by Tracy Wolff
No, there’s been no contact from Ethan whatsoever. I know it’s a good thing, know he’s only respecting my wishes. I’m not one of those women who says one thing and means another. I told Ethan I couldn’t be with him and I can’t.
But that doesn’t stop me from missing him, all day, every day.
It’s only the nights that I don’t want him around, when my dreams are filled with nightmares of Brandon and the rape and the terrible months and years that came after it. Even worse are the dreams where I think it’s Brandon holding me down in the front of his car, think it’s Brandon raping me, only to find myself staring into Ethan’s face when he finally lifts his head.
I know it’s not true, but each time I have that nightmare I end up a little farther away from Ethan and a little closer to crazy.
To combat it, I’ve pretty much given up sleeping. It’s been days since I’ve gotten more than an hour or two of rest. I’m exhausted and miserable and jumping at nonexistent threats around every corner. Every noise behind me is an attacker conjured up by my paranoid mind, every shadow is someone just waiting to hurt me.
Add to that the fact that Ethan’s absence is a gaping wound inside of me that hasn’t even begun to scab over, and no wonder Tori thinks I need therapy of some kind. I really am only one small step away from being a total basket case.
“So, what can we get for you today?” asks the man behind the counter. He’s wearing more makeup than I even own and to add insult to injury, he looks absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes life really is unfair.
“She needs a makeover,” Tori tells him, pointing at me. “A whole new look.”
“Oh, yes, she does, doesn’t she?” he says, and though the words are rude, the tone and his expression are nothing but kind. “Come on over here, sweetheart, and let me get a look at you. I’m Sam, by the way.”
“I’m Chloe. And my crazy friend over there is Tori.” We both watch, bemused, as Tori randomly picks five or six different eye shadows off the display and starts applying them one on top of the other. She does this, of course, without taking off any of the rock star makeup she’s already wearing.
“She does like color, doesn’t she?” he says. It doesn’t sound like a judgment, exactly, but the man is dressed from head to toe in black. Even the gauges in his ears are black.
“You have no idea.”
After another minute of staring at Tori gone wild, he leads me over to a trio of makeup displays that are set up behind the counter. “What look are we going for exactly?” he asks after I’m settled in the chair.
I shrug. It’s not like this is my idea.
“We’re going for anything that makes her look less dead,” Tori chimes in as she bounces over. I expect her to look like a clown after everything she just put on her face, but instead she manages to look better than ever. Just another reason why I should hate her.
“Hush!” Sam says. “She just looks a little tired, that’s all. We can fix that.”
“Bad breakup,” Tori whispers loudly enough to be heard in the shoe department all the way across the store.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Sam clucks sympathetically. “I’m recovering from a breakup myself. It sucks.”
“You seem to be handling it a lot better than I am,” I tell him. It’s true. He looks absolutely gorgeous.
“That’s why you need a makeover,” he says. “A good lipstick can hide a multitude of sadnesses.”
“See! I told you!” Tori crows, clapping her hands triumphantly.
And that’s how I end up spending the next ninety minutes in Sam’s beauty/therapy chair. He powders, applies, spritzes and blends until I’m certain I am wearing enough makeup to outfit an entire Cirque du Soleil production, all the while delivering little tips on how to survive a breakup.
Set a routine for yourself every day. Don’t just lie in bed wanting to die.
Always wear something pretty. It’s hard to be depressed when you’re wearing a gorgeous dress.
Don’t let yourself fall too far off the wagon. You don’t want to be a total wreck when you’re finally ready to get back out there.
I’m not sure if these pearls of wisdom are meant to be taken seriously or if Sam is just trying to make me laugh. Either way, by the time he holds the mirror up to my face with a theatrical, “Voila,” I’m feeling better than I have since I opened Ethan’s door to find Brandon on his front porch. And that’s before I see the absolutely astonishing job Sam has done on my makeup.
“What do you think?” he asks, as I stare at myself wide-eyed in the mirror.
“I think you’re a miracle worker.”
He preens under the praise. “I try, doll. I try.” He grabs a couple of face cards from his drawer and says, “Now, let me show you exactly what I did so you can do it at home.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” I tell him.
“Of course it is,” he answers, waving off my concerns.
I spend the next thirty minutes getting a step-by-step tutorial from Sam on how I can make myself look like this every day. I’m still not sure that he didn’t wave some kind of magic wand and do this to me, but I’m willing to take his word for it. At least until the first time I try out the look and make a total disaster of it.
Tori insists on buying me everything Sam recommends, even though I try to pay for it myself—what are credit cards for if not to splurge when your heart has been ripped out of your chest? Another pearl of wisdom from Sam, by the way. And though I still feel a long way from okay, I have to admit I feel better than I have in days.
It’s a start.
We spend the rest of the weekend eating ice cream and watching Titanic and a bunch of other love stories that don’t end well. Nothing like a sinking ship and thousands of dead people to put my own life and breakup in perspective.
Or at least make it seem just a little less traumatic.
