by Corri Lee
Wrapping himself around me, Calloway crawled behind me and planted a kiss in the crook of my neck. “I’ll sleep well after that. You’re just full of surprises, Emmeline; most women tell me to slow down.”
“Yeah, well,” I said bitterly, unimpressed by his ill-placed conceit at a time when I really needed not to be reminded how, once again, I’d found the ultimate and not been able to emotionally invest in him enough to act like a functional person. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“I’ll find out, and not through Google.” With that promise, he pulled me back to be the little spoon and rested his head against my shoulder, satisfied and tamed. Despite old habits, I had never been more awake.
Closing my eyes, I tried to drown out the roar of Fat Emmy enough to fall asleep.
Are you kidding? You’re going to make this guy the first man you wake up with? The hell if I’ll let you, not that you even need me to tell you how ridiculous and stupid that would be. I mean, seriously, do you hate yourself that much for leaving that you have to create more reasons to justify your next attempt to open a vein? Because it will happen, Emmeline. You wake up next to him in the morning and it will eat away at you until you end up back on that slippery slope of penance. At some point, you’ll crack, and you know it. You think I’m just a bothersome voice that criticises you? Wrong. I’m trying to help you. God knows somebody has to force you to see some sense through this lunacy...
I lay there for an hour before I gave up and crawled out of bed, leaving Calloway sleeping peacefully. There was an overwhelming sense of sadness for the fact that I couldn’t fully appreciate him and be grateful of his interest in me. He was heartbreakingly gorgeous, stinking rich and an amazing lover—I should have been considering myself lucky to be the woman allowed to share a bed with him.
But instead I was the woman who didn’t think he was enough for me. The two great loves that had been extended to me, I’d thwarted over trivial details. Well, a wife wasn’t that trivial, but I could have fought harder to make him see that he belonged with me. I could have tried to understand. Hell, I didn’t even know what was wrong with the woman—she might have only had a week left to live.
If I’d thought that my life was messed up before Blaze arrived, and then messed up because of him, I was wrong. My life was messed up because he was gone.
Calloway found me in the study the next morning. The room had been chosen and designed with me in mind, offering me a place to hide when I visited New York with my family. I never did, but I was glad of the forward thinking now.
It was, by far, the loneliest room in the apartment. Apart from a bookshelf, a desk and a high backed black chaise longue, the room was empty and stark, with no art or embellishments to brighten the space.
The whole street facing wall had been fitted with a long semicircular antebellum styled window with a ledge thick enough to sit on comfortably. The loneliest point in a lonely room. My childhood bedroom had been very similar, and that was why Calloway found me there. It was the closest to home I could be.
The storm from the night before had not yet passed. In spite of the light grey overcast skies, prongs of jagged white pulsed through the clouds and lit up the atmosphere around it. Undeterred, true New Yorkers still wandered the streets, running with newspapers over their heads to ineffectively shield them from the hazy rain as they ran between the awnings covering shop-fronts to make coffee dates with friends.
I was almost jealous as I watched them from the comfort of my new home, dressed in nothing more than a loose t-shirt, boy shorts and last night’s sex hair with my laptop at my toes and my hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. Just two days before, I’d stepped out on those streets loving the vibrance and palpable excitement oozing from the pores of everyone around me.
But at that time, I looked at it all and felt home sick. Not for London, but for the romanticised city I’d arrived in. Either it had changed or I had. That much I couldn’t decide.
“You weren’t there when I woke.” Calloway tucked my straggled hair behind my ear and pressed a kiss to my temple. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I lied, looking up at him with a half-hearted smile. He was, for the most part, dressed but hadn’t buttoned his shirt, giving me a fabulous view of his muscles. “I’m just not much of a sleeper.”
Anymore. You used to sleep like a rock. A dumb rock. Now you’re just dumb.
“You have too much going on in here, don’t you?” He tapped my forehead gently, then stroked a finger down my nose. “I know how that feels. It would be so easy to tell you to just relax, but—”
“I know,” I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you.”
‘Thank you’ for what? Lavishing his attention on probably the worst woman for him? You saw those scars...
“No need to thank me.” Shifting to sit next to my feet, Calloway’s gaze swept across me, then over to my laptop. “You’re looking at cars?”
“I am. We don’t all enjoy being chauffeur driven.”
Looking back at me, he squinted in contemplation, looking for signs of satire. I winked so he knew I was teasing and his face softened into a fantastically affectionate smile. “I’ll have you know that I’ll be driving myself today. My flight was cancelled due to the storm, but it’s my mother’s birthday.”
“Ah.” I nodded sagely. “VIB.”
“Excuse me?”
“Very Important Business. Missing the matriarchal anniversary of birth is punishable by death by stoning.” I actually laughed when I saw him look alarmed and do a mental Google search for ‘British capital punishment’. “I’m joking! But of course you have to be there.”
“I’ll be back on Monday,” he mused, turning back with obvious interest to the Bentley website I’d been looking at. “Would you like to come to my office for lunch?”
