Pax had gestured once it was clear I’d only suffered a nightmare, not a murdering fiend. “Dude.”
“Fuck!” Foster stared at the marble figure in his hand. “Mom would have murdered me!”
We’d all had a good laugh, and I’d managed to convince them the disturbance was an isolated incident. Nothing to worry about. Nothing that transpired so often I sometimes thought I was losing my mind.
The awful images that had roused me to consciousness at three a.m. this morning had refused to be banished, so I’d lain there for three miserable hours, exhausted but wide fucking awake, unable to escape a hell that had been generated by a real-life nightmare instead of a morbid, regrettably wired imagination. When my alarm chirped at six, I’d just begun to drift off and had almost thrown my phone and its jaunty time-to-wake-up tone across the room.
I’m pretty sure I fell asleep for a couple of minutes during child’s pose. Also, quite possibly, during my shower.
Once the dream began, it was always inescapable, because I never knew I was dreaming. Though the sequence of events never varied, I was unable to predict what was coming next or how it would end. I lived the whole thing anew every time, start to finish—shock, hope, agony—and then I woke to debilitating, irreparable remorse. Over and over, as if my brain was determined to make me pay for the rest of my life.
“Chaz?” My throat didn’t release more than a whisper, and the only answer I got was the whine of wind, hissing in fragmented bursts through the cracked windshield. The car was entirely off the road, sitting at a sharp angle on its side. The impact had come out of nowhere. No bracing for it, no split second of awareness beforehand. Nothing but an unanticipated force slamming into us, severing our conversation midsentence—his or mine, I couldn’t recall. Nothing but the shrill protest of tires and metal and glass giving way before either of us realized what was happening. Our bodies were tossed like flimsy, inanimate things, restrained in our seats as we spun and rolled into our current position.
Crumpled against the concaved driver’s side door, his shoulder and face against the window, he was motionless and silent. Choking back a sob, I reached out to touch him, my fingers trembling, but he was a few inches out of reach. “Chaz?” I repeated, my voice more substantial, if disembodied—like it wasn’t coming from me. Still, he didn’t respond, didn’t move, and I went numb with fear.
The sickly-sweet smell of burned rubber, crushed metal, and leaking engine fluids assailed my nostrils in confirmation of what had just occurred, but the speakers still emitted an upbeat, twang-filled country narrative from his brother’s band’s newest album, as if we were still sitting at the stoplight, waiting for green. I stretched one shaky finger to switch the sound off but couldn’t reach the dash, so I balanced my hand on the center console to keep from falling onto Chaz and pressed my seatbelt’s release. The rowdy music went silent with one click, and I leaned closer to hear his shaky inhalations and see his breath making faint, steamy clouds against the cracked glass of his window. I gasped in relief, silent tears tracking down my face. I heard sirens in the distance before a low drone began inside my head, like a hive full of livid bees had lodged there, buzzing.
“They’re coming.” I swallowed hard, trying to tamp the panic down from the space in the middle of my chest where it pressed and swelled. The moon was a sliver, and the nearest streetlamp was across the street. It was too dim inside the car to assess how extensively either of us was injured, but as my eyes adjusted, I made out the thin, dark trickle of blood seeping from his right ear. It dribbled down the valley behind his angled jaw and across his throat like a slash.
The sirens grew louder. They were coming for us—I was sure now. “Hold on, Chaz. Please hold on.”
He opened his eyes and shifted them toward me, though no other part of him moved. I edged closer, hovering over him from my elevated position. “I’m here,” I said, and then stupidly, “Are you okay?” His contorted limbs and the fact that he’d not moved anything but his eyelids were all the answer any rational person would need to that question.
He blinked and squinted as if he couldn’t quite focus on my face. “I don’t think so.” He closed his eyes while I bit down on my lip and wished we could back up ten minutes and never get into this car.
“Baby?” His voice was familiar but rasped, as though it had been scraped with coarse sandpaper. He hadn’t called me baby in months.
