by Donna Alam
‘What do you want?’ he asks again.
To be loved. To be held. For Remy’s head to explode. Any of those. Instead, I order the damned café. ‘With milk. And sugar. And in a big mug,’ I call as the waiter withdraws. ‘Oh, dear god. I feel so messy right now.’ Too much tequila and heartbreak will do that to a girl.
‘You look fine,’ Ben answers, though he’s not looking at me but studying his glass of wine. Probably regretting he said he’d bring me to this café, the kind that has penny-sized tables and spindly chairs that look like they might break at any minute and waiters who’ve taken classes in Gallic-style insolence.
‘Sure, that’s the kind of compliment I need.’ The apathetic kind. The uninterested kind. This Ben is different from Saturday Ben, but that doesn’t mean I trust him; mood-altering substances or not. It just means he’s the only one in this country I can talk to about this. Which also means he’s also one of the few who know I’ve made such a fool of myself. I can take some solace in this, I guess. When I get to that point. But whatever, it’s kind of convenient that he isn’t interested in me, or else I might be feeling spurned for a second time in one day.
‘We have decided to be friends, no?’
‘No. I mean, yeah. I suppose.’ But the friend I need is currently on the other side of the globe. Unlike Benny, Amber would know what to say. We’d probably be at Remy’s apartment, cutting the sleeves off his shirts and shoving shrimp into the hem of his drapes. We’d be singing Lily Allen at the top of our lung, fuck you very much, then she’d get me so drunk that I couldn’t possibly feel sad any more, before holding my hair and wiping my tears while I puked, trying to purge him from my system.
‘At least you’re fulfilling the drink part of this,’ I mutter, pushing away the shot glasses to make space for my mug as the waiter returns. ‘When life gives you lemons, break out the tequila.’
He turns a little in his seat, crossing one leg over the other before picking a little invisible fluff from the knee of his pants. ‘Ask me about him,’ he murmurs without looking my way. ‘I know you want to.’
‘Fuck him. He’s an asshole.’ A traitorous, treacherous, heartbreaking bastard and I never want to hear from him again. Except, I want to hear all the things. About his past, his relationship so I can slot away the tiny details to obsess over later, to torture myself. But I won’t ask because I’m not sure I can keep the desperate hope from my tone.
‘Yes, and asshole. But not as bad as you think.’ I think we’re having a staring competition until he blinks.
‘You don’t even like him.’ That much was clear in Remy’s office.
‘He’s family.’ He shrugs as though this is explanation enough, but then he smiles the kind of smile that looks like it belongs on a serial killer. ‘You’re right. I don’t. But I think that’s natural, no? We are . . . rivals.’
I ignore the way his eyes linger on me. ‘Here’s not to liking Remy Durrand.’ I hook my fingers through the tiny handle of my cup, tapping it to the edge of his drink.
‘He’s a man. He’s made mistakes, but you mean something to him, I can tell.’
‘Why are you telling me this? Here.’ I pick up the knife from my abandoned sandwich, offering it to him handle first. ‘If you want to hurt me, go ahead. Just start poking holes.’
‘And I thought the French women were dramatique.’
I spin the knife in my hand, pointing it at him this time. ‘Want to say that again?’
‘I think he might even love you.’
‘Sure,’ I scoff. ‘That’s why I was the one who left his office. That’s why he came running after me. Oh, wait. He didn’t.’ Not that time, at least.
‘In his own way. As much as he is capable, I suppose. But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced he was protecting you by reacting as he did.’
‘What reaction? There was none.’ He didn’t even respond to her kiss. He didn’t turn his head, his hands staying straight by his sides. I look down at my own hand as it begins to smart and see tiny half-moon indentations from my nails. ‘Go home, Benny.’ I bring my coffee to my mouth. ‘You’re drunk.’ And then I burn my tongue.
‘Let me tell you about ma cousin.’
‘I think I’d rather have a pap smear,’ I murmur, beginning to doctor my molten beverage as a thought hits me. A similar procedure might not be too far away in my future because Remy and I didn’t use condoms.
