by Chloe Cox
Carefully, he cooled his anger while the phone rang. He didn’t want to be angry with her. He didn’t want her to pick up the phone and have the first thing she heard be anger. He knew that wasn’t right.
He needn’t have worried. She didn’t pick up. Not the first time he called, not the third, not the fifth.
He collapsed to the floor, hands covering his head. This couldn’t be what it looked like. She wouldn’t do this again.
“Fucking bullshit!” he shouted.
He knew where she lived. She could at least actually tell him she didn’t want to see him again. He at least deserved that.
~ ~ ~
Jackson actually jogged across town, slowing down only where the ice demanded it, and made it to Alphabet City in just under fifteen minutes. He barely felt it, even without a proper warm up. He hadn’t felt adrenaline like this since football. But then, football had never carried with it this sense of impending disaster.
Stop it, Reed. Just find your girl.
He recognized her building right away. It looked even worse in the light of day. He didn’t want her living like this, even if she never wanted to see him again, not that he’d have any say in it. Christ, it didn’t look even remotely safe. There were obvious drug dealers hanging around in the park on the next block—heroin, if he remembered his tabloid headlines correctly. And where there were addicts, there were robberies.
Glowering and breathing hard, his shoulders bunching up in his old ski jacket and his hands curling into fists, he approached the stoop. Jackson did a double take when he recognized his old coat on the man sitting on the heating grate.
“Hey,” the man said, making the effort to get up. “It’s you. The coat man.”
“It do the job?” Jackson said, catching his breath. He noted the names on the buzzers. 3A, Barnett. He pressed the buzzer, but it didn’t appear to work.
“Yessir. What’re you doing back here? Thought you got lucky.”
Jackson choked on a laugh, even though it wasn’t funny. Not in the least. The homeless guy brushed some straggly hair out of his eyes and studied him.
“Well,” Jackson finally said, his chest starting to hurt from the run. “Not as lucky as I thought. Trying to fix that. I’m here to see a woman.”
“Well, go on in. Door’s unlocked. I know you’re good people.”
Jackson stared at him. The homeless guy waved him on, like Jackson had passed a test, and went back to his seat on the heating grate. Jackson pushed on the door, and lo and behold, it just opened. In this neighborhood.
Fantastic.
The fear that Ava had left him for good intensified, spiked with the new fear he felt for her safety. It was a strong mix.
He took the stairs two at a time, glad to keep moving since the hallway wasn’t heated, but he couldn’t get ahead of it. Couldn’t get ahead of the feeling. It was creeping up on him, making him madder and madder.
He raced across the landing on the second floor, trying to outrun it.
His mind was full of warring, terrible thoughts: on the one hand, Ava in trouble, unsafe in this shitty building, this shitty neighborhood. On the other, Ava not caring, just leaving him again, like he was worthless. Neither of them fit the image he had of Ava, but nothing made sense to him at all, with her gone.
Jackson reached the door marked 3A, breathing hard from the run, the stairs, and the need to see her right fucking now. He could hear music from inside. Music. He pounded on the door, calling out her name, but there was nothing. No response. Like he didn’t even exist.
“Ava!” he shouted.
He had hold of the doorknob in his big hand and he rattled the thin door with every blow of his fist. How could she not hear him?
“GodDAMN it!” he yelled, and threw himself against the door.
No one was more surprised than him when it gave way.
Jackson stood in the middle of a modest, messy living room, looking big and dumb, and with an aching shoulder. The door swung uselessly behind him. He was suddenly aware that he had just broken into Ava’s apartment.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said out loud to no one at all. He was alone in the strangely lonely looking living room.
As if that fucking matters.
The quick remorse of a little kid who’d been roughhousing too hard passed through him momentarily. The music was coming from a bedroom.
What the hell was going on?
He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that he’d find her in there with another man, but he’d also just told himself she would be at his home, waiting for him, he’d also just told himself everything would work out, and he very clearly didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about when it came to Ava Barnett. He took two giant, seething strides towards the door with the music behind it, and shoved it open.
And got hit in the face by a flying boom box.
It didn’t hurt him so much as stun him. It hit him square on the nose, and for a moment, he could see nothing. In the next second, someone tried to run past them, and he instinctively grabbed them and held on. He only wanted to make everything stop until he had a handle on what was happening, until everything slowed down and decided to make sense. Several things penetrated his adrenaline-soaked brain in a slow, terrible progression: whoever was struggling under him now was much smaller than him; whoever was struggling under him was afraid; and whoever was struggling under him was screaming his name.
There were certain evolutionarily determined consequences to getting unexpectedly hit in the face, particularly for someone who wasn’t used to it. One of them was the panic blindness. Acting without thinking. But eventually those blinders fell away, and Jackson Reed was stunned to find himself holding a screaming, crying Ava Barnett as though she were some kind of threat to him.
He let her go.
