For long seconds, he just stares at me, teeth clenched and jaw working overtime. Fury burns in his eyes, so dark and bright that part of me wants to take back what I just said. But I can’t—partly because I know what I said is right and partly because I refuse to back down to Miles. If I do it now, I’ll always do it, and if our relationship has any chance of working (something I’m doubting right about now) he needs to see me as an equal. More, I need to see myself as one.
“That’s not fair, Tori,” he finally grinds out.
“I know it’s not fair. But I also know it’s true. You think I’m a mess. You think—”
“You are a mess!” he roars. “I mean, just look at you. You’ve been disowned by your father, you’re so broke that you have to crash at your best friend’s house, you don’t have a job, any clothes, or any devices to help you look for a job, and up until this morning you were the punch line to an international joke. It doesn’t get much messier than that.”
His words hit like fists, so hard that I have half a mind to lift my shirt up and look for bruises. “Wow. Don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think of me.”
“Damnit. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure there’s only one way you can mean that, Miles. But thanks for being honest with me.”
Tears burn in my eyes and I turn away so he won’t see them. I blink crazily, try to force myself to think through the hurt. That’s when my eyes fall on Ethan’s bright-red Tesla roadster, parked in the last bay of the garage. It’s one of two cars still in here, and for a second all I can think about is getting in it and driving far away. From Miles. From my problems. From the messiness that is the life Miles just described.
I even take a step toward the car, but then Miles is grabbing me, pulling me into his arms, holding me tight as he murmurs, “Tori, sweetheart, I just want to make things better for you.”
“I know you do.” I don’t fight him, don’t do anything but stand there and let him hold me, which is usually the most comforting feeling in the world. But not right now. Right now, I can’t feel his body where it’s pressed against mine, can’t feel his arms where they’re wrapped around me.
I can’t feel anything really. Except cold. Right now I feel really, really cold.
“But your better isn’t necessarily mine,” I tell him when he finally loosens his hold enough that I can step back. “I’ve spent my whole life being told I’m too silly, too impractical, too fucked up to make anything of myself. I’m messy and have bad judgment and cause more problems than I solve.”
“That’s not what I said—”
“That’s pretty close to what you said. I’ve heard those things my whole life, and for most of it I’ve done my best to live down to the lack of expectations set by my parents. Done my best to show them that I didn’t give a shit what they thought of me. Of course, that just made them think less of me, until one day my father pulled the rug—and everything else—right out from under me.
“How he did it, why he did it—that’s on him. But the rest? The fact that I fucked up my own life to get back at him, the fact that I didn’t take responsibility for my actions, that I let him support me long after I should have been supporting myself…that’s on me.
“And when I walked those two miles here from my condo, I told myself I wasn’t going to do that again. I wasn’t going to let some man take care of me when I should take care of myself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life the way I’ve spent the first twenty-three years, letting someone I care about tear me down while I try to live up, or down, to their expectations.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“That is what you’re doing. Maybe you don’t mean to be doing it, but it’s exactly what you’re doing. You don’t trust me to make decisions about my life, you don’t even think I’m worth talking to before you make decisions for me. I spent years living like that, under my father’s thumb. I won’t do it again, not even for you, Miles.”
I turn my back on him then, walk into the house and grab my purse with its small stash of cash. He follows me, demanding to know what I’m doing. Where I’m going. I don’t answer him because I don’t have an answer. I don’t know where I want to go, only that, for now, I need to be far away from here. Far away from him.
And so I head back out to the garage, walking the length of it until I get to Ethan’s Tesla. Usually he keeps the keys in the cars, and as I pull down the visor to check, I realize with relief that the Tesla is no different.
“Damnit, Tori, answer me. Where the fuck are you going?”
I climb in the car, give him a little shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have your phone.”
“No, I don’t.” I open the garage door and start the car.
“Goddamnit!” he mutters under his breath. “At least wait here while I go get your phone and some shoes for you. You’re fucking barefoot.”
I don’t agree to do so, but I don’t disagree, either. Miles must take it as consent, though, because he takes off into the house. The second the door closes behind him I back out of the garage and start the long drive down the driveway. Barefoot, phoneless, with nothing more than what I brought with me when I showed up here a few days ago.
Because Miles is right about one thing. I am a mess, and it’s past time I learned how not to be one anymore. Too bad it’s a lesson I won’t trust him to be a part of. Not now, not ever again.
Chapter 24
Miles
She took off. She fucking took off the second I turned my back. There’s a part of me that can’t believe it even hours later, a part of me that half expects to find her curled up on the couch crying over some ridiculous rom-com or standing at the kitchen counter eating ice cream straight out of the carton.
But she isn’t there. She’s gone and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
Goddamnit.
I shut my laptop with a snap, then barely resist the urge to hurl it across the room in the beginnings of the temper tantrum burning inside me. But since destroying it won’t solve a damn thing right now, I reach for my phone instead and hit the familiar number.
It rings twice before my sister’s voice comes on the line. “She still hasn’t called me, Miles.”