I want to feel you skin to skin.
The last woman I slept with was you.
Lies again.
Tears prick my eyes like glass. I trusted him with my heart and my sexual health. So help me, if anything is wrong . . .
‘Rose?’ Ben’s concerned expression hovers in the periphery of my vision.
‘I don’t want to talk about him anymore,’ I say, dashing away an escaped tear. ‘Let’s talk about someone more fun. Like Genghis Khan.’ My words are more brittle than bright even as my greedy heart wills him to go on.
‘It’s not a love match.’
‘It sure looked lovey-dovey to me.’ I make a tiny whirlpool in my cup as I stir in the sugar, wondering if that’s really true. He looked dumbstruck, sure. Then emotionless. He didn’t reciprocate her greeting, her kiss, none of it.
Or maybe I’m just seeing what I want.
‘How often have you seen him?’ Ben’s prodding brings me back from someplace painful to somewhere equally as agonising. ‘How many times each week?’
‘We’ve seen each other quite a bit,’ I concede. Just call me Rose, the side ho.
‘He’s obsessed with work. Obsessed in making Loup Industries bigger and better than it was under his father. But I’ve noticed he’s been available less since you arrived. No working dinners, no weekend meetings. And I heard he moved into the Tower.’
‘You mean he didn’t live there before? Oh, my God. They were living together!’ My entire body burns with indignation.
‘Bedrooms as separate as their lives, I’m sure. The only thing that keeps them together is a mutual love of money, as I understand it.’
‘Well, I don’t understand it.’ Do I believe it? He seems pretty calm about the whole thing. Besides, what reason would Ben have to lie to me? He might have seemed interested on Saturday night—not to mention creepy—but right now, he seems genuine. If he wanted me, wouldn’t this conversation be different? Wouldn’t he keep all this information to himself?
My head aches with the weight of it all, but I know at the very essence, the possibility that this relationship isn’t real means nothing. It changes nothing. Remy has had a hundred opportunities to tell me. To explain. He hasn’t, and I’m not sure what that says about me.
Was I not worth it?
‘Remy wasn’t supposed to inherit his role, you know. Money, yes. Control, no. He didn’t even live in Monaco. When the details of his father’s will were made public, shares nosedived. The board tried to block his appointment. There was almost a corporate coup.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was a playboy. Inexperienced in the world of work, let alone a billion-dollar business. He knew what to do to court a headline or a girl, but not to inspire the confidence of investors.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with his . . . with her.’ Something inside me curls up and dies. My self-worth, maybe.
‘He didn’t follow you out of the office as Amélie need only complain to her father and you would be deported. He’s very high in the principality government, you see. The family has influence but not billions. Remy has billions, but at that time, he had no influence. So he proposed to her.’ His head tilts, his expression twisting a little. ‘Perhaps “propose” is a little too evocative. He brokered a deal. Her father’s support for his cash.’
‘And the hand of his daughter in marriage.’
‘It would never have come to that, even without you. The pair are not well matched, though I believe he tried. Amélie is . . . spoiled, selfish, and quite frankly, a bitch.’
&nb
sp; ‘Maybe those are admiral qualities in the wife of a billionaire.’
I guess I’ll never find out.
26
Rose
It seems liquor doesn’t agree with my stomach tonight, despite my best efforts. Ben left earlier. He might have said he felt responsible for what happened this afternoon, but not enough to ruin his whole evening.
Whatever. I don’t need his company. And at least he paid the bill.
I find myself wandering along the marina and farther to the shorefront where there are fewer tourists, and certainly no one lingering. In the early evening humid air, I sit at the base of the cliffs overlooking the water. As the waves crash against the rocks below, I pull the monogrammed scarf from my hair and contemplate letting it go fluttering out over the sea. I end up stuffing it into my purse instead; this isn’t a Hallmark movie. There will be no happy ending for me. Plus, I only have one scarf, and I still have a job. At least, so far.
