We didn’t have a reason to be out in public. I didn’t want to be. I knew she didn’t want to be either. It was just a game we played. How long could we last? Where would we lose it? Who would be the one to give the touch that made not being connected unbearable?
It made us walk. From my apartment to the street full of coffee shops, restaurants, a sex shop. We saw it at the same time and grinned. I took her hand and led her across the street to it. I would have opened the door for her if it hadn’t swung open. So fast and strong I pulled her back, behind me.
I looked her over to make sure she was okay. She smiled at me. Then she smiled at him.
“Kevin.”
He held the hand of a small woman. The woman held a bulging bag and wore a smile of her own. One of those open happy smiles that’s almost always inappropriate for the situation it’s used in.
“Cassidy.”
I didn’t like the longing that passed over his face. I didn’t like the way he said her name.
Her hand slid into mine. “Have a good day.”
Her voice was polite, neutral. His face was confused. The woman whose hand he held lost her smile.
And Kevin just stood in the doorway.
“Champ,” I said. “Can we get past you?”
“Oh.” He moved a little. Into the store instead of out of it. “Cassidy we should catch up soon.”
“No. I don’t think we should.” Words for him. Eyes on mine.
I was going to have to fuck her. Soon.
We moved deeper into the store. When I looked away from Cash, Kevin was gone.
“I haven’t spoken to him. Or called him or anything,” Cash said.
“Was that his wife?”
She laughed. “No.”
That laugh. That genuine, easy laugh. I felt my heart flip, turn, swell, twist, become something new. Something that made me pull in a little too much air a little too sharply. And then I settled.
“Cahir.”
I looked down at her. The same. Exactly the same and yet completely different. No, I was different. Holy hell. I was brand new.
“I haven’t been in contact with him.”
“I believe you.”
“I just didn’t want you to think that I wouldn’t consider your feelings-”
Oh. Of course. I saw her. I saw what she felt. Why hadn’t I seen that sooner?
“Cash, why are you so worried about this?”
I watched her turn the question over in her mind. I watched her eyes widen.
I smiled at her. “Yeah. I think so too. Do you need to go home?”
She nodded. I wanted to laugh, but I knew how she would react.
I took her home.
Sixteen
Cassidy
It was supposed to be a good day. It was supposed to be a phenomenal day. I was supposed to buy sex toys I didn’t need. Cahir was going to take my clothes off. Every time he took my clothes off he looked at me like he’d never seen me before and couldn’t believe his good fortune. I was going to spread my legs wide and sigh at the first flicker of his tongue over my pussy. It was always light, that first moment. It was always more than I prepared for.
I was going to make a mess of someone’s sheets, someone’s home. I was going to sweat and feel his, luxuriate in it. I was going to smell all the new smells desire brought to rest on his skin. I was going to hear him call for me, beg for me, grunt, groan, moan. I was going to have him.
But fucking Kevin.
Kevin just had to ruin it all. Oh, he just had to show me how over him I was. Wasn’t I happy living in the world I built? The bubble I built?
I saw him and saw a man. Not the day I met him. Our day. Not dancing in the dark. Not sex in the wildest of places. Not the exhaustion. I saw a man holding the hand of a woman that wasn’t his wife. And I felt sadness for her. Her and the wife. Worry for Cahir. I didn’t want him to think for a moment that he wasn’t enough, that there was a thought in my mind for Kevin. There wasn’t.
There was just Cahir. And I wouldn’t hurt him. I wouldn’t betray him. I wouldn’t take his trust and devalue it. The idea of it, the thought-it crumpled me. It hurt me. Not Cahir. I would hurt myself before I hurt Cahir.
I didn’t know how to say it. But I wanted him to know. I wanted him to see that I would bleed before he would. I would fight before he saw the threat. I would-
And then he looked at me and smiled. I saw what he saw. I saw myself. And I knew.
I knew. He knew. And I had to get out. Go. Be alone. He saw that too. He took me home and didn’t touch me. He didn’t say a word. He knew me so well he didn’t even turn on music. He didn’t kiss me when he walked me to my door. He only smiled. That smile. I almost slapped it off his face. Punched it off.
But no. I worked hard to control my temper. I worked hard to walk in love and light.
I sat in my house. With my plants. My babies. I thought I would crawl out of my own goddamned skin.
I watered them. I swept and mopped. I cleaned my windows. With newspaper and vinegar. I washed my sheets. I reorganized my closet. I laid on those freshly cleaned sheets that still smelled like sex. I washed them again.
I made taco salad. If Cahir were there he would have run to the store for nacho cheese Doritos. I would have laughed at his disgusting American habits and-But I wasn’t supposed to think about Cahir. Not when I still wanted to slap the grin off his face.
Because he knew. Fuck him though.
I meditated. Or tried to. When it failed I turned on my playlist of soothing rain noises. But they only agitated me.
It was midnight and I laid out across my hardwood floors. My hair was a ball of tangled frizz. My socks didn’t match. They always matched. And I promised to always be honest with myself. Not because it was a better way to live but because I learned when I was young that I was shit at running away from the truth.