I strained to pull myself closer but my legs wouldn’t move. They were dead weight. Numb. “Yes,” I gasped, trying not to freak out at the realization that my legs could be paralyzed. “I’m here.”
Opening his eyes again, he stared up at me. “Lie to me. Please.”
“What?”
He was speaking nonsense. His head must have slammed into the window during the crash. His throat worked to swallow, and even that ended in a grimace. “Lie… to me,” he repeated.
“Don’t try to talk—they’re almost here,” I said, unable to see the road in our twisted, angled position—but I heard the siren roar around the corner at the end of the street. Half a block. Ten seconds. Five.
“If I’d asked you again. Would you—” He gasped. “Would you have said yes, eventually?”
Lie to me.
I couldn’t hold out pretending I hadn’t heard. “Yes. Of course I would have. I love you.” I realized that even if the first part was a lie, the second wasn’t. Not completely.
The right side of his mouth turned up in the barest hint of his customary cocky smile. “Thanks, baby.”
I laid a careful hand on his chest, just above his heart. It was warm. Warm and wet. My fingertips came away dark, and a trembling terror detonated in my lungs and ripped through my limbs as if I’d touched a live wire. I clamped my teeth together and tensed my shoulders and arms but couldn’t prevent the shudders from multiplying or the tears that sharpened my sight of everything I no longer fought to see.
A fire engine pulled up behind the car and emergency personnel swarmed around us, their determined voices coming through the broken glass. I pressed against the console, trying to free myself from the wreckage, and the edges of my vision blurred. The next thing I knew, they were dragging me away from him.
“It’s not a lie,” I’d shouted, opening my eyes to the total darkness of my room. Silence, but for the whoosh of breath from my mouth and the heartbeat hammering away in my ears. No wrecked car, no paramedics, no flashing lights.
The truth rushed out from the shadows, bright and excruciating, as it had dozens of previous times. Reality returned to separate nightmare from memory. Pain came in waves, bursts of fiery currents surging through my heart and scattering to reach my skin and set it aflame. I couldn’t move, and everything hurt—but it was a phantom pain more debilitating than any physical agony I’d ever experienced. Tears trickled from the corners of my eyes and streamed into my hair.
Chaz and I had broken up spring of junior year, over a year ago now. And even if it had hurt like hell to do it, I hadn’t regretted my decision. In front of our friends, their smiling faces gradually fading into expressions of incredulity and dismay, I had placed my hand over his, closed that hinged box in his palm, and broken his heart as softly as I could manage.
“Oh, Chaz. I can’t. I’m so sorry, but I can’t.” I wasn’t in love with him, not like he loved me, and it would have been wrong to pretend.
After a summer of no contact, we’d begun our last undergrad fall semesters. We managed a few semi-awkward social interactions, and the story of his failed proposal gradually faded from campus gossip. Within a couple of weeks, we were both hanging out and hooking up with other people. Everything felt settled between us. So what if I caught him looking at me from across the room during his frat’s first big party of our senior year? He’d smiled that familiar, affable grin and returned his attention to the girl he was chatting up, easing any lingering guilt I might have felt for not anticipating that months-ago proposal and heading it off before he’d arranged it.
Days after that party, a driver sending a text failed to notice that the stoplight ahead had turned red. She’d flown through the intersection and hurtled into Chaz’s car without ever hitting the brakes.
His mother caught me alone after the funeral and told me—her red-rimmed eyes full of stark grief and her words raw with bitter reproof—that her stubborn, loyal son had never stopped plotting to win me back. That he’d never returned that ring he’d proposed with the previous spring—the one I couldn’t accept because I didn’t want to be anyone’s wife and I’d known with utter certainty, when that diamond solitaire had winked up at me, that if I ever did it would not be him.
“You broke his heart, but he loved you until the day he died,” she said before her husband slid an arm around her shoulders and led her away, sobbing.