Jokingly, I asked, “what, like a date?” Then my amusement faded with his teasing ‘yes, and?’ expression. In my whole life, I’d been on one official ‘date’ and it had been fairly impressive. I wasn’t sure that I could even feign approval of Chinese take-away in his office.
But overnight, I’d had time to think. Of course I was going to still be hurting over Blaze; it had been no time at all since I’d left. That must have been why Calloway hadn’t been put off my by too-obvious feelings of regret. I had to give him some credit for sticking with me regardless and expressing an interest that extended beyond one night in my bed. I couldn’t write him off after two evenings in his company.
“I’d love to.”
“Great.” His smile kicked up a notch to something molten that made me shuffle on the spot. The more pleasant side of the previous night sneaked up on me and had me biting my lip. Until the frustration had spoiled it, sex with Calloway really had been mind-blowing. I could still feel the pleasant thrum where he’d been inside me, which only made my much neglected sex drive worse.
Knowing what was on my mind, he trailed his fingers slowly down my thigh. “Emmeline.”
“Cal.”
“Are we reminiscing?”
“I don’t know, are we?”
With a tut, he pulled away and stood. “No time for that, sex pest. I’m facing a death penalty.”
“Oh, mean!” I whined, the complaint not really carrying any conviction. On the one hand, I was a woman who liked sex—especially cardiac-arrest inducing sex with one of the hottest men on the planet. On the other hand, the fear of being trapped in that situation of not being able to really enjoy it again worried me, and I knew that the concern would cause a further mental block in the vital moments. Maybe a couple of days of distance before we slept together again—if we did—would give me chance to clear some of the reservation that obscured the way.
“Well, he certainly appears to have taken care of it on your end,” sighed Ivy almost resentfully. It seemed suspiciously like she was looking for reasons to dislike Calloway.
I stared at her sullen face on my laptop and did my damnedest to discourage the feelings of
negativity he really didn’t deserve. In lieu of my actual presence, we’d reached a compromise that I’d video call my mother every Saturday so she could see the face of the daughter she so missed.
It was more than she’d seen of it when I was living in London. Sometimes it would be weeks, even months before my mother suddenly rolled up at my flat batting her delicate lashes, looking to steal just an hour of my time. Now I was out of the country, she made me commit to weekly ‘visits’. What a fucking hypocrisy.
Having already endured a tedious twenty minutes of her holding up all the articles she’d found that morning correcting the assumptions over Calloway and I, the task of returning the favour had my nerves on a knife’s edge. The retractions and apologies had been terse but, at least, factually accurate, and yet she’d still picked them apart sentence by sentence until my arms felt like dead weights from holding up the publications.
“He seems to be taken with you though,” she griped, referring to the articles that had pictured us together at The Mary Rose, praising me for ‘wearing the trousers’ in our ‘relationship’. “You do look very distinctive together.”
I rubbed circles on my temples to ease the pounding. The pressure from thunderstorms always triggered a migraine, but it was Ivy’s cryptic chides that really made my head hurt.
When it came from her mouth, the word ‘distinctive’ was never necessarily a compliment. It could be implied the same way a skunk had a ‘distinctive’ odour or semen had a ‘distinctive’ taste rather than the way a peacock had a ‘distinctive’ grace. I presumed she was comparing our public image to pre-cum rather than an impressive plumage.
“This doesn’t mean wedding bells are on the horizon, Mother. Neither of us are looking at prospects this soon. He’s just good company—like-minded.”
Her look in response was shrewd and assessing, but I didn’t have the strength or inclination to either argue about it or elaborate. She could believe what she wanted about Calloway—she already hated him irrationally because he was a threat to a romance she’d believed in. I didn’t have it in me to tend to her dented pride. She’d been wrong about me and Blaze. She’d just have to learn to accept it.
“You look shattered, Emmy.” I nodded uncaringly, putting my laptop down on the glass topped coffee table so I could curl up on the couch. She’d already had me talking for nearly an hour, so she was undoubtedly just warming up. “Are you eating well?”
“Of course I’m eating well. You’d be a fool to not eat well in this city.” In fact, the sumptuous variety of food available to me could have been construed as dangerous. I was always one meal away from falling back into binge/purge habits, so I’d strived to avoid keeping snack foods in the apartment. “Not too well obviously.”
“All right,” she conceded, unconvinced. “Are you fine otherwise?”
I balked. There was no way I’d tell her that I’d been for an initial consultation with a psychiatrist that afternoon and he’d agreed to take me on as an ad hoc patient. Clearly I’d given off the impression that I needed his assistance on an intermittent, unpredictable basis. Oh, joy of joys.
So I appeased her with an, “I’m getting there.”
“You miss him, don’t you?” I blinked in askance. “Blaze.”
“Oh, come on, give me a break!” Did she really have to do this?
“Don’t be like that. He misses you, too, Emmy. He—”
“Don’t,” I snapped. “Just don’t. You can’t coerce me home with his name, so don’t.”
“Emmeline...”
In a temper, I leaned over and slammed my laptop shut. Why was everyone so determined to tear me apart?