I sat up. I wanted to sleep, and I knew it wouldn’t happen until I spoke the truth.
“I’m falling in love with Cahir,” I said to the ancestors, the air, my plants, myself. “Fuck.”
Cassidy
He was not the best choice. He was not a choice at all. A man in love with his ex. A man who would have to share his affections, his heart. A man that couldn’t come to me whole because pieces of him were with another. Sure, he was different from the man I met. Sure, he laughed more, smiled more. Sure, it had been weeks since I saw the shadows pass over his face. And we didn’t talk about the past anymore. Zion and Kevin weren’t interesting topics of conversation.
There was never a moment I felt like his body was with me while his mind was with her. There was never a moment that I didn’t feel like the center.
But still. There had to be boundaries. There had to be rules. There had to be a way to control or curb what was happening.
I thought it over at work. Over and over and over. While the music was loud and the camera was pressed to my face as I photographed clients for their social media and mine. While I popped bottles of champagne and talked to them about their vacations, their lovers, their dreams. While I made them smile and reminded them why they followed me from The Agency to Beyond.
When it was over, Cahir was there. I knew before I turned. Knew by the way my last clients acted. A group of girls that couldn’t come see me alone. They got it in their heads that they were going to be the new New Money Girls. I didn’t have the time to explain to them why that was a futile idea. I just took their money and gave them clothes. They tittered. They preened.
“Cahir, go talk to Junie,” I said.
I heard his laughter trail down the hall, down the steps.
He was back twenty minutes later. I was on the couch.
“Rough day?” He slipped my heels off my feet and massaged my instep.
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not? Got other plans for us?”
I would have laughed. If I didn’t know what I knew, I would have laughed. “We have to talk.”
“If you were any
one else, I would be worried.”
“I think what we’re doing needs some parameters.”
“It doesn’t, but I’m willing to listen.”
“Cahir, be serious.”
“I am.” He pressed his thumbs in just above the heel of my foot. I thought I would die.
“You aren’t.”
“Need me to bleed on the floor, Cash?”
Was I supposed to tell him I could find better uses for his blood? Would that freak him out?
“I don’t like the look in your eye.”
I laughed and that felt like betrayal. “Friends with benefits.”
“No.”
“You didn’t even let me finish.” I tugged my feet out of his grasp.
“I don’t need to hear a whole lot of words to recognize a bad idea.”
It was the grin on his face that wiped the laughter and joy off of mine. I wanted to protect myself. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to avoid nights in my bed without him. I wanted to avoid longing and jealousy and pain. What if we couldn’t handle it?
“We need boundaries.”
“What are you afraid of?”
My insides churned. “Fuck you, Cahir.”
Someone, sometime, might have taught me that anger was not the best reaction, that it accomplished nothing. But how else would I protect myself when I was afraid? How else would I explain the way my hands shook? Better to let the heat rise in me than succumb to the numbness of vulnerability.
“I will. But I don’t think that’ll really fix the problem.”
I hated him. “Friends with benefits. It’ll help me deal with the fact that I’m only going to get half a man at best.”
“Half?”
There should have been some triumph in the way his brows rose and his voice dropped. “You’re in love with someone else.”
“I’m in love with you.”
Matter of fact. Humble. Soft. I couldn’t swallow his words. So I let my hand swing forward and tightened in anticipation at the feel of my palm cracking across his face.
Instead his hand manacled around my wrist. I was yanked off of the couch. Our height difference never mattered until that moment when I realized my feet dangled and strained to reach the floor.
He laughed before he kissed me. Ugly and cruel, I wished he’d hissed at me instead. I wished the fight, the way I twisted my body and pulled my mouth from his to gulp down air were all real.
“Do you want to fight, little Cash?” A hand around my wrist. Another around my neck.
Was this fighting? Was the way I went wet and soft for him proof that I wanted more?
No. I had to protect myself. I had to show him that I wasn’t someone to laugh at. And I wasn’t weak.
I kicked out and that leg was wrapped around his waist. I tried with the other leg and found myself locked against him.
Mannequins crashed to the ground. The soft tinkle and slide of jewelry as it fell to the floor. It hurt when my head crashed against the glass. At least I thought it was my head. I thought it hurt. His hand was in my hair-pulling. When I gasped his mouth was there. When I went limp his body held me up.
“Tell me you don’t want it.”
I fumbled for his pants, his belt.
“Not the sex.”
I stared into warm brown eyes that weren’t going to back down and walk away. Brown eyes that got closer to mine. His forehead rested on mine. His lashes tickled mine.
“Say you want it, Cash.” His fingers caught my chin before I could turn away.
And he stood. With my body pinned against the glass wall that looked into what was once Zion’s office. His eyes never left mine.
The trembling started in my hands and moved up until I had to bite my lip. Not that that stopped the tears. He kissed away as many as he could catch.
“I want it,” I whispered.
His zipper was loud when he yanked it down.
Seventeen
Cahir
My nose was full of her. My back burned where she scratched me. My ears rang with her screams. Shit, my ears rang with my own shouts. My legs burned from the effort. My arms, too.
I was alive.