His absolution was a trick that disappeared when I was awake, because I wasn’t in his car that night. I hadn’t been there with him no matter my mind’s desperate attempt to invent a closure I could bear. I’d never told him that lie he wanted to hear. And he had died alone.
chapter
Eleven
Isaac hadn’t spoken to me or so much as acknowledged my existence for the remainder of the day yesterday. And after the unexpected predawn return of my guilt-induced nightmare piled atop my personal responsibility for the Anderson debacle, I was a stressed-out ball of anxiety when I slunk by his open door, wishing myself invisible, and entered my cubbyhole office. I hoped my boss would continue to ignore me for one more day so I could make it to the weekend when I would maybe, finally, call Jacqueline and dump everything on her, so I was apprehensive when he rang my antique desk phone Friday morning and asked me to clear my schedule for the morning.
“Oh?” My heart squeezed painfully. I was being fired. I deserve to be fired! I thought, realizing with simultaneous shock that I didn’t want to leave this job. Not this way, as a failure. Not now, when it was all I had that was mine.
But no—Daddy wouldn’t let that happen, bestowing both the best and worst kind of job security.
“I want you to join me on an errand related to the issue with the Anderson home,” he said. He paused on either side of the word issue, as though separating out both the word and what it referenced, in case I needed a reminder of it.
“Errand?”
“I’ll meet you downstairs in fifteen minutes,” he answered. His authoritative tone told me in no uncertain terms that this request was more order than invitation.
A rather strident click rattled my eardrum, and I reached an immediate comprehension of those “In my day hanging up on people was more satisfying” memes older people passed around on social media. I glared at the receiver—opposite hand over the offended ear—before banging it down in its cradle, but with no one on the other end, my satisfaction was short-lived.
I rearranged my a.m. calendar, postponing two on-site client visits, grabbed my bag, and was gratified to see his office door was already shut when I strode into the silent hallway. I’d never been the sort of girl who arrived first, even when I was eager to meet up with someone. Especially then.
I was not eager. I was not.
I sauntered to the elevator, pressed the button, and waited for the ponderous response of the single car, which always took a good fifteen seconds to register the command and begin to move, another fifteen to arrive, and five to open. I knew because I’d counted once out of impatient curiosity. On most occasions, I took the stairs because standing and waiting made me want to scream. But I still had three minutes to be downstairs; there was no need to hurry to obey Isaac Maat’s summons. I checked my lip gloss in the reflection of the shiny gold-toned door and fluffed my hair around my face, hoping he was pacing irritably, checking his phone or a watch. My brassy likeness gave me a conspiratorial smirk at the thought.
I regretted my decision not to take the stairs when Isaac appeared from the opposite end of the hall, where the bathrooms were, rolling the sleeves of his crisply pressed, sky-blue shirt to just under the elbow. As he came closer, his attention on fashioning a perfectly squared cuff, tiny white pinstripes became visible in the smooth poplin. No tie today, and his collar was unbuttoned. I yanked my eyes from that visible, contrasting triangle of skin before he caught me ogling it.
His steps faltered slightly—when he looked up to see me standing there, I assumed—but he reached my side and the elevator was still struggling to ascend one measly freaking floor.
I detected a trace of spicy aftershave behind the blended lavender and rosemary from the bathroom soap dispensers as he took his place next to me. The piquant blend made him smell like a gingery dessert, or the mulled wine and chipotle pepper garnish my mother sent around on trays at our annual holiday party. Swallowing, I tried not to breathe through my nose and concentrated on the double doors, behind which a motorized drone promised the arrival of the elevator. Any day now.
“I feel like I left my office half an hour ago,” I said, attempting levity in the guise of shared frustration. “Guess I should have taken the stairs.”
“I usually do.” His tone was neutral, but I caught his reflection’s eye-roll before he spoke.
“Why stop now?” I snapped at his gilded image.
His brows arched as he met my indignant, mirrored stare, realizing that I’d probably seen his not-so-stealthy eye-roll. “I thought it more courteous to wait with you since you were already standing here, than separate and beat you downstairs.”
I didn’t want his courtesy if it came with a side of disdain. “Courteous? Hmm.”
“What?” He frowned, turning just enough to look down at me. “You think I lack courtesy?”
