Now I’m the one crying. Again. I swipe at my cheeks, trying in vain to stem the flood of tears.
“Fuck.” Ethan breathes the word out and this time when he pulls me into his arms, I don’t fight him. I can’t, not when I crave his touch like a junkie craves a fix. I’m addicted to him, to his strength and his kindness, to the way he holds me and the way he makes my body burn with just a touch.
Except tonight. Tonight I’m cold. Cold to the bone. Cold to the soul.
It only makes me crave him more.
“Baby, don’t cry. Please, Chloe, don’t cry.” He kisses my tears away, one by one by one. Over and over again. In between the kisses, he murmurs incoherent fragments of love and loss and apology and I can feel the crack widening deep inside me. Can feel myself breaking into thousands of irreparable pieces. So many pieces that even Ethan won’t be able to hold them together, no matter how strong or safe or determined he is.
I take a step back, out of his arms. Away from his warmth. It hurts, physically hurts, but I know I don’t have a choice. I have to push him away now, while I still have the strength. Or we’ll both end up destroyed under the weight of my failures.
He tries to hold on to me, tries to keep me in his arms. But all it takes is a whispered, “Ethan, please, stop,” for him to let me go.
“I can’t do this,” I tell him. “I’m not strong enough.”
“I am,” he tells me. “Let me be strong enough for the both of us. Please, Chloe.”
He reaches into his pocket, then presses something metal into my hand. I know what it is before I even look down.
“You had it fixed.”
He presses a gentle kiss to my temple. “Always.”
I stare at the belly chain, my fingers stroking familiarly over its cool platinum and diamond links. I want it so badly. Want to wear it. Want to feel the weight of it around my waist, a tangible symbol that I belong to Ethan. That we belong to each other.
“Can I put it on you?” he whispers against my ear as his fingers brush against my waist.
Yes! I want to scream my assent, want to beg him to claim me again, to make me his. I want to feel safe in the way I do only when Ethan is all around me.
But I can’t let him do it. Not now when everything is so, so awful.
“No.” It’s quieter than a whisper, so soft that I can barely make out the sound of it and I’m the one speaking.
But Ethan hears. Somehow he hears, and he looks away, but not before I see the obvious hurt in his eyes, hurt that echoes the agony slicing through me like the dullest of blades.
His fingers clench on my jaw, and we stand that way for what feels like forever, the same pain that is keeping us apart somehow also tying us together. And then he’s tilting my chin up so that I have nowhere to hide, no choice but to look at him.
And I do. God, I do. The anguish of the past couple of days is etched into his face. I can see it in the bruises from the fight, in the dark circles beneath his uninjured eye and the grooves around his mouth that weren’t there last week. Before I even know I’m going to do it, I reach up to stroke the deep line to the right of his mouth. He turns his head then, brushing his lips against my fingers.
The pain intensifies until it feels like there’s a fist around my diaphragm, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. I know I need to pull away, but I can’t. Not when Ethan is pressing soft, sweet, tender kisses across my palm.
My breath hitches in my throat at the feel of him and Ethan smiles a little at the sound. Then it’s his turn to brush a thumb across my lips, his turn to shudder when I press a kiss to the tip of it.
“Chloe.” My name is soft on his lips, reverent, as he slowly lowers his head, giving me plenty of hints as to his intention … and plenty of time to move away if that’s what I want to do.
It isn’t.
It should be. A little while ago, it was. But right here, right now, there is nothing I want more than for Ethan Frost to kiss me.
The first touch of his lips on mine is tentative, sweet, like he’s asking permission or forgiveness or both. It’s gentle and lovely and so not what I want from him that I can’t resist pushing to my tippy toes, can’t resist wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him into the kind of kiss we’re both craving.
It’s hot and heavy and carnal, tongues sliding against and around, over and under, each other. It’s teeth nipping at lower lips and mouths mashing against one another. It’s murmured whispers and violent heat, terrible pleasure and even more terrible pain. It’s everything a kiss with Ethan is meant to be, everything it always has been and everything I’m terrified it will never be again. It’s sex and seduction, lust and love, and I can’t get enough of it. Enough of him. This man who has given me more in a few weeks than anyone in my life has given me ever.
Maybe that’s why I cling to him, arms wrapping around his shoulders, fingers digging into the nape of his neck, mouth sucking desperately at his own.
He tastes like the ocean and feels like it, too. Powerful, violent, infinite. I want to immerse myself in him, to drown in him. And I want this kiss—this feeling—to go on forever.
But even as I cling to him, even as I stroke my tongue against the warm roughness of Ethan’s, I can feel the magic fading. Can feel the horror creeping back in until the heat fades and all I’m left with is the frigid, terrible cold that has taken up residence deep inside me.
“Chloe.”
He bends his head to kiss me again and I let him because I am weak and he is not and I can’t believe this is happening. I don’t want to believe it.
His fingers skim my waist, burrowing under my blouse and the fitted waistband of my suit. He strokes my stomach, my hips, my lower back and I know he wants to fasten the belly chain around me, I can feel his need to reclaim me, to mark me as his, throbbing in the air around us.
