by Cox, Chloe
“You gonna tell me what happened?” Declan asked.
Soren cracked his knuckles and stretched out.
“Something went wrong,” he said. “Don’t know beyond that.”
“Something?” Declan asked.
“Yeah, something,” Soren said. He let the silence linger for a minute before catching his friend’s eye. “I’ve never been this crazy about it before. I feel sick, man. If I don’t know, I can’t fix it. And if I can’t fix it, I know she’s hurting. And that makes me…fuck, I don’t know.”
“What are you gonna do?”
Soren shook his head. “You know how it is,” he said. “I gotta let her come to me. Some things you can’t be told, have to figure them out for yourself.”
Declan smiled. “If she’s yours, let her go.”
Soren looked at him sharply. His friend knew Soren’s stance on relationships, and he knew the reason for it, too.
“Don’t try to mess with my head,” Soren said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. You don’t need any help there.”
“Bite me.”
“See? This is what happens when you let your sub get away.”
Soren laughed it off. It wasn’t until later when they were all watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles for the millionth time—Brian’s favorite holiday movie of all time—that Soren got the texts from Cate.
He already knew what they would say.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do us anymore. I can be your lawyer, but I can’t be anything else.”
Soren felt the sadness descend on him like a weight. He knew how much she must be hurting. Knew how lonely she must feel to send that text. He’d been there. Maybe not exactly the same, but in a similar enough place, the place where you have a good thing and think it can’t possibly be right, so you burn it down. He never wanted her to feel like that, and it didn’t matter that he knew she had to, at some point. It was just something she had to go through, but it made him crazy with grief to think of it.
If he pushed, she’d run away screaming, and for good reason. All he wanted to do was help her, and he fucking couldn’t.
Aont size="+1">Before he lost his mind completely, he typed out the only true thing he could say without making it all worse.
“You never have to hide.”
And then he called Adra.
Brian threw a couch pillow as he got up and blocked the screen, and Soren caught it, threw it, and nailed Brian in the head with it without breaking stride. These guys were family, but God help them if they got in the way right now. Only Desi, still weirded out by being in a new house, followed him out.
“Soren, what time is it?” Adra said.
“Don’t know,” he said, stepping out into the brisk night air with his dog. “You talk to her? About all this? Ford set her up with you, right? So did you talk to her?”
He could hear Adra sigh. “Yeah, I talked to her, but you know I can’t tell you anything, Soren.”
“Adra, you don’t have to tell me shit except whether or not she’s ok. Is she ok?”
He was pacing, looking for some way to get the energy out. Desi whined at his heels. He felt like a gladiator without an enemy. He would climb mountains to fix whatever it was, and instead he was pacing around Declan’s porch like a moron.
“Adra! Just tell me she’s all right!”
Adra sighed again. “Yes. Ok. She’s not in any immediate danger or crisis.”
“That’s a very lawyerly answer.” He laughed humorlessly.
“I think it’s contagious.”
“You know what I want to know.”
“I can’t give it to you, Soren,” Adra said. “There are so many different ways to be ok, or not, or…look, she’s obviously figuring stuff out. Let her do that.”
“That was the plan.” He paused. “Thank you. I just needed to know that she was all right, and that there was someone watching out for her. This isn’t gonna be fun for me, but I can handle it. Just…watch out for her. As a favor to me.”
“I’d do it anyway. It doesn’t have to be a favor to you.”
“Yes, it does.”
He could practically hear Adra roll her eyes at Dom ridiculousness. It made him think of her and Ford.
“Hey,” Soren asked. “What about you? You ok?”
Silence. {1">ked. font>
“After the thing with Ford, Adra. You all right? I haven’t been down to the club lately.”
Another sigh. When she finally spoke, Adra was quiet. “I have no idea how to even talk to him,” she said. “So we’re not. Talking. I don’t even—”
“He went crazy when another man invaded your space, Adra. Don’t overthink it. We’re not that complicated.”
“We?”
“You know what I mean. Men.”
“It’s just so not like him,” she said. She sounded sad, and somehow hurt.
Soren pinched his nose and shook his head. For two people who had had the love of their lives handed to them on a silver platter, Ford and Adra were unbelievably stupid.
“Christ, Adra, will you two just work it out already?” he said.
Adra finally laughed, and it was a good sound, an all-is-still-mostly-right-with-the-world sound. “Says the man calling me to find out about his sub,” she said.
“She’s not my sub anymore,” Soren said. Even if he planned to fix that soon.
“Oh, Soren, I’m sorry,” Adra said.
“Just keep an eye on her for me, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” Adra said.
Soren paused. “And I won’t tell Ford you called me ‘sir.’”
Adra hung up, laughing and cursing at the same time. It felt good to make his friend laugh under the circumstances. For a bunch of people who made a point of being self aware enough to keep their various kinks safe, they all seemed to suck at relationships.
