Fuel the Fire

by Krista Ritchie

He kisses me on the lips.

  And he says, “I will.”

  Translation: We’re done having children together.

  [ 45 ]

  CONNOR COBALT

  “I misjudged you back during Princesses of Philly,” Scott Van Wright says. “You’re actually cool, Connor.”

  I head to the door, nodding a couple times. “Same to you, man.” I block out Rose’s voice in my mind, unable to hear her truth and cope with what just took place in Scott’s house an hour prior.

  What happened was a price I had to pay to reach a greater benefit. It was a loss leader. There are no emotions in facts.

  I turn around and shake his hand, pat his back, and say goodbye.

  “We should grab lunch tomorrow,” Scott tells me as I skip the steps down his porch.

  I casually wave to him like sure thing, and then he smiles, accepting our friendship wholeheartedly, no trace of doubt, no hesitance—exactly what I wanted. He shuts the door, and I walk along his driveway, my house diagonally across the street from his.

  On my way back home, I call Frederick.

  He answers on the second ring. “I’m not talking to you about Daisy.” He won’t ever share more information about her progress, but that’s not why I called.

  “Remind me, Rick, why do people choose to feel?” Because Richard, it’s—I shut out Rose’s beliefs. They’re not helpful anymore. I was able to pass Scott’s test this afternoon only because I pushed her voice away. In my mind, she’s restraining me from completing goals. She’s making this more difficult than it has to be.

  “You know why,” he tells me.

  “Emotions stifle me. It’s a straightjacket that superior people know not to put on.”

  I hear papers rustle on his end, as though pushing them aside to concentrate. “What happened, Connor?”

  “You don’t have an answer do you,” I realize, “because you know I’m right.”

  “Emotions make you human.”

  “Then I’m more than human.” I’m indestructible this way.

  “No,” he says. “When you don’t feel, you’re less than human.”

  I swallow distaste. “No. I accomplish more than they do.”

  “You love less.”

  “There is pain in love,” I suddenly say, hurt flaring and swelling my chest. I submerge it all, feeling nothing. Richard—no, Rose. I can’t hear her. I can’t feel what she wants me to feel. “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Greater men would experience pain just to love.”

  I reach my mailbox, and my hand tightens around the phone. “Are you trying to incite me, Rick?”

  “You feel, Connor. It’s there, inside of you. You’re just afraid.”

  “No.” But I have no other defense than that one.

  I’m scared.

  I’m scared to feel agony tear through me, and I’d rather return to the time where my choices were driven by selfish pursuits, where my decisions never emotionally impacted me. Where I could wake up the next morning and never waver. I’d never feel my soul wither.

  “I won today,” I say. “I don’t want to feel like I lost.” Not again. I step onto my porch and unlock the front door.

  “Concentrate on what you have…”

  I tune out his voice as Rose rushes into the foyer, barefoot, no socks or clean heels that she’ll usually wear indoors. Off my gaze, she says, “I was in Jane’s nursery, and I saw you returning. How’d it go with the devil?”

  I say a short goodbye to Frederick and hang up. “It was easy,” I tell Rose, locking the door behind me. Then I pass her and head to the kitchen.

  I have no problem being what other people need, to be the level head, the calm in the face of a raging, undying storm. I like being needed, being useful. Rose knows this, but she also knows, as well as I do, that Scott is different.

  I’ve never despised a human being quite like him, and to be anything else but enemies has been far from easy.

  She follows me with a blistering stride. “Last week at the golf course, you said it was hard not calling him a twat and decking his head with the nine-iron.”

  I open the fridge. “I was thinking irrationally last week.” I glance over the water bottles and leftover Lucky’s burgers. I don’t know what I’m searching for.

  “Richard,” Rose snaps.

  “Rose,” I say calmly, shutting the fridge and turning to face her.

  The longer she looks at me, the more her nose flares, her rabid, sweltering emotions bubbling to the surface. It’s beautiful…just not something I personally want to share.

  “What happened at his house?” she asks.