The security staff groaned when I stepped up to the desk in the foyer of Calloway’s building on Monday at lunchtime. I’d gone out and purchased a new games console with a kick-boxing fitness game on Saturday and it had left me just exhausted enough to get a couple of decent night’s sleep, which had done me the world of good. Okay, it was exercise, but it wasn’t in a gym and it was for a productive purpose. At least that’s what I told Fat Emmy every time she tried to verbally beat me down.
She’d gotten considerably quieter over the weekend. I hoped it was a sign that it was the fatigue that’d brought her back, and that if I carried on wearing myself out, she’d be banished completely. As much as she insisted that she was there to help me, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe her. I’d listened to her too many times before to know she couldn’t be trusted.
The female guard who’d cleared me before eyed me over the desk. “Remind me to never play poker with you.”
“Shame,” I grinned, “could be fun.”
“Hmm.” The corners of her mouth twitched with stifled amusement as she rifled through the files on her side of the desk, eventually producing a credit-card sized pass with a barcode. “Mr. Ryan asked that you were given this. Seems you have free passage down here on the ground floor. Welcome to Hell.”
“Have you ever been to England?” She shook her head, a slight frown creasing the space between her eyebrows. “Well, this place is more like a luxury resort in comparison. At least when I’m robbing you blind in broad daylight, you know I’m doing it.”
Leaving her laughing, I made my way through the turnstiles with my new pass and pressed the call button for a lift. As I waited, I remembered my frantic research mission on my way up to the thirty-fifth floor just four days earlier. I still barely knew Calloway, though the circumstances now were far different since I knew him in the Biblical sense.
Ho. It doesn’t make it any better because you’re going back for round two.
I sagged with resignation as I stepped into the newly arrived empty lift car. If I was honest with myself, I knew that she would rear her fat ugly head more when I was around him but I felt stubborn and defiant.
You’re a figment of my imagination. Cut this shit out.
Give it a rest. You’re a little old for imaginary friends. I’m as real as you are.
Seriously? I’m way past thinking this is normal behaviour.
And yet, you’re still talking to me.
Fat ass.
Whore.
Shaking my head at myself in disbelief, I stepped back to allow a group of five into the car. Slagging matches with my own mind; was I really going to humiliate myself like that?
For the rest of the journey up, I tried to make guesses at what it would be like to step into that impressive office for a second time with my arrival expected. And then my mind wandered to the canvas hanging up in the reception area outside. It was impossible to tell why that quote might have been displayed quite so boldly in his workplace in an area so few saw, even knowing what I thought I did. Did he need the daily reminder? Jesus, what was the point of speculating when I could just ask him myself?
Calloway was standing out next to his assistant’s desk when I reached his floor, drumming his fingers across the well polished surface with the hint of a smile playing across every inch of his face. Strangely, I felt almost shy seeing him again, even knowing that I’d seen far more of him than I probably deserved.
His assistant looked at me coolly before arrogantly turning her eyes back to down work. Whatever her problem was, I didn’t care for it when her boss looked so damn delicious in one of his token suits.
“Cal,” I purred as I got closer. For the third time in as many months, I’d woken up determined to make some productive changes and was equally as determined not to fuck it up this time. “How was Boston?”
“Great,” he muttered, eyes fixed on the black Daisy Duke shorts I’d purposely worn with my baggy-shirt and cut-off cuffed blazer. Head cocked, he pushed his line of sight up to my face—I was the picture of wicked innocence. “We have reservations.”
“Oh, good. I’m feeling very reserved today.”
“Is that right?” Caught somewhere between confusion and hilarity by my uncharacteristically playful behaviour, Calloway stepped back and pushed his office door open. “You’d best come in, Miss Tudor.”
“But—”
“Like now.” The sudden lapse in his professionalism made me giggle out loud, forcing the grumpy assistant’s attention in my direction. Calloway rolled his eyes at her and patronised her with a sigh. “Don’t look so surprised, Matilda. We’ll keep the noise down.”
His office was as grandiose as I recalled, though the fire wasn’t burning as it had before. Several spotlights embedded in the formica ceiling lit the room with a dimmed fluorescent glow, changing the general atmosphere from homey to strictly business.
Hand back in it’s place between my shoulders, Calloway urged me forward to the couches and indicated for me to sit down. Reactively, I flared my eyes at him, expecting him to take me as his entree, but instead he surprised me by walking over to a cleverly concealed cupboard behind his desk. “How was your weekend, Emmeline?”
I craned my neck nosily to look at what he was hiding. “Active. I took your advice and got my endorphin kick.”
“Damn, I bet that was a joy to watch.” My eyebrows shot up. I had no idea what had happened to him during his weekend in Boston but he seemed so... young.
Making a slow way back to me, he moved around the room in a way that kept whatever he held between his back hidden. “What do you know about the American public school system?”
I laughed. “What?”
“I know it’s different over in the UK, so what do you know?”
Still laughing through confusion over the way the conversation had turned, I shrugged. “I don’t know. As much as is poorly documented in appalling films about teen romance?”