by Lee, Corri
"And what if my day trip becomes an extended holiday?"
"Emmy would never... You have seen the scars right? Doesn't it bother you?"
"Of course it bothers me. What kind of person would I be if I was cool with someone I cared about being in such a bad place that they felt like hurting themselves was the only option? But if you're asking me if I can accept it, of course I can. As long I'm not the person that's causing that kind of self-loathing."
He turned his gaze onto me, that same scorchingly intense gaze he'd hit me with before he left my flat. All of the blood in my body rushed to my face and the deepest depths of my stomach knotted and contorted, much like the way I felt in a crowded room— claustrophobic, out of breath and horribly self-conscious. The smallest of smiles kissed the corners of his mouth when I mouthed an apology and sagged back warily. What was I doing so wrong? How could he say he cared for me knowing that I was, for want of a better word, a slut?
He excused himself and slunk over to the bar, turning every woman's and some men's heads as he travelled the distance. That kind of spellbinding effect seemed to be universal and for that I was grateful. I had no desire to become that girl who mooned after a man because she'd bumped uglies with him. It wasn't my style.
Esme leaned over to grip my chin and pull my eyes away from what looked like a dangerously serious conversation between Chris and Blaze. "Why did you apologise just then?"
"I just felt like I had to. Didn't you see the incomparable fury in his eyes? Jesus, not even Hunter looked at me like that when they sectioned me."
"Incomparable fu— ... My god, you can't see the forest for the trees, can you? Open your eyes, Emmy. That man up there is the forest." I shook my head at her blankly and received a raised eyebrow in return. "Get used to his face because you're going to be seeing a lot of it."
WHAT concerned me is why that statement didn't concern me. When I pictured night after night of drinking in Blaze's company, taking him home and falling asleep next to him, I didn't feel sieged like I should have. I felt... indifferent. It already seemed like normality when this was really only the first night of what was forecast to be many. He was too close but I couldn't bring myself to hate it. A crazy little piece of me thought that he might just be the person who broke the curse of unrequited affection Hunter had hung over my head.
"Cupcake?"
"Hmm?" The sudden blast of giggles around me alerted me to the stupid mistake I'd just made. "Oh! Oh god..."
"Might catch on." Blaze slid onto the seat next to me, one leg up on the velvet between us, and held out a dainty cupcake iced in pale pink butter-cream and a white sugarcraft rose. "But I was asking if you wanted this. They're good, maybe the second best thing I've tasted today." He bit down on his lip and flared his eyes at me, sending a delicious shudder right through my veins. I knew he was thinking about what else he'd tasted that day and just the memory made me want to claw at the cushioned seat next to me.
"I'll lick butter-cream off anything, you know." I narrowed my eyes at him, trying not to break the seductive ruse with a squeak. "Call it an indulgence."
"Miss White, you're incorrigible."
"Surely you mean 'encourage-able'? And I'm almost certain that if you save that cupcake for later when I'm far drunker, you'll have a few choice words of encouragement for my greedy mouth."
"Cheque, please." His eyes twinkled brightly in the soft light of the candles I'd learned to keep a safe difference from when he was around. The barely containable urge to reach up and stroke his face made my fingers twitch with unfamiliar adoration. After only eight days, he'd come to mean so much to me and left a heavy footprint on my life. If I never saw him again after that night, I'd never be able to forget him and his smile, or his laugh, or his frown. I suspected that his memory would haunt me just as Hunter did, and that alone told me enough to know that I'd come out of this hurting. It might not be today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point I'd have to face the repercussions of trying to touch an untouchable man.
I glanced sideways at the table and caught my miserable, distorted reflection in my glass. Daniel pushed it out of my line of vision when he realised how furiously I was staring at it.
"She's not here, Emmy. Not anymore."
"Who?" My eyes looked up to meet Blaze's though my head didn't move. Yet again, I prayed for a distraction.
