by Fiona Keane
“We did. We can get back there. We can find that again. I owe you everything,” he divulged. “It isn’t Malcolm Young’s fault that your memories aren’t there. I’m trying to find out, babby, believe me. Someone stole them. I know that much, but I don’t know who it was.”
Chapter Twenty
I was undone by the reflection of myself in Julian’s eyes, his gaze determined and relentlessly deep.
“You know everything, Julian,” I hissed, still entranced by his stare. “You’re a master of two entirely corrupt and evil universes. You know.”
We spent weeks not communicating, talking around his riddles and quips that left my mind and heart shattered and frazzled. Actually speaking with one another was an unusually new symptom of our fairytale that I only thought existed in my fractured dreams. His fist fell from my chin as a server approached, dressed from head to toe in black. Funeral day for everyone.
“Good evening. I’m Carrie. It’s a pleasure to assist you tonight.” Her young face glowed with admiration while mesmerized with Julian. “Have you two had an opportunity to review the menu?”
“No.” Julian smiled politely at the young woman, surely sending her knickers to the combustion chamber. “We haven’t. Darling, do you want some hummus or something to start?” Darling? Oh, right. That’s me. I’m Darling. Um. Hummus? I want more than hummus to start, Fuckoy.
“That would be wonderful,” I agreed, smiling at Carrie and surely shattering her dreams of tossing me through the window and seducing Julian. “Thank you. Oh, and we’d like another bottle of wine when you have a moment.”
“Gladly.” Carrie promptly left our table. I returned to observing Julian, receiving his humored smile as he scratched the back of his neck.
“Do you realize you only call me that when we’re in public or when you’re chastising me with your supreme arrogance?” His laughter vibrated throughout the room, pulsing into my chest and filling my heart with fragments of its previous damage.
“I hadn’t. I’m sorry.” He grinned, sending my knickers along with Carrie’s. “Darling. As I was saying, I have been spending every night trying to solve the puzzle. I’m hitting wall after wall. Tell me about your dreams, Aideen. You’re beginning to remember all of it, aren’t you?”
“Some.” I sighed, looking beyond his broad shoulder at the shimmering water. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s a fairytale or even a nightmare.” The sound of bubbles pouring from the wine bottle echoed while Julian refilled our glasses as he listened intently to me.
“Is that why you…that’s why you asked me what I thought about…when you kissed me?”
“Which time?”
“After I slapped you.”
“Which time?” He chuckled, sipping from his wine. “Both have happened a few times. Ouch, by the way.” He’s so infuriatingly charming, I want to slap him and kiss him again just to shut him up.
“The first time.” I rolled my eyes at him. “You’d asked me after you gave me that pill. You asked what I thought about after our kiss and, now, I don’t think you were asking me to reflect on how it felt. You were wondering if it sparked anything. Weren’t you?”
“I’ve always loved your intelligence.” He nodded, his eyes narrowing into mine with praise. “Everything I did was to shake something free, to rid the cobwebs someone scattered within your mind. Fuck, Aideen…if you think it was easy to not kiss you, I’ll just end my life right now. That wasn’t part of the plan, that was because of my feelings for you.”
“But why this game, Julian? Why the kidnapping, the secrets, the stories? How could you do that to me and look at me every day, knowing who I really was and who we really are, without losing it?”
“I’ve lost it,” he assured me, his laughter almost a scoff, “multiple times. And of course I knew there was a risk that you’d hate me, that I would cause more damage than help, but I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted you to figure it out. I wanted it to click, for us to just start over where we left off, but there are too many variables. There were too many undetermined pieces, things I still don’t know, that I couldn’t risk your safety by announcing to the world who we are when you didn’t believe it for yourself.”
“Are we still…is this still an act? Whatever,” I motioned between us, my nervous hand shaking while it moved, “this is? It’s still to protect your reputation? Dammit, you’re one fucked-up motherfucker, Julian.”
“That mouth.” He laughed, glancing down at the table. “Yes and no. It was all to protect you while I figured things out. Call it cowardice, arrogance, whatever you wish, babby. I needed to keep you safe, just like I promised.”
