by Corri Lee
We spotted her by one of the other portable bars chatting animatedly with a tautly poised blonde with cropped hair wearing a tightly fitted lemon dress that barely covered her crotch. I shot a look back at Esme, who shrugged and mouthed ‘no idea’, which told me that the woman was someone’s date. Wow, poor guy.
Helen pulled her attention away from her with a tight laugh and looked at me and Hunter with a glint of desperation. On the plus side, I appeared to be in her good books. But the bad news for the blonde was that she obviously wasn’t.
With the same sun kissed red hair as her son, Helen looked admittedly striking in her bold red tea dress. I could imagine Esme feeling completely unimpressed by the attention being sucked away from her. Scooping my hands up in hers, Helen planted kisses on both of my cheeks and took a step back to admire me.
“Goodness, don’t you look well?” I answered with a high pitched grunt rather than make the night prematurely ugly by going with my gut reaction to stamp on her toes. Words like ‘well’ held connotations with ‘fat’, and she knew it.
That was her one free pot-shot. She always needed one to feel like she had the upper hand. Any more and I’d start biting back.
Knowing that she had it, Helen turned her ardour on her son. “And you, I’m almost certain that I recognise you.”
“Mother...”
“Yes, I have a son who calls me that. I used to have two.”
“Christ, Mother!” I tightened my grip around Hunter’s arm to reign him in. Having suffered the wrath of an overbearing parent myself over the last few months, I knew how annoying it could be. But his older brother, Samson, had left home three years earlier, and any idiot could tell that Helen was feeling the emptiness of her nest. It was written all over her face—in the fact that she couldn’t physically frown at her estranged son after numerous cosmetic surgery procedures.
“I’m sorry,” he acquiesced, reaching for her hand. “I missed you, too.” I smiled inside because he hadn’t really, but it was nice that he was pretending.
I was surprised by the way Helen courteously worded her questions around my move to New York without making any inference to what I’d left behind or how Ivy’s heart had broken over it. While it wasn’t like her to be so tactful, I appreciated the change of pace and the ease with which words flowed in a conversation I’d been dreading. We traded opinions on the restaurants and museums we’d both visited at some point, the whole time Hunter and the blonde stood bored beside us, paying no attention to what we said.
Something was still bugging Hunter. I planned to find out what after dinner.
A large dinner gong sounded to draw us to our tables, I excused myself to freshen up in the fifteen minutes we had before our starters were served. I tried not to groan when the blonde said she’d come with me, shutting myself off from her as we walked out into the foyer so she knew that I didn’t want to talk.
The more I looked at her, the more I hated her. She was overly slender and made up to the nines, trying far too hard. The simple fact that her date was yet to join her made me wonder if he’d seen her and turned right back around out of the door. I wouldn’t have blamed him.
She had already left the bathroom when I exited my stall, which gave me a precious second to pull myself together. Unless, by some miracle, Blaze had thought better of coming, I was just minutes away from having to face him again. Thankfully, the make up I’d had applied by a bona fide professional was still immaculate—the grey circles left from lack of sleep were covered, my eyes bright and lively, cheeks rosey with health. I looked a hell of a lot better on the outside than I did within.
Which was just as well, because I didn’t even have the walk back into the auditorium to steel myself. I stepped out into the foyer, distractedly walking right into the blonde’s back. I looked up to apologise and felt my insides curl up in pain.
Blaze stood in front of me, draped in a tailored Italian suit that emphasised the perfect body I knew intimately inside it. His arms looked thicker, like they might be solid with muscle, waist trim and narrow, giving him the idealistic triangle stature. He’d had his hair cut shorter and waxed into spikes, the darkness of it offsetting those luminous emerald irises. And those irises looked to be making the same assessment of me.
His raking gaze flew across me back and forth like he was reading me, appreciation and hunger for my new curves manifesting in a shaky inhalation he probably didn’t realise anyone heard. His desperation to touch me was given away by the restless flexing of his fingers around his glass and raw, unashamed flame of carnality behind his eyes.