  They’re just words.

  I should be able to say them without falter. I’m superior that way. “I knew he was going to see if I contradicted myself, to test me.” I take a step near Rose, towering above her. She raises her chin to appear taller, even when she’s not. “And he chose something I said at Saturn Bridges.” The bar where Rose picked me up. “That night, I told him that I didn’t care about the sex tapes but you did.”

  I’d never bad-mouthed Rose in my life, not to climb a social ladder, not to fake my way through the corporate world, and that night at Saturn Bridges was the first time I degraded her. The words I spoke today are worse. They’re unforgivable, so heinous that I struggle to crawl back to an hour prior in Scott’s house and remember them.

  If I just focus on my goals, on what I achieved, and not stare into her eyes—then I can be free of these crippling emotions.

  It’s hard to avoid Rose, seething in front of me.

  I do look at her, and her hot gaze burns holes right through me. She’s fine. I didn’t hurt her.

  She sets her hands on her hips. “It wasn’t easy for you to tell him that lie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw your face in the car that night, and you looked distraught.”

  Distraught? “No,” I say flatly.

  “Yes,” she sneers. “It was in the corner of your eyes.”

  I raise my brows at her. “The corner of my eyes?” I rub my lips, wondering if I want to laugh or if I want to scream. Maybe I’m just numb to everything. “And what’s in the corner of my eyes now?” I wear the blankest face I have.

  “Ugliness,” she retorts.

  “You’re the only person on this Earth that’s ever called me ugly,” I muse. “Do you know that, Rose?”

  “Then you’ve fooled everyone but me.” She stomps over to the breakfast table. I don’t understand what she plans on doing, but she drags the wooden chair to the other side of the island counter where I stand.

  “You’re scratching the hardwood,” I point out.

  “I don’t care about the floor,” she retorts, positioning the chair across from me. And then she stands on it, gaining two inches on me for height advantage. It’s comical if not entirely ridiculous.

  “Feel better?” I ask.

  “Cut the bullshit,” she tells me. “I know you, and you may be arrogant, you may be wholly conceited and unabashed to the millionth degree, but you’re not cold-hearted. You’re not unfeeling, so stop pretending to be.”

  “I can’t be you,” I remind her. “I can’t stomp my feet and scream and shout. It gets me nowhere.”

  “I’m not asking you to do those things.” Her yellow-green eyes push me towards the imprisoned parts of myself, and a forty-ton weight tries to descend on me. Why would anyone want to feel this? For years, I’ve watched secondhand as Lo’s hurt affected Lily, and Lily’s hurt affected Lo—never did I believe I’d reach my own tipping point with the pain of love.

  Never did I believe it’d be too overwhelming for me.

  I look at Rose. “Then what do you want?”

  “The truth,” she says. “Not just facts.”

  “You can’t handle it, Rose.”

  She almost appears wounded. She’s fine. Then her eyes flash hot, indignant again. She points a manicured nail into my chest. “You can’t handle it, Richard. If you could
, you’d tell me the full extent of what happened.”

  I don’t want to confront her or tell her the truth. I’ll see her pain. I’ll feel it churn through me, and I won’t—I can’t bear this weight. I’m stronger alone. “Let me live with this knowledge. You don’t need it.”

  She fists my shirt. “I won’t let you lie to yourself. I made you that promise, and I’m keeping it.” She stares down at me, her forehead nearly pressed against mine. I match the rhythm of her heavy, vexed breath.

  “Everyone except you loves this version of me, so maybe it’s you who’s wrong.”

  “Everyone loves the awfully, cowardly fake versions of you.” Her eyes swell with passion. “They love the lesser you because they don’t even know the real one.”

  My hand shakes. “Rose,” I murmur, my chest blazing the longer I stare into her. She fuels the fire in my soul, the embers slowly dying, and she tries feverishly to awaken me.

  I open my mouth to say the truth—what happened…the words stick to the back of my throat.

