by Corri Lee
“Relapses?” He stared blankly at my look of horror. How much had he heard? “You work in a bookshop, Emmeline—a usually empty bookshop—and the guy talks so loudly that you may as well have just had your phone on speaker. I wouldn’t want to go to his wedding, either, if he spoke to me like that.” Ignoring my obstinate grunts of objection, he pressed on. “Your other friends don’t talk to you like that.”
“No, they don’t.” My mind cycled through the motions of the affinity I shared with the other men in my life. Daniel and Jonathan had struggled to find acceptance over their sexuality and Chris had been dealt a pretty shitty hand in the self-esteem stakes. It didn’t take much to knock any of us down to rock bottom, and until you’d been there yourself, you just didn’t understand how it felt. “They know what it’s like to be damaged goods.”
“Damaged goods!” Blaze snorted, but didn’t pursue the conversation further. Instead, I watched him snarf down his sandwich with quiet enthusiasm and silently tended to my internal war wounds.
I was damaged, inside and out, and it wouldn’t be long before that damage spread. I was too far gone to fight it.
Every day I saw the same face. That washed out, beady eyed, chubby cheeked face caked in chocolate and smudged make-up.
Why are you trying to make yourself look pretty, freak? Everyone thinks you’re ugly. You’re ugly, fat and everyone hates you. No matter how hard you run on that treadmill, you’re always going to have a big doughy backside and five chins. Six years of this and you’re still wearing the same sized jeans you wore when you left school. Even the fat chicks are embarrassed to see you in the plus size section. Maybe you can cut it out. Maybe you can remove that fat yourself and stitch it back up. You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you? Just make it go away. Nobody would ever know...
No matter how sharp her tongue was, I stood there sadly and took her insults without ever answering back or looking away. I was as bored of hearing it as she was of saying it, but somehow we needed each other. I needed to hear it and she needed to be heard. We were gluttons for punishment. Words were meaningless with no action and neither of us could act alone.
If you looked at us side by side, you’d never guess that we were two sides of the same coin. You’d never understand why we stood so close together. You probably wouldn’t even realise that she was there...
“Hey, Emmeline!” The loud voice at the door of Double Booked’s bathroom made me jump out of my skin like I’d been caught with my hands in the cookie jar. “You have five seconds before I barge in through this unlocked door, White—I have your boss’ permission. Wake u-up!” My chubby company returned my quizzical look at the sing-song voice. She wanted to know why Blaze had intruded on my workplace two days running, too.
My failure to answer in my time limit provoked an uninvited visitor to my bathroom break. I instinctively took a step backward when the door swung open and leaned protectively towards the wide-eyed face standing with me.
Blaze paused, frowning, then sagged back on the spot. “You look upset.”
“How do I look upset? I’m not upset. Who’s upset? Are you upset? Because I’m not upset.” His lips pursed at my ramble and his wariness to approach me dulled. He reached out for my hand carefully, which I almost surrendered until I saw my fat friend giving me a wholly disapproving look. “What are you doing here?”
“Hoping to take you to lunch, actually.”
Lunch? With him? How else would you like to fraternise with the enemy?
I could have sworn I heard her hiss. Her patronising tone made me pale. I was somehow betraying her and Hunter by going with him.
“We had lunch yesterday.”
Blaze arched a brow at me and grabbed at the hand I didn’t give up willingly. His skin was remarkably soft and warm, almost like he was wearing a suede glove. “Hadn’t you heard? It’s a daily thing. And that was hardly lunch, Emmeline. Come on, something more substantial.”
“I don’t—”
“It’s a free lunch. Who turns down a free lunch?” The muck-caked face shrugged at me. She’d never turned down a free meal in her life. That was my job.
I watched her slide out of view over my shoulder as I was unwillingly tugged from the bathroom, wondering how much worse she’d look in a few hours. Blaze didn’t know it, but she’d be lurking everywhere we went. Stalking us.