I watch the setting sun touching the horizon with golden fingertips, the clouds backlit by a light that’s almost celestial. I’m still sitting there as dusk turns to dark, the evening breeze bringing with it a slight chill and making me wish I’d brought a jacket.
I can’t stay here all night, but as I leave, I stand and lean over the concrete parapet, but I can’t see the waves below. I’d read somewhere years ago that most ills could be cured by salt. Sweat. Seawater. Tears. Well, I’d taken a walk, and I’d be walking some miles back to my apartment, plus I’d spent more than an hour listening to the waves. I’d even had salt with my tequila, but I’d yet to try crying with any real depth to release the tightness in my chest.
I guess it’s time to give that a shot.
It’s gone eight when I get back to my apartment. I kick off my shoes and drop my keys to a dish not picked out by me, sitting on a table that I like, but I also didn’t choose. Bypassing the living room, I make my way to the bedroom, intending on hitting the shower for my epic cry fest. It seems as good a place as any to give it a try. One hand works a few buttons loose, the other reaching for the remote to close the automatic blinds when, in the reflection of the darkened window, a looming figure appears. I choke back a cry, my mind processing the data on slow-mo. There isn’t someone at my window, not twelve stories up, but there is someone standing behind me. I stumble deeper into the room, my hands blindly scrambling for something to hurl.
‘It’s not really my size.’ Remy stands at the doorway to my bedroom, holding the nude heeled pump I’d just thrown at him. ‘You really should let me buy you a new pair of these,’ he murmurs in that stupidly deep voice of his as he glances down at the worn heel.
‘What are you doing in here?’ I grab the matching shoe, launching it at him.
‘I have your key.’
‘That doesn’t mean you get to use it. Not after the shit you’ve pulled! Get the hell out!’ Excess adrenaline rushes through my veins as I frisbee a small, square pillow from the end of the bed at his head. Hurt and offended—fucking furious, and though I’ve used that word before, probably hundreds of times, I now know I haven’t been using it right. My head throbs with violence, my ears ringing with his untruths, my chest filled with this all-consuming rage where my heart used to exist. And to add insult to injury, that goddamned pillow just didn’t cut it. I grab a small decorative box from the dresser and an almost empty bottle of perfume I really don’t want to see wasted yet really do want to see smash him in the face. I don’t know what’s come over me. I can and will always stand up for myself, but violent tendencies aren’t really my thing.
Or they weren’t.
In an effort to avoid the perfume bottle, his head connects with the doorframe as it glances off his chin. My joy blooms and shrivels. How can I want to hurt him and regret when I do?
‘Rose, stop.’
‘You don’t get to tell me stop. You don’t get to tell me anything!’ Next, it’s a book, followed by a tub of moisturiser, each aimed at his heads, plural. The book to his head on his shoulders, the heavier tub to the baguette, which he catches with a reflexive smile. My head feels like it’s about to explode as I launch myself at him, fists flying like hammers to his chest. ‘I never want to see you again!’
‘You don’t mean it,’ he answers, stumbling backwards against the bedroom door, his fingers like manacles clamping around my wrists. I fall after him, landing on his chest, half in and half out of my bedroom, my body pressed to his. ‘You wish you meant it.’ His gaze is full of something I don’t recognise. ‘But you don’t. You can’t.’
‘Don’t you tell me what I mean! You’re a lying, cheating bastard.’ I try to punctuate my words with my fists against his chest, but he holds my wrists too tightly. I don’t think I’ve ever hit anyone since I was in third grade. I guess I never felt like I needed to before now. I might not have my fists, but I do have my knee. As I raise it, he twists, and I find myself suddenly pinned under him—pinned like a butterfly on a piece of felt. He holds my wrists on either side of my head, pressing his right thigh at the very apex of my legs.
‘Ma Rose. You fight dirty.’ His expression is provocative and sardonic and infuriating, and I hate every atom of him, yet as he brings his thigh higher, my traitorous clit reacts with a solid pulse. ‘I prefer you didn’t.’
I tell myself it’s my body answering his, that the reaction not at all brain-based. Nothing at all to do with jealousy or the sick sense that I still want him.
