Every Time He Leaves (The Raeven Sisters Book 1)

by Karington, Anna

  In a very short time, I lost the two men who meant most to me, and I was devastated. Until I saw him just moments ago, I didn't even know what had become of him. I imagined he'd run off and found sanctuary working as a mechanic, but he's wearing an awfully nice—and what I assume is a tailored—suit for a mechanic.

  What will I do? How can I approach him when all I want is to slap him across the face? However, I can't spend the rest of my evening hiding. I don't want him to know how he's affected me all these years later. I return to the auditorium, grab a glass of white wine from the nearest waiter, and regroup with Kelsey and her friends. If he's going to see me at this event, it won't be as someone busting her butt off to keep the function moving, but as someone who's so preoccupied with her magnificent life that she's hardly thinking of him. While looking everywhere but at this man from my past, I'm acutely aware of where he is at all times. I position myself between Carol and Melanie so I can keep an eye on him while he chats with Janet. He makes a comment that she laughs at before downing a large gulp of wine. I feel betrayed. She should be my ally. She's my sister, after all. However, I can't blame her. I never spoke to her about what happened—never told her how much he broke my heart.

  I sort through myriad fantasies: storming across the room and slapping him across the face, pulling him aside and berating him in a nearby hallway, retrieving one of the Kinderly family's decorative statuettes and breaking it over the back of his head. There are so many ways to punish him...all of which he deserves. But I feel any sort of punishment is admitting I've been hung up all these years, and he doesn't deserve to know that. He doesn't deserve that satisfaction. Although, if I nabbed one of the kebob sticks from the appetizer table and stabbed it through his neck, that satisfaction would be short-lived.

  I'm not inclined to dwell on these sorts of sadistic thoughts, but they must stem from years of repressed aggression towards Jarek. How else could I feel toward the man who wounded my family and my heart? Through my peripherals, I see one of Janet’s friends dragging her away from Jarek. I catch him glancing in my direction before heading toward our little group. I haven't been listening to the conversation since Carol brought up a travesty of her disagreement with her contractor about the tiling in her bathroom, a plight I doubt I'd sympathize with even if I wasn't so distracted.

  As he grows nearer, I wonder what he's doing at the Women's Club's charity function. My body stirs with emotions similar to the ones I experienced at sixteen, when I started to see him as someone I was interested in being more than friends with. My face feels clammy and warm. My heartbeat quickens. He shouldn't affect me like this. If anything, he should evoke rage. However, I can't deny this feeling within me—one that wishes he would wrap his arms around me, cradle me, and tell me he loves me. I curse my body, my emotions, as I did when I caught my first glimpse of him tonight.

  I thought I'd come a long way from feeling these sensations around him. My mind and body should know better than to permit them. Where are my survival instincts? Shouldn't they kick in and help me feel total disdain for him—the sort that doesn’t have any lustful impulses attached to it?

  But in the same way I know I'll never be able to shake him from my thoughts, some part of me will always feel connected to him. When we were together, he activated a part of me—something I've attempted to recall in past experiences with my boyfriends, using my imagination just to get close enough to the fantasy of those feelings so I could reach my destination. I'm not proud of those imaginings, but they're not about what I wish would arouse me, they're about what actually arouses me—what I crave. Whether I like it or not, I crave Jarek, and I always have.

  I wonder if this sensation lingers because of how close we became those nights when I'd stay up watching TV with him, lying in his lap. Or was it those days when he'd tease me before I ran off to school? Perhaps it was that impulse that made me give in so easily to him when I was most alone. Whatever the reason, as he slips around Kelsey and approaches me head-on, I'm face-to-face with the man I thought I'd never see again—the man who I never should have had to encounter again.

  I work to conjure a greeting. As much as a part of me wants to lash out at him, to find some way of hurting his body as much as he hurt my heart, I must be civil. Not just because I don't want to cause a scene, but also because I don't want him to have the satisfaction of thinking of me as another desperate fling, like those girls who frequented his dormitory his first and only year in college.

