“Oh,” she whispered. She picked up the pendant hanging from one of the gold chains around his neck. Too girly. Too ornate with all that filigree and those flower engravings. His granddad had given it to his nan when she was seventeen and she’d given it to Bruce when he was twenty because he couldn’t help but to lift it for another look whenever it caught his eye.
Ev let it fall gently against his chest and gave it an attentive pat before withdrawing her hand. She hadn’t asked about the jewelry, but knowing Ev, she might have figured out on her own that the pendant was important to him.
“I understand,” she said. “You have to confront it all, for better or worse.”
“I feel like I’d be able to make decisions if I could. I might be wrong.”
“I think you’re right. I think we both need to have conversations with our families that we don’t want to. Or in my case, shouting matches. It’s just... I don’t know what to do anymore.” With each word, her voice got softer, less resolute. “My father thinks that I can stay in my current situation and that in a few years’ time, I’ll become complacent enough to grow into it. I want more than that. I want to build something I can be excited about.”
“Of course you should. Misery shouldn’t be anyone’s birthright.”
“But here I am with this obscene amount of privilege and I have the audacity to be unhappy. I have the audacity to consider going without a salary for however long and helping my friend get her business off the ground. That would make me happy, knowing that she has something, and that she’s taken care of and successful. I feel like I can make a difference, but I have to disappoint people to do it.”
They were in a similar boat, him and Ev, and they couldn’t bail each other out. They each had to throw themselves overboard and make their way toward whichever mass of land could sustain them. That meant they wouldn’t necessarily be going in the same direction, but they could reunite once they’d found their moorings again.
“I’m never happy when I’m pretending to be someone else,” he said. “You helped me realize that.
”
After a few moments, she nodded against his shoulder. “I’m smart sometimes. I should take my own advice.”
“Do. Please do, love.”
“If your dealings with your family go badly, you’re going to hate me, aren’t you?”
“You know I won’t.” In fact, Bruce already anticipated the confrontation going badly. They were going to talk over him in that quiet, but insistent, way they always did, and he’d get confused. He’d talk himself in circles. He’d forget his point. They would triumph over his “coming ’round to reality” and offer him tea.
He’d written it all down, though. Every single point, and he was going to stay until he’d made every single one of them, even if he had to camp out on their front steps. Even if he had to make himself a spectacle, he wasn’t going to let them win.
Some of that shit was going to come out in the film or the book, anyway. He may as well stop avoiding the truth.
“If all goes according to plan, my portfolio will be far lighter this time next month,” he said cheerfully. “Do you think you’d still like me if I didn’t have my diamond mines and sketchy ore investments? I plan on donating them all to charity in my sister’s name as a wedding gift. That ought to cause a very polite riot in the Engle townhouse.”
Ev laughed, pulling her face away and wiping away a few errant tears. “You should call that song you sent me that. ‘Polite Riot.’ It was lovely, by the way.”
“It was a joke.”
“No. It wasn’t. It was amazing.”
Oh.
Her opinion meant more than anyone’s to him.
“It doesn’t sound like much of anything without the band,” he demurred.
“No, it just doesn’t sound like what you’d gotten used to. It’s funny how people lose their voices when they become overly concerned with other people’s ideas of success. You’ve just forgotten what yours sounds like.”
He mulled that over as she dressed. He helped. He liked smoothing her seams and tucking her in. Like having his hands on her and how patient she was when she didn’t really need the help.
“Will you...see anyone?” he asked when her clothes had been completely righted. “I can’t promise I’ll be able to stay in touch. You don’t have to answer. If I were your boyfriend, I suppose I could demand an answer, but we never got there, did we?”
He’d take her with him, if he could. Hold her hand throughout and let her more direct logic guide him through the mess, but he needed to try to navigate the bullshit on his own. He couldn’t demand that she prop him up while she was so busy trying to stay afloat herself.
When he returned, he’d be better for it, and they could be more than friends. Legitimately more.
If not, he’d leave her alone because she deserved to have someone with discipline and a plan.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, carefully turning his pendant over in her palm. “But don’t let me stand in the way of your perfect someone if you stumble across them. Don’t let opportunities slip away, Bruce. I’ll be fine.”
She was his opportunity, and he doubted anyone else would understand him the way she did, but he nodded, anyway, because he couldn’t be selfish. “Aye. You do the same.”
Chapter Fifteen
Everley had spent so many weeks in a fog of anxiety that she hadn’t even realized that Christmas was barreling down on them and the entire publishing company was in a state of constant hyperproductivity. She was essentially on autopilot, somehow managing to get last-minute promotional coverage for books she couldn’t even remember having read.
Somehow managing to get the charity donation drive sorted and promoted, basically by robotically performing the items in Raleigh’s careful outline of tasks.
She’d been like that since about a week after Bruce left. She hadn’t heard much from him. The couple of emails he’d sent from Johannesburg had been scant on details and he hadn’t responded to her follow-ups.