“Are you sure? Maybe she texted you. Or maybe she called the house phone. She’s—”
“I’m sitting here with Violet in my arms with both my cellphone and the home phone in my lap. Believe me, if she tries to get in touch with me, I’ll know.”
I know I sound like a crazy man, but I’m still not ready to give up. “Maybe Ethan—”
“No, not Ethan. I swear she hasn’t contacted either one of us.” There’s a pause, and my sister’s already concerned voice grows even more worried. “Are you going to tell me what happened? What did you two fight about that was so bad it sent her running with nothing but the clothes on her back? Tori isn’t normally a runner. She’s more a—”
“Fighter. Yeah, I know.” God do I know. I’ve spent the last year on the receiving end of all that fight. Which is just one of the many reasons I’m so fucking worried about her right now. It isn’t like her to just walk away, to disappear when she feels she or someone she cares about has been wronged.
And where would she go anyway? The Tesla has only so many miles before it runs out of charge. And while there are charging stations she could go to, how can she find them when she doesn’t even have a cellphone to look them up?
“It was nothing,” I finally say when the silence has stretched on too long between us. “We didn’t fight about anything. Not really.”
“Not really?” Chloe repeats. I don’t know if it’s her bff sixth sense or her sister sixth sense that is going off, but it’s pretty obvious that she’s not buying what I’m selling. Not for a second.
Not that I blame her. I was there. I know that I was only trying to help Tori, not hurt her, and still I can’t help but doubt myself. Still I can’t hel
p replaying the conversation in my head over and over as I try to figure out where it all went wrong. Why it all went wrong.
Not that it really matters if she isn’t around to hash it out with.
The thought pisses me off all over again and I walk outside to the driveway and look down at the street below. Where are you, Tori? Why the hell did you run away instead of staying here and fighting with me? Why the hell did you take the coward’s way out?
When I say as much to my sister, she just snorts out a laugh. “You obviously don’t know Tori very well. She didn’t leave because she’s a coward, she left because if she stuck around when she was that pissed off, she would have eviscerated you. You should probably count yourself lucky you still have all your body parts. When threatened, she tends to shoot from the hip and ask questions later.”
Don’t I know it. I still have the marks on my ass from a year’s worth of fights to prove it.
“I just want to know that she’s okay,” I say almost desperately. “It’s been eight hours and no one has seen her. How the hell is that possible?” I’ve got my bots crawling through the ’Net, searching for any tweet, Snapchat, Instagram photo with her in it. Her face is pretty famous right now and if she’s out in the world, I expect someone to notice her—and to throw her face up on their social media. The fact that no one has in eight hours tells me she’s holed up somewhere.
But where? It’s the million-dollar question right now, and not knowing the answer to it is making me absolutely insane.
She was obviously upset when she left here. What if she got into an accident? What if she’s lying in some emergency room right now, and they don’t know to call me instead of her family? What if—
I cut off the thought, try to tamp down the crazy before it takes all control. But at the same time, with these new thoughts in my head, I’m suddenly itching to get off the phone with Chloe so I can check auto accidents in the area. Make sure Tori hasn’t wrapped Ethan’s very expensive toy around a telephone pole somewhere.
Just the thought has my hands shaking as I make some frantic, half-cocked excuse to hang up with Chloe. I make her promise to call if Tori contacts her, then open up my computer and start to search.
Half an hour later I’m reasonably convinced that Tori hasn’t been in an accident. But the knowledge doesn’t put my mind at ease half as much as I’d hoped it would. Where is she? Where the fuck is she?
How could she just run away like that in the middle of a fight? I was only trying to help, only trying to make things easier for her, and her response is to fucking disappear like this? Never again, man. Never again. When I get my hands on her, she’s going to be damn lucky I don’t turn her over my knee for all the worry she’s caused me.
She’d probably claw my eyes out if I so much as tried, but I find myself looking forward to the fight. Looking forward to having her back in my arms where she belongs.
Rubbing a hand over my face, I wander back into the house and consider pouring myself a drink. But I want to be sober when she shows up—sober enough to get to the bottom of this mess and sober enough to drive to go pick her up, if that’s what she needs from me.
So in the end I just pace the house, our fight playing over and over in my head like a playlist gone wrong.
Each time I do, it gets harder to hold my head up. Harder to tell myself that this isn’t my fault, that she’s the one who went off half-cocked. She did, absolutely, but when I hear myself telling her that she’s a mess, when I remember the look on her face when I listed all the ways her life is currently fucked up, it makes me furious with myself. More, it pisses me off.
I’ve never been one to kick someone when they’re down, especially not someone I care about the way I care about Tori. So what the fuck was I doing when I said those things to her? What the fuck was I thinking?
It’s pretty clear that I wasn’t thinking. I was reacting, lashing out at her because I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had a point. That I should have talked to her before leaking that story about Parsons.