"Just a small ghost from the past. An unwelcome face who tells her lies."
"Lies?"
"Truths." I closed my eyes and resigned myself to confessing to the hallucination. Better it came from me. If he stuck around, he'd find out sooner or later. Sooner meant the inevitable hole he left behind might be smaller. "The shadow of my teenage self telling me that I'll always be—"
"A little bit ugly, a little bit frumpy, a little bit socially stunted, a little bit fat and a whole lot boring." Esme, Daniel and Jonathan recited the prose in unison, having heard it themselves a thousand times before.
"Lies then." Like I hadn't heard that platitude often enough for it to be meaningless. Blaze ignored my muttered 'whatever' and squared himself to the table, effectively turning away from me. That was it then... He understood what had been chasing me all afternoon and it was just too neurotic for him. "I happen to find you quite fascinating and easy on the eyes, and I think we... hammered out the fat, frumpy thing this afternoon." Did he really think it was that easy?
"You still think I'm socially stunted though?"
"Yes." He tutted mockingly. "Not so much as a thank you."
"For the lunch I didn't want, the clothes I didn't ask for, or the entirely too public 'hammering'?" I saw his eyebrow raise and cheeks lift into a sly smirk. "I'll thank you with butter-cream."
"Phew!" Jonathan fanned himself theatrically with a cork drinks coaster and swooned against Daniel's shoulder. "It's like watching my parents all over again and I heard how hot it was in their bedroom!"
"Is that what turned you towards the frilly paisley pink side?"
"It helped. What did you say to Chris anyway?" At once, we all turned our attention to the unusually empty seat next to me, then to the sullen figure slumped over a whiskey on the rocks at the bar. "It's not like him to prop up the bar. Especially when we're all spitting feathers over here."
Blaze shrugged and raised his glass to his lips, pausing to speak. "I told him that I enjoy the scenery of the Deep White South too much to stay away. That I'm planning on renting a log cabin there to concrete my intentions of visiting frequently until such a time when both a permanent place of residency becomes available and I'm in a more comfortable position to retire there." He took a small sip of his drink. "More or less."
"Well was it the more or the less?" I blurted my words out in a rush, feeling my face return to the shade of red it seemed to visit far to often around Blaze. It sounded suspiciously like he'd told the most protective of my friends that he was going to hang around until our complications stopped obstructing the way to what? A happily ever after? He'd be waiting a long time.
"Less," he laughed, ignoring the three anxious faces sat across from us, "but less is more. At least I know how you feel about the matter now. Don't worry." He dipped down to my ear so his lips brushed the lobe. It was the closest he'd been since he'd arrived to light up my dark evening and reminded me just how lost I felt around him. "I have a guarantor."
Esme, Daniel and Jonathan collectively sighed with relief when the comment made me laugh and inexplicably comforted me in a way it probably shouldn't have. Rather than respond to the threatened intrusion with a dramatic breakdown or a swift sprint down the path leading to the hills, I rolled my eyes at him with a smile on my face and made lustful eyes at the cupcake I didn't want to save for later. Just the fact that he said he planned to stick around for the long haul made me feel good— special. I may well have been the worst woman for the job, but nobody else could say that they'd been offered the chance, and I would have been crazy to not be grateful for the opportunity to hang on to a man like him. I might have eve
n dared to say like I felt like a concubine to a prolific king, my purposes singular, indecent and terminable, but I'd been picked from many as the best. I doubted that he felt the same way.
Chris did eventually rejoin us, still looking downtrodden but forced enough polite conversation to make it obvious that he was putting himself out to be civil for my sake. I loved him for it. To our surprise, we learned that Blaze was somewhat well versed in our nerdy persuasion, owning an extensive comic book and graphic novel collection that would have made Stan Lee weep. He even carried some street cred destroying pictures of said collection on his phone, and pinpointed exactly where Syncretic Sciences now took residence. Naturally, everything was ordered alphabetically, then by year, issue and language— comics and novels separately stored. My mother would have loved him and his anally retentive organisational habits.