By the time Monday morning rolls around, I’ve actually gotten close to eight hours of sleep over the weekend—a record for me in the last couple of weeks. And if I’m not exactly feeling refreshed, at least the hour I spend on my makeup is enough to make me look like I am.
It’s a big day for the legal department. We’re heading over to the Trifecta building to hammer out the last major parts of the merger agreement today—parts that deal specifically with intellectual property acquisition. We’ve been working toward this meeting for weeks and I only hope that it goes well. Otherwise I’ll be buried in patent research for the rest of the summer.
I dress carefully in the same old suit I wear for everything important. I even put on the Louboutins Tori got me that I haven’t worn since they crippled my feet on my first day at Frost Industries. With my makeup done and my hair twisted up into a complicated chignon, I feel as ready for the meeting as I’m going to get. Not that I’ll actually be doing anything but taking notes and looking up case law if that becomes necessary, but it’s still good to look the part.
Fake it ’til you make it. My own personal motto.
And it works, too. At least better than wallowing has. Maybe Tori knew what she was talking about, after all.
I feel almost okay as I pull up to the office. Or, at least, more okay than I’ve felt in a while. That isn’t saying much, but I’m going with it. I gain a little more confidence as I walk through the building and rack up a couple of compliments from people that I pass. And by the time we walk into the boardroom at Trifecta, I’ve almost managed to relegate Ethan to a sideshow in my brain instead of the main attraction. It won’t last—it never does—but I’ll take it as long as I can get it. Thinking about him once a minute instead of sixty times a minute is a big improvement. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
And that, of course, is when my whole carefully constructed day comes tumbling down around my ears. Because even though he’s supposed to be in Paris right now in the middle of some global conference, he’s here. Right here. In front of me.
Looking as tired and strung out and miserable as I feel.
I have one second to assimilate his presence before he notices me. In that moment, my heartbeat triples, I start to sweat and adrenaline races through my body. Full-on fight-or-flight response.
I’m just about to flee—the response exists for a reason—when he glances up, his gaze sweeping over the whole group of us until it finds mine and locks on.
For long seconds he doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, doesn’t so much as breathe. And neither do I. How can I when I’m staring into his eyes—his beautiful, haunted, storm-tossed eyes—and can see everything I feel, everything I fear, reflected back at me.
“Chloe,” he whispers my name and as he does, I feel every ounce of protection I’ve built around myself—and my trembling, traitorous heart—collapse.
Chapter Seven
Ethan. Ethan. Ethan.
His name is pounding in my blood, a mantra in my soul.
Ethan. Ethan. Ethan.
All that work. All those hours and days of trying to move on. All those assurances to myself that I had this, that I could do it. All of it blown out of the water in one fell swoop.
Ethan. Ethan. Ethan.
He’s here, right here in front of me. And despite everything, it’s all I can do not to fall straight into him.
I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to act. There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to run across the room and throw myself into his lap. To bury my face in his neck and beg him to never let me go. To pretend that the last two weeks never happened and that, somehow, someway, all the pain, all the agony, was nothing but a nightmare gone awry.
But there’s another part—equally as big and equally as important—that wants to run away. Or at least dive behind the nearest chair and not come out until he’s gone. Until he’s no longer looking at me like he saw a ghost.
Or worse.
Of the two choices, the second is definitely the smarter one. Humiliating, yes. Unprofessional, absolutely. But still so much better than standing here remembering what it feels like to be held by him.
To be loved by him.
And yet, even knowing what a terrible idea it is, I can’t stop myself from taking a step toward him, then another and another. In seconds, I’m standing right in front of him, close enough to touch his soft hair and smoothly shaven cheeks. Close enough to register the uneven rise and fall of his chest beneath the navy silk of his shirt. More than close enough to feel his heartbeat if I just reach out and stroke my hands down his chest as I’m longing to do.
“Ethan.” His name is a tortured sound ripped from me, half whisper, half sob, but I can see by the way his eyes narrow and his fists clench that he hears me. Can tell by the way he looks at me that he understands all the things I don’t have the words to say.
He doesn’t react for a long time, doesn’t so much as move a muscle. Then, suddenly, he’s leaning forward in his chair, and I think that he’s going to be the one to do it, to break the oh-so-fragile understanding between us. To touch me the way I’ve been longing to be touched from the moment I left him in that parking lot.
But then his eyes go blank and he’s looking through me like I’m not even here.
Or worse, like I never was.
“Lorraine,” he calls quietly to one of the senior lawyers from Frost Industries who is sitting halfway down the huge table. “Do you have the documentation on the O’Riley case? I think the precedents set there are going to become important as we negotiate …”
He continues on about the case, but I tune him out. He’s not saying anything I don’t already know. Hell, I’m the one who did the investigation on the O’Riley case and found the precedent he’s speaking of. I’ve been neck-deep in research for this merger for weeks. But he’s the boss. If he wants to deal with Lorraine instead of me, then who am I to get offended?
Except I am. I totally am. Because Ethan has never, not once, looked at me like he just did.
Like he’s completely indifferent to me.
Like he doesn’t even know me.