He spun around when he heard me mutter a goodbye to her and frowned down at me. His hair had been left to flop leisurely across his forehead again and, as ever, he looked beautifully male and edible. I doubted he was going to volunteer himself as my lunch, though.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody.” As much as a nobody as I was. “I’m not hungry.” Not strictly speaking...
“Then you can watch me eat.” He was in I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer mode again. I wasn’t confident that he had any others. “But I think you might be persuaded after the journey.”
“What does that mean?”
He shot me a wicked grin that made me smile slightly. “It means you’re going to sing for your supper.” Nightmare visions of karaoke bars and busking flashed in front of my eyes. “Not literally!” He laughed and steered me towards my bag behind the cash desk. “But I meant it when I said this would be a free lunch. I’m not paying for it, either.”
There was no chance to question his cryptic statement before we were ushered out of the door by an only too eager to shut up shop early, starry-eyed Mrs. Reynolds. She stared after Blaze enviously; I knew that she, too, planned to live vicariously through me.
Hell, if she wanted to go for lunch with him instead she was welcome to take my place. Central London on a Saturday lunchtime was even less desirable than Friday lunchtime, and my already fragile disposition was quivering with the thought of all those people swarming the streets again. There’d be more of them, flocking and swooping at me like scavenging eagles, mentally picking away at my inadequacies...
Imagine my horror when Blaze parked the goblin car in the very heart of the city and dragged me to Oxford Street sans handbag, throwing me out into my interpretation of a nightmare with no means of calling for help. I doubted that blinking in Morse Code would be useful.
And I was letting him lead me to unfamiliar places and coming out of it unscathed. Was this progression or regression?
“Okay.” He pulled me into a small barely noticeable alley way and grabbed my face between his hands. My heart pounded frantically at his proximity. This was how I’d wanted him since the night we met in Esme’s—somewhere secluded and up close. Public didn’t bother me.
He ducked down towards me and stopped an inch away from my face. “Keep dreaming, Emmeline. I’m still not done terrorising you.”
I caught a glimpse of the fat girl in a murky window opposite us and her sardonic expression.
Ho. You’d screw him in an alley and he still doesn’t want you. Why the hell would he lower his standards?
She was cruel to me, my sister in misery.
“Of course you’re not,” I sighed, pulling my attention back up to Blaze, who stared down at me with a frown.
“Lost you there for a minute. You keep looking like you’re having conversations with an invisible friend.”
“She’s not invisible,” I whispered, distracted by how perceptive he was. The truth was that days like these were intermittent and yet frequent. I kept bad company, but it was company nonetheless. Like Hunter and I, we were devastatingly inseparable, and maybe more destructively. It was thanks to Hunter that we’d come together and I still didn’t know if that was a good thing. She was there for me, always, but she was an honest bitch. “So why are we in an alley?”
“Preparation,” Blaze replied, still frowning. “Mess up your hair and rub your eyes.”
“You want me to look like I’ve just been bent over and fucked without the fucking?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, I want you to look like you’ve been mugged.”
It was my turn to frown, conf
used. I stood stock-still while he worked at roughing me up himself, brusquely tousling my tied back hair and smudging my sparse eye make-up with his thumbs. Totally numb and paralysed, my mind struggled to process what was going on and draw a conclusion as to where this plan was headed. Until—
“I’m not picking pockets!” Blaze blinked blankly for a moment, then shook his head and laughed. “I mean it. I don’t care how much of a ruffian you make me look like, I’m not stea—”
“I’ve not brought you out to steal, Emmeline.” I sagged back slightly with relief. “Just to tell a few fibs.” Consider that relief unceremoniously ripped out of my hands and stamped on.
“Fibs? What fibs?”
“Well...” He grinned and pulled the hem of my shirt askew. “You’re going to run down that street like you’re being chased, pick a rich type to ‘unintentionally’ bump into and turn on the charm for our lunch money.” Was he positively insane?