Carrie returned with our hummus and the second bottle of wine before I could fathom a response to his divulgence, but my eyes refused to detach from Julian’s. I watched, quietly observing every mannerism, each muscle moving in his face while he thought or spoke to Carrie before her quiet retreat.
“The rope?” I took his wrist, distracted with the warm flesh grazed by my thumb. Julian’s eyes flickered from my hold to my face, turning his wrist over and reaching for my hand with his.
“Drastic, I know. You’re beautiful, Aideen. Please take the key.” I ignored him, thinking only of assembling the pieces. He is incorrigible. I need to up my game.
“What does Liam know?”
“How to flirt with you,” he snarled, pulling away from my hand to smother hummus onto a small piece of warm pita bread. “And not much else other than who you are.” I couldn’t resist the smile that trickled onto my face.
“You’re jealous,” I uttered, grinning widely. Cold blue eyes met mine with warning.
“I’m protective,” he corrected, the blue flame burning against me. “I’m not the only one with eyes for you, but I am the only one who knows you.” He inched closer to me, his chair squeaking against the floor as his body neared my frozen figure.
“I’m not asking you to sell yourself to me, Julian. I already know you’re an impossibly arrogant bastard.” I studied his face, smiling with only my eyes. “You’re obnoxious and horrible. You’re a murderer and you terrify me, but there’s something that worries me more, something that leaves my nightmares lingering like a haunting shadow.”
“What’s that, Aideen?”
“Never knowing where my dreams end and the nightmare begins,” I told him. “Losing the feeling my heart held while having some of those dreams, regardless of what sort of devil brought it to me.” His left hand tugged on my ear before resting against my shoulder, holding me. How do we do this? How do I bridge fantasy and reality, all the while knowing fantasy is reality? How do we do this?
I reluctantly spared my eyes from the divine torture of watching Julian study me, returning to the glass of wine reflecting the subtle shimmer of the dim bulbs around us.
“Aideen.” Julian’s throat cleared while his hand left my shoulder and his chair scooted closer to the table. “I need to apologize once more for—”
“Please,” I muttered around the rim of my wine glass. “Don’t.” Persistently, Julian’s head shook in quiet response.
I sighed, smiling while spinning the stem of my wine glass, avoiding his eyes. “Who am I to defy you?”
His voice gave way to the smile it fought, a light chuckle leaving his mouth and requesting my hesitant glance. “It doesn’t matter who I am or what I do, babby, you know that. I want you to defy me. I want you to have your own brain. I love your mind. But really, Aideen, please let me apologize. I was thinking of this fucked-up journey I put us through, and I’m distraught remembering how horrid I was to you initially. I shouldn’t have been so cold, so haughty…I just…I wanted you to remember. My frigidity was supposed to rattle it back into place, when in reality it’s what caused you to hate me. That wasn’t me. I mean…it is. But not with you. I’m a blubbering fool here.” He actually blushed, pausing to rub the bridge of his nose while collecting his thoughts, and I died watching it. “I shouldn’t have treated you so poorly, and I
need you to know that I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you.”
“Good.” I nodded. “But I don’t want you to waste your future on the past, Julian. Let’s just try. Let’s eat this dinner, pretend to be civil with Emma’s family tonight, and we can meet for coffee or something this weekend.” In reality, within the twisted thoughts brewing in my chest, I wanted to skip the meal, avoid the funeral, and let him chase me beneath the luxurious covers of a hotel bedroom where we could pretend the dream was still a dream, if only for a little while longer.
“Something,” he taunted, his tongue slowly moistening his bottom lip. “You could just take the key and we could make coffee together…every morning.”
“Julian.”
“Aideen.” He leaned forward, the darkening navy burning its sweltering flame into my eyes. His smile broke the silence, melting the room around us while my ears rang with the warmth of his gentle laugh that tickled along my skin. Maybe I could skip dinner and devour him instead?