Like I don’t matter at all.
It hurts, much more than I expected it to. Maybe because I know that no matter what happens between us, I’d never be able to look at him that same way. Never would I be able to just … dismiss him, not after everything that he’s meant to me.
“Excuse me, Chloe.”
Lorraine shuffles me aside as she takes my place in front of Ethan, talking as fast as she can about the salient points of the case. Points that I spent hours pulling out of the court documents and putting together for just this moment.
Because it’s my job, I remind myself viciously as I step back to give her room. I’m an intern, one of the ones who do the research and the grunt work. She’s one of the lawyers, the ones who interpret all that grunt work and figure out what it means—and what to do with it. I have no right to resent her this much.
And yet I do. I really do, especially when Ethan looks at her with rapt concentration. The same kind of concentration he used to give me when I spoke to him about work matters—or anything else.
Again, it’s my own fault. I’m the one who has worked so hard to put distance between us these last couple of weeks. Who hasn’t responded to one text or call from him since that morning at his house. I have no right to be upset about the fact that he’s obviously taken my wishes to heart and moved on.
With that thought first and foremost in my mind, I move backward to give Lorraine all the room she could possibly want. It’s not like I even belong up here anyway. The interns usually sit at a smaller table behind the Frost Industries lawyers, computers open and research readily available to help clarify any discussion points that might come up. I’m certain everyone else is settled in and ready to go while I’ve been too busy mooning over the boss to so much as put down my briefcase.
It’s time for me to remedy that.
But as I take another step back, start to turn, the right heel of these ridiculous Louboutins catches on a snag in the carpet and I start to fall. Panicked, I reach for the table to catch myself, but I’ve stepped back too far and my fingers just miss the edge.
I brace myself for the fall—the jarring pain and subsequent humiliation of going down in the middle of a boardroom filled with my peers and superiors—but it never comes. Instead, Ethan reaches out in a flash, grabbing the front lapels of my jacket with both hands and pulling me forward. He holds me steady until I can do it myself. And then, the second I’m recovered, he lets go of me and sits back down, turning the laser beam of his attention on Lorraine like the whole thing had never happened. Like he hadn’t just saved me from making a total fool of myself in front of everyone, not to mention from some very unpleasant bruises.
What I don’t understand is how he can be so nonchalant about the whole thing, when I can still feel the brush of his knuckles against my breasts as he made the grab for me. Can still feel the strength and the power of his hands as he held me steady and the answering response in my body that I so don’t want to give.
“Thank you,” I tell him in a voice so husky I barely recognize it.
He doesn’t so much as nod an acknowledgment that he’s heard me.
I step back for real then, being more careful this time around in an effort to avoid any more close calls. I make it back to my table without any other mishaps and start setting up my own station.
Laptop, open and connected to Trifecta’s wireless, check.
Legal pad and pens at my fingertips for note taking, check.
The fifty-five page case reminder cheat sheet that I had put together at my boss’s request sitting next to me, check.
I’m as ready as I’m going to be for this meeting but instead of joining in the conversation of the other interns, I spend the few minutes before we’re called to order fiddling unnecessarily with my cell phone. Playing with my pens, making sure they’re all perfectly lined up. Reading over the cheat sheet with such concentration that no one would ever guess that I have the whole thing memorized.
By the t
ime the meeting finally starts, I’m as close to a basket case as I’ve been in quite some time. Though I promise myself I’m not going to do it, I keep stealing glances at Ethan out of the corner of my eye. I’m not the only one doing it—he’s a brilliant, charismatic guy and it’s impossible not to be drawn to him, especially as he helps hammer out the last of the important points of the merger.
Another CEO might not even be in this room right now, leaving these details to his lawyers to figure out. But they’re important details and he’s Ethan Frost and though I thought he was going to be in Paris, now that he’s here I can’t imagine him being anywhere else. This merger and what it brings—not just to Frost Industries but to the injured veterans Ethan has spent so much of his professional life trying to help—is too important for him to let anyone else handle these last, intricate details.
The meeting takes all day and most of it passes in a blur. I try to concentrate on the matters at hand, but every time Ethan opens his mouth to speak, I get lost in the sound of his voice. In the passion behind each question he asks and each answer he refuses to move on without.
There are a few times when we’re asked to find specific answers to the questions being discussed, but for the most part the other interns and I are just along for the ride. Which is normally a dream come true, because getting to watch, up close and personal, as the final points get hammered out in a merger of this magnitude is the best learning experience any of us could ask for. The other three interns in the room are relishing every second of it, but for me it’s more torture than adventure, more pain than pleasure.
Finally, after hours of verbal parrying and legal maneuvering, agreements are reached and the meeting draws to a close. After a brief—very brief—period of congratulatory-sounding small talk, the Trifecta people leave us to our own devices and Ethan takes a few minutes to thank everyone for their hard work. Though the job is far from finished—thousands of man hours are still necessary to ease the transition, this is it for major negotiations. The last of the big stuff has been handled and now it’s just the actual road map for the blending of the two companies that needs to be worked out.