The sun had begun to set by the time I pulled up to the Reed’s residence, Charlotte and a few bags for us both packed into the backseat.
The sky was this faded watercolor portrait of oranges, pinks, and purples, breaking a crimson red at the very dip of the horizon. The air outside was feather light and cooling with the sinking sun. Everything about the picture of this moment was so much more soothing than the bullshit going on inside of it.
Dominic had left only a half hour before us to try and smooth the worst of it over with Heather before Charlotte and I got there. Mom had been crying when we left. Not sobbing, but a constant trickle of tears down her blotchy face that I guessed were supposed to spell out how sorry she was.
We were in this mess because of her. Her ugly life bled over into mine and now threatened the very existence of it. She still couldn’t reason why Tommy Lynch had taken an interest in me, but did admit—through even more tears—that she had mentioned me a few times to him when she was high or as small talk.
She used me as water cooler material, and now I was fucked.
Dominic seemed convinced that this Tommy guy was at the center of these kidnappings, and had taken a special interest in me like no other victim because of something my mom did. Except, no matter how long or how hard he grilled her, she couldn’t figure out what she’d done.
Whatever it was was probably information lost in the poisoned stream of her veins. In the end, it didn’t really matter. My life was apparently in danger all the same.
I texted Dominic to tell him I was there and then turned to Bugs in the backseat.
“You excited to spend a few days with Maya?”
She nodded, her sprouting ponytail boinging on top of her head. “Yeah, but I still don’t know why Mommy couldn’t come too.”
“Well, Bugs, she had to stay and watch the house. Someone’s gotta keep it standing while we’re here having all the fun.”
And neither Dominic or I were putting that woman anywhere near Maya.
My sister squished her mouth to the side, staring out the window. “I guess.” Then she turned her face back to me. “Do you think we can have cupcakes again?”
Soft laughter broke through, and I was so fucking glad in that moment for her innocence and ignorance. My smile ran deep, all the way to my bones and blood that pumped for her.
“I’ll see what we can do.”
From inside the house, a sudden, jarring crash shattered my smile.
Both Charlotte and I snapped our heads towards the loud noise. My chest tightened, worry firing to life as my thoughts bounced from Dominic to sweet Maya, and before I could think, my driver’s side door was cracked open.
“Stay here and lock the door,” I threw back to Charlotte.
I pushed out into the open air, legs carrying me up the driveway to the stone-faced house with visions of violence flashing behind my eyes. I already knew Heather wasn’t afraid to use her hands to fight with, and the echo of that crash splintered through my one-track brain, pushing me faster and madder towards those imposing front doors.
Dominic was a big man. A strong man. He didn’t need me to defend him, but I’d fucking stomp all over her porcelain face if she hurt him because he was trying to help me.
I sniffled as I reached the door, head still clogged and nose too stuffed up to smell the ripe stench of money that polluted this street, but I knew it was there. The breeze flirted with the waves of unbrushed hair framing my face, bringing with it angry voices.
I paused in my quick steps, pressing my ear to the thick door, surprised when the voices came through clear.
Dominic’s was the first I heard.
“You were supposed to be leaving for a work trip these next couple days anyway,” he argued, his grip on his exasperation surprisingly steady. “Telling you was more of a courtesy than a necessity.”
“So you were planning on sneaking her and her sister in here while I was gone?” Heather spat. “How noble of you, Dom.”
“I think the fact that I’m telling you negates the idea that I planned to sneak them in.”
“Why would you ever bring them here in the first place? Why would you think I’d ever be okay with having her here?”
I could picture Dominic so perfectly, sighing and his strict jaw tensing.
“I didn’t think you’d be okay with it, but I hoped you’d have some compassion for the situation.”
“Compassion for what? Her mom being a drug addict or karma biting her in the ass?”
The callousness of her words struck me back from the door like an actual shove. I brought my hand to my chest as if I could feel all five fingered indents from the shove, stinging my fevered skin and bubbling my temper to the surface.
There was a lull in the fight, and a bird chirped somewhere in the background. I hissed, swatting blindly at its sky to tell it to shut up so I could hear what came next.
I leaned my face towards the door again, my blood rushing too loudly in my ears.
