Thick Love Page 23

  “Well, you can’t right now.” Tommy’s voice went right over my head and I took another step in, pushing my hands into my pockets as I looked her.

  She was still angry, I could see that by that hard frown and how tightly she held herself. I couldn’t blame her and if I wasn’t still pissed at her, maybe I would have smiled, tried to get her to do the same. But I was still pissed, still more than a little bothered with how strongly I’d reacted to the truth and how much I’d missed her.

  You’re weak, the voice said when I thought, just for a second, that I should apologize first. You don’t need her. Look at how he’s touching her. They’re fucking. It’s obvious.

  “It’ll be a long while,” Tommy continued, blocking Aly from my view as he stood in front of me.

  The breath I released came out on a slow exhale, I had to rein in my anger, that irritation at this asshole that bubbled when he crossed his arms over his chest and gave me a look that was both challenging and amused. Slipping my eyes to the right, I squinted at him, regarding those cut arms that were smaller than mine and the stupid smug grin on his face.

  “You wanna back up, brah?”

  I thought he might start in with the smack talk, maybe come closer just to piss me off, but then the asshole glanced back at Aly and clapped his hands together like my question had been the funniest thing he’d heard all week. “Is he for real, Aly?” Another glance at me, at my stance and how it hadn’t shifted an inch and he laughed. “Oh shit, he is. Wow.”

  Two slow steps had me inching closer and finally that asshole stopped smiling. “Yeah. He is for real,” I said. Another step. “Really real.”

  “Look, man, Aly…”

  “Can speak for herself.” She stepped in front of him, keeping her gaze from me.

  Her eyes snapped as she spoke. “We’re done for the night, Tommy. We can pick it back up next week.”

  “Aly, there is no way I’m leaving you with this asshole.”

  She nodded toward the door. “Night, Tommy.”

  His tone shifted smoothly to “easily bored” and didn’t bother to argue, picking up his backpack and leaving the studio, shaking his head as he left. But I didn’t care. He could laugh all he wanted. The voice kept firing off suggestions, more absolutes I didn’t bother to acknowledge. But I shook that off, too. Instead I watched Aly as she moved around the studio, turning off the stereo, and picking up her bag.

  She wouldn’t look at me and I didn’t understand why that unsettled me so damn much. Shouldn’t I be the one ignoring her? Wasn’t I the one that was wronged?

  “Say what you have to say and leave, Ransom. I’m tired.”

  She had a lot of nerve, I’d give her that much, but the return of that cold, distant attitude pushed back any thoughts I had of missing her. I glared at her when she stopped flitting around the room like a bee looking for an open window. She stared ahead, messing with her phone in her hands, likely forgetting that I could see her in the mirror, that I knew she wasn’t looking down at the screen.

  “You left my family.” It was why I’d gone there. To find out why she would cut herself off from them. Me, I got. But not them, not Koa.

  “I got a better offer,” she tried, sounding weak.

  “Why are you lying?”

  Aly jerked her attention up, glaring at me in the mirror. “I’m not…”

  “Leann watches you. We know you’re not working anywhere else.”

  “Fine,” she said, shrugging like nothing mattered to her but getting as far from me as she could. “I couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to.”

  I could have let her go, let her continue denying why she’d taken her anger with me out on my family. But what kind of son, brother would that make me? Aly passed right by me, came too close and I didn’t hesitate. She tried jerking out of my reach, but I didn’t loosen my grip and pulled her close.

  “Pa manyen mwen! Don’t touch me,” she said, voice piercing, distant and I caught the threat right in her eyes.

  I couldn’t keep my heartbeat even, hated that my hands were trembling. “Why? Just tell me.”

  “What do you want me to say, Ransom?” She jerked free, pushing me back when I stepped toward her. “It would have been too awkward with you hating me. You really want me of all people around your family?”

  “Hate? Aly, I don’t hate you.”

  “Now who’s lying?”

