Tempting - Lucian Alex - Страница 39

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“Oh, honey. Why don’t you come home?”

Pinching the skin between my eyebrows, I sighed. “Mom, I can’t. I have school and my job. I can’t just quit.”

“Okay. But perhaps you can change?”

And there it was. My hand fell and I inhaled through my nose. “I don’t know—”

“You know I worry about you,” she interrupted. “All alone in that big city. Leo told me you didn’t even have internet hooked up.”

I narrowed my eyes, now convinced that Leo’s true first name was ‘Fucking’ with the amount of times I referred to him as ‘Fucking Leo.’ Just like in that moment. “I was bumming off the neighbors, but I have my own now.”

“Adele, there’s another way. You’re just like your father—stubborn.”

Shit. The gravity of her words shifted the ground beneath me. Was I just like him? Stubborn, unwilling to be deterred. Doing what I wanted, no matter what anyone else thought. That was my father defined. And, it was me.

“You can still write, Adele. But this way, you can study something more lucrative, more secure.”

She was knocking me down, nick by nick. Defeat was beckoning my name. Suddenly, I didn’t want to fight anymore.

When we ended the phone call, I stood by the stairs to the subway, fully intending to go to Nathan’s house as planned. But instead, I turned back toward campus and entered the registration office with my heart in my throat.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Truthfully, I don’t know how the hell this happened. All I’d wanted from the very first night was just a release. I wanted to feel someone next to me, even for a short amount of time. And some way, somehow, I found myself staring into my refrigerator, wondering what I could make Adele for dinner, since I knew she had to work late. She hated mushrooms, so I stopped keeping them in my fridge. And she, against all my warnings, loved eating whipped cream straight from the bottle. So that too, had found its way onto my shelves.

Her smiles became my currency. Like the goodness or badness of my day was dependent on whether I saw her, saw that snarky narrowing of her eyes and heard that cutting tongue, read the words that she put in front of me, held me against her when I fell asleep, marveled at the mess she was able to make with such a small number of items, studied the different shades of gold in her hair when the sun hit it, hurt when I saw how moved she was by simple affection, the same way I used to be when I first started dating.

I’d fucked my way into a relationship.

Who the hell had I become?

At the age of thirty-four, I was someone’s boyfriend. I looked forward, down to the minute, to that moment where she’d walk through the door and give me that secret little smile. The one that said, “These people? They don’t know you. I know you. I understand you.”

I’d become addicted to her skin, to feeling every part of her that had been previously neglected. The freckle on the inside of her right arm and the light birthmark on the bottom of her left thigh had been discovered in the last week. I wanted to make her feel so good and so beautiful and so wanted that she couldn’t fathom having any man touch her but me.

And every single part of that scared the ever-loving shit out of me.

Because I hadn’t been looking for it. And I certainly didn’t think I deserved it. But nevertheless, she was there. I didn’t want that to change. We could just stay like this, keep our heads down while she was finishing her classes. I was thinking about the future again.

The realization that Adele had embedded herself so deeply underneath my skin is what drove me to sit on my couch, staring at the wedding picture of me and Diana.

Diana had fought her mother for that veil, the one with tiny pearls along the edge, that had sat anchored underneath all her dark hair. I remember sitting with her, railing and cursing at how her mother was a fascist tyrant who couldn’t fathom doing something new if it jammed her in the asshole. Our relationship had been so smooth and so real, we knew everything about the other person, knew when to soothe and when to push the buttons that would immediately turn a disagreement into a fight. Losing her had been like chopping off both of my arms in one fell swoop. And it had taken this long for them to grow back.

I sat there, staring at our young, smiling faces, not knowing what to feel. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew Diana wouldn’t expect me to stay single and celibate for the rest of my life. But she hadn’t had cancer, something where we’d had time to talk about what might happen in my future. One second she was there, the next, I’d blinked, and she was gone. We’d never had the opportunity to have those conversations. About kids and love and regrets.

I knew my regrets. That wasn’t the issue. They were never far from my thoughts, especially when I was sitting in this home by myself.

While I sat there, turning those things over in my head, there was a knock on the door. Like the universe, or God, or quite possibly Lucifer himself knew that it was the very last thing I needed. Adele was working, so I knew it wasn’t her. When I looked through the peephole, I almost lost my breath. The eyes that looked back at me were the exact same shade of deep brown, so dark that you couldn’t read much of anything, unless you really knew them.

“Open the fucking door, Nathan. I can see you looking at me.”

So I did. I opened the door and stared at my former brother in law for the first time in four years. Since the day we lowered my wife, his sister, into the ground.

He was bigger than he used to be, and a beard fell inches past his chin, the same dark brown that his whole family had.

“Elias,” I said in greeting, opening the door to let him in. He shouldered past me, pushing just hard enough that I had to step back, or get shoved. I set my jaw and faced him once the door was shut. “Where’s your car? Did you lose it again?”

He’d plopped onto my couch, stretching his long, tree trunk legs out onto the mahogany coffee table. “I haven’t had a car in years, dickface. Cabs and trains and buses and planes take me everywhere I need to go.”

“What are you doing here?”

He scratched his jaw, hidden somewhere under all that fucking hair, and peered up at me. “I missed you.”

I almost laughed. But the coldness in his eyes kept my mouth shut. I didn’t sit. I didn’t want to grant him the smallest comfort in my home.

“I bet. Seriously, what do you want, Elias? It’s been too long for a simple social call.”

He leaned forward, and the motion made his shoulders pop with muscles that gave me pause. There was a good chance that he’d take any opportunity to pound the hell out of me. And from the looks of it, he probably could.

“It’s been over four years.”

I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. “I know. Do you honestly think I don’t remember?”

Elias shrugged, his coal colored eyes never leaving mine. “I’m sure you do, Nathaniel. And you should. It’s your fucking fault she’s dead.”

I sank into the chair behind me, dropping my head into my hands. “I know.”

“Good.”

When I finally looked up at him, the silence in the room too heavy for me to shoulder any longer, he looked less angry and more sad. “And you needed to remind me?”

“Yes. I’ll remind you for as long as it takes me not miss my sister so much that I feel like someone’s ripping my goddamned heart out of my chest.”

When I stood, he did too. “Why are you here?”

“I’m here because I’ve stayed away for too fucking long. She was my sister, Easton. I didn’t have a single memory that didn't include her, until you came along.”

“So why now?”

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