She backed as far away from him as she could get, which, since he still stood in the doorway, was back into the room she’d come from. Not good. Jackson still didn’t understand everything that was going on around him—there were sheets on the walls? It looked like a padded cell—but then his eyes fell on Ava, and everything else vanished.
She was crying. She was shaking. He had done that.
He wanted to die.
“Ava,” he began.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she said, very quietly. “I thought… There have been push-ins around here. I thought you were…”
Jackson touched his face and his fingers came away red. His nose was bleeding. It was pretty clear what she’d thought was happening, and he couldn’t imagine what that did to a woman, in particular. This might be the most frightening experience of her life. He had done that. She was crouched in the far corner of the room, between rows of canvases, clutching a paintbrush. She was still shaking.
Otherwise, things had gotten very still. It felt very dangerous. A part of him that was detached noted the irony: now he felt in danger. A moment ago, he’d made Ava feel that way. The rest of him was in full-blown ‘holy shit I fucked up and I don’t even know how it happened’ mode.
“I thought you’d left,” he said. It sounded so stupid when he said it like that.
“What?” she said. She seemed confused. “I did leave. I left you a note. I was coming back.”
“No, I thought…”
Oh fuck, she left me a note. As if it fucking mattered. As if anything would undo what he had done.
“I thought you’d left. For real. Permanently.” It didn’t sound any better when he said it out loud. Jackson was stuck with the fact that he’d done something terrible.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her, miserable.
“Me? What am I doing here? I live here, you fucking psycho!” She threw the paintbrush at him. It was loaded with paint, scarlet red. It left an indelible mark on his dressed down suit. “What the fuck are you doing breaking into my apartment?”
“It was an accident.”
Ava stared at him. “Exactly how do you break into an apartment accidenta
lly?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she began to pace in the small room, walking in and out of the thin light from the window. Watery winter light bounced off of her hair as she shook her hands violently, like she needed to work off the energy, the shakes. Jackson recognized that. It wasn’t a good feeling.
He would have to explain. He didn’t know if he could explain, even to himself. “I just…I came here because I thought you’d left. I thought you’d left me—again—that you’d freaked out because…”
“Because?”
Ava had stopped pacing, and now all of her terrible fury was focused on Jackson. As it should be. As was right.
“Because you said you loved me.”
Whatever Jackson expected next, he didn’t expect Ava Barnett to cry. But she did, in great, big, heaving sobs, slowly collapsing into an unformed ball, and when he tried to come forward to comfort her, she scuttled off into another corner without even thinking, a reflexive action that hurt him to his core. She regarded him as a danger. As a threat. As someone who would barge into…
What was this place?
For the first time, he looked around. And when he processed what he saw, he hated himself even more. It was obviously her studio. A place she came to paint. Canvases everywhere, canvases he would have dreamed of seeing under different circumstances. The place where the real Ava Barnett lived, the most cherished, protected part of herself. And he’d invaded, broken in, violated the only thing she held sacred.
“You told me you didn’t paint anymore,” he said hollowly.
“I told Lillian I didn’t paint anymore. You didn’t ask,” came the reply from the corner.
“Would you have told me?”
She didn’t answer. He probably didn’t deserve it. He’d never seen anyone so raw in his entire life.
And then he got to watch her reassemble herself, as she’d done so many times before. Only this time, it was because of him. The armor she assembled around herself, piece by miserable piece, in this place that should have been her own—she needed it because of him. Ava rose up slowly, dried her face, straightened her spine. Finally, she turned her head toward him regally.
“I want you to go.”
“No,” he said. Jackson knew it was wrong, but it was the wrong of a desperate man. “Please?”
Again, she stared at him. Her hands clawed at her sides. Her expression was molten, changing. There was a fair amount of disbelief there, but also anger, and loss, and grief.
She sat down to cry again. She was still working off the shock.
“Don’t touch me,” she said before he’d even moved. Like she knew he was thinking about it. Of course she knew. They were still connected. And she’d decided she didn’t want him near her. “How could you do this?” she said.
“I’m not this guy. This…I know this was wrong.”
He came towards her, slowly at first, making careful steps on the sheet-covered floor. He edged his way around the shield she’d built around herself, wary of every edge, every boundary. He watched her slowly begin to open, to turn towards him.
“Can I hold you?” he asked.
She nodded to him, not looking at him. She seemed miserable.
The feel of her against his body after such a fright was something else he hadn’t bargained for. He wanted her again, instantly. He could feel the heat rise in her, too, in the way her hands lingered on his arms, the way her breath quickened.
“What happened?” he asked her.
“Nothing happened, until you broke into my apartment and scared the shit out of me,” she said, the anger coming back up. She pulled away from him.
“I came here…” she began, walking off to the other side of the room. He missed her already. “It’s none of your business why I came here. You fucking asshole.”
For a moment, Jackson was blindsided by that. Clearly, he had been a jackass; clearly, he had fucked up. Looking at her now, quietly sad and angry, he thought, Oh Christ, I’ve fucked it up for her, too.
“No,” he said, then again, louder, “No, no, no, no.”
