by Corri Lee
As it was, I was scared of seeing him again—scared of the consequences of getting on the wrong side of a man who was clearly far too unstable to have as much power as he did. But I resigned myself to the fact that even if he did resurface like the pond scum he was, I’d never be alone for him to get to me. Plus Blaze was even more muscle stacked than Calloway was now. The guy didn’t stand a chance of getting through him.
“So, come on,” I said, surprisingly brightly. “What do you want to do?” I would have gone along with anything, but secretly had my fingers crossed that he didn’t want to go out and soak up the bar scene or take a late night battle through the Times Square crowds.
His eyes flitted over to our four cohorts in waiting, then turned back to me with that all knowing look he quite often had for me, at the times when I was most transparent. “I’m beat after that flight. I think it was the altitude... I want to explore tomorrow, but for tonight, how do you feel about renting some bad movies, raiding a corner shop for munchies and ordering in the best take away you can think of?” With a conspiratorial wink, he added, “I know you’ll have a stash of menus hiding in here somewhere.”
Boy, did I ever. I was no longer a mystery to my man, yet he managed to amaze me every day by showing me just how deeply my transparency laid.
The guys looked a little disheartened at the idea of staying in and I knew Blaze would have wanted to go out, too, but I appreciated the compromise. They’d be grateful for the relaxation when I woke up the next morning, smelling the New York coffee, in full city swing. They thought they’d seen the new Emmeline Tudor since I’d gone home.
They hadn’t.
Though maybe I overestimated my enthusiasm. I got up at the crack of dawn after not really sleeping. The coffee smelled like crap, and so did the city—putrid with the mixture of food smells and pollution. So much for my wild love affair.
Despite never sharing it to sleep, I couldn’t really get past the fact Blaze was lying in a bed I’d screwed another man on, least not one he disliked so deeply. It had never bothered me when we first met, but since I’d brought the new bed for the flat, having anyone else in it felt like a betrayal.
Completely irrational of me to think so, of course. I really hadn’t been prepared for the way I’d feel when I returned to New York—like a fraud. It was impossible to decide if the person who was the fake Emmeline was the person I’d been with Calloway or the person I was trying to be now.
My identity crisis was struck dead in its path by a sleep-mussed Blaze padding towards where I sat at the kitchen table wearing nothing but underwear. Wow. He really was amazing to look at and if I hadn’t known better, I’d never have guessed him at being a day off thirty. His vivid green eyes were dopey and glazed, like he was only just shaking off the last memories of a dream. And when he looked at me...
Christ. Every morning since Hunter’s wedding, he’d wake up and look at me with the same innocent awe as he had when I said I loved him. I wouldn’t even try to pretend I knew what he saw in me but I wouldn’t argue with it, either. Especially not when he was emerging from the master bedroom after a night spent asleep next to me, exactly how I’d wanted it to be the last time I was in this apartment.
He helped himself to coffee and sat down on the table in front of me, slowly pulling my laptop away from my fingers. “No work. You promised.”
I offered a weak defence of, “You were sleeping,” but saved my work and closed it anyway. I had promised and he knew I wouldn’t break it. I didn’t have it in me to do that. “I thought you’d be out longer.”
“I was missing something.” Stealing a kiss, he stood and pulled me with him, urging me to rest my head against his chest. He was always so warm to touch, so easy to get lost in when his arms were around me. “Tell me about this nightmare, cupcake.”
“I told you already.” Admittedly I’d glossed over the sick glee I felt just before I woke up, but he knew the basic plot and play of it. “I just want it to stop.”
“Do you think it’s you? The woman on the bed.” He asked me so casually I really had to think about it. “Do you think it’s your subconscious telling you that you feel suffocated by something?” What the... Oh. I got where he was going with the question.
“You’re not suffocating me, Blaze. I’d have run a mile months ago if that were the case. Besides, she has grey eyes.” Grey eyes, dead grey eyes... Just thinking about them made me shudder. I quickly changed the subject for my own sanity. “What do you want to do with the last day of your twenties?”