I bit my lip to hide my amusement when the blonde glared up at him and scoffed her contempt at him for so blatantly eye-fucking me. If I needed any reassurance that he was still hot for me after my three month absence, I had it.
But it stung to see him looking so good without me, with a tiny little waif of a date with the haircut Calloway had wanted for me. So I nodded with a cursory, “Blaze,” and excused myself, turning quickly so he couldn’t see my chin start to quiver. Breathing hard to fend away the tears that burned my eyes, I rubbed at the knot in my chest as I walked until I reached the bar, where I slammed both my palms hard and drew a loud shaking breath that turned heads. I had to close my eyes to contain myself, resisting the driving urge to claw at them and ruin my make up. I have to save face, I have to save face. The mantra barely worked.
Jonathan and Chris came up behind me, both possessively rubbing my back, knowing how the gesture would set me at ease. Daniel followed closely and ordered me the scotch I’d been holding off all night. It was more than necessary to drink myself into a stupor now.
Running my finger around the rim of the glass, I did a mental play-by-play of that horrible shituation. “Tell me I didn’t just look as green as I feel.”
“Are you kidding?” Chris laughed at my side, drawing my attention to him. He arched a brow and looked at me with something eerily close to admiration. “You gave him a solid ‘I’d fuck you harder because I hate you’ look then walked away. I was coming out of the bathroom when I saw it. I nearly lost my shit.”
“Oh. Good.” Downing my drink in one swift gulp, I sucked in a wince and released it on a growl. “How dare he still look like a fucking god.” In my own conceited way, I knew I looked good. But my new looks had come at a price. I’d had to take on habits I swore I never would; eating food I swore I’d never touch again five years ago and sweating like a pig over the gym equipment I’d been banned from for my own health. Blaze’s awesomeness was innate and effortless.
“Yeah, he really pulled himself together yesterday.” Jonathan took a step back at the ferocity of my glare. “None of us were sure how much faith he had left.”
My throat tightened. “What?”
“You have no idea what it’s been like over here, Emmy. He’s been a total wreck since the day you left.” I eyed Jonathan sceptically, trying to figure out if I really believed that man had spared a single thought for me. I had always been a complication to him. Without me, life was simple. “He had a beard.”
Scoffing incredulously, I pushed away from the guys and made my way to the head table, already feeling a slight fuzziness from the scotch. The choice of spirit may have been a bad one, but it loosened the knots in my stomach and muscles.
The men already seated at the table stood when I approached and smiled with a serenity that even surprised me. Henry and Ivy sat beside Helen and husband number five, the men to the left of their respective women. I took my place next to Hunter, who sat beside his mother, and felt Chris take the seat on the other side of me.
“Want to put a wager on this meal?”
I leaned towards him, intrigued. “What have you got?”
“Twenty quid says that you’re the first person to use inappropriate humour to dissipate the tension.” His bet was endearing. It was just like me to do something like that at a formal event. So I countered with a wager of my own.
“Sure, if twenty also says you’re the fir
st person to break a silence with inappropriate laughter.”
“Deal.” We shook on it with our determined faces, which splintered into the aforementioned inappropriate laughter as Blaze and his date took their seats at our table. All heads turned to us frowning as we somewhat unsuccessfully tried to quash the hysterics behind our hands. It felt good to laugh, even when it became a dry sob. My life had seen so little laughter of late.
We settled just in time for our starters. Esme took the seat beside Chris, and Daniel ended up sat next to Blaze. It had been a battle to not start laughing again over the fact he had been inadvertently identified as the ‘woman’ in the partnership. It was common knowledge that he was the femme, but the mixture of alcohol and anti-psychotics put me in a dangerous place where everything seemed too funny for no reason. I considered twenty pounds of my British sterling lost—almost penance for the eighty-five dollars I’d taken from Calloway’s security staff.