  Maybe I’d done this with that look I’d given her at Summerland’s. Maybe my anger, my surprise had sent a message I’d never intended. Still, I didn’t get why Aly was so cool now, why her reaction to me was so harsh. But, God, I’d never hated her. “I was mad. I was…I thought we were friends and you…”

  “Friends?” she said, releasing a laugh. “When were we ever friends?”

  “Aly…”

  “No, I want to know. When exactly have we been friends? When you kissed me right here in this room?” She lifted her hands up and waved them, making me grind my teeth together. “Or was it when I went to you that day on campus telling you that all I wanted was your friendship? Remember that?” Aly came so close to me then, tilting her head as though she needed to catch my gaze. “How’d that friendly encounter end, Ransom? Was it just you being my friend when you kissed me again? Or when…”

  “Stop it, okay? Just…fuck!” I didn’t need to hear it, didn’t want her repeating history I knew all too well.

  Aly woke something in me I hadn’t let fly since that day on the lake. Even before I knew it was her, when she was just the faceless dancer moving her glorious hips against my body, or when she sang a song about freedom and loss like she knew what each word meant—she had released that buried hope inside my chest, the one that promised I would survive. I couldn’t lose that, didn’t want to be free of even the smallest chance that Aly promised.

  Like always when I was around her, my body acted, and my steps felt heavy as I stalked toward her, knocking that angry frown from her face with my arms caging her against the mirror.

  “Tell me,” I said, keeping my voice even. But Aly’s eyes had gotten glassy and her chest moved up and down, breath panting like she was scared, like she was turned on. “Why did you leave?” I asked.

  I wouldn’t let her look away from me. Not until she answered. Why did you leave? But what I was really asking was why did you lie?

  Aly’s throat worked slowly, and her breathing became less frantic before she flicked her gaze up and watched me with her chin lifted, defying me with a look to argue. “I wanted to help you.”

  My jaw ached from how tightly I tensed the muscles there. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Bullshit, Ransom. You’re lost. You’ve been lost a long time. I wanted to help you find yourself just for one night.”

  She didn’t move from the wall when I backed away from her. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “It is,” she said, catching me in my lie, taking two steps to stand directly in front of me. “You wanted to know why I didn’t tell you it was me dancing for you at Summerland’s? Because you wanted to know if there was anything there with that dancer; not me—her.” I could only stare back at her when she came closer, unable to do much more than breathe. “You wanted to know if you could feel that way again, the way you had the first night. Before there was even a possibility of us.”

  My hands came down on her arms, holding them firm before I could think much about moving them. The past two months, Aly had been an anchor, the one person that could calm me. Right then I wasn’t calm, I was confused and frustrated and utterly incapable of doing anything but watch her. “I don’t care that you danced for me. I don’t care if you needed the money…”

  “It wasn’t the money, Ransom. Not the second time and I didn’t do it for anyone else. Just you.”

  “Why?” I held my breath, not understanding why I was so desperate for her answer.

  “Because I wanted you to smile again.” She reached for me and I knew, before I felt her fingers on my skin, that I would let her tou
ch me. “I wanted you to smile and mean it.” But Aly didn’t touch me, hesitated too long before she dropped her hand to her side and I couldn’t push back the voice that time, the one that taunted and laughed. The one that told me what an idiot I’d been.

  “Aly…I…” There was a hint of mocha on her breath, something warm and spicy. That smell had my stomach tightening, had me fighting the voice in my head that told me she wasn’t worth the effort. I knew better than that, but was too much of a punk just then to think about what I was feeling. Out of habit, I reached for my chest, needing that slight comfort of the tattoo, but didn’t touch it. “I can’t smile again no matter what you do. It’s just not going to happen for me, but I can make sure my family is taken care of.” I moved my gaze from the floor back to her eyes, scared when the glassy glean flooded. “Why can’t you help them? Would it really be so bad?”

  “I won’t be around you,” she admitted, holding herself tight, as though she needed to protect herself from me.

  “Aly, please…”

  “I can’t be around you. It…it hurts too much,” she clarified and suddenly there were tears on her face.