But when he takes the chain from my hand and slides it around my waist, every alarm bell I’ve got inside of me starts to shriek. Letting him do this will break both of us. Already I can feel the jagged pieces inside of me shifting around, trying to make room for this new reality. But there is no room. There is nothing but horror and fear and emptiness, so much of it that I can’t feel anything else now that he is no longer kissing me.
“Chloe, please,” he says in the husky voice that has sent shivers down my spine from the first time I heard it all those weeks ago.
“No,” I tell him, pulling the offending chain from around my waist with a definite air of determination. It makes me sad in a way I’m not expecting. After everything that’s happened between us, after everything he’s given me, I never thought I’d be able to deny Ethan anything. But for both our sakes, I have to deny him this.
“I can’t be with you, Ethan. I can’t. It will ruin me. Undeniably. Irrevocably. Being with you now will destroy me in a way that Brandon didn’t come close to.”
“You don’t know that,” he tells me even as the light dies in his eyes. His beautiful blue eyes that suddenly look so much like the ones in my nightmares. The ones that have haunted me for five long years.
“I do know it.”
“How?” he demands, and for once he sounds as impatient and confused and hurt as I do. “How can you be so sure without even trying?”
“Because,” I tell him, my voice breaking on the truth I can’t hold back any longer, the truth I never wanted to say out loud—for either of our sakes. “Because now, when I look in your eyes, all I see is him.”
Ethan reels back like I’ve struck him and I want to take the words back, I do. But I can’t, because they are my deep, dark truth. They are the insurmountable obstacle standing between us, and they always will be.
“I have to go,” I tell him, fumbling my car door open and climbing inside.
This time he doesn’t try to stop me.
Chapter Six
“That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!” Tori says, making an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of University Towne Center.
“Take what
?” I ask, absently staring out the window at the passing traffic. UTC is one of the biggest and busiest malls in San Diego and it’s also Tori’s personal nirvana. Well, next to Paris and Rodeo Drive, that is.
“The moping! Always with the moping.” She brings the car to a stop at the valet parking stand, then all but drags me from the passenger seat. “You’ve been miserable for two weeks and I can’t take it anymore.”
She’s not wrong—I have been miserable for the last two weeks, ever since I left Ethan standing in the parking lot at work, tears in his eyes and his heart on his sleeve. But I can feel myself getting defensive anyway. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. I’ve gone out of my way to make sure my misery doesn’t spill over onto her or anyone else.
If I spend most of my non-working time locked in my bedroom, staring blankly at the text messages he sent me all those days ago when my phone was off, whose business is that but mine?
If I don’t go running or to the gym anymore, who am I hurting besides myself?
And if I don’t want to go out and party with Tori every night in an effort to meet a guy who won’t ever come close to measuring up to Ethan, then why should I?
“I’m not moping,” I tell her as I make a desperate grab for my purse from the backseat.
“What would you call it then?” she demands as she drags me through the gates and into the open air mall.
“I’m thinking.”
“Yeah, well, you’re making yourself sick with all that thinking and I, for one, have had enough of it.”
“So we’re going shopping?”
“Don’t sneer,” she says, narrowing her eyes at me. “I will have you know that shopping is the cure-all for everything. Even your bad attitude.”
“I don’t have a bad attitude!” I tell her with a glare that combats the words. “I’m just tired. Work’s been crazy lately.”
“Work, shmerk. You’ve been brooding. And I get it. I do. Losing Ethan Frost isn’t an easy thing for any woman to recover from—even if he is a total douche.”
“He’s not a douche.” We’ve been over this same ground about a hundred times in the last two weeks.
“He hurt you, which means he will forever be a douche in my book. It’s the best friend code.”
She dances ahead of me then, and with her new spiky green hair and matching minidress, she looks like a leprechaun. A punk rock leprechaun with piercings, tattoos and Doc Martens, but a leprechaun nonetheless.
It’s just one of the many, many reasons I adore her. Or would adore her if she would just stop trying to fix me. As it is, all this pixie dust and do-gooding is getting on my nerves. Especially since Tori has always been the prickly one in this relationship, the one who wears multi-layered damage on her sleeve—literally and figuratively, thanks to the wild tattoos she’s got. Which begs the question—in how bad shape does she think I am if she’s pulling out all the stops to make me feel better?
Maybe I’ve been wallowing more than I think I have.
Still, it’s not like it’s a conscious decision on my part. And it’s sure as hell not like I want to feel like this. Because I don’t. I hate the fact that I worked so hard to banish Brandon from my life and my thoughts, and now he’s back, lurking around every corner in my mind just waiting to jump out at me like my own personal boogeyman.
I hate even more the fact that I can’t stop thinking about Ethan. Can’t stop wondering what he’s doing or if he’s okay or if he’s thinking about me. Can’t stop remembering what it was like when we were together and I was happy, truly happy, for the first time since I was a child. Maybe for the first time in my life.
Not that that matters. Not that any of it matters. Not when everything about my life—even my work—is a shambles. Most days it’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed and to the seven building oceanfront campus that houses Frost Industries. And once I’m there, I try to focus on the research, on my job, but everything about the place screams Ethan’s name and more than once I’ve ended up curled up on the bathroom floor trying to get my head together. Trying to pretend that I’m all right, that any part of this is all right.