  I place my hands on hers, the ones clutching my shirt, as though she’s seconds from throttling me to her plane of existence—where the world is painted vibrantly in sadness, in rage and despair. I’m the one who lives in muted tones of impassivity and emptiness, needing other people to color my landscape for me.

  Tears drip down her cheeks, but she never smothers the fervor in her gaze. “I’ll wait until you have the strength to tell me.”

  Strength. It takes more power to confront emotions than it does to expel them.

  I cup her slender jaw with one hand, brushing her tears with my thumb, and I use the other to hold her hip, drawing closer to her body until we’re two vertical lines pressed together. She stands two inches above me.

  She’s crying silently.

  She’s far from impervious. And yet, she is better than me.

  I asked her to be, so when everything compounded on top of me, she’d lift me back to her height again. “Facts,” I whisper.

  “Truths,” she counters, resilient and unbending.

  My throat closes. What’s the idiom—the truth will set you free? It’s a buoyant phrase that inadequately describes the torment of speaking truly.

  “I’ll wait,” she reminds me.

  I shake my head once.

  Strength.

  I hold her tighter, and I reroute my mind and go back in time. Across the street. Scott’s house. “He wanted to see if I really cared about the sex tapes…since I said I didn’t.” Instead of avoiding her gaze, I meet her head-on, doing this right. “He sat me on his couch, remote in hand—and that’s when I knew what he planned to show me.”

  I watch her face begin to contort as she tries to comprehend the event.

  “I had to shut you out of my head…I couldn’t do what he needed of me with you there.”

  Her chest collapses. “He made you…did you…?”

  “He asked me to watch one of our sex tapes—with him.” I pause. “And I did.”

  I wait for her to release my shirt and slap me, but she holds on with a tighter grip as though saying I’m not leaving you. Her features ride a rollercoaster of dark sentiments. An overpowering, foreign emotion claws at my organs, a battering ram coursing through vital, necessary places inside of me.

  I hurt her.

  I open my mouth to explain more…to say how it was a tape that hasn’t been released yet. Where I tied Rose’s wrists to our bed, and I kissed her—I made love to her, and I had to sit there, beside Scott Van Wright, a man I hate, and make a mockery of the woman I adore.

  I had to be vulgar and callous—I had to say things that’d make her skin crawl, that’d make her scream until her throat became raw, that’d make her sick at the sight of me…that makes me sick at the sight of me.

  The act of viewing the tape with Scott carries its own desecrations, but my words won’t stop haunting me.

  “I would’ve repulsed you,” I tell her. “The things I said…”

  “No…he repulses me.” She jostles my shirt when the guilt weighs my shoulders down. I travel through a scalding cycle of pain, almost unbearable.

  Wetness slides down my cheeks, and she holds my face that keeps fracturing. I’m paralyzed from my actions, no matter how much I accomplished, no matter how grand the achievement I shelved—my love for Rose outweighs these victories.

  “I forgive you,” she breathes, fighting more tears. Her forgiveness should unburden me, but I feel the same. I feel disgusted and ashamed.

  “I hate myself for what I just did,” I whisper. I want to separate the man that spoke ill of his wife from the one who would drop to his knees before her—if I could just pull them apart, then I’d be free.

  But I’m one person with one soul, and I’m wading in every malignant word I uttered and every heartless laugh I made. I’m wading in my spirit that I’ve defiled, and I’ve never felt so utterly low.

  Her tears mix with mine. “You have to forgive yourself, Connor.”

  Forgive yourself. How can I forgive hurting someone who is more than an extension of me? Who I’ve spent years seeking out during our adolescence, just a few more minutes, just one more hour—just a little more time. She can forgive me, but she never heard what I said.

  I won’t ever repeat it.

  I won’t ever think it.

  It’s too much—even for me.

  I grasp the back of her head, my fingers tangled in the thick of her hair. “I’m not positive I ever can, Rose.” It’s a weight that nearly knocks me backwards, crushing my ribcage against my heart.

  With her small hands on either side of my jaw, she says, “You should never hate the better version of you, the one that loves, the one that hurts—because this man in front of me is extraordinary.”