  There was something else —that hurt expression maybe, or the way her chin moved as she tried to hold herself back from sobbing. I didn’t understand what all that meant at first. She couldn’t be this upset about our argument or be this damn devastated about losing whatever friendship we had. And then, just like that, the flood of awareness hit me straight in the chest and I understood where her attempts to help me and the source of her tears came from. What she felt was written in the way her eyes had lightened, how the pain in them transformed the bright color to something washed and transparent.

  It felt exactly like believing something your entire life and then discovering that none of that belief held any truth. Shock, doubt and the sickening sensation of a truth you never expected.

  “What… I don’t understand. You’ve only been around me for two months. You can’t be…”

  The sound of her harsh, bitter laughter felt like an insult. “Two months? My God, Ransom, open your damn eyes.” Aly rubbed her neck, stepping away from me as though she needed the space. “Try over a year,” she said when I shook my head. “You have no fucking clue how good you have it. You have a family who loves you, who is so damn proud of you and you have…you had me and you didn’t even know it.” That quiver in her chin didn’t stop and as I watched her, that raging voice in my head went quiet. All I heard was her, Aly, as she continued speaking.

  “I drove myself crazy with just the damn thought of you. Watching you week after week, fall further and further away from everyone who loved you. And you didn’t know, couldn’t see. You still don’t know how beautiful you are, and how lost.” She swiped at her wet face like her tears were an irritation. “I can’t watch that anymore. I won’t. I tried to help and it blew up in my face. I tried to heal you as much as you would let me but you only wanted the dancer. Not me. Her. And still, I tried…even if it wasn’t me, I tried.”

  “Aly…” She stopped me with a shake of her head. She moved too quickly, her reaction to my upheld hands, defensive, but still I tried. “I didn’t know…”

  “But that doesn’t matter, don’t you see? It doesn’t matter whether you knew or not, because you’re still stuck in the past. It’s where you want to be.” Aly’s hands shook violently but her tears had dried on her face, letting me know she was either absolutely terrified or in such a rage that she didn’t care about hurting me. “It’s safe for you there. All that damn guilt, it keeps you from facing everything around you. You don’t want to live anymore, Ransom, because life is too damn hard. So you stay in the past when things were easy, where you didn’t have to move past anything, where you could just wallow in your own world. It’s where you are now and I will not stay there with you.” There was an echo on the floor when she walked away, her anger, her frustration thicker than the heat coming from the vent. And I let her walk away from me, knowing that she was right. Why fight for someone who’d given up on you?

  “As much as I want to save you like you did…like you’ve done for me, I can’t. I can’t be with you in this limbo of grief and I cannot compete with the specter of Emily. So I’m not even going to try.”

  I couldn’t expect her to, right? How could I expect anyone to fight for me, to challenge me to live when I’d given all that up? Over a year, she’d said. She’d watched me from the beginning then. She’d waited all that time for me to leave behind the heartache I’d created.

  And now, son of a bitch, she wouldn’t wait anymore.

  But then something else hit me. What had she said? As much as I’d saved her? When did I ever…. Oh God. There was a memory, of something that happened before the accident, before I lost Emily… Dammit, it was so hard to recall anything that happened before the accident…. But there was something…

  Then it suddenly flooded into my head—a memory of Aly and.... Yes. That asshole in the parking lot, her in the loft. She was the girl who needed a bed. I should have known that. I should have remembered. Why hadn’t I remembered?

  I jerked and glanced over my shoulder when I heard the back door slam shut. She’d left me alone, wallowing once again. I’d come there for answers and had gotten what I wanted. But I damn well didn’t like it. I’d looked for an apology and got the bird and, much as I hated to admit it, it was a gesture I deserved.

  Son of a bitch, she’d given up on me and I let her. I fucking let her.

  Overhead I heard her in her apartment, slamming doors, her heels snapping against the hardwood and then, the rumbled of the pipes as she turned the water on.