Soren maybe more than others. He didn’t pretend to be good at it. He didn’t keep in touch with his family, he didn’t let anyone but Dec and the band and now Cate depend on him, and he knew there wasn’t anyone out there who needed him except Cate. He thought he had it pretty well under control.
And that was when his sister called.
~ * ~ * ~
Cate had a longstanding habit of throwing herself into her work whenever her personal life became too painful, something that at least partially accounted for her professional success—something she’d decided long ago to see as a silver lining—but this time when she threw herself into work, it meant th {, i’t ainking about Soren.
It was killing her.
She even sort of hoped that all the new research her team was doing would somehow uncover something that could make her fall even a little bit out of love with him. She wasn’t proud of that desperate, frustrated thought, but it had happened, and she could live with it.
But even though they were scrambling to catch up with this drug den of sexual perversion story precisely because Soren had failed to tell her about Julia Goode, the long-ago ex-girlfriend who had died of a drug overdose shortly after leaving him, she still couldn’t find a way to paint him in a bad light. Oh, she knew how she’d do it if she were suing him; that was easy. But that was because as a lawyer she was only really concerned with the perception of truth.
As a woman? She cared about the actual truth. And all she could see, the more they uncovered about Soren’s affair with Julia Goode more than ten years ago, was the possible source of Soren’s conviction that he wasn’t capable of love.
Cate shook her head, going through the file one last time. It wasn’t helpful for her to make assumptions. That was just a clever way of getting her hopes up.
And her traitorous brain kept freaking doing it.
Because she was in love with him. More than that, this was the first time she’d felt love that felt…real. With Jason it had been about her own screwed-up issues; with Soren? She’d love him even if she never saw him again. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted him to feel what he’d allowed her to feel.
>
It was a good thing, a warm thing, something that made her better. It felt like it was about who she wanted to be, not about something she was running from.
She couldn’t explain it, and she certainly couldn’t justify it, and if she were being honest, it even kind of embarrassed her a little bit, because who fell in love like this after the age of, like, sixteen? To the point where they read the same sentence in a report over and over again without ever understanding the words?
And here was the torturous part: the fact that it was so dramatic, so certain, made her question it all the more. Because what if she really was broken and just couldn’t see it? What if she had been right, in the beginning of all this, to tell herself never to trust her feelings for a man, never to trust her judgment ever again?
She had gotten approximately no work done. This was ridiculous. This was adolescent.
Cate felt like she might cry.
So of course that was when Jason showed up.
“Ms. Kennedy, I have your husband for you,” Verna squeaked on the intercom.
Cate practically shot out of her seat. She was st {t. n>anding there, hands on her desk, wild-eyed and stock-still like a deer in the headlights when Jason strode into her office.
She noticed he closed the door behind him.
Cate felt her eyes darting about, felt her blood pumping, her heart racing. It was the shock of it. She watched Jason, watched him carefully, looking for any of the telltale signs that would warn her of an impending incident. He looked…he looked smug. He looked proud, the way he did right before he was going to knock her down.
She hadn’t had to operate like this, from this vigilant place, in so long that part of her was seeing it clearly for the first time. It was insane. It was insane that anyone could make her feel like this, let alone someone who supposedly cared about her.
But insane was good. Insane meant it felt wrong. It felt other. It felt like the past.
“Jason, what do you want?” she said.
He smiled at her. He smiled at her warmly, in that way that might have seemed caring once. Now she knew it to mean something else. And in this context it just seemed triumphant.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said. “The case isn’t going so well, huh?”
Cate wanted to laugh. He was so incredibly, absurdly transparent. It was like he’d seen Cate get beat up in the press for a professional failure and immediately his dick had grown about three inches. He just needed to come in and lord it over her.
“I am not talking to you about the case,” Cate said. “Please get out of my office.”
“Cate, don’t be petulant,” Jason said. “So you’re losing your first big-league case. Mark Cheedham has a lot of experience.”
Cate just stared at him. First big-league case? Mark Cheedham was a bottom feeder. She’d gone up against multinational corporations and won.
And still, it stung. She could feel her old insecurities waking up, beginning to nip at her heels. She had been distracted by Soren, it was true. She never should have been blindsided by this Julia Goode dying of a heroin overdose thing.
“You know you’re going to have to settle,” Jason said, picking up the ship in a bottle she had on her desk. It had been a gift from a law professor when she’d graduated. She only just now realized how much it resembled Soren’s tattoo.
Wait—Jason was asking about settlements?
This was even more ridiculous than she’d thought. She watched Jason peer into the bottle as though he didn’t care about her answer, like it was unimportant or incidental. The man was a terrible poker player. He always, always let his ego get in the way. And now with this little display of affected nonchalance, he’d made it clear to Cate why he was really here—on behalf of Mark Cheedham, fe { Ch the way.eling her out for settlement opportunities.
Which told her a few things. One, Jason was still looking for a job, principally with Cheedham, and he hadn’t told the truth about the state of his marriage; and two, Mark Cheedham’s actual case was as weak as she suspected it to be. If he had the slam-dunk he’d projected to the press, he’d be begging to go to court for a chance at a giant jury award.