Jackson moved towards her again, this time plaintively. This couldn’t be.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” he said to no one in particular. Maybe to the universe.
Ava didn’t miss a beat. She swiveled her head around and glared at him. “According to what? Your plan? You fucking Svengali?”
Oh no. Don’t…
But it was too late. Her eyes had narrowed, and he could see the gears whirling in her head. Ava’s gifts of perception seemed mostly tuned to the people outside her immediate circle, like an automatic act of self-preservation—most people didn’t really want to know what their closest friends and family really thought or felt all the time—but she could focus those gifts like a laser beam when she wanted to. He could see her running through every encounter, every exchange they’d had. He’d never felt more exposed. It was probably close to the way she felt about him breaking in.
“Was it even chance that you saw me at Stella’s engagement party?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“Holy shit, it wasn’t! What did you want with me?” Ava’s eyes narrowed. “A do-over? So you didn’t have to feel like such a dick about something that happened ten years ago? Is that it? Well, get over it. I absolve you. Done. Not such a big deal. You don’t have to manipulate and control me to get what you want. You didn’t have to put me through this whole… You could have just asked.”
“Ava—”
“We’re done, right? So get out.”
Jackson stood there motionless, not sure what to do. Finally, he said, “That’s not it at all. I’ve set things up a certain way because I care about you, and I’ve always been really careful about respecting your boundaries. I mean,” he added hastily, looking back at the busted door, “I’ve tried. I’ve had that in mind.”
Ava rolled her head around, like he’d just told her one of those lies that was so blatant that either the liar or the one being lied to must be stupid. “You tried? You had it in mind? Jackson, you can’t try to control someone and respect their boundaries at the same time. Those things are mutually exclusive, you utter asshole.”
He reached for her again, completely out of ideas. She jumped away. “You don’t get it. If you try to control someone, Jacks, you don’t respect them. And you can’t…”
She stopped, her anger suddenly giving way to tears. She took a moment to fight them back, and when she looked at him again, her blue eyes were cold and clear. “You can’t love someone you don’t respect.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, the frustration coming back to him. How could she possibly think that? After everything he’d done? “I do respect you. I do love you. Ava, come on. I always have.”
“How would I know any of that?” All the fury and tears had gone from her, and what was left was a quiet, calm shell of sadness. This was the most terrifying incarnation yet, he realized, because it looked final. Stable. Settled. His engineer’s mind recognized equilibrium when he saw it, but this was an equilibrium that locked him out.
“Seriously, Jackson,” she said again. “How would I know any of that? You push me all the time to talk to you, to open up to you, but you don’t do the same with me. You don’t tell me anything. You mastermind all these…these stunts, but how am I supposed to know if what I feel with you is real and not just wishful thinking if you don’t open up to me, too? That it’s not just…that I’m not just convenient for you, until something happens and…”
Ava stopped herself, putting her hand to her face, and he was reminded of how much he still didn’t know. How much he’d thought she was going to share with him. He had the terrible suspicion that maybe, just maybe, he’d triggered something, something she’d seen before. Something he didn’t know about.
“How am I supposed to trust you? And then you do something like this.” She motioned sadly at the busted up door in the next room. “I mean, Jackson, this is nuts. And I have
to wonder at all that stuff I don’t know, and if I’m just crazy to ever think of trusting you at all.”
Jackson didn’t have an answer. Panic that someone he cared about might be hurt or might have left him wasn’t new to him; and neither was the fear that he had lost control of himself, that he’d crossed a line. In fact, both of those fears were distressingly familiar, and it hurt him profoundly to know how badly he’d fucked up today. He’d been working on himself for a long time, but it hadn’t been long enough. He’d crossed a pretty severe line, and it wasn’t ok.
But it had not occurred to him before that there was a disparity between what he craved from Ava and what he was willing to give. And it had never occurred to him that she might want to know the things he didn’t tell people about; it was just a given to him that he had to keep them hidden. But now that she pointed it out, it did seem pretty damn obvious.
Jackson was accustomed to seeing all the angles of a given problem before anyone else. The genius wonder boy didn’t have much experience in being flat out wrong, or being caught off-guard. He wasn’t very good at either.
“But I love you,” he said stubbornly.
“I can’t see you right now,” Ava said. “I don’t… Please don’t take this the wrong way, Jackson, I’m just…I’m just scared. And I don’t mean physically, necessarily, I just…I don’t feel safe.”
She lowered her eyes, like she knew how badly that would hurt him and didn’t want to see it happen. And nothing had ever hurt him like that.
She didn’t feel safe.
It felt like someone had scooped out a big part of his insides and now he was slowly collapsing in on the cavity to try to dull the hurt. He wanted to find someone to beat the shit out of him, because it would make him feel better, it would feel right, and he was sure he deserved it. The gaping maw of grief kept getting bigger and bigger the longer he stood in that room, looking at Ava while she wouldn’t look at him, until he just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to make his unwilling feet move.