“Of course it was going to happen. You’re news, he’s news. Together you’re bigger news. Why wouldn’t they run the story?”
“Because I told them not to.” He starts dialing God only knows who. “Give me a minute, baby. Let me get to the bottom of this, sweetheart—”
“Do you really think that’s what matters to me? Do you really think I give a fuck who leaked the story after you tried to shut it down? The fact that you tried to shut it down is enough for me to want to walk out the front door and never come back.”
“Hello? Ethan?” We’re close enough that I can hear the voice of his press secretary quite clearly through the phone.
“Sorry, Anthony. I’ll call you back.” He cuts the call off. “Explain,” he says to me.
“There’s nothing to explain—”
“There’s everything to explain. I told you why I didn’t tell you. I was trying to protect you—”
“You were trying to protect yourself!”
“Excuse me?”
“I saw you, Ethan. I saw you at that fund-raiser. Hell, you threw the damn thing for him, to help raise money for his campaign. You were laughing and joking with him. And you were proud, so proud. I know that look on your face. I’ve seen it dozens of times. Forget about killing the story! How could you raise money for that bastard? How could you stand next to him and celebrate his victory and then come back here and climb into bed with me?”
My skin crawls as I lay my questions out for him, as I let him see the whole picture, the whole horror, of what I’ve been carrying around since lunchtime.
For long seconds, he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything but stare at me with his jaw moving frantically. It’s the most discombobulated I’ve ever seen him and if I wasn’t going out of my mind with grief and pain and betrayal, I might actually appreciate the fact that I’ve caught him off guard, especially considering how rare such a reaction is from the great Ethan Frost.
“The last fund-raiser I hosted for my brother was in May, before I met you. Long before I knew what kind of man he was. What he was capable of.”
“I saw you. I saw the footage with your mother and your brother. I saw it—”
“It was from May!” he tells me again, more forcefully. “Or maybe even before that. I don’t know, I didn’t see the story. But there has been no fund-raiser since I found out. There’s been nothing. I swear.”
His words echo in the fragrant air around us. They wrap themselves around me, burrow deep inside me. I believe him. I don’t think anyone looking at him now, face stoic, eyes wide and angry and alarmed, could doubt the veracity of his words.
I know I don’t. They make sense—so much more sense than the idea that he ran off and did this during the two weeks we were apart.
And still there’s something inside me that doesn’t feel quite right. Something twisting and turning and making me feel all kinds of wrong.
“Why did they run that story, then?” I demand. “How did they make it look like—”
“They spliced old footage together to make the story and didn’t bother to say when and where that footage was from. It’s not unusual. It’s unethical, but it isn’t unusual. As for why they ran that story? I don’t know. Especially when there was supposed to be a moratorium on coverage of my family. But I can assure you I’m going to find out. Tonight.”
He starts to dial the phone again and I turn away, walk into the house. This isn’t a conversation I want to hear anyway. Not when I’m still feeling so overwhelmed, so off.
I head to the bedroom, to the closet where I keep my spare set of running shoes. Ethan follows me, his hand on my lower back and I try to relax into his touch. Try to be okay. But I’m not. I’m just not.
He’s talking to Anthony about the story that MSNBC ran, wanting to know what other—if any—networks picked it up. Anthony must be Googling as they speak, because a bunch more letters start showing up in the conversation. As do a lot more curse words.
I tune them out. How this happened doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that it did. That it could, so easily.
I get my shoes on without saying anything to Ethan, without so much as looking at him. And then I walk toward the front door.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he demands, suddenly blocking my way. “Anthony,” he says into the phone. “I’ll have to call you back.” He hangs up on the poor man again.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I tell him after he disconnects.
“Now that’s where we think differently. Because I happen to be of the opinion that when my girlfriend is walking out on me, I should be emotionally present for it. Especially when she promised me less than a week ago that she wouldn’t do this.”
“I’m not walking out, Ethan. I’m going for a walk to clear my head. It’s not the same thing.”
“You sure about that?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m sure. I’ll be back in an hour. Maybe two.”
“It’s after midnight. Give me a minute to change and I’ll go with you.”
“I’m a big girl, Ethan, I can take care of myself. Especially in La Jolla, where the crime rate isn’t exactly skyrocketing.”
“I’d still feel more comfortable if you let me come with you.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t. I need to think, Ethan.”
“And you can’t think with me there.”
“No! I can’t. Not when it’s you I need to think about.”
“What’s there to think about, Chloe? I didn’t do what you thought I did. I would never hurt you like that! I would never—”
“But you did! You did hurt me like that when you didn’t tell me about Brandon. And now you’re doing it again, keeping secrets from me for what you think is my own good.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you any more. You’ve been through enough.”
And there it is, the reason I still feel so icky. The reason everything feels just a little bit off. The reason I’m finding it so hard to trust Ethan even now that he’s saying and doing all the right things.
“You know, that’s exactly what my parents said to me before they forced me to sign that NDA. Before they forced me to recant my statement to the police. That I’d been through enough and they didn’t want to see me hurt any more.”