“No!” I snapped resolutely. There was no way in hell I was going to try and pull a scam like that anywhere, let alone on Oxford Street, even if he was the hottest man on the planet. “Why the hell would you think I would do that?”
Blaze shrugged uncaringly and took a second go at messing up my hair. By the time he finished, it was sticking out all over the place from my hair tie and I looked like a street urchin. “You look like you need a little mischief in your life.”
“Why would you think that?”
He shrugged again. “You look like your life never deviates from a work, drink, sleep routine.” He was almost right. It was a work, drink, copulate, sleep routine. I think I had a right to be defensive.
“Are you done making asinine judgements about my personality? You don’t know me, not even a little bit.”
Smirking, Blaze pulled me by the wrist to the mouth of the alley and stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders. I could see both sides of the street from that point, crammed to bursting with native Londoners and day trip visitors craning their necks to look around in awe. All of them travelled with far more ease and fluidity than I ever could. Was I really going to make such a scene and risk the backlash of collaterally embarrassing Henry by being identified just on Blaze’s say so? Did I want him that much?
“Your family is well off. They have high hopes for you but you don’t want to comply. You’d prefer to spend your life drawing but now you’ve self-published one graphic novel and sold both copies, you feel like you’ve reached the conclusion of that episode in your life.
“School was rough, people didn’t like you. You lived in your friend’s shadows, though it was entirely by choice. You met a boy. You fell in love. He didn’t want you. That rejection consumed your life. You left suburbia to become a self-made woman and got stuck in a depressive routine of working, drinking and rolling out of stranger’s beds in a series of one night stands in a futile attempt to gain acceptance you don’t really want.
“You don’t like yourself and you want change, but you don’t know where to find it. When left in your hands, decisions about your life are reckless and unproductive, so you count on others, like Esme and your charming male friend in Japan to take those decisions out of your hands.
“Am I right?”
I glared at him over my shoulder. How had he deduced so much from four short meetings with me? Was he psychic? A stalker? Had I really given so much away just by the way I looked at him?
His eyes shone sympathetically in the summer sun. “This is change. Besides, I left my wallet in the car, so if you chicken out on me, I go hungry, too.”
In a flash, his hand wrapped around my ponytail and yanked it. Hard. Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Fuck!” I spun around and, in a knee jerk reaction, slapped him hard. Pain rang through my hand and radiated until it began to tingle. It was the most physical discomfort I’d felt in years, after becoming numb to all else. “What the hell was that, your idea of foreplay?”
Blaze’s fingers traced his reddened cheek. He didn’t look even slightly shocked by my attack. Silently, he turned me back around and shoved me out into the fray with only one word as guidance.
“Run.”
And I’d never felt so much like running in my life. Between that girl chasing me like my shadow, Blaze’s uncanny ability to analyse me, and the current of arrogant shoppers flooding around me, panic was the only emotion I could process. Run, yes, I could do that. I could dodge and weave through the people as though I was running from my own life, and maybe if I ran fast enough, I might actually escape.
I felt much warmer than the sun might have made me, and my skin prickled uncomfortably. I was aware of everything—every voice, car, cyclist, and the fact that Blaze was nowhere near me—but somehow totally unaware of my feet moving of their own accord.
I’d run like this before, relentlessly and aimlessly, and the agonising cramps in my muscles were deliciously cathartic. I liked to hurt—I deserved it and it felt productive. The overwhelming need to prolong that ache drove me to keep limping forwards, gasping for breath and eyes burning.
She crept up, running along side me and matching my pace.
You’re doing it again. You can’t run away from him. You’ll always love him and you’ll never be good enough. Stop running.
I couldn’t. I wanted to run until there was nothing of me left. I wanted to gain enough speed to burn up in the atmosphere like dust. If I couldn’t be enough, I didn’t want to be anything.
