by Amber Rides
“Brenna!” He sounded startled and a little unhappy.
“Um. Hi. I brought the cupcakes. And the recipe. If your boss still wants it.”
His eyes flicked up the hall nervously. “What are you doing here?”
I frowned. “I just said—”
He stepped forward, grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the bathroom. “Never mind. Can you wait in the kitchen?”
“Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m just gonna get dressed, all right?”
“Sure.”
Relief flooded his face. “Thank you. I’ll see you in a minute.”
“Uh, Ridley?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re still holding my arm.”
He dropped it like it was on fire. “Sorry.”
As I turned to go, a flash of movement from Ridley’s bedroom caught my eye.
“Is someone else here?” I asked.
“No.”
Except all color had drained from his face. What the hell was going on?
“You’re lying,” I said. “Who’s here?”
“Just a friend.”
“A friend?”
I pushed past him, ignoring him as he called after me. I stopped in his doorframe and stared in surprise at the girl seated right in the center of Ridley’s bed. Even under her day-old black makeup and bleach-blonde hair, it was easy to see how pretty she was.
My heart fell to my feet.
“Who’re you?” I whispered.
Ridley’s strained voice came from behind me. “This is…”
When he trailed off, I spun to face him.
“You don’t even know her name?” I asked incredulously.
Ridley shot me a helpless look. “It’s…”
“Thea,” the girl filled in. “And you must be Pancake.”
My eyes widened even further and hurt stabbed through my chest. “You told her my nickname?”
“I’m just gonna go,” the girl said.
She jumped up and sidled across the room.
“You stay,” I replied. “I’ll go.”
“I was just leaving,” she argued. “Seriously. I was.”
She grabbed an army-print backpack and a helmet from the floor and dashed from the room. Five seconds later the front door slammed. I tried to follow her, but by the time I reached the living room, Ridley had grabbed my arm again. I yanked myself away.
“What? Did you come out here to grab her number?” I snapped.
“No.”
His voice was too quiet and it made me even angrier. “Really? Because I think you can still catch her.”
“I don’t want her number.”
“So you’re the kind of guy who just fucks a girl one time, forgets her name, and then forgets her altogether?”
Something in his eyes changed. The pleading, guilt-ridden gleam hardened and morphed into cold fury.
“The thing is, Brenna, that’s not the kind of guy I am. At all.”
“So how do you explain Thea?”
“I don’t have to explain her. Not to you. You have no right to be jealous.”
“You arrogant, self-centred asshole.”
It was all I could manage to get out. I couldn’t deny the spark of jealousy that made my temple throb. But whatever I was feeling went much deeper than that. It was a dark, spiralling ache. Just the thought of Ridley with that pretty girl shattered me. But he was right. I had no claim on him.
“Brenna, sometimes life just deals you a shit hand and you do what you have to so you can move on.”
“What would you know about being dealt a shit hand?”
In my head, I knew I was being irrational. Maybe it was partly the hormones. Maybe part of it was exhaustion. But mostly, I was sure, it was just about Ridley and me.
“What would you know about what I know?” he retorted, sounding just as angry and just as juvenile as I did.
“I know that your mom died and you used that as an excuse to get yourself in some kind of trouble. But the bottom line is…You’re a nice guy with a nice job and a nice family who took you in and that you have no idea how hard things can be for—” I cut myself of just before I said single mom.
He barked out a laugh, then strode over to the fireplace and snatched a photograph from atop the mantle. He waved it in my direction.
“Is this what you’re basing your assumptions on?” he demanded. “What you see on the surface?”
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” I countered snidely.
“They say a lot of things. Most of which are complete bullshit.”
“Whatever.”
“What do you see when you look at this?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Like fuck you see nothing,” he replied.
He shoved the frame into my hands. I had little choice but to drop it on the hardwood or hang on tight.
“Fine,” I said. “I see you. I see your cousin. I see his mom and dad. And I see all your stupid Santa hats and your stupid smiles.”
“You see a Christmas card.” Ridley snatched the picture away, sprung the rear piece free and handed it back.
I opened it slowly. I wasn’t sure where to look. It didn’t seem right to stare at Ridley’s face as I did it. I wasn’t even sure if I could stare at him for that long without losing it. But looking at the photograph somehow felt like giving in. My eyes flicked between the two before settling on the object in my hands.
And it really was a Christmas card. I saw that once it was open all the way.
“Yeah,” Ridley said. “That’s us. Ian, Aunt Penelope and me. But that man’s not my uncle.”
I sullenly refused to take the bait. “So?”
He raked his hand through his hair. “Let me tell you a story about an eleven-year old kid, Brenna. He lives with his drunk-ass dad who regularly kicks the shit out of his mom. Until one day, his dad is just gone. The kid has a huge fucking chip in his shoulder. Roughly the same size and shape as his dad, as you can imagine.”