  Her words flood me, choke me, grip me and burn me.

  Her words light me in a lethal blaze, and I’m smothered in hot sentiments that pull at me and beg me to scream. I hold her harder, tighter, my forehead pressed against hers.

  I’m on fire, every part of me.

  I don’t want to be less than human. Maybe it’s this natural remorse that makes me like everyone else, and maybe it’s our everlasting, cerebral love that makes me more.

  My muscles scald, my breath locked tight, but I hold Rose right here, pain distancing my lips from hers, tension tearing at my flesh. It’s overwhelming. It’s horrible and blinding, and I clutch onto her as my own guilt and shame keeps pummeling me at breakneck speed.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she whispers in a broken voice, further compounding this gut-wrenching pain.

  Kiss her. “Je t’aime,” I choke, grasping her slick cheek. I love you. “Je t’aime. Je t’aime.”

  I’m burning alive.

  She cries more audibly, and I kiss her, our lips together in a fervent, tortured kiss that lingers. I inhale with her, and I slow the movement, our tears dripping, and it becomes a soul-bearing, passionate kiss that awakens my mind.

  I hug Rose to my body, taking her off the chair, my lips stinging with salt and urgency. I press Rose so close against me that her feet never hit the floor. Instead, we’re eye-level. At perfect, equal height.

  I’ve been split open. I’ve been spilled bare. I’ve allowed her spirit to seep inside of me—to remind me, remind me…why I love.

  I can barely catch my breath, blistering against her.

  And she asks so quietly, “What else do you need?”

  What do I need? No one has asked me this before. The answer hits me at once. “A break.” I need more time away from everything.

  “I’ll make it happen,” she assures me, her hands dropping to my chest. I stare into her yellow-green eyes, and I sense that she’s feeling my heart pound against her palms.

  “What would I be without you?” I blink and a single tear drips down my face. We both know the answer to this—we both recognize what she’s doing for me. Remind me. Burn me. Love me.

  I kiss her forehead, my chest alight with passion and pain.


  “Ensemble,” she whispers in French. Together.

  “Ensemble,” I murmur.

  Together.

  [ 46 ]

  ROSE COBALT

  Please come to Sunday luncheon. I promise Jonathan won’t be there, but we’d love to see you all and the babies. – Mom

  I delete the fifth text she’s sent this week. We’ve been skipping the Sunday family luncheons since the media shit storm. All conversations would’ve surrounded the press conference, which is now in nine days. I can just picture myself at the patio table, brandishing a fork at my mother or even my father for pressuring my husband to lie to millions of people and do what they want instead of what he wants.

  “Is that Mom again?” Lily asks, hands braced on the steering wheel. She drives my Escalade while I give her directions. My car is filled to maximum occupancy. We’ve been switching seats every three hours since it’s a long drive, but currently Connor sits in the back row, the babies on either side of him in rear-facing car seats. Loren and his half-sister, Willow, are in the middle chairs, an aisle of space between them.

  Willow moved into our house not long ago, and when I asked her to join our mini-vacation, I was worried she’d decline. We’re not the quietest group of people, and I thought she might need a break from us when, ironically, we needed a break from everyone else.

  I was glad she said yes, especially during a twelve-hour car ride with Loren. He tones down his asshole comments when he’s around her. I wonder how different he would’ve been if he had grown up with a little sister instead of meeting her later in life.

  “Rose?” Lily asks, eyes flickering from the road to my cellphone.

  “She wants us at next week’s luncheon,” I say, “which is not happening.” We’re on a weeklong secret trip, and we’re excluding luncheons from the itinerary.

  A white Ferrari drives parallel to us, Coconut’s head sticking out of the open window. I can see Ryke’s hand clasping the top of the window frame, sitting in the passenger seat.

  Daisy must step hard on the gas. One second later, the Ferrari goes from forty-miles per hour to about a hundred on the quiet, nearly deserted street.

  They speed ahead of us.