I lift my head from the floor to get in his face using the pause to untangle my suddenly thick tongue. ‘And I’d prefer not to have been the silent partner in a love triangle.’
His laughter sounds unkind, but what do I expect from a man who would string two women along? ‘There is no love triangle. There is just you and me. I have not been unfaithful, Rose.’
‘Please don’t insult me by saying you have an understanding fiancée.’
‘We’re engaged only on paper.’
‘So Ben said.’ And though I’m not sure I one hundred percent believe either of them, it hurts a little less to think so.
‘Ben?’ Shock hits his expression. First, fury then flashing across his face. ‘What were you doing with him?’ I’m tempted to make him suffer. Not just because he’s the off the chart’s kind of sexy when he’s angry, his accent thickening, his green eyes glittering, and not because of the way he presses my wrists to the floor, the solid weight of him pressed against me, his body over mine casting me into shadow.
‘That’s really none of your business. But before you start throwing your big dick around, he did what you should’ve done already. He explained.’
‘I find that hard to believe. If he touched you—’
‘We might be even,’ I retort.
‘Don’t,’ he growls. ‘Don’t even joke about that.’
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do.’
‘No?’ His thigh presses harder, my body working against him of its own accord, and I bite back a whimper. ‘Maybe you should tell me what you’d like me to do.’
‘I’d like you to get off.’
‘Get you off?’ His smile is beautiful and cruel, and though it makes no sense, I want to lick the salt from the hollow of his neck, press my teeth into the cording standing taut at the sides, and bite until he bucks into me with a cry. ‘Relationships come in many forms, Rose, but that one was purely business. I swear to you on my mother’s life, we have never been emotionally involved. I haven’t been intimate with anyone but you since March.’
My mouth snaps shut as I process the implication before my brain processes another wave of hurt. ‘But you have fucked her.’ The woman who looked like a supermodel. How can I compete with her?
‘Yes, but it was a long time ago.’
‘I don’t know why I asked because it doesn’t matter.’ It shouldn’t matter.
‘You ask because you care. You ask because you’re hurting—’
‘Because you hurt me. You took me for a fool. You lied to me, and I hate you for it
.’ My chest heaves as I pant, my nipples still pebbled by the brush of him.
‘If I could take it all back, make it better, I would. But what you saw was smoke and mirrors, not the truth. You have to give me a chance to explain.’
‘I don’t have to do jack shit,’ I grate out, angry with him, angry with myself, and angry with my faithless body. I know it would take nothing to raise my face to his, to kiss him, to have him kiss me. To slide my legs around him as we tousle and tangle, thrashing out the confusion and hurt. But what would that make me?
Weak. Wrong. Faithless. Heartless. No better than him.
‘Get off me.’ I try to wriggle away, to twist from under him because my arousal has been burned away by my anger.
‘I’ll let you go when you listen to me, and when you stop behaving like a brat.’ He presses my wrists flat, his dark hair falling over his brow.
‘This brat that wishes she’d hit you harder back in March!’ I continue to rail at him, shaking my fists to the best of my abilities.
‘You hit me? You made me come off my motorcycle?’ His words are sharp and more than a little ugly, finger manacles tightening.
‘Yeah, sure. I saw you whizz past and launched a purple dildo at your helmet, just for the hell of it. It was four in the morning, you idiot. You crept up on me! You’re lucky it was the dildo I grabbed and not the can of pepper spray.’
‘Then I have to ask. Why were you carrying such a . . . deadly weapon in your bag?’
‘Don’t you laugh. It came in the mail.’
‘It came in the mail?’ As he begins to chuckle, I drop my head back against the tile.
‘Not even a cute. And not like that. It arrived . . . it hit my mailbox. Urgh!’ This is a minefield of innuendo. His pickle might be tickled, but I’m just annoyed. Trying again, I utter the words through barely moving lips. ‘My friend sent it from Australia as a joke. I’d collected the package that day on my way into work.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful she didn’t send you a cricket bat.’