Smiling. Cash made me smile. When she brought me breakfast that morning in bed then straddled my face and gave me something else to eat. When she fixed my tie. Not because she wanted to touch me. She did that the entire time we got dressed. When I pulled clothes off hangers and when she realized I unpacked her bag while she slept. Her toothbrush was cozier, happier, next to mine, I said. She laughed and kissed my shoulder.
She dropped me off at work. Her fingers pressed into the parts of me that burned until all of me was on fire for her and I dragged her across the seat to straddle me. The windows fogged. Maybe the car rocked. Or maybe I only thought that as a way to explain what happened to me.
I smiled in the elevator at my staff. They went silent. Had it been that long since I smiled? I laughed at them and talked about nothing until their shoulders relaxed and I felt like more of an asshole. I used to have easy relationships with them. We used to have beer and tacos delivered to the office because none of us wanted to go home even though there was no more work to do. We went on company trips.
All that stopped with Zion.
Idiot. It didn’t have to be that way.
Not that I knew that until Cash. When I was with her, I was just with her. I didn’t become her. I wasn’t absorbed into her moods, her wants, her demands. I didn’t drown. I was me. And whenever I wanted, I could fly. She would be beside me. To keep me away from the sun. To urge me to do something reckless. Whenever I wanted, I could leave. I was a part of her life not her whole life. She didn’t need me to complete her.
I thought that would hurt. To not be the center of someone’s world, their focus. It was relieving. Empowering. It calmed me. Focused me. Made me more ambitious. Just made me more. I was proud of that.
“Cahir.”
The way my assistant, Melody, said my name made me stop in my tracks. I had to push my shoulders down, stop the tremble in my hands.
“Okay,” I said.
I pushed open the door to my office. Clean. Everything clean, modern. When it didn’t smell like a funeral home, it was one of my favorite places to be.
There had to be four dozen flowers in the vase. Red and dark crimson roses. Anemones. Aster. Pink Camellia. Lilies. Red and pink carnations. White clover.
I wouldn’t have been able to name them without Cash and our weekly trips to the farmer’s market. If the first time I bought her a bucket of flowers she hadn’t carefully picked out certain ones and told me what they symbolized and why they weren’t welcome in her home.
Zion sent me a big bouquet of “this love just won’t die”.
“Melody.”
The door was too thick for her to hear me, but Melody always knew.
“Yeah, Cahir.” She had a broom in her hand.
And I remembered that the last time Zion sent me flowers I let them sit. Through most of the day. I didn’t know what I was trying to prove. Then, in the middle of a meeting with Colton, I shoved them off my desk. I didn’t like the way Colton kept talking as if my shitty behavior should be ignored. I didn’t like the quick flash of sympathy and understanding that crossed his face. I didn’t like that Melody was there to clean up after me. I hated it. I hated it all.
I picked up the vase. She took a deep breath. I hated that too.
“Do something with these, please?” I handed them to her.
“Throw them away, you mean.” She wrinkled her nose. “They smell like dead people.”
I laughed. “No. Just get them out of here.”
She didn’t look at me like I was crazy even though that was how I felt. It was smarter to throw them away. It was what I should have suggested.
Cassidy
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
Dinner was over. Everything cleaned and put away. We sprawled across his couch with wine in our hands and lamplight on our faces.
&nbs
p; “God.” He rolled his eyes and grimaced. “I hate when you women do that.”
I laughed so hard he had to take the wine out of my hand. “I’ve been thinking.”
“What have you been thinking, Cash?”
“About how you can be in love with Zion and me.”
I did think about it. A lot. And if he were any other man, I wouldn’t have asked. I wouldn’t have been able to handle tense bodies, anger, impatience that I would bring up a woman I’d never seen when we were so happy. I wouldn’t have been able to remain calm when I was called insecure or told that I was harping on something that didn’t even matter.
But he wasn’t any other man. He was Cahir. He wasn’t tense. He handed me my wine and settled deeper into the couch with his own.
“I think it’s a two part thing,” he said.
I could see him roll and examine the words in his head before they came out of his mouth. Kevin did something like that, and it always set me on edge even though I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Cahir just wanted to get it right.
“Okay.”
“The two of you are nothing alike. Absolutely nothing.” He chuckled. “And I’m grateful for that. I couldn’t survive Zion twice, and I can’t imagine a life that doesn’t have you in it. Us.”
Us. I was too smart to react to that one.
“There was so much wrong with me. So much wrong with her. Too much wrong with us even though I couldn’t see that at the time. Love isn’t supposed to throw your whole life off track. Love isn’t obsession. Love isn’t walking around all the time feeling like you’re drowning or can’t breathe. That’s drama. Who wants that all the time? Who can sustain that all the time?”
“Huh.”
He laughed. “Being with her was-I remember after she left the first time, I told myself I would rather be miserable with her than smiling with someone else. I was proud of that. I thought it was so fucking romantic. I thought it said so much about my devotion to her. I thought it was justification to chase down a woman that couldn’t talk to me when things went wrong. Just talk. Even though she said she loved me.”
Better as Friends Page 8