  "Hey, Strawberry." My nickname is like a knife through my heart because it refers to a different time, a better time, when Jarek and I would take a ride in his pickup truck, listening to old cassette tapes of Willie Nelson and Prince, singing as loudly as we could on our way to enjoy milkshakes at the local ice cream shop.

  I recall one of many times waiting in line, the sun stinging against my flesh. Jarek wore a sleeveless tee, his shoulders and cheeks burnt red. He laughed at me as I bobbed about to a song he didn't recognize that came from a small, duct-taped radio on the chrome counter before the window where the attendant would take our order. As we reached the counter, Jarek ordered for both of us: strawberry for me, cookies and cream for him. I continued my little dance, which the attendant and Jarek laughed at, but I just kept doing it anyway, because it was making him smile.

  Those were much happier times—times I don't want to reflect on because he doesn't deserve the nostalgia.

  “Hey, Jarek,” I reply. I'm not curt, nor am I overly friendly. I'm matter-of-fact. It's the best front I can muster right now. I look into his eyes, sapphire-blue, stunningly more beautiful than any eyes I've seen since I first met him. I ball my hand, squeezing to encourage myself to be strong. I can't show my weakness, how I desperately want to run off, and even though I knew he was approaching me, I didn't imagine it would take so much effort to be strong. As I look into those eyes, I want to cry—not for my present self, but for the girl who was tormented by his abandonment, by not receiving so much as a telephone call from him. You're a murderer, Jarek Dean. You murdered my heart and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.

  Since him, I've never found the sort of passion we shared that night. I've never felt that explosive chemistry, that intensity that left me reeling, as if I’d been overtaken by some powerful surge of electricity. His passion, his caress ruined me for those who came after him, and that, along with so many other reasons, has left me despising him.

  “How did the cleanup go?” he asks.

  “It's all taken care of,” Kelsey replies by proxy, as if I need someone to respond on my behalf. However, I'm relieved she's given me a moment to consider how I'm going to respond to all this. “She was just so surprised to see you,” she says.

  “I was,” I admit, looking directly into his eyes. I'm conquering some great fear, not because I'm fearless, but because I won't be defeated. It reminds me of when I was scared to go in the woods at night as a kid, so I mustered the courage by encouraging Janet to sneak out with me. She didn't last long, but I persisted. I wouldn't be defeated.

  “What brings you here?” I ask. That sounds too eloquent for casual conversation, like I'm in an old movie, like some of my favorites that Jarek and I used to watch together. However, I feel keeping my words to a minimum is the best I can do.

  “I'm in town on business, and a friend of mine invited me tonight to see if I might be willing to donate some money to the foundation.” Donate money? I assess his suit once again. Surely he can understand why I'm puzzled about him A) having money and B) donating it to anyone.

  “He's a CEO,” Kelsey says. “What did you say you do? Something to do with engineering? Oh, I feel so stupid. It's totally escaped me.” She says it the way she used to talk to boys, with her blonde, I'm-too-stupid-to-think attitude. I'm sure that since it has to do with money, she hasn't forgotten what he does for a living.

  Jarek chuckles, as the boys always do when Kelsey is oh-so-coy. “Engineering,” he says coolly.

  My Jarek is a CEO? That'
s absurd. Not that he wasn't intelligent. He just never struck me as terribly ambitious, and I don't mean that in a bad way. He just didn't want an extravagant life. He wanted a simple one. His big dream was to own a double wide and have cable. When he left, he must've transformed into someone entirely different from the Jarek I knew.

  “How have you been, Lana?” he asks, as if he doesn't want the attention on his newly acquired riches.

  “I've been really good,” I say, and while I don't feel as if I've been particularly bad, I'm overcompensating because I don't want him thinking I've been living anything other than an amazing life without him. He doesn't need to know what he's done to me.

  I'll play cool and sweet as pie so that you think you meant so little to me that it hurts you. The problematic nature of my approach is that it may be exactly what he wants. Would he prefer I was unaffected by my past? How could I be unaffected by it?