Calloway. That knocked all the hilarity right out of me. I hadn’t enabled overseas calling on my mobile phone tariff and had only had chance to leave a quick voicemail message to explain that I’d been dragged to London, but would be back before he returned from Boston. It was a shitty way to leave, but I’d been rushed, bullied and not thinking straight. My return flight was already booked for two days later and the tickets in my holdall; there really was no reason for him to be fraught by radio silence.
But I knew my Calloway. My absence would drive him mad until I returned and it had been selfish of me to cut and run like I had. He needed me, and we both knew that was unhealthy. But it was a hell of a lot better than sitting in a room full of people I’d hopped a continent for and found that none of them looked like they really needed me at all. They were all fine without me. As long as I was in New York, I was as inconsequential as that glass centrepiece.
Luckily, my appetite hadn’t been left behind or hindered. I ate my smoked salmon souffle with quiet enthusiasm, paying no mind to what was happening around me. Esme always hired the best chefs for her balls, and this was the first year I could really enjoy what was on my plate.
And I focused on it. I ate in small bites so I could prolong the period of time my attention could be centred on that one item of food, knowing that if my mouth was full, nobody would engage me. And if I picked at it methodically, I heard nothing but a buzz of a hundred voices. Bliss. Almost. The souffle wasn’t nearly big enough.
I almost wrestled the servers to keep the plate so I could individually pick off each crumb when they arrived to clear the tables for our mains. With nothing but the wine I had to ration in front of me, I had no choice but to participate in the idle chit chat. At the time, it seemed to centre on Esme’s most recent voice acting jobs but quickly, and I guessed intentionally, turned in another direction when I was no longer distracted.
“So Blaze,” Helen spoke over the blonde when she was piecing together some bullshit account of doing some ‘independent cinema’—cough cough amateur porn—the cunning glint in her eye sparkling. “How is Ms Valentine these days?”
“She’s... uh...” I didn’t lift my head but my ears pricked. “Natasha is doing all right. Her mother and sister are there at the moment.” Ugh, Natasha. Natasha Valentine no less. What kind of hope had I ever stood against a dying woman who’s mere name oozed sensuality?
“That must be tough on her,” Helen pressed on, “but I suppose it’s necessary...”
A thick silence hovered over our table. I elbowed Chris, goading him to laugh, but he responded with a sharp jab to my ribs. “Ah, bitch!” I sank down in my chair, feeling my face turning puce, which triggered the cackle I’d wanted in the first place. Cursing, he fished his wallet out of his tuxedo jacket pocket and slapped a twenty pound note down on the table in front of me.
“Want to drag this out? I think I stand a good chance of winning my money back.” Nodding, I tucked the money into the cup of my strapless bra and caught Esme taking another look at my ‘assets’.
“Think these are good storage solutions, sweetness? You should see my coin purse.” Daniel creased, quickly followed by Jonathan and Henry. Knowing that the comment fell into the ‘inappropriate humour’ category, I handed Chris back his money and shrugged helplessly. “It was worth it.”
“Excuse me.” Blaze abruptly rose from the table and paced out into the foyer with the blonde close behind. I tittered down into my glass, vaguely aware that I should have been feeling a guilt that the drugs were blocking.
“Are you done?” Ivy hissed at me with a viciousness I’d never heard before. Alarmed, I gaped up at her and found her shaking with ephemeral rage. “Whether or not you still love that man, what you’re doing right now is an insult. For three months we’ve fought to keep him optimistic that you’ll come back to him and nursed him through the pain, but you’re killing that with this ridiculous new flighty attitude. We made him give you space to heal, Emmeline Elizabeth. We let you do whatever it was that made you feel better. But it’s spiteful of you to be laughing in the face of a man who’s none nothing but cry for you.”
Shaken, I stared at her in horror. I wanted to object. I wanted to argue that there was nothing ‘in his face’ about it. I wanted to point out that the bets had been made in the spirit of relieving some of the tension hanging over what was actually a very traumatic event for me. But all my words were lost to the fact I’d just been scolded like an errant child over a boob joke.