“Chloe. You know this isn’t the same thing.”
The thing is, I do know. It just doesn’t seem to matter right now. Nothing does but getting the hell out of here before the walls close in around me.
“I’m going for a run,” I tell him, walking through the house to the front door. “Don’t follow me.”
“Chloe, goddamnit! It’s not safe!”
“There are some things you don’t get to decide, Ethan. I’m a grown woman. I get to make my own decisions and you don’t always get a say in them. This is one of those times.”
Grabbing my phone out of my purse, which I left on a table near the front door, I put in my earbuds, turn on the 1975 playlist as loudly as I can handle it, walk out the front door. And then I run. I run as fast and as hard as I ever have in my life.
Ethan doesn’t follow me.
Chapter Seventeen
How the hell has everything gotten so messed up again?
It’s the question that haunts me as I run along the nearly deserted beach. I’m down close to the ocean, because the wet, hard sand is so much easier to run on. And tonight I want to keep up my energy. I want to run far.
Maybe, if I run long enough, I’ll be able to leave behind the whole screwed up mess that is my life.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know what to think.
It’s not that I don’t believe Ethan—I do. His explanation of events makes so much more sense than the idea that we broke up over Brandon and he ran off to host a fund-raiser for him. My brother’s words may haunt me, may run through my head when I least expect and least want them—but that’s all they are. Only words. Just because he believes them doesn’t mean I have to. It doesn’t
mean they’re true.
But he also has a point. I saw Ethan with his mother at that fund-raiser, saw how happy they were together, saw how much he loves her. This is the same woman who haunts my nightmares, with her bright red lipstick and strident voice and insistence on protecting her son no matter the cost. For me, she’ll always be the wicked witch, my own personal Maleficent just waiting to tear me apart with her vicious nature and too-sharp claws.
When we got back together, I told him I didn’t want to talk about his family. I didn’t want to know them, didn’t want to hear about them, didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I thought that would be enough. That if I put up a wall between us then I would be able to live with who they are and what they’d done to me.
Because they don’t matter. I won’t let them matter. It’s Ethan I love, Ethan I want to be with.
The only problem, the only flaw in my logic, is that they do matter … to him. As they should. I wouldn’t wish my relationship with my parents on anyone. The disdain, the distrust, the out-and-out dislike. The betrayal. No, I don’t want that for Ethan. But at the same time, I’m not sure I can take anything less than his total repudiation of them.
It’s not fair, maybe it’s not even right, but it’s how I feel.
Because I was good. For so long, I was doing okay. I had a life—maybe not a great, exciting life—but a good life. A steady life. One that made me feel strong and secure and healthy.
And now—now I have a great life. I have Ethan’s love for me, a job I adore, and I have my feelings for Ethan. Feelings that the word love doesn’t come close to touching. I don’t think there’s a word in the entire English language that encompasses the depths of emotion I have for that man.
And yet my life has gone to hell. I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel steady and I sure as hell don’t feel healthy. How can I when every day is a new roller-coaster ride? When every moment is a terrifying journey into one more unknown?
I’ve survived this long because I made a plan and I stuck to it. It gave me something to focus on, something to aim for when everything else in my life had gone to hell. Now, it feels like my only goal is to get through the day without an emotional breakdown.
It’s not enough. Not nearly enough—especially when I so rarely even make that goal.
Is this what my life with Ethan is destined to be? Great passion, towering emotions, but rudderless? Directionless? A joyride without the joy? The thought terrifies me as nothing else could.
And so I run. I run and run and run. I run until my back aches, until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst, until my legs are nothing but limp noodles beneath me. And then I run some more. For miles, for hours.
I’m way down the beach when my headlong flight catches up to me and I collapse on the sand, my trembling legs refusing to take me one step farther. It’s a long time since I’ve run like this, since I’ve used physical exertion as an exorcist as much as an exercise.
I look around me, try to figure out where I am. Try to figure out how far I’ve run. But none of the houses look the least bit familiar and I’m too tired to walk up to the street and try to find a sign.
Besides, I just don’t care enough. There’s a part of me that would be more than happy to lay here forever—or at least until the lifeguards come upon me in the morning.
With that thought in mind, I turn my music off—it’s Imagine Dragons now, as I’ve long since exhausted my 1975 playlist—and toss the phone next to me on the sand. And then I listen—to the sound of the ocean rolling in, to the water lapping at the shore, to the far-off sound of a car making its way through the dark and empty streets.
It’s peaceful, in a way nothing in my life has been peaceful in so long. Even as the cramps set in—partly from the running, partly from stopping without stretching out, and partly from lying here on this cold, wet sand—I find myself loathe to move. Loathe to do anything but take these moments as they come.
But it can’t last. Nothing does. And only a few minutes go by before my phone starts to buzz. There’s a part of me that wants to ignore it, to just let it go, to stay in the moment—and the headspace—that I am currently occupying. But there’s only one person who would be calling me now and he doesn’t deserve to be ignored.