His smirk told me exactly what he wanted to do, even though he didn’t say it. “Later, I’d like you to show me all your old haunts. But right now, I’d like to nap with the love of my life.” Grinning, Blaze stepped back and cordially offered me a hand. “Care to join me in the master bedroom, m’lady?”
Mother, may I?
“I can sort of understand why you wanted to stay here.” My friends jogged behind us at a kind of awkward half-skip-step between the steady stream of insular businessmen racing against the New York minutes to make lunch meetings. My footing was somewhat surer than theirs; even Blaze struggled to keep up with my confident prowl through the busy streets of Manhattan.
“You can put the girl in New York, but you can’t put New York in the girl,” I mused philosophically, remembering how hard I’d tried to put London, my friends and Blaze behind me. In hindsight it was better that I hadn’t been able to.
“You look plenty ‘New York’ to me, Emmy.” Chris winced through his seventh knee-to-briefcase collision. I could see his tolerance level plummeting.
He might have had a point, too. I was a good little honorary New Yorker, completely at home between the cosmopolites with a suburban king on one hand and a cup of coffee brandished like a lethal weapon in the other. The confidence had stuck, as had the city style. The difference was that this time, I had everything I needed in one place.
Blaze wasn’t as well known in The States, which allowed us a reprieve from the stop-start rhythm forced by adoring fans halting us for autographs. For that reason it took twice as long to get anywhere in London, so naturally I’d planned around that usual time frame.
We were only bothered once. Nearly all of what I’d thought would take us right up to dinner was done by lunch. I’d shown them The Seymour and The Mary Rose, pointed out Calloway’s penthouse from within Central Park, walked the banks of the Hudson to revisit the restaurant there and taken them to the Soho boutiques that had inspired my image revamp. All that remained was Chinatown and it’s Canal Street.
I was excited to see Sophie again. I felt bad that I hadn’t said goodbye or even spoken to her since my first date with Calloway, but didn’t think she was the type to hold a grudge.
We walked the same stretch of pavement five times before I sagged against a wall, totally confused. I’d seen the shops I knew, faces I recognised, but the café had vanished. Instead, in it’s place, sat a wide alley leading back into loading bay for the surrounding business’ stock deliveries.
“Impossible,” I muttered to myself, aware that it really couldn’t be. The road markings were weather-worn enough to disprove any theory that the café had been promptly and neatly demolished since I last ate there in September. Had I really imagined an entire place and the people inside it? What had I really been doing when I thought I was there?
I repeated to myself, “Impossible,” and pushed up from the wall to look at the gaping great alley, trying to convince myself that there was a reasonable explanation other than me being insane. It was fair enough to hallucinate voices, but I’d been nowhere near bad enough to fabricate this.
Blaze tugged me back toward Chinatown, trying to appease me with a fairytale notion; “Maybe someone else needed it more.”
An occasional café for heartbroken travellers, sure. I’d created some kind of safe house to keep me until I could be relinquished into Calloway’s care. That was surely a sensible and viable answer to my question of ‘what the fuck?’.
<
br /> “I’m not crazy,” I snapped, shooting challenging glares at my friends. “It was here.”
“Well, seeing as it’s not...” Jonathan cautiously linked his arm with mine like I might bite it off. “... I hear there’s a great arcade around here. We can check here again later.”
I knew we wouldn’t but I walked away anyway and the conundrum followed, no closer to being understood. For the rest of my life, I’d madden myself by questioning where it had gone and what had really become of the time I’d lost to it.
And if the café wasn’t real, was Sophie? I didn’t want to ask anyone for fear that she wasn’t. Had my strange mind made me a friend to compensate the fact that I’d really been alone? It was probably better that I didn’t get a definite verdict on that.
The now somewhat ambiguous Valentine’s Day sneaked up offering a hangover in the way of a greeting. My recollection of the night before was fuzzy at best; I’d seen all the parts of the city I’d missed before, namely the parts offering toxic cocktails and pounding club music.