  “It's good seeing you again,” I say to him. I turn to Kelsey. “I'm going to check on Mom.” I look back at Jarek. “You know how she is.” I offer a friendly smile, and as I turn, I can tell by the pout on his face that he's disappointed by my departure. Perhaps he thought he had an opportunity to make amends. If that's the case, he's out of luck, because I can't offer him that.

  I search for Mom, but I run into Janet alongside her husband, Kirk. “Good to see you again, Lana,” he says.

  “You, too,” I reply. He wears a flannel shirt, tucked into slacks. He looks adorable next to my sister. They've always been an adorable couple. However, I could never shake a sort of resentment I’ve felt toward him. It's not that he's awful to her. On the contrary, he's always been Janet's most doting partner. And he's never been anything but an angel to me. I believe my resentment stems from when they began dating. Since then, I've felt distant from my sister. Janet and I used to get along so well...far better than Kelsey and I. When Kirk came along, sweeping her off her feet faster than Romeo with Juliette, everything other than Kirk fell out of her vision. It was as if she could only love one person at a time, and it had to be him. Despite her living fifteen minutes away, I hardly ever see her. And while she used to cite work as her excuse, she recently became unemployed when her school laid off several employees, and she still hasn't offered to spend any time with me. Kelsey's the same way. Now jobless and husband-less and back in town, she hasn't managed to conjure up a moment of time. Although it's forgivable with Kelsey because we were never that close. We didn't understand each other, it always seemed. With Janet, it's as if she needs to keep away from me to conceal some great secret. Janet has always been incredibly secretive, and it only worsened after Daddy passed. She didn't unleash a red-faced, wide-mouthed performance like Kelsey did. She, like me, fell silent. It may have been better if either of us had taken to Kelsey's approach, as her efforts left her with dozens who were eager to aid her through the dark times, whereas Janet and I shut out the world. She used to see a therapist, but I figure she had as much trouble opening up with her as she does opening up with anyone.

  “How's life been treating you?” Kirk asks.

  Right now, not so great. “Just fine,” I say

  “Kirk has to go to Dallas for work this weekend,” Janet says. “He's doing some big software installation. Evidently, the guys who handled it before really messed up.”

  “Yeah,” he adds. “Can't say I'm doing that much better. What's happening with you?”

  “We have a major internal audit week after next because of a problem with our last client, and I'm in charge of a fundraiser that happens to be the weekend after the audit.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “So what are you going to do while you're in Dallas?” I ask, trying to turn the subject away from me.

  “Aside from work, I'll probably just hang out with some of the guys. Poor baby. Don't want to leave her here all by her lonesome, but...”

  “Aw,” Janet says in her most cutesy voice. “Baby'll be just fine.” I've heard their back and forth referring to each other as ‘baby’ before, but it's not something I like to hear. No one's a baby here. Also, I find when he uses ‘baby’ to describe my kid sister condescending. If any of my exes had attempted to call me baby, I would have thrown a tantrum that would have probably earned me such a title. I don't need a man talking down to me, and neither does Janet. She doesn't have this sort of feminist view of the issue, though. I think she sees it as some sort of privilege to earn the title. And Kirk's use is innocent enough, but it's not going to keep me from secretly wishing he'd find a new nickname that didn't make him sound like a pedophile.

  “We should have a girls night while he's gone,” Janet suggests, and I'm pleased by the look in her eyes because she appears to genuinely want to do something with me. Although, knowing Janet, she'll just want to down a bottle of wine, and my presence has never been required for that.

  “That'd be great, Janet. Just let me know when.” I know I don't have the time, but I'm willing to make it for Janet. She smiles. It's been a long time since I've seen her look excited about the possibility of doing something with me.

  As the event comes to an end and people start to leave, I settle beside a table, sipping a glass of white zinfandel. I've never been one to turn to alcohol for comfort, but the more I talked to Janet while she tossed them down, the more convinced I became that, considering the events that had transpired, I needed something to take the edge off. As Jarek approaches me again, I'm pleased I've made the decision. This little glass of wine has given me a bit of courage and maybe I'll get through a discussion with him. Although I'm also terrified it might have loosened me up so much that I'll blurt out some confession about that night or about how I feel now.