“To be fair, Ivy,” Hunter’s hand reached for my leg under the table and gave it a reassuring squeeze, “I had to adopt underhand tactics to bring Emmeline back here. She isn’t ready for this yet. If Blaze wasn’t ready to see her either, he didn’t have to come. He did know she’d be here.” She spluttered into indignant silence, eyes still burning but at least not at me.
“Regardless, rubbing it in his face that she’s coping without him—”
“Is she?” Hunter half-laughed and flicked a hand in my direction. “She not only skips town this time, she jumps across an ocean to escape and jumps into a relationship with one of the world’s most notorious narcissists. Her life doesn’t exist outside of an insular bubble of just them and work—you send me there to bring her back because she’s running herself into the ground and she’s ‘coping’?”
I twisted away from him, livid. “I am sitting right here, you know!” Ivy went crimson when I finally had the words to protest against yet another discussion about me that didn’t include me. “Do you have any idea how uncomfortable it is being spoken about like you don’t exist? I’ve heard you people talk about me like I’m a vegetable and take decisions out of my hands in times I’ve been fully coherent. I’m sorry that you’ve missed me. I’m sorry that I’ve made myself a new life with someone else—which, yes, is dysfunctional, but frankly none of your fucking business. I’m sorry that I’m trying to put a brave face on the fact that I’m having to spend an evening in direct view of a man who ripped my heart out because you’re all persistently belly-aching over the fact I don’t live here anymore.
“But I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep letting you talk for me when I’ve proved that I’m capable of talking for myself.” Startled, I realised that I was on my feet and sat quickly. Chris snorted loudly and bit the inside of his cheek, handing me back his money as he split into a raspy laugh that set my other friends off again. Trying not to join in, I challenged Ivy with a look that said, Come at me again, I dare you, and took a large gulp of wine.
God, I missed my simple Yankee life.
Henry traded seats with Hunter until the main courses arrived, taking the opportunity to talk about work a little while he had me in person. I explained my concerns over a gut feeling I had that his budget was a little off somewhere but there was just far too much paperwork. With great reluctance, he agreed to let me add to my workload when I returned from my break in Barbados to investigate independently.
My father and I had never existed so closely. Our relationship had always been something of a power struggle; he t
ried to give it to me while I pushed it away. We sat in a building I technically owned but took no control over and I still acted like an obedient employee when he was more than happy to share his authority equally.
I caught him looking at me with an unusually pained paternal reverence while I was scribbling my action plan on a paper napkin. It had been very easy for me to deny that I really meant anything to him for a long time, but after the way he’d put his own feelings aside to get me settled in America, I was having to swallow the painful truth that I was more than just an adornment hanging onto his life. Like my mother, he adored Blaze and believed that the heap of crap between us was not insurmountable. He’d wanted me to stay in London and stick out the life of waiting in the wings, but he’d let me go anyway and made sure I had a home, money and a job that kept me stimulated.
It was impossible to keep pretending that I wasn’t grateful he was my father.
His gaze lifted briefly to Blaze, who I hadn’t noticed retaking his seat, and his hand nudged mine to encourage me to look that way, too. I did, with great difficulty, because it was hard enough to be breathing the same air as him.
“Admit it,” Henry whispered, “you’re glad that he’s been a mess.”
I was. And Blaze would know it because someone would tell him how I’d been working myself ragged so I didn’t have to think about him. The words he’d said when our friendship first became more rattled around in my mind.
“We’re going to destroy each other and both of us are going to pretend that we’re not happy about the damage we’re doing. And we’re going to deny that we’re enjoying taking the damage, too.”
I was happy—happy to hurt and be hurting. Happy because he felt the same way. At least I hoped so. I hoped that he hadn’t pulled himself together just to show me that he was over me.
“Has it been that bad here?” I looked back down at the napkin, though I’d lost my train of thought. Honestly, it had been an unwelcome shock to be told that anyone had cried over me, let alone Blaze. He looked so unruffled and unconcerned by my presence.