It was a satisfying few seconds of deduction. The only reason she didn’t laugh out loud was because this was Jason at his most dangerous.
Right when he was feeling big, and feeling powerful. Right when he was feeling alpha. Anything that disrupted that, anything that threatened to bring him down, could set him off.
Of course, so could nothing at all. Sometimes he just liked to feel even bigger by making Cate feel small.
Cate found herself automatically preparing for that eventuality. For that possibility. Like it was something she had to just accept. And that made her so, so angry.
“Jason,” she said through clenched teeth. “Get out of my office.”
“C’mon, Cate,” he said, sitting on the corner of her desk and giving her those soft, concerned eyes. “I’m not just here to talk about the case. We can drop the case, that’s fine. I’m here because I’m worried about you.”
Cate fought to keep the bile down.
“You’re my wife, Cate,” Jason said, reaching for her hand. “My wife. And I think it’s time you stopped this and came home.”
Cate snatched her hand away and backed away from her own desk, moving around the edge of the room. For some reason, that did it. That snapped the string of experiences connecting her to the idea of this past self completely. She could see why she’d put up with Jason, why she’d allowed this to go on, and it was because for a long time she hadn’t known it could be any other way. And she’d been afraid that even after breaking away, there’d be some sort of pull. That she’d believe him. That she’d never be able to do better.
But now she knew better than that. And she was done with this.
This time, she laughed.
“You’re insane,” she said.
Jason’s face went dark. He stood up swiftly, replacing the ship in a bottle with a gesture of exaggerated care, the way he did when he was angry.
“Don’t push me, Cate,” he said. “I really will do it. I will show everyone what you really are if that’s what it takes to get you to see reason.”
“Don’t you push me, Jason,” she spat back. “I’m getting this divorce one way or the other. I don’t care what you threaten me with anymore. I don’t care if you tell every {ou one I’m a kinky slut. You think I have secrets? Fine. So do you. How do you think Mark Cheedham will react when he finds out I’m suing you for physical and emotional damages? Think you’ll get your job?”
It was like she’d hit him in the face with a frozen mackerel. The expression was priceless. She actually wished she could preserve it.
Then she watched it turn to white-hot, impotent fury, and she had to fight back the fear. The fear was smart. She knew that. But she didn’t want to live like that anymore.
She didn’t want to be prey.
“Watch how you talk to me,” Jason hissed. He stood up off the desk and turned towards her in silent threat.
Cate took one last, good look at this man who had been such a big part of her life. Such a big, terrible part. He hadn’t started out abusive, but he’d always been a selfish narcissist, and that had made it easy for her to be with him. Pretty easy to hide yourself away from a narcissist.
But now that she didn’t have to do that?
She looked at Jason, and she saw almost the negative image of Soren. The contrasts between them were just astounding. And she knew Soren wasn’t here, in this room with her, but that was ok. She was the one about to kick some ass all on her own. She just knew Soren would liked to have seen it.
Cate walked to her office door and flung it open. She looked directly at Jason.
“Verna,” she called out. “Please call security and have them escort Jason Whittier from the building. Do it now.”
Verna didn’t hesitate. She picked up the phone.
“You’re fucking joking,” Jason
said. “You’re fucking hysterical, is what you are. It’s embarrassing, Cate. You’re humiliating yourself.”
“I’ve asked you to leave three times,” Cate said. “I’m not hysterical, and I’m not embarrassed. I’m standing up for myself. You should get used to it.”
“I warned you,” Jason sputtered. “I warned you not to talk to me like that.”
Cate didn’t respond. Nobody responded. Verna simply stayed on the line, quietly relating events to whatever security dispatcher was on the other end, keeping an eye on things. For the first time, Jason had an audience for his behavior, and they weren’t giving him the kind of response he wanted.
That turned out to be a bad thing.
Jason walked red-faced to the open door and slammed it closed, cutting them off. Trapping her with him. Then he turned to look at her, the vein in his forehead throbbing, and shook his head.
Cate didn’t even flinch.
She wasn’t sure why. She should have been terrified. Maybe it was the knowledge that security was on its way, or that Verna had a key to her office door, or that this would soon be over. If Jason assaulted her, he’d be going to jail for a very long time. It would be over.
Or maybe she was just beyond fear. He could hit her, but he couldn’t terrify her anymore. She didn’t believe him anymore.
And then the door opened back up. Cate watched a swarm of gray uniforms spill into her office, covering Jason, slamming him down on her desk. She didn’t even feel particular satisfaction; mostly she was relieved that she didn’t have to think about this anymore. She’d already done all the self-assessments available online—Jason wasn’t likely to threaten her, emotionally or physically, after he was removed from her life. He’d never threatened to kill her, and his threats had been limited to maintaining a public image. And if she was wrong, Cate had the resources to take extraordinary measures to protect herself. She was actually incredibly lucky in that respect.
Jason was, however, still a grade-A shithead, and she’d make sure he was treated as such.