"Shame you haven't done more, really. I'd like an Emmeline White shelf. Autographed first editions, obviously."
"Obviously. But my imagination is a little limited."
"To garrotting wire?" Blaze gave me a knowing wink and topped my glass up from a bottle of wine he'd ordered that I'd never tried before but had gotten a taste for. Too much of a taste. It was hard to fall into my usual depressive drunken slump with him around, knowing what mischief lay in wait after the bar closed. But the bad mood threatened.
"Speaking of work being 'limited'—" I barely caught the spiteful smirk on Chris' face before it faded, "you're not exactly fighting off the paparazzi for a man with his fingers in multiple pies and your portfolio isn't all that impressive. You're not filling your days filling Emmy, so what do you do exactly?"
"Chris!" Oh my god... Wincing, I thrust my hands into my hair and peeked up at Blaze through my fingers. "You don't have to answer that." What he did in his own time was his own business, just as my 'extra-curricular activities' were mine. Whether he taught the word of God to small children or murdered whores in brothels, it was none of my concern.
"It's fine," he assured me, wrapping an arm around my back and turning to address the question, "you're asking me what keeps me away, aren't you?" Away from me. Did I really want to hear his reason 'why'? "I'm a carer."
My head jolted up, not nearly attached to my ability to form words. A carer? When he wasn't looking out for me, he was looking out for someone else, someone sick or disabled. I hadn't put much thought into what his complication was, but something like this would never have crossed my mind. It wasn't nearly as bad as the other ideas that might have plagued me given half the chance, and it just seemed so... him.
"They're not completely incapacitated, but accidents happen and concessions have to be made. Job opportunities come and go— being on standby compromises my time. I can't take work outside of the city and I don't like to start something I can't finish. If there's a risk of anything interrupting the little time I get with Emmeline, I'd prefer to sacrifice seeing her rather than give her just half my attention through phone-watching."
AND THAT WAS how it would always be. A watered down version of my role in Hunter's life. He too only called when he could give me his undivided attention, so the concept didn't distress me too much. How could it when I knew that Blaze's motives were much more honest and noble?
The gaps were shorter, a few days at most. Whether it was just lunch or a night out, I knew that the flying visit was always good for at least one cervix-destroying orgasm that sent me searching for a place to catnap. Mrs Reynolds didn't object to my post-lunch snoozes when I found my way to and from them smiling.
Blaze was like my own brand of Prozac. The all-encompassing woe that usually drove me subsided and the fat girl disappeared from my mirror in the mornings. By no means did I love myself, but I could bear to be me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn't think about Hunter and how I lacked the qualities he desired the moment I woke up. I stretched my arm across my bed and remembered who'd been there, talking to me as I nodded off. Complicated or not, whatever we were doing worked and it worked well.
It worked through the scorching heat of June that had us peeling our sweaty, replete bodies off the leather interior of the goblin car on occasion. It worked through impromptu lunch dates and nights out at Esme's. I wore the clothes he'd chosen for me and my hair loose on the off chance he arrived because I liked to imagine what he thought when he opened the door into Double Booked and saw me looking just how he liked me. For some reason, he was attracted to me and made no effort to hide it, kissing me when he saw fit and making vulgar yet endearing propositions regardless of the company we were in. We didn't talk about it, but we both knew that we felt too much for each other. Neither of us cared as long as the other was still on the same page of our bizarre 'don't ask, don't tell' understanding. We were inextricably bound by our denial, a bond so honest that it might have been devalued if we'd forced I love you's like everyone else.
We were functionally dysfunctional and not even the summer heat could compare to how moltenly hot I burned for him at every given chance.
A few days became a week, and a week became ten days. The space that we left for him at our table in Esme's grew cold but stayed open for him to warm up when he could. My friends fussed, sure that I'd crack in his absence. They saw how close we'd grown but were so negative about the outlook of our 'relationship' that they didn't believe in my blind conviction.