  Why shouldn't I fuss at him about it? I have every right to be furious. However, it feels like in doing that, he'd be winning. I refuse to cave to a tantrum. That's not me. That's something Kelsey would do after some date slighted her. I remember when her ex-husband disagreed with her at a dinner party. I thought she was going to throw him out the window. She went into a tirade, berating him as if he were a toddler who'd done something against his mother's wishes. That's not what I'm looking for. I don't want him to see me mad. He doesn't deserve that. I'll keep my cool. I’ll be so cool he'll even question if I remember what happened all those years ago. But wait—I can't be that aloof. Then he might realize I'm faking it. I have to be clever about this. I have to acknowledge what happened, but act as if so many years have gone by that naturally I don’t have any major feelings about it anymore.

  “Hey again, Lana,” he says. The guilty look on his face reminds me of the first day he introduced himself, when he knew he had been wrong to rob us.

  “So you've been doing well?” I say, attempting to direct the conversation.

  He smirks a smirk I remember seeing frequently, a sort of false-humble expression that he'd get whenever he told a joke in just the right way—jokes that caught me so off-guard I couldn't help but drown in laughter. “I hear the same about you,” he says.

  “I'm not exactly a millionaire.” Exactly? Ha. I just barely make five figures.

  “I hardly do the word service.”

  “Really?” I ask, looking over his suit. “Did you wear a lot of designer suits before?”

  He rolls his eyes. “It comes with the package.” Speaking of package, I can't help but sneak a glance. I'm hoping it will look smaller than I recall, but the bulge suggests the contrary. Surely it hasn't gotten bigger...or smaller in my recollection. Neither of those things seems particularly likely. I'm not sure I'd even be willing to take that thing now—after having years of practice with other men. I must have been a very bold girl...or just incredibly naïve.

  Why am I even thinking about his penis?

  “So what's this business you're in town for?” I ask, more to redirect my own line of thinking than to actually discuss his business affairs.

  “I came down to check out an engineering start-up. I'm interested in acquiring it.” But never interested in acquiring me.<
br />
  “Where are you usually?” I ask, worried my emphasis might stress the years that went by without me knowing where he was.

  His expression turns sad, as if he caught the dig. “San Diego.”

  “Do you like it in California?”

  “Can't really complain about the weather, that's for sure.”

  “Well, that's—”

  “Hello, you,” Kelsey sings as she slides between us. She throws her arms around him. I can't help but resent them both for the display. This wasn't something she would have done back when he lived with us. I recall occasions when she'd tell him to clean up because he smelled like sweat, but I never understood her issue with his scent. He smelled wonderful to me. It's no surprise that a new suit, new hairdo, and considerably larger bank account go a long way with Kelsey.

  “Are you outta here?” he asks with a smile, one I wish he'd worn when he first saw me.

  “Yeah. I have to get home. It's late.” Late? What she means is she's getting the hell out of here so I can do the real work.

  “It was good seeing you,” Jarek says. “And sorry to hear about—”

  “Don't worry. I'm fine. It really was over long before the divorce was finalized.”

  “I'm still sorry to hear about that.” Kelsey giggles that awkward giggle she does whenever she doesn't know how to respond to a comment. I guess that was the way to survive the various idiots she surrounded herself with in high school, but I can't figure how it benefits her as an adult. But who am I to question Kelsey's skills? She's been wooing men far longer than I have...and with far better results.

  “How long will you be in town?” she asks.

  “Until my business here is resolved.”

  “We need to go out. Catch up.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “How about this week sometime? What's your number?” Before she finishes her sentence, she has her phone in hand. She keys away, preparing to take his digits. I don't make any movement to take out my phone. I hope it’s clear I'm not interested. A glance from Jarek assures me he's noticed.