“I don’t know what happened to you, or if you were always like this and I somehow missed it.” God, he sounded so disappointed. Defeated, even. “Despite your feelings about Ms. Sanders, think about how devastated Maya would be if anything happened to her. You remember how she was when Shelly stopped showing up.”
It was almost weird to hear him use my name so professionally, but it was smart. Definitely smart.
“That doesn’t give you a free pass to bring her into my home!”
“Our home, Heather,” Dominic clipped. “It’s still our home until we sign the papers, and I can bring anyone I want into it.”
A screech of epic proportions ripped through house and home.
“What the fuck do I have to do to get her out of our lives? I fire her, and you run after her. I tell you to stay away from her, and you decide to move her into our home.”
“What did you expect me to do, Heather?” he pressed, his tether on his anger fraying. “Really? What did you expect me to do when I found out Tommy Lynch was after her?”
There was a deafening pause, and then a muffled, bitter reply.
“Not this.”
Her reply hit me harder than I expected it to. My chest felt bruised from it. I knew she hated me. I got that. I accepted that. She had every reason to even if she didn’t know all the reasons. It wasn’t her hating me that was such an oxygen-snatching gut punch.
It was how much she hated me.
Her hate was visceral, a palpable thing with claws and teeth that ate through the thick wood of the door and chomped down on me.
She really sounded like she’d sleep better at night if Tommy got me and took me away. Maybe she even hoped it happened. I didn’t blame her for wanting me gone, but couldn’t I blame her for the extreme she was willing to go to to let it happen?
I understood hate. I loved to hate. Hate was my coat of armor, and I wore it proudly.
Hate wasn’t my weapon though. It was my protection. Heather was using hers like a gun aimed right at my head, and she could pull the trigger and end me anytime she felt like it.
And she did feel like it.
A low-pitched rumble resonated through the door, and I pressed me and my sore chest back up against it to listen.
“It shouldn’t be for more than a few days,” Dominic said.
Hearing him again, my heart withered just a bit. He’d detached all of his beautiful emotions from his broad voice. Sure those emotions could be fucking terrifying to a person unequipped to deal with them like me, but I didn’t like his voice without them either.
It was like a garden without any flowers.
“We’re putting a restraining order on Tommy, and we’ll tail him until he comes too close to her. Then we can at least begin to build a case against him.”
That was news to me. It sounded like a good plan though.
“Well,” Heather’s shoes clicked, her tone as pointed as the heel of the stilettos she invariably wore. “If you thought I’d be leaving so you two could be alone, you’d be mistaken. I’ll be staying as long as she is.”
“That’s fine. There’s no reason to, but I understand if you want to.”
Ah, there’s the lying he talked about. You could tell he hated it. The words even sounded different coming from him, like they’d been rolled around in mud first.
I wondered if Heather could hear it too.
“Each time you tell me there’s nothing to worry about, your words get weaker,” she fumed with slow-forming venom. “Because you keep choosing her over me every time you have the chance.”
“I’m not choosing her over you.” Liar. “I’m choosing her safety over your contempt for her.”
A loaded beat lingered, and in it, I felt the devastation of what came next as if the grief that drove his words flowed through me the same as it lived in Dominic.
“And I chose you in our marriage, Heather. I chose you plenty of times, and it didn’t matter. I’m divorcing you so I don’t have to choose you anymore.”
Ouch.
Even I felt the sting of that, prickling across my skin like fire ants set loose. Those words weren’t even for me, but they were a fresh reminder of how toxic love could become once it had gone stale, and that even men like Dominic could succumb to its villainy.
There was no response from Heather after that.
Distinct footsteps carried towards me, and I backed up into the shadowed coverage of the garage and out of view of the front door camera.
The heavy door opened with a loud click, and I shot a quick glance to Charlotte to see her staring at me through the backseat window, head tilted and innocent eyes on me. Seconds later, an imposing shadow fell over me, and I looked up into sterling eyes.
The silhouette of his broad shoulders sunk an inch or so, and I knew he was pissed I was out of the car and in the open. Like an idiot.
“I heard a crash,” I said pathetically.
In the fading sunlight, the tick of his jaw looked even more fearsome. “She threw a vase.”
“Is Maya—”
“My mom took her out for a drive.” His even-toned voice delivered a breath of relief I didn’t realize I needed. I let it out, the rhythm of it shaking.