***
I needed to remind myself to thank my nerves once it was all over. I successfully stomped them into the ground, allowing Aideen and Julian to exist around the dining table like normal people. Normal people who knew each other and had once been in love. Once. Are? It was tortuous, a new set of challenges teasing my heart and twisting my stomach. But, naturally, the wine helped. I didn’t push, he didn’t pull; we simply existed.
As the SUV slowed along the curb just one block shy of the church, reality weighed heavily against me. The reality of Elliott’s death. The reality of Emma’s curiosity. The reality that the man sitting at my side, his fingers securely intertwined with the fingers of my left hand, was, in fact, mine. My chest tightened with the knowledge sparkling through the heavy cloud of knowing silence dimming our glow as Julian’s seatbelt unbuckled. We arrived, silently, and the mood violently shifted. Yet, deep down, I knew I was safe.
I felt the reassuring squeeze of his hand around mine, but my gaze was despondently focused on the church steps. Julian slipped from his door, snaking around the front of the car to reach my door, holding it open for me. He was somber, deliberately slow while reaching for me once more.
“Babby,” he whispered, breaking my stare from the people climbing the steps into St. Robert’s. Looking up at Julian, my heart knotted, twisting itself into sublime suffocation, but I couldn’t speak. I melted from the seat and into his hold, allowing him to lead us toward the hypocrisy of the evening.
The sidewalk was dampened with melting snow, still shimmering from crystals of salt. My ears tickled with the often-forgotten soundtrack of the city, awakening now that my anchor arrived. Julian switched hands, holding my left with his as his right hand wove around me to adhere my hips to him.
“It’s crowded,” he mumbled, initiating our ascent into the church. I silently nodded my reply.
Stepping between pews, I felt like Julian and I returned to the scene of our crime with the gun still smoking in his powerful hands. The only light visible inside the church was that of flickering candles, softly illuminating faces of people gathered to celebrate the life of a criminal. Meanwhile, the fingers of my criminal intertwined with mine as we ventured further down the aisle.
“We can sit in the back,” I turned to whisper, catching the tension in his jaw while Julian’s glower expanded beyond me toward the altar. I followed, searching the hoard of people collecting near the front of the church, many of the faces unrecognizable to me.
“J—”
He pulled me against him, startling me as my face smacked into his hard chest. “My uncle.”
“What?” I tried to turn my head around once more, but his hands held me tightly against him. “Julian, stop. Let go of my face.”
“I need to make a phone call,” he whispered above my head, stepping backward with me in his arms, my face still adhered to him. “Come with me.”
“Julian, no. Let’s just get this over with. Please,” I urged, peeling my head from his body once he carried us back to the front steps of the church. “Let me show Emma that I’m here and we can go. I promised her I’d come.” With his left arm around me, refusing to release me from his hold, Julian’s right thumb frantically pressed along the screen of his phone.
“Let me go,” I muttered in a whisper, wriggling free of his hold to the barren air on the church steps. His eyes never left mine, a hauntingly deep warning radiating from them like the initial ominous crackle of a blazing fire. A hot, blue, tormenting beautiful fire.
“Liam,” he spoke into the phone once it was pressed against his ear, “yes. We are. Sheehan is here. It has to be more than paying his respects, you half-wit. Jesus. Meet us—”
“Oh my God,” Emma’s shrieking voice bellowed before her arms engulfed me from behind. “Thank you so much for coming, Aid. You have no idea how much this means to me.” My eyes bugged, caught off-guard by her grasp while I felt the air move simply from Julian’s flaring nostrils. His head tilted over his shoulder while he mumbled something into the phone before hanging up.
“I had to come,” I responded to Emma, spinning to return her affection while Julian’s eyes burned into my back. “I’m so sorry, Em.”
“We both are.” Julian approached, his tone suspiciously calm and tentative, but with a familiar sense of confidence that always oozed from his lips. “I wish we were seeing you again under different circumstances, Miss Daly. My entire family sends their condolences.” I’m sure they do, buddy. The fingers on his right hand slowly clung to the back of my neck, anchoring me at his side while Emma released her hug. I shivered in response to the circling motion of Julian’s thumb at the base of my skull, a slow, deadly reminder of the power his touch had over me.