“You know shopping isn’t going to fix me, right?” I hiss at Tori as she drags me toward the entrance to Nordstrom. “Besides, I can’t afford to buy anything from here. I’m a lowly unpaid intern at Frost Industries, remember?”
She snorts. “Another reason to think he’s a douche. He makes how much money every year and he can’t send a little of it over toward his interns, who work all hours of the day and night for him? That’s the mark of a total loser.”
“The experience and being able to put it on our resumes is more than enough. Besides, it’s only the first year interns that don’t get paid. Anyone who comes back a second year gets a pretty generous stipend.”
“Will you stop defending him, please?”
“I wasn’t defending him.”
“You so totally were.” She rolls her eyes at me as she picks up a scarf that costs almost as much as my entire wardrobe and loops it several times around my shoulders. “You look beautiful, daaaaaaahling.”
“Anyone would look beautiful in a three thousand dollar scarf.”
“You’d be surprised.” She gives me a push and I spin around like a top in an effort to unwind myself from the pashmina. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen through the years, you would know just how false that last statement was.” She mock shudders. “Some people should never be allowed out of the house without a fashion consult. Just saying.”
She jumps over to the hats, which are against the wall, and picks up the biggest, most ridiculous one she can find. It’s hot pink with purple flowers, and though it’s almost as big as she is, Tori somehow manages to carry it off with the kind of panache I can only dream of.
“How do I look?” she demands.
“Like you should be walking the red carpet. In Ireland.”
“Oh, good. That’s just the look I was going for.” She flips me off before picking up a black and white hat and plopping it down on my head.
“How does it look?” I ask, resigned.
She just shakes her head and laughs. Of course. Tori has a gift for carrying off hats, no matter how beautiful or bizarre they are. She even looks good in the ridiculous cardboard hats you find at party stores. I once talked her into trying on a jester’s hat and I swear if she’d worn it out of the store, she would have started a new fashion trend.
I, on the other hand, am headwear challenged, to put it politely. I look absolutely ridiculous in everything from snapbacks to fedoras to the beautiful feathered and floral Easter hats that fill the stores up once a year. Which is why Tori insists on trying hats on everywhere we go. It’s a quest of hers. One of these days, she swears, we’re going to find a hat that looks good on me. I’m not nearly as optimistic, but with Tori, the path of least resistance is often the only one available.
Despite the laughter that signals this isn’t the hat that will change my life, I turn toward the nearest mirror. And then wish I hadn’t. The hat is elegant, gorgeous, really, and yet, somehow, I manage to make it look like a clown hat. And not even a very nice clown hat.
“Here, try this one instead,” she says, switching the black and white one out for a wide-brimmed red one.
I do and, of course, it looks even worse than the first one did. The fact that Tori is now wearing the first hat I tried on—and looking like she belongs on the cover of British Vogue while she’s at it—doesn’t make me bitter at all. The bitch.
We spend the next hour trying on one ridiculous hat after the other, all to no avail. Tori has a pile of about twenty that look great on her, while I decide a scarf just might be the way to go, after all. Tori only laughs at my pouting, then pulls me toward the makeup counters on the other side of the store.
“What you need is a new lipstick,” she tells me with all the authority of a woman who has spent her life believing in the veracity of retail therapy. “Something bright and fun and gorgeous.” br />
“I don’t need another lipstick,” I tell her. “I’ve got like ten.” Besides, I feel about as far from bright and fun and gorgeous as I can get.
Gasping, she puts a hand to her heart in her best Scarlett O’Hara impersonation. “Blasphemy,” she all but shouts. “No one ever has enough lipsticks. Besides, no one can be sad at the MAC counter. It’s against the rules.”
“What rules?”
“All the rules. Everywhere. I think it might even be an amendment to the Constitution,” she tells me with a totally straight face. Then she reaches over and pokes at the corners of my mouth. “Smile. It’s good for you.”
“I’m smiling. See?” I give her the best I’ve got.
She looks vaguely nauseated. “If, by smiling, you mean looking like you’re about to be eaten alive by the lions in ancient Rome, then yes, you’re smiling.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her for what has to be the millionth time. I keep hoping if I say it often enough, she’ll actually believe me. Then again, if I could put even a little conviction behind the words, we’d probably both be better off. “I’m really not sad. Just tired.”
Tori doesn’t bother to answer my blatant lie. Instead she says, “Come on, slowpoke,” as she wraps a hand around my wrist and pulls me along. “Maybe we’ll get you a whole makeover. My treat.”
“I don’t need a makeover,” I tell her even as I allow her to drag me up to the MAC counter.
She snorts. “Sweetie, you need something. Might as well be this.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. I’m an absolute, total mess and I don’t have a clue what to do about it.
It’s been two weeks since I last saw Ethan. Two weeks since my heart broke wide open for the second time. He hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, hasn’t emailed. He hasn’t even sent any of the care packages I’d gotten so used to in the time we were dating—little boxes filled with seashells and tea and other myriad things that made him think of me or that he thought I’d like.