"Aren't you worried?" Esme walked home with me through the side-streets after lunch in a quiet little bistro I'd discovered near my flat during a walk with Blaze early the week before. The world hadn't found it yet, which meant that the beastly Saturday crowds had yet to taint it's Mediterranean serenity with popularity. London was in full flow with older children enjoying their summer holidays after exams, students shopping for university essentials and tourists absorbing the fascinating landmarks we natives took for granted. My fear of that mania remained.
"Worried?"
"That he's not coming back." Her reluctance to say the words manifested in a whisper, pausing me for only half a beat.
"No, I'm not. He told me that he'd always come back for me and I believe him."
"Oh, Emmy. Even you aren't this naive." That stopped me for a moment longer.
"You think he was lying?" I challenged her with a raised eyebrow. She immediately relented, knowing that the man was despicably honest to the point of it sometimes being too much. I wasn't sure that he knew how to lie. "He'd tell me if he wasn't coming back, Esme. He wouldn't just leave me flailing."
We scaled the staircase up to my flat on the first floor in silence before she sighed and held up her hands. "I just don't want to see you throw yourself under the metaphorical bus here. You're setting yourself up, but I'm not sure which direction the punch line will take yet. Don't be foolhardy. He may not have been lying at the time, but you don't know how or when the wind might change direction."
"I'm prepared for this to all go wrong. I know that it will so I'm at peace with it." I shrugged and pulled my keys from my pocket. "I'm a realist, you know that. Ask me how I'd cope if it all went right, well that's a different mat—" My sentence was cut short by the door swinging open and hand shooting out to pull me inside. The door kicked shut behind me, putting an abrupt end to my conversation with Esme.
I was tugged so quickly my head spun, eyes barely clear of stars when a familiar mouth closed around mine. I'd never been kissed so passionately before, like I was so essential and life-defining. I shivered at how mighty I felt— an evil harpy done hexed this poor unsuspecting man. Hexed him like he'd hexed me.
My feet left the ground, my legs were wrapped around his waist, and I smiled against his lips. I knew you'd be back. Not only did I have him here, but I also had the satisfaction of a big 'I told you so' for my friends.
"Blaze, quelle surprise. Have you been working hard or hardly wo—" My back swiftly found the fabric of the couch the same moment his mouth found mine again and kissed me hard, quietening my satire to a needy moan into him. God, the ten days had been too long.
All the craving I'd been able to block out while he was gone flooded back into me in a deluge of heat and lust. My face flooded with colour and my eyes with life, reigniting a flame he snuffed out every time I woke up alone. I never knew how much I'd miss him until he came back, and this time was almost painful. Just because I didn't feel the hole he left expanding didn't mean I didn't feel it being plugged up. My fingers raked across his back and held him until he shifted, breathless and flushed. "That was one hell of a greeting."
"I was checking if I was still damned." Like he needed it to breathe, he pressed his lips to mine again and moaned softly. I felt his longing surge through me and aggravate that volatile little flame that burned for him.
"And?"
"Very damned." His lips trailed across my jaw to my ear. "I missed you, cupcake."
"I..." Had never been 'missed' before. Not like this. I didn't know where the boundaries lay in an association like ours, but I was certain that they were being pushed with pet names. Still, I couldn't deny that I was right there with him, though maybe a little less confident about it. "I missed you too. Especially when you call me sweet names like that but I'm really turned on right now and your erection is digging into my leg."
He laughed softly and kissed the frantic throb in my neck. "It's a shame you'd just fall asleep if we made love." My mouth dried. I could tell that if I looked at him, he'd be regarding me with that almost carcinogenic glare I felt so guilty about evoking in him, but if it came with the sweet nothings reserved for treasured lovers and long term partners, was I misinterpreting it? I was so confused, and so reluctant to let myself get carried off in a pipe dream fantasy.