But goddamnit! What was I supposed to do? What the fuck was I supposed to do? I’ve already screwed up once in my life with a woman I cared about, totally missing it when my parents sold Chloe out and sent her into a downward spiral that nearly destroyed her. That did, for a long time, destroy any chance I had at a relationship with her.
I couldn’t just sit by and watch the same thing happen to Tori. Couldn’t sit on my ass while some bastard destroyed her for his own fucking entertainment. Not when I could see her light getting dimmed a little more with each day that passed, with each online comment she read that called her a gold digger or a slut or a fame whore.
She didn’t deserve that—no woman deserves it—and especially not when that fuckwit got away scot-free, his career and his life enhanced by the same thing that destroyed hers.
No way. No fucking way.
Should I have talked to her first? Yeah, absolutely. I’m willing to acknowledge that now. But I was only trying to help, only trying to do what I thought was best. The last thing I wanted to do was make her feel like I thought she was incompetent, though. I just wish—
The phone rings, interrupts my circular thoughts. I make a dive for it, answer on the second ring. Then hold my breath as Ethan’s voice comes over the line.
“She’s here,” he tells me. “Just walked in the door and she looks like shit.”
“She’s there?” I repeat like a fucking parrot. “In San Francisco.”
“Yes,” he says, and suddenly there’s noise in the background. My sister talking, Violet laughing, and Tori cooing, fucking cooing, at the baby.
“Don’t let her go anywhere,” I order him, suddenly both weak-kneed with relief and absolutely furious all at the same time. “I’m on my way.”
“Yeah,” Ethan snorts right before he hangs up. “Like I hadn’t figured that out already.”
Chapter 25
Tori
“I need a job,” I tell Chloe as she tries to get me to settle on the couch with a glass of wine. But I’ve been in a car for nearly nine hours straight, stopping only when the Tesla needed to charge. Every muscle in my body is tight and I need to stretch. Plus I’m too wired to sit. How can I not be when I’ve had the last eight and a half hours to play my fight with Miles back in my head in a never-ending loop?
“What you need is to tell me what the hell is going on,” Chloe says quietly from her spot in the rocking chair near the window, where she’s nursing Violet.
“No, what I need is a job. And a drink. Not necessarily in that order.”
“Already got you covered,” Ethan says as he comes up behind me and hands me a glass of red wine. I take it, gratefully, then allow myself to sink against him as he wraps an arm around my shoulder in a brotherly embrace. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, squeezing briefly before making his way across the room to gaze adoringly at his wife and baby girl.
“Is she asleep?” he asks, voice low and eyes locked on Violet’s angelic little face.
“Just drifted off,” Chloe answers.
“Let me take her.” He drops a kiss on my best friend’s mouth before expertly scooping the baby out of her arms. Violet wakes up a little, lets out a small, distressed cry. But he’s pulling her into his chest and shushing her before she even finishes the cry, his voice soft and soothing and so filled with love it’s like an arrow to the fucking heart. Ethan Frost adores his wife and baby girl and isn’t afraid to let the entire world know it.
I’d be jealous, except Chloe deserves every ounce of love he can give her, every second of adoration he heaps on her. No one on the planet deserves a guy like Ethan more than my best friend does. They’ve been through hell together, especially this last year, and they deserve whatever happiness they’ve found together. The fact that they’ve found so much—that they have so much—has me nearly bursting at the seams with happiness for her. Or I would be if I weren’t wallowing in my own angst after my fight with Miles.
??
?Shit!” Chloe exclaims suddenly, drawing my attention back to her as she jumps up from the rocking chair and races across the room to me. “You’re crying!”
“I’m not,” I tell her even as I wipe my eyes and sniffle a few times. “San Francisco makes my allergies act up.”
“Yeah, right,” she says even as she wraps me up in a Chloe-scented hug. “I’ve been here with you at least half a dozen times and I never saw you have allergies before.”
“It’s the fall.” I sniff again, do my best to stem the tears still swimming in my eyes. “There’s different stuff in the air now.”
She pulls me closer. “Okay, baby. You just go on telling yourself that.”
“I will.” I squeeze my eyes shut, press my face into her shoulder, and will myself not to start sobbing. I’m too afraid that if I do, I’ll never stop.
It’s been such a long week—such a long fucking week—filled with so many emotional highs and lows that no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop a few more tears from leaking onto her sweater. No more than I can stop one heartbroken sob from escaping. I manage to beat the rest into submission, manage to swallow them down, but it’s too late. The damage has been done.
Chloe pulls back, her eyes worried as they search my face. “It’s been a hell of a week, huh?”
Another sob escapes. “You have no idea.”
“So tell me,” she says as she links her arm through mine and propels me toward the couch. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning and leave absolutely nothing out.”
And so I do, starting with the rooftop party where Miles and I danced and I pissed off Alexander before moving on to my dad’s visit to my apartment and his subsequent disowning of me. Chloe’s heard the story before, right after I moved into her and Ethan’s house because I had nowhere else to go, but she’s no less outraged than she was the first time I told her. “Your dad is such a dick!” she says for the millionth time, her green eyes blazing and her voice shaking with rage.