Honestly, I didn’t see the hype when it was just as easy to lose an evening in a nice quiet bar that didn’t offer gaping holes in my memory and complimentary displays of soft-core pornography at no additional cost. I had the grace to not get indecent with Blaze in public, as much as I might have loved to do so at my slightest whim, and would have appreciated that favour returned by the horny masses.
My arm stretched out across the bed next to me and found it empty. I rose with a start, alarmed by the lack of birthday boy.
In lieu of Blaze, I found a note.
Enjoy some pampering, my Valentine-to-be.
Pampering? Fuck pampering; I wanted my customary morning sex as a hangover remedy; a tried, tested and proven method with optimal results.
Shaking off my funk, I ambled through to the lounge, finding nobody but Esme rattling around the kitchen singing Vera Lynn songs. She winked at me from the kettle. “ ‘Morning, lover.”
“ ‘Morning yourself, but I’d been rather hoping to hear that endearment in a sexy male baritone.”
She tried to extend her vocal range that far but failed, being a dainty female soprano. “Go shower. We have a spa day booked.”
“A whole day?” I wilted down into the couch. The prospect of an entire day without Blaze made me miserable. It was his birthday, damn it. It was my duty to be with him. And why wouldn’t he wake me to say goodbye at least? What had I done wrong?
“Okay, a morning,” Esme qualified, passing me a mug of coffee she knew I’d kill in seconds, “we’re meeting the boys for lunch.”
“All right.” I supposed I could put up with a few hours. It really shouldn’t bug me to spend any length of time away from Blaze, given that I already did it all the time when I went to work. “Where are they?”
“Out.” My brow crept up at the vagueness. “Don’t look at me like that. You can’t begrudge him some male bonding time.” No, I couldn’t. Between Esme, Ivy, myself and that damned Natasha, if Blaze had any more oestrogen in his life he’d bud a fine pair of breasts, and as we lived, ate and slept together, our menstrual cycles would start to synchronises. “Besides,” Esme pointed a finger at me, “it’s your day, too. He’s spoiling you.”
With a grunt I stood and made my sulky way to the shower. His birthday shouldn’t have started like this. It really wasn’t fair.
I stretched out contentedly after a thoroughly relaxing massage from an exotically beautiful holistic therapist who kept telling me ‘Namaste’. Sanskrit wasn’t one of my many languages but it was a nice touch nonetheless.
I’ll admit to enjoying the pampering. The complimentary champagne served as a muscle relaxant, mood enhancer and hair of the dog all in one, and it helped that the treatments were quite nice, too. If Ivy had let me have a spa day when she was trying to reinvent me it might not have been as painful, but prestigious establishments with world class specialists always won out with that woman.
As it was, the waxing, plucking and preening I’d conceded to having this time was just as good as it had been in all those expensive salons. My skin was soft and glowing after an assortment of baths in various goop; my waist trimmer by three inches after a seaweed wrap. All in all, I felt pretty damn radiant.
I’d just had my face smeared in some interesting smelling muck with the consistency of clay that felt pleasantly cool to the touch, and my eyes covered in cooling ice packs when I heard Esme take the seat next to me after a salt rub. I’d been dubious when she told me that the morning would make me irresistible to Blaze, knowing that he only had to see me naked to become so aroused it was impossible to function. But if I smelled half as delicious as she did, I might have serious concerns over my ability to walk the next day.
I was no different from any other woman in that I loved to feel attractive and got a kick out of seeing my man’s forehead bead with perspiration when he was forced to keep his hands off me. I was different in that my man could put me in Accident and Emergency just by fucking me too hard. As much as I’d enjoy it right up until the point he got carried away and cracked one of my ribs, neither of us wanted to be asked the embarrassing questions regarding circumstances of the injury under the premise and suspicion of domestic violence.
I raised a hand to her so she knew I’d acknowledged her arrival, the other occupied by a reflexologist. The protective vinyl covering the chair creaked as she sat, almost completely covering her sigh. “What’s up, Es?”
“Enjoying yourself?” Not really an answer to my question, but I smiled in response anyway, feeling the face mask crack slightly. “Feeling good?”