  Leave her alone. She doesn’t want you. No one will want you again.

  I closed my eyes, breathing through my nose to fill my lungs to capacity. She may have walked away, she may have told herself that she wouldn’t try anymore, but I knew she hadn’t given up a damn thing. Not this girl. Those tears told a story. They were real. They were honest, and for the first time in over a year, I was working on a plan.

  I had a fight I wanted to win.

  She doesn’t want…

  “Yeah. But I do.”

  19

  What’s the difference between past and present? It isn’t just time. It isn’t that memory haunts, that it can cripple. It’s the way we remember that marks the change. I saw him clearly that first day because he was impossible to miss. And every day since that first one in my tiny apartment with Ransom tugging a bulky mattress onto my floor, I hadn’t stopped seeing him just as he was.

  Maybe that was the problem. I saw too much and nothing at all.

  I’d seen his stoic, beaten expressions and let them soften my heart. I’d heard the harsh clip of his tone when he and Tristian argued and convinced myself that he was defensive because he was scared. Because he was alone.

  I couldn’t do that anymore. At least, that’s what I told myself. It was a small mantra to get myself used to the idea of not letting Ransom consume my thoughts. I repeated it in the shower with my hair stuck to my neck and the soap bubbling around my feet. I don’t care, I said over and over until the syllables sounded like the insistent thump of a drum, a melody that I heard as an anthem, one that would stick in my head. Until I was sure that I could manage really, truly not caring about him at all. I practiced it as I toweled off, patting over my skin with my threadbare towels, wrapping the largest one around my body.

  “I don’t care,” I mumbled as I stepped out of my tiny bathroom and came to a quick stop.

  Turns out I did, in fact, care that Ransom was leaning against the kitchen counter, legs extended, arms crossed. I cared that he stared at me hard, that his eyes took on a look I’d only caught glimpses of when he’d watch over me, likely thinking I didn’t notice. There was something in that look that was more than lust, something I couldn’t clearly define but knew would affect me if I thought on it for too long.

  He didn’t move and I couldn’t speak and we stared at each other. Ransom’s
blatant perusal of my body, the slick glide of his eyes moving over my wet skin, made me lightheaded, feeling like I was on display but finding it impossible to be upset by it.

  Finally, when those black, burning eyes of his settled on my breasts and the single bead of water that meandered in the cleft between them before disappearing behind the wrap of my tight towel, I couldn’t take the silence.

  “Me zanmi, you grosoulye bata, what the hell are you…”

  “Did you know,” he started, like this was completely normal, like it wasn’t highly inappropriate that I was nearly naked and he was in my apartment uninvited, “that the storage room next door has an old lock?” I shook my head, a little scared to move, more than a little annoyed with myself that I wanted to rip away the towel and give him exactly what his look told me he wanted. “That lock is easy to trip if you know how to do it.” Ransom glanced once at the small access door inside my laundry room. “Tristian used to bring Becca Asbury here before you moved in.”

  In my mind, I saw Ransom squeezing his impossibly large body through that access panel door and pushing through the small space that was my laundry room. Why was he going to so much trouble? One glance back at his eyes still focused on my breasts gave me one possibility, but I didn’t put too much faith in that. That was just blatant lust.

  “Why didn’t you knock?”

  He finally moved his eyes away from my chest, shifting his focus to my face. I found that more unsettling than a slow rake of his gaze over my body.

  “I didn’t think you’d let me in.”

  When he pushed away from the counter, I backed up, walking into the wall behind me before I managed to stop him. “That’s far enough.”

  “Aly…”

  “Non. Stop right there.” A small voice in my head, one that sounded a lot like my grann screamed at me for keeping him at a distance. But my body was too worked up just by him being in my small apartment again. Besides, I was still annoyed, still bothered by how everything had ended before it really began. “Turn around,” I told him, flicking my forefinger in a circle to demonstrate. The apartment was too small for more than one person. It was definitely too small for Ransom and me, especially when I was nearly naked.