“Ridley, it’s—”
“Shut up and listen!” he growled and tears pricked my eyes. “The kid’s mom gets her shit together. Finally, the kid thinks. He’s almost thirteen when she meets his stepdad and for a little while everything is good. Then the baby comes. At the same time that stepdad loses his job. Suddenly the kid finds out that stepdad is also a raging alcoholic whom his mom met at a meeting. And the recovery isn’t going well. So one day the kid’s pseudo-family goes on an outing, maybe it’s a ball game, maybe it’s bowling – the kid has never been able to remember accurately no matter how hard he tries. Stepdad has been drinking a lot during the day and has an open bottle in the sedan too. He’s angry. He’s reckless. He’s screaming and tossing things around and he’s already given the kid’s mom one backhand. The kid can’t take it anymore, and when stepdad stops at a stop sign, he jumps out with the intention of running as hard and as fast as he can in the other direction. He doesn’t get very far.”
I wanted to cover my ears before he could say what happened next. The tears that had been threatening overflowed and fell down my cheeks. Ridley ignored them and went on.
“The kid went a block. Or maybe half. Then he had to turn around and look; he needed to see if his mom was coming after him or if he’d enraged his stepfather a little too far. What he sees instead is this: the family car shoots away from the stop sign just as a semi-truck barrels down the road. In his head, he wonders why a truck so big is driving on the residential street. He never finds out. The truck smacks into the car. They all die on impact. Mom. Stepdad. Maya, who is two. The truck rolls and the driver dies too. They fucking die.”
He didn’t tell me it was him. He didn’t have to. I knew it was him before he looked me in the eye and spoke again.
“But I didn’t fucking die. Not physically anyway. For two years I tried my damnedest to get there. I drank and I smoked and I fucked anything that walked. I didn’t think about legal shit or long-term consequences or any fuckin
g thing at all. I bounced from foster home to foster home and still…I didn’t die. When I was seventeen, my Aunt Penelope took me in. Not because she wanted to. She could’ve stepped in when they all died, right? Nope. She didn’t want my shit-crazy self ruining her kid, Ian. She’d been sober for years and she’d washed her hands of my mom too. But Aunt Penelope got diagnosed with cancer – terminal – and the universe told her she had to bring me to live with her and Ian. I went. Not because I wanted to. Because the terms of my release from the juvenile detention centre required me to have a capable adult supervisor. So we had an agreement. Which grew into something more. She loved me and took care of me and it didn’t take all that long for me to love her back because essentially I was just a broken soul waiting for someone to help me. And Ian? He was a sweet kid. But the sicker his mom got, the worse he got too. And the better I became. Which may have been Aunt Penelope’s real plan. She knew what her son was going to be like and she needed someone like me to watch out for him when she died. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing for five years. That Christmas card photo was taken three weeks before my aunt died.”
Ridley’s speech finally ran out, and with it, the heated expression on his face. He took the photo-card from my hands, closed it up and set it back on the mantel very carefully. Without looking at me, he sunk into the couch.
“I’m sorry, Ridley.”
My voice wavered pathetically at the end and I had to wait a very long moment for him to answer me. When he did, he sounded exhausted.
“I’m past pity, Brenna. Yours or anyone else’s. All I wanted was to show you that I do know what it is to suffer and to be obligated.”
I stared down at his face, taking in his features in a new light. The mussed hair. The ever-present crease in his brow. The hard-won muscles and the tiny scar on his ear and the guarded hurt I knew was in his slate-coloured eyes even though I couldn’t see them right that second. His heart was layered and scarred and imperfect.
Ridley was a body of work. An emotional tribute to his past. A hard-fought war of a man who rose above everything that should have destroyed him.
My heart broke into a thousand tiny pieces – one for each bit of pain that he had suffered.
Dear, God. I’m in love with him. And he can never know. Because even if there was a chance that he loved me back, I could never ask him to take on Ian’s baby.
My breath cut away at the simultaneous, definitive realizations. The shards of my heart glittered and danced inside my chest driving the agony deeper. It felt like an infinite number of tiny deaths. Again and again. And again.
“Have I done it, Brenna?”
I stumbled over my answer. “Done what?”
“Have I shown you that I do know what it means to hurt and to be stuck and to do things for someone else every single day even though you’d rather not do them for even one?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“So go.”
“Go?”
“Leave. We’re done. This week is over. The three dates with Ian are through. We. Are. Done.”
With a feeling in my throat that was as thick as the clouds above me, I tore from Ridley’s house. I raced across our adjoining lawns to my place and reached the porch just as the first rain drops splattered from the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ridley
I waited until I was a hundred percent sure that Brenna was gone before I opened my eyes again. When I did open them, they found the framed card immediately.
I missed my Aunt Penelope. All the time. The influence she had on my life was monumental. It was also deeply personal and I rarely – if ever – talked about it without being prodded.
The other part…The events leading up to bringing her and Ian into my life…I’d never spoken that aloud before. Not in a forced counselling session, not to Ian, not even to my Aunt Penelope herself.