The next thing I knew, I was on my back on the concrete, dazed and light-headed, and only vaguely aware of a throb in my forehead. Everything was quiet and serene for a moment. Not one cell in my body cared how I’d found my way to the ground until the fog in my mind cleared and the faces overhead came into my blurred view.
“I’m so sorry, she just fell at me from nowhere.”
“No, no. It’s okay, I’m just glad I found her.” One of the dark haired faces above me leaned closer, and I could immediately smell who it was. “I’m here. I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch up with him.” Blaze stroked my hair, then grabbed both of my hands to pull me to my feet. My legs promptly flagged beneath me, overused and flaccid.
“What?”
“The guy who cornered you. Why did you run off this way?”
“Sorry...” What was he talking about? My hand felt my way to my face and found the reason why my vision was so blurred. “Glasses,” I mumbled, twisting out of Blaze’s grip to search the floor for my absent lenses. The other dark haired face grasped my hand and wrapped my fingers around them firmly, his grip lingering around mine for just a second too long. “Tha—”
Holy shit. When my glasses revealed exactly who it was I’d stumbled into, I couldn’t help but simper.
Super-urbane and well-groomed, the man still holding onto my hand shot me a smouldering smile that made the corners of his ice blue eyes crinkle joyously. Dimples burrowed deep into his cheeks, adding youth to the age added by a flawless black suit embellished with a shirt that matched his eyes and a black tie.
“Are you all right?” American! My stomach back-flipped. Of all the men for me to collide with, it had to be the single-most man in London who might just be scrummier than Blaze.
“Better now,” I breathed, falling victim to my raging libido. “I don’t remember falling, I’m very sorry.”
“You were mugged?” He glanced up at Blaze for his answer but turned his eyes back to me expectantly. “You and your boyfriend?”
I blurted out, “he’s not my boyfriend,” and bit down hard on my lip. The insatiable harpy in me wouldn’t be happy unless that man was crawling out of my bed in the early hours of the morning.
“Uh, yeah.” The snarl in Blaze’s tone surprised me enough to look up at him and raise an eyebrow. What the hell was his problem? “I was trying to talk this beautiful lady into accepting my business card so she can look me up next time she’s in the city, but a guy jumped out of nowhere and snatched her handbag and my wallet. I tried to chase him down but the fucker was fast.”
“Quite.” The stranger spoke with enough apathy for it to be obvious that he was ignoring Blaze. I could feel his gaze raking me, mentally undressing me. “You’re not from London?”
I opened my mouth but Blaze answered for me. “Cardiff.” Hiding my irritation, I nodded and fiddled impatiently with my own fingers. Being spoken for like a child was more annoying than being cock-blocked.
“How will you get back?” The man’s eyes glinted when I shrugged, and his hand delved into the pocket of his crisp blazer. “Here.” He passed me a money clip engraved with a lavish ‘R’ holding an indiscernible amount of money wrapped up in a business card.
“You just happen to carry this around?”
“No, I just woke up feeling lucky, actually. With good reason, too, apparently. You call me. I’ll come running to that Cardiff of yours for my money clip.”
I was as aware of the man smiling as he walked away as I was of Blaze seething next to me, practically vibrating with cataclysmic ire next to me. Waving the money clip in his face, I elbowed him in the ribs, still watching my new ‘friend’ slink down the street with almost feline grace.
“What’s your problem? You get your free lunch—I did what you asked.”
“What?” I glanced up at him and rolled my eyes at his denial. “What the hell was that, Emmeline?”
“I believe that was a pick up line. And it’s going to work on me. See?” My fingertip tapped the business card. “You get free food and he gets laid tonight. My good deeds for today and tomorrow are covered.”
“I meant you.” Blaze pulled my hair free of the elastic tie and tried to restore some order to the straggled locks with his fingers. “One minute you’re running like the Grim Reaper is on your heels, collapsing into a heap into some New York stiff, then you turn into Miss Sex Appeal.”