“Enough to forgive Blaze for vanishing without so much as a farewell orgasm.”
“Oh, good, that’s considerably better than before. Can you embrace that positivity for a minute?”
“Why, what have you done?” When she didn’t answer immediately, I lifted an eye pack to look at her and repeated, “What have you done?”
It was obvious she’d done something wrong. Her teeth were digging into her bottom lip hard enough to make the flesh blanch and her hands were wringing at her thumbs. She couldn’t have looked more guilty if she tried.
Esme looked up at me, head still low, then looked anywhere but me. “I lost your ring.”
It took the length of two heart beats to process what she’d confessed, decide if she was being serious and shake out of my semi-vegetative state of relaxation. “My engagement ring?” Damn you, Esme! I’d put up a real fight about taking it off, needing the testimonies of four staff members to convince me that nothing good would come of caking it in mud. “How?”
“I went into our locker to get a towel for the sauna and it just kinda of... fell out of your bag and skittered across the floor into one of the drains before I could catch it.”
I closed my eyes because it hurt to hear it. That ring alone had gotten me through so much—kept me strong when I needed it and shown Blaze that I’d always had him in mind. Now it was gone, floating somewhere through the New York sewage system. Part of my heart bobbing around with dead goldfish won from carnivals and workmen’s faecal matter.
“Oh, God.” My thumb unconsciously rubbed the band of untanned skin around my ring finger. “Blaze is going to kill me.”
“No, he won’t.” Esme grabbed my naked left hand and squeezed it. “I’ll tell him it was my fault. Make sure he knows you were bullied. I’m so sorry, Emmy.”
I couldn’t stay mad at her for long. She didn’t reject my request to leave the spa prematurely and neither did Blaze apparently, when he took the call to say we were done an hour early. I noticed how Esme hedged around the subject of what had caused my shitty mood, but there was no way I’d let her get away with it scot-free. She would tell him it was her fault; I wouldn’t take the blame for her.
We found the guys in a down-town sushi bar—no surprise there—which had flashing white rope lights around the doorway and a custom made neon sign of pink love hearts and white doves. If I’d been in a better
mood I’d have been impressed by it; impressed by the city’s overall commitment to a Hallmark holiday.
Valentines Day was dead to me. The small amount of enthusiasm I ever had for the sham celebration had gone down the drain along with my ring.
Not even the sight of Blaze could cheer me up, and that said an awful lot. He easily stole the attention of every woman in the room—and some of the men—even those who were with their own dates. Dressed in a pure black suit with the only splash of colour being a red tie, he looked amazing. Smelled better. As I got closer to him, I noticed how he emitted an all-male incense and a magnetism I’d noticed only once before, the day he walked into my book shop and I’d identified him as a demigod.
And he was frowning at me. Still, he rushed over and crushed me to his chest almost painfully. I smiled only because it was a relief to know he’d been going out of his mind like I had.
He immediately demanded, “Tell me what’s wrong,” not slackening his hold on me any.
I wanted to dress it up and make it seem like less of a deal, even though I was heartbroken. I really wanted to try and pretend it had never happened and plead ignorance somehow. But for some reason I ended up with, “That dumb bitch lost my fucking ring!”
Okay, so I was still mad. I didn’t care that she looked hurt and affronted by the insult, just that the disappointment was aimed in her direction.
It didn’t come. Blaze just hummed on a sigh and adjusted his grip on me so it was less cobra-like and more comforting, though no less restrictive. “Never mind. We’ll get you a new ring.” Mouth agape, I looked up at him in total disbelief. He parodied my expression with a mocking scoff. “Accidents happen, cupcake. It’s just a ring.”
“It is not just a ring!” Mortified, I pushed out of his arms. “It was a promise!”
“Promises are words wrapped around your heart, Emmeline. It was a visual reminder, not the promise itself.” He caught me by the tops of my arms when my chin started to quiver. “ ‘Something to the same effect as pissing up me’. You knew what it was from the moment you wore it. I can collar you with any ring. It means no less because it’s a different band.”