“That’s good.”
I trailed off, a tightness burdening in my chest that had nothing to do with my cold.
Everything was so fucked up, and it had happened so quickly. Dominic and I slipped the night before Maya’s birthday, and we’d been falling ever since. A kiss used to be our biggest worry, then it was the growing sickness, and now it was my life and his future.
I always said that we’d be catastrophic, and here was the proof of it.
I locked my eyes on him, wanting to close the distance between us but not daring.
“This is such a bad idea.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “We don’t have much of a choice right now.”
“She sounds really suspicious.”
He leveled his stare to the driveway, his Adam’s apple moving beneath his skin that glowed like amber beneath the sunset.
“She is, but she doesn’t have any proof.” He flashed his serious eyes up to me, quieting his pitch. “We can’t give her any either. I could lose Maya in the divorce if she had proof that I cheated on her.”
My lips parted to take that in, inhaling the severity of what we’d gotten ourselves into. Sometimes I forgot it was cheating. Sometimes I forgot how bad of a person I really was. Even with them separated, the reminder that if we were caught, it could rip Maya out of his world forced me to remember that it was still wrong.
It was wrong to touch him and kiss him like he was mine. He wasn’t, and I wasn’t his either.
“This is a lot,” I breathed.
He held a silent beat, back jaw pulsing. “I know.”
We held each other’s gaze, the streaks of scarlet pink and burnt orange from the sky painting his face the color of warmth; the color that happiness should be. However, burning at the center of all that happy warmth was unimaginable sorrow, two laden pits of it.
The color of it was gray, a bleak and miserable gray, staining this would-be perfect portrait.
He knew before I said it what we had to do.
“Maybe…” I breathed, preparing myself and the words. “Maybe we should cool it?”
Dominic dove his stare to the ground the second the words were out. His shoulders went rigid.
“Maybe,” he agreed, voice thick.
I felt the same thickness widening up my throat, no matter how hard I tried to swallow it back. That tightness in my chest was pushing it up, forcing me to feel every single ache of it.
Aching morphed to pain—real, unbearable pain—when Dominic brought his eyes back to me and showed me how much he was suffering.
It exploded almost in slow motion inside of me, trickling fire and poison through my organs, between my ribs, filling my stomach until I was inflamed with the pain. It felt like actual death.
Something was dying, that’s for sure. Somewhere in the sickest parts of my heart, a tiny whisper came that said it was our souls. They were being ripped apart, shredding back to single cells and screaming as they went. They had been nuzzling, intertwining, composing together a symphony that drowned out the world when they were in the same room.
They shouldn’t have meshed so well, but they did, and in their defiance of right and wrong, they had been possessed by the potential for greatness. They wanted it. They had a taste of it, and now it was gone.
Our dialogue might have left room for something later on, but the way we were staring at each other felt like a goodbye. Our timing was shitty, but it was now, and who knew if there would ever be a later.
Actually, I knew.
I knew there would never be a later. We’d agreed to light and fun, nothing serious and nothing permanent, but this hurt felt permanent. It felt serious. It felt like all the strings I’d agreed to keep unattached between us had wrapped around my heart and were strangling it to death.
My poor, sick little heart wouldn’t survive this again, and the little girl sitting, watching this goodbye unfold in the car wouldn’t either if I let it happen.
“So…”
And then my throat closed up.
Wow. I couldn’t say it. I actually couldn’t fucking say it.
Dominic knew though. He knew and every muscle visible in his body rippled against the solemn nod he jerked out.
So that was that.
We were going back to basics. Back to ignoring the burn of heroin chemistry in our veins. Back to lingering looks and hiding them from harsh blue eyes that would be watching us around every corner we went.
Dominic had this tension in his body and blaze to his eyes that said it was taking all his strength not to reach out to me. He’d hidden his hands in his pockets when he first got out here, and now it made sense why.
He was struggling not to grab me and wrap me up in his big chest. He wanted to hide me in the shadow of his body so he could kiss me goodbye and goodnight.
I wanted that too. So fucking badly. I wanted him to smother me in bittersweet kisses until all the pain went away.
Instead, Dominic turned his feet towards my car.
“I’ll help you get your bags.”
And so it had ended. And so it began.