With Brenna, it all came out. Of course, I’d said it to be mean. To hurt her the way she was hurting me. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what kind of pain she was causing me. I just wanted to build a wall to protect myself from getting in any deeper.
Only it backfired. When I told her the story, it didn’t feel cruel. It didn’t feel like a wall. It felt like the tearing down of a wall. Like, for the first time in my life I had someone to share my darkest secrets with.
What did I want her to do with them, though? What had I expected her to say when I confessed the thing I kept closest to my heart? What had I thought she would do? Sink to her knees and beg to be with me instead of Ian?
No.
Maybe.
Yes.
No doubt about it, yes.
Why the hell hadn’t she?
Yeah, I’d acted shitty and pushed her away, but…But what?
I was damned sure she liked me. Maybe more than liked. This past week together had been as close to perfect as my life had ever been. She felt it too. I knew she did.
The only thing standing between us was Ian and I still didn’t see what kind of hold he had on her. So why had she run off so easily?
“Too many damned questions,” I muttered.
It took me ten hours too long to decide that the only way to get answers was to ask Brenna herself.
***
I rang the doorbell three times in a row. Just as I raised my fist to pound on the door, Brenna’s roommate answered it.
“Afternoon, Lisa” I greeted in as cheerful a voice as I could muster.
“It’s Risa,” she corrected.
“Sorry. Good afternoon, Risa.”
Brenna’s roommate gazed at me flatly. “It’s night.”
Shit.
What had Brenna told her?
I smiled and cleared my throat, but her expression didn’t change.
“Can I help you?” she asked coolly.
I decided to drop the pleasantries. “Is Brenna home?”
“No.”
“I can see her car in the driveway.”
“So?”
“So…I only have a few minutes before I leave for work and I want to talk to her.”
“Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I know.”
“What makes you think you’ve got the right to make Brenna’s decisions for her?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She crossed her arms over her chest defensively. “I’m not going to spill Brenna’s secrets to you.”
“What secrets?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” she repeated insistently. “I just want to know why the hell you’d send her back to Ian.”
My blood went cold. “I didn’t.”
“Did you, or did you not give Ian some kind of all-night pass for that stupidly fancy hotel you work at?” she demanded.
“Yes, but—”
“Do you think Ian would make a good husband?” she almost-yelled.
“What?”
“Brenna has spent her whole life running! From the things her mother did, from the things her mother said she’s become, from everything! And now she thinks she’s got herself backed into a corner with no way out and she’s freaking out. For fuck’s sake! Help me show her she’s not stuck! Help me show her she’s about to make the biggest mistake of her life.”
“Risa, please. Back it up. Did you say Ian took her to my hotel?”
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
Sonofabitch. How had that happened?
“How long ago did they leave?”
“Ten minutes?”
Ten minutes.
I grabbed my keys from my pocket and turned to go. Risa grabbed my arm
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To do what you said,” I replied. “To stop her from making the biggest mistake of her life.”
***
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Brenna
The second Ian closed the hotel room door behind us, I took a deep, steadying breath and kissed him hard on the mouth. He pu
lled away, surprise clear on his face.
I’d made my decision the moment Ian suggested the hotel as a place to talk. I’d give us both a night to remember.
This time.
And it would seal my fate. Sleeping with Ian on purpose would take away any illusion I had of choice. And it was something Ridley would never forgive.
I dropped my jacket, exposing the sheer negligee I wore underneath.
Ian turned toward me and his eyes widened. He took a step back. “Whoa. Brenna. What’re you doing?”
I plastered a sultry smile onto my face. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
I moved toward him, reaching my hand for his chest. He stumbled backwards and landed on the bed.
“You said you wanted a private place to talk,” he reminded me.
“I did. I do. But you can’t tell me you brought me to a hotel room to talk.”
“I – Listen, I – Okay,” he stumbled over the words. “Brenna…Have you thought this through?”
“Do I look like I haven’t thought it through?” I countered, and twirled so the negligee danced up to expose my rear end.
“You look delicious.” He eyes raked up my body. “But I don’t think this is really what you want.”
“Ian, I’ve done nothing but think about this for the last week. The last month and a half. I’m tired of thinking. I’m ready for doing.”
I bent down and pushed my lips against his softly. For a second, he kissed me back, but then he groaned and pushed me back.
“Can I just have a second?”
“Sure,” I agreed.
He jumped to his feet and walked to the bathroom.
I climbed into the bed and adjusted the sheets. I slid one leg out from under the satin covers and hung it across the bed in a way that I hoped was sexy.
Ian dropped something in the bathroom and cursed loudly.
I looked down at my exposed leg doubtfully and spied a scrape on my knee. Crap. Wrong leg.
I moved the sheets again, but when I stuck the other leg out, it slipped off the bed altogether. It also pulled the lace of my thong straight up my rear end in a decidedly unpleasant way.
I didn’t feel even close to sexy.