“Thank you.” Emma nodded to him. “The mass is about to start. Will you both come in? I need to get back to my mother. Thank you again for coming.” Four more people mounted the steps, speaking with Emma as they entered, and she quickly followed them into the building. In isolation beneath the darkened evening sky, with a church full of suspicious villains, I turned to Julian on the steps.
“Your entire family?”
“We need to go.” He peered down at me, his expression impassively void. “Now.”
“No,” I blurted. “I can’t just let Emma see me standing outside with you and not go in.”
“No? You want to spend the evening with Malcolm Young? You want to stay for the duration of the mass?”
I leaned closer to Julian, already impossibly close to his consuming aura, melting against him. “You have told me nothing,” I snarled, my teeth biting against each other so intensely that my jaw almost popped, locking in a pained position, “yet you expect everything of me. Tell me why we need to leave or I am leaving.” Damn right, Aideen. You put that heeled foot down and wiggle it on his metaphorical toes a little. Julian placed a stray hair behind my ear while he studied my face, looking everywhere but my eyes.
“My uncle is in there. He was at the banquet last weekend. He’s—”
“Yes,” I nodded, “Liam told me. He’s friendly with Malcolm’s family.”
His eyes locked with mine, cold and void of softness. “Liam told you, did he? What else did Liam say?”
“Dammit, Julian.” I pushed against his chest, stepping back from him with irritation. “I belong to absolutely nobody. Remember? I’m a nobody. A nothing. Don’t get territorial or I, my darling, will kill you.” I watched his lips twitch, a welcome smile fighting against his angst.
“You missed my uncle in there, didn’t you? His arm around Malcolm Young’s back, adhered to that bastard like the fucking filthy pawn he is.”
A hand appeared, resting against Julian’s shoulder, its wrinkled skin distracting my attention.
“What’s this?” its owner questioned, the crackling voice widening Julian’s eyes.
Chapter Twenty-One
His inhale was shaky, the muscles of his jaw clenching tightly before words left his sealed lips.
“Aideen, you remember my grandfather.” Julian’s eyes flicked to mine before he reached for my wrist, pulling my hand against his side. I remember him talking shit like a damn bastard while you creeps thought I was asleep last week. Jesus. Buddha. Mary and Judas.
“It’s a pleasure to see you, Senator.” My smile widened with contempt and irritation. Oh, I remember him. The disdain expressed through his graying eyes was enough to shatter confidence, but for each sliver that broke from my nerves was a restored piece from the squeeze of Julian’s hand around my own.
“What are you doing here?” Julian murmured. “Strange occasion for a family reunion, don’t you think?” Grandpa Fuckoy glanced at his shadow, nodding at two men standing along the steps, their expressions rigidly sober. My eyes hesitantly wandered to Julian’s, hoping for any sort of feedback. On second thought, let’s get the hell out of here. Please. Now. I’m not really one for family reunions.
“You should know better than to have a lover’s quarrel on the steps of a church during a funeral,” he scolded us, his wrinkled mouth oozing revulsion. “I’m here because, as you’ll soon learn in the Senate, my dear boy, it’s best to keep a close eye on those whom we cannot trust.” The patriarch’s gaze flew to mine, the detached and dampened fire attempting to remind me once more of my place. I’m right where Julian wants me. His side is my place. Isn’t it? I need a drink. Julian read my mind and snaked his arm around my back, securing me to him with his palm spread against my hip. In my place.
“I received a message from Edward Regan that many of the curious sort would be attending the funeral of a Daly boy. Said Daly boy is also cousin to the Young family. Now, I feel it is my duty as a representative of this great city to pay my condolences to families who suffer such an enormous loss. Especially families so…important to you.”
“You’re checking on me?” Julian growled through clenched teeth. I felt the anger hum through his body, wiggling through my own skin in uncomfortable radiant waves.