Yes, but just to me, so please discontinue smelling so good if you’re dead set on treating me like I’m a joke. I couldn’t say any of that. The elevator emitted a sound between a ding and a honk. As the doors slid open, I stepped forward, but Isaac’s hand shot out, cupped my left elbow, and pulled me to a stop, preventing me from slamming into Joshua, who was darting through the slowly widening gap, eyes on his phone’s screen.
“Erin! Shit!” Joshua took hold of my right arm to stop from running me over, or to keep himself upright. “Man, I didn’t even see you. I’m in a hurry to grab some numbers from my desk for this cheap-ass, time-sucking prospective I’ve got waiting downstairs.”
And then he noticed Isaac, whose big, warm palm was still supporting my elbow. I could feel the connection to the soles of my feet and everything in between.
“I would’ve run up the stairs, like always, but the elevator was just sitting there open, so I took advantage.”
Isaac made a low humph that I pretended not to hear, and for one brief, uncomfortable moment, I was a bone between two adversarial dogs. I did not appreciate the sensation and shook both of their hands loose.
“I’m fine,” I said. “No harm, no foul.”
I knew better than to wait for an actual apology from Joshua, who’d neglected to stuff a single, clear-cut I’m sorry into his litany of excuses for almost knocking me down. Like my eldest brother, he was all justifications, all the time, and I suspected he’d express the same sort of belligerence when backed into a corner. That similarity to Leo had rubbed me the wrong way the day I met him, and no amount of hallway chats or coffee runs had changed my mind. He was adept at sniffing out company gossip and enjoyed disclosing it to me—along with his unsolicited running commentary on what each tidbit signified—but that was the extent of his usefulness. I was interested in gossip concerning my boss, but most of his supposedly privileged intel on Isaac seemed like a bunch of resentful, unwarranted BS.
I preceded Isaac into the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor and then jabbed the Close Doors button several times while the two men stared at each other. The elevator sat there like all we’d wanted to do was board a cramped, stationary box for no reason. Finally, the doors jerked as if rudely awoken and then shut as slowly as possible, leaving Joshua on the second floor. I poked the first-floor button again for good
measure. Twice. Go, dammit.
Standing a foot apart, Isaac and I faced the burnished doors instead of each other. I expected a tense, silent ride to the first floor, but he cleared his throat and I readied myself for a comment about Joshua or some sort of personal rebuke.
“I, uh, apologize for the eye-roll,” he said. “That was discourteous and juvenile.”
Whoa. I risked a glance at his reflection.
Staring at his shoes, he slid his hands into his pockets. “I made an assumption that you’d rather have walked down—or had me do so—than share the elevator for five seconds.”
His candor was a solid gut-punch. Every time I tried to peg what he was thinking or feeling, I was mistaken. My quirky insight into other people’s motivations wasn’t functioning with Isaac, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“Apology accepted.” I watched mirror-Isaac as I spoke. “But c’mon now. Five seconds? It’s more like five minutes.”
He laughed softly. “True. True.” His relaxed gaze rose to connect with mirror-Erin’s.
I tried not to tip over, staring at the pleasant shape of his mouth, upturned at the corners, a little higher on one side than the other, while the warmth of his masculine laughter flowed over me. I wasn’t sure whether it was the habitual sluggishness of the elevator or my visceral reaction to his atypical smile that made time slow. The sound of his laugh—maybe, I thought frantically, it was the close quarters that unleashed such whimsy—made my heart twist and fumble toward him as though he was everything familiar, everything safe, when he was nothing of the kind.
DONK. The spell was broken when the elevator sounded its dejected, obligatory warning and the doors slid apart, separating our images. His laughter faded, and the smile with it, his mouth returning to its characteristic taut line. He extended a hand toward the lobby, inviting me to exit first. “After you, Ms. McIntyre,” he said, but that unanticipated laugh had overlaid my perception of him, and instead of the stark, professional tone he meant to project, I heard something else—the real Isaac Maat. He pushed through the lobby door and held it open for me, and we stepped out of the building’s cool mid-seventies temperature into the soggy warmth of July in North Texas.