He was in the weeds. She understood that. And she understood that in his prioritization scheme, she had to be lower than certain things. His family. His unwanted financial entanglements. His music.
She’d just never been with someone she’d simply liked so much before and was feeling far too vulnerable that their connection hadn’t been permanent. She could go out and try to find someone who was just like him, at least on paper, but he wouldn’t be the same. The replacement wouldn’t have the same energy.
And they certainly wouldn’t insist on holding her hand when they crossed the street because “Christ, you could get plowed over.” She’d been crossing streets alone since she was eight, but she’d been so touched by Bruce’s concern—or at the very notion that her survival meant something to someone she wasn’t related to.
“All right, let’s get this over with for the day, shall we? You’re last in the department.”
Raleigh’s flat delivery from her office doorway made her slowly raise her head from the gift basket catalog she’d been staring at without seeing for who knew how long.
He leaned in her doorway holding a green Sharpie and a square piece of cardboard. Somehow, the snowflake graphic on the back of the card was familiar, but she couldn’t quite recall why, especially not with her brain far too focused on the holder’s sweater.
There were ugly holiday sweaters, and then there were designer-ugly ones. Raleigh’s was the latter. The festive red monstrosity featured a reclining Mrs. Claus draped over a chaise like Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business. Instead of crooning “Lazy” like the chanteuse, a speech bubble pointed toward her mouth read “Hazy.” Snow was falling heavily outside the window behind her and Rudolph’s flashing nose flashed in five-second bursts.
The man was wearing a battery-powered sweater.
Her brain couldn’t make sense of it.
Raleigh knocked. “I see you, but I can’t tell if you’re in here.”
“Sorry,” she said in a rasp of vocal disuse and cleared her throat. She hadn’t been talking much in the past few days. “What did you need?”
He held up the card. “I’m doing the Athena bingo.”
“Bingo?” she whispered weakly, thinking of Bruce’s Nan.
She’d learned a lot about the old lady—that she was buried in her favorite slippers, for one thing. And that she fancied black coffee and had her hair dyed to match.
Raleigh’s brow creased. “Haven’t you seen it? HR droned on about it for fifteen minutes during yesterday’s all-hands meeting. You know. Right after congratulating you for getting that charity campaign finished on time.”
“Oh.” She might have zoned out then. Her brain had been a swamp of ideas ranging from December holidays at her parents’ place in Oyster Bay to the dearth of food in her refrigerator. She hadn’t felt like grocery shopping. Takeout was easy, even if she was just picking at it. “Well, the charity thing turned out to be simple thanks to all the notes you left in the margins. You’ve got a knack for that kind of thing.”
That may have been something of an understatement. Raleigh didn’t simply have a knack for charitable giving organizing, but he had strong opinions about how donations should be earmarked. He’d put schemes into place with the charities they partnered with. It didn’t cost Athena anything extra to donate books to needy schools, but cash was a whole other animal. Raleigh had always insisted that Athena’s donations be distributed via a fund named for the company so that the charity execs couldn’t skim off so much of it. If they complained, Raleigh looked for a different charity. Fortunately, Everley had been able to ride on his coattails and piggyback on his prior year’s work.
He was brilliant. She’d known that, though, from her first day at the office. She’d been awed by how creative he was. Her math-inclined brain was rigid as concrete in comparison.
“How does it work?” She rooted through the scattering of papers on her desk
until she found her stack of cards. There were five—one for each day of the workweek.
“The prize is for an extra day of paid time off,” he said. “I had to offload all my accumulated PTO before the merger and I need that extra day for the holidays.”
“Plans?” she murmured, still on autopilot, still squinting at the cards. It seemed the natural thing to ask.
“Heading down to Richmond,” he said after a few uncomfortable beats of silence. “New tradition at Stacia’s.”
“Not your parents’?”
She didn’t think he was going to answer, and she wouldn’t have blamed him. They weren’t friends, though not for lack of trying on her part. The question was far too personal.
But then, just after the heat vent kicked on and mussed his shiny red hair a bit, he intoned with an acid snap, “No. I don’t do holidays with my parents.”
“Must be nice,” came her reflexive whisper.
She took a bracing breath and read the instructions on the top card twice. The intricacies weren’t quite landing right in her brain so she gave up. “What do you need me to do?”
“I’ve got my card for today ninety percent completed. I still need to find someone who’s broken a bone, someone who’d been suspended from school at least once, and someone who’s a natural blond. With the way the card’s arranged, one of those has to be you. The rows are sorted by department.”
“I suppose I’m the natural blond.”
“You...suppose?” His eyebrows shot up.
“Dye.”
“Why?”
“Because in my head, I’m a brunette. Plus I got tired of guys treating me like a ditz in my college math classes.” She twined her fingers together and peered at the card again, wondering which of those items on line five might have referenced him. “Where did they get these trivia items?”
“We all sent a list two weeks ago.”