I pick up the phone, am shocked to realize that it’s nearly three-thirty in the morning. That I really have been running for hours. And that I have already missed three calls from Ethan. Shit.
“I’m okay,” I tell him the second I pick up the phone.
There’s a couple of beats of silence, as if he’s trying to get a grip on his temper and himself. Then, “Where are you?” It’s clipped and stilted and calm, so calm that I know he’s absolutely furious.
“I’ve been running on the beach. I’m fine,” I tell him again.
“I’m on the beach and I don’t see you. Where. Are. You?”
“I don’t know. I ran pretty far.”
“I am aware of that—I’ve been looking for you for the last hour.”
Shit. His tone is perfectly modulated, perfectly polite—and lacking any and all warmth. He really is furious. I sit up, glance around the shadowed beach looking for something that will tell me where I am.
There are a couple of signs farther up the beach and I walk toward them, ignoring the cramps in my legs. One of the signs reads Coastal Preservation Project and suddenly I know exactly where I am.
“I’m over past Coastal Park,” I tell him. “Probably a couple of miles.”
He bites off a particularly vicious curse. “Are you telling me you ran over twenty miles tonight? Straight down the beach?”
“I guess. I wasn’t—”
“Is there anyone around you? Anyone hassling you?”
“No, it’s completely deserted. I’m the only one out here.”
He curses again. “I’m not sure if I should be grateful for that fact or upset. Look, don’t move, okay. Stay on the beach, preferably in the shadows, and answer your goddamned phone when I call. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He clicks off without saying good-bye—more proof of how angry he is at me—and it’s not like I can really blame him. In my headlong flight I’ve gone well beyond the safe boundaries of La Jolla and while this area isn’t bad, it isn’t great, either.
Ethan really is going to kill me when he gets here.
I try to do what he asked, I really do, but after a few minutes of just waiting here I start to get antsy. And cold. Now that I’ve cooled down from the run, the cool breeze off the ocean is striking right through my thin tank top and yoga pants.
So I get up and start to walk back up the beach, the way I came. I don’t go up on the street—I’m not totally stupid—but I do try to walk the two miles to Coastal Park, so I have an actual landmark for Ethan to meet me at when he calls again.
I’ve just stepped foot in the parking lot when Ethan calls again to try to get a better location. I tell him where I am and he’s there in under three minutes. He jumps out of the car the second he sees me, and then he’s wrapping his arms around me, pulling me against his body.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, struggling against him.
“Can you just let me hold you for a minute, please? Let it sink in that you really are okay?” His voice is hoarse, the strain of the last few hours evident in it. The strain is also evident in the way he holds me so tightly and the fact that he’s in no rush, at all, to let me go.
“Look, I know it was stupid and I’m sorry. I meant to just run a couple of miles, but then I was in my head and I went a lot farther than I intended. I’m sorry. But nothing happened. I didn’t even see another person the whole time I was running.”
His grip finally loosens as he pulls back to look me in the face. “That’s because whole areas of San Diego are under curfew and other areas are being forced to evacuate. With the wind tonight, the forest fires have gotten much worse. You picked pretty much the worst possible time to disappear.”
“Oh, shit.” No won
der he was so worried. He wasn’t just being his normal overprotective self. He’d been worried about me running straight into a wildfire, something I could have done if I hadn’t made the unconscious decision to stay on the beach.
“Yeah, my sentiments exactly.” He ushers me into the car, and then we’re speeding through the streets as Ethan aims to get us back to his house—and to safety—as quickly as he possibly can.
“How close is the nearest fire?” I ask a few minutes later as we drive past La Jolla Cove.
“About four miles. They think we’ll be fine down here, but they’re evacuating Miramar all the way down to UTC and Torrey Pines all the way up to Del Mar.”
“God. That’s half the coast. How many fires are there?”
“Seven right now, but with this wind, they think there are going to be more before too long.”
“I need to call Tori.”
“I already have. She’s fine. Her father is sending a plane for her tomorrow morning. She decided now was the perfect time to go to Vegas for a few days.”
Of course he’d checked on Tori. It’s the kind of guy Ethan is, the kind of guy he’s always been. Who his family is doesn’t change his basic decency.
“Maybe we should go to Vegas,” I joke. “I just turned twenty-one, after all.”
Ethan glances at me. “Believe me, I’ve thought about it.”
“Oh, yeah? Vacation?”
“Honeymoon. I could get you drunk and married before you knew what hit you.”
“Yeah, right,” I tell him even as my stomach gives a funny little jump. “You shouldn’t joke about that. I might take you up on it.”
“If only.” He doesn’t glance at me as he negotiates the winding street up to his house, but somehow that only makes our current conversation seem more surreal.
“Stop teasing,” I tell him as he finally pulls the car into the driveway.
He jerks the car to a stop and then he reaches for me, pulling me out of my seat and onto his lap in one swift movement. It’s a small space and the steering wheel is cutting into my back but I barely notice it. How can I when Ethan is all but devouring me with his eyes.