Hearts On Fire (Heart's Revenge Book 2) Page 3

  I’ll pick you up at eight. Be ready.

  That’s all it says. It’s not a question; it’s a command.

  Go fuck yourself, I write back, but I don’t hit send. I let the words sit there on the glowing screen for a minute, and then I delete those, too.

  Perhaps I went into this too over-confident. I let my guard down. I’ve been so used to using guys to get off that I just assumed I’d be able to distance myself from him, too, but that isn’t the case. I just need to erect the wall around me again—the one I’ve been using to protect myself for so long now. If I can just get my shit together, everything will be okay. Yes, if I can just do that, this plan will still hold water.

  I take a deep breath, nodding to myself. I can do this. I can. I’ll be better prepared when I see him next. He just caught me off guard is all. Pure luck. I won’t let it happen again.

  Chapter Four

  Aidan

  Just call me the man with the plan. She doesn’t text back and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad sign, or maybe no sign at all, but fuck it. I’m still going to show up. I don’t allow myself to consider what I’ll do if she isn’t there—well, I try not to let myself think about it. Will I just sit and wait until the sun rises tomorrow morning? Will I simply do my best to forget about her completely? Demanding she be ready eight o’clock was probably a step too far, especially when I’ve been so damned careful with her up until now, but something had to give in the end. And it was my patience.

  When I turn up out the front of her apartment building, she’s there, waiting. Judging by the pink and black, tight, low cut dress she’s wearing, she’s assumed we’re going somewhere fancy. She’s more beautiful than any woman I’ve ever seen.

  “Hey,” I say when she gets into the car. Her presence fills the small space, makes it feel like the air is buzzing.

  She buckles her seat belt and then looks out the windshield. “I’m going to be honest,” she says. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing.”

  I laugh. “That’s good. Neither do I.”

  “Oh.”

  And that’s all she says. No I’ve been thinking about you too, or I’m happy to hear that, though I guess I haven’t been stupid enough to expect that from her.

  “You look stunning,” I say. “Though I’m sure you know that already.”

  “Thank you.” Her tone is cool, detached. “So. What’s the plan?”

  “Are you hungry? I’m sorry if you thought we’d be dining out, but I thought we could do something low key tonight.”

  “I could eat. And it’s totally fine, we don’t have to go to a restaurant.”

  “Great. Then we’ll go back to my place. I’ll cook us something.”

  This information must take her by surprise. She twitches in her seat, eyeing me curiously. “You can cook?”

  “I can cook.”

  “That’s…surprising.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. I was planning on making you breakfast the other day, but…” My voice trails off. Probably mentioning anything about that other day isn’t such a good idea.

  “I had to go. I…had somewhere I needed to be,” she says.

  “I get it. You’re busy. I’m busy. It’s all good.”

  But it’s not all good. It’s actually terrible, but I refrain from questioning her further. She won’t respond well to that. Instead, I drive across the city, trying to defrost the atmosphere by keeping the conversation going. Her responses become slightly less stilted as the time passes. Slightly. In my apartment, she tiptoes in the same way she tiptoed out, like she’s afraid of being caught by someone.

  “Are you in the mood for anything in particular?” Perhaps I should’ve planned this whole thing a little better, but I’m good at whipping things up on the fly. And, despite the fact that I feel so strangely connected to her, I don’t feel the need to impress her with lavish meals or over the top gestures. Aside from the horse I made for her, perhaps.

  “I could go for some pasta?” she says quietly.

  “I can make that happen. Do you want wine? I’ve got a nice Pinot Grigio.”

  “Sure. Just a glass, though. I won’t drink as much as I did last time.”

  I smile. “Cloud your judgment?”

  She doesn’t bat an eyelash, though I can tell she knows this is a loaded question. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  She sits on one of the high bar stools at the counter with her glass of wine while I gather the ingredients from the pantry and the fridge. I decide I’ll do my version of spaghetti aglio e olio, which is fairly simple but always delicious, and it won’t take too long to make. It’s not long before the air in the apartment is thick with the smell of sautéed garlic and olive oil. I add sliced banana peppers along with the salt and regular black pepper, as well as some fresh basil.

  “Smells great,” Essie says when we sit down at the table. I pour myself a glass of wine and top hers off, though she hasn’t really had that much. I try to think back to the other night when we were at the restaurant and how many drinks she had. Certainly a few, but she didn’t seem completely inebriated or out of control. Had she been though? Is that why we ended up sleeping together? Because she’d been drunk?

  A shitty thing to consider. But then, if her sole reason for sleeping with me was because she was wasted then she probably wouldn’t be sitting here in my apartment across from me at the dining room table, about to eat a meal that I just prepared for her. Her icy mood from earlier seems to have lifted ever so slightly as well, thank god.

  I hold my wine glass up. “Cheers. Thank you for coming over.”

  Essie smiles at me, eyes finally thawing out, and lifts one shoulder as she raises her glass to mine. “From the text you sent earlier, I assumed I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.”

  “That’s not true at all. You always have a choice, Ess. In everything you do.” I take a sip of wine, but I’m not blind. I see the color slowly draining from her face. She looks like I just told her she’s dying. “You okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, of course.” She takes a sip of her own wine. “You…you just called me Ess. Not many people do that.”

  I smile. “Should I call you Vanessa instead?”

  “Not unless you want me to bruise your shins.”

  “Hmmm. I’ll pass. I like my shins bruise-free, thank you.”

  She smiles, but it’s only half a smile. There’s a shadow over her, a shadow in her eyes, and I get the feeling that whatever’s bothering her has nothing to do with shortening her name. She twists some spaghetti onto her fork and then eats it carefully.

  I take a bite and mentally fist pump myself; the pasta is perfectly al dente. Nailed it. The flavors are perfectly balanced, too. My brother would have failed miserably at this task. He never attempted to cook a meal a day in his life, I’m sure of it.

  “You look very smug right now,” Essie says. “Were you worried for a second that this might be inedible?”

  “Ha! No, ma’am. I never worry.”

  “Never?”

  “Not about the small things. And not about things outside of my control. What’s the point?”

  She looks down at her plate, spearing a piece of mushroom. “I thought a guy like you would be worried all the time. Am I going to fuck up my business and lose my fortune? Will I be invited to the next big socialite party? Will I be able to buy the brand new super car before any of my friends? Y’know. The important stuff.”

  I place my fork down on my plate and bridge my fingers together, watching her as she plays with her food. Her eyes are still down, but she knows I’m looking at her. I can tell by the stiffness of her shoulders. “You really think I’m that guy, Essie?”

  “I don’t know. I barely know you. Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “Look at me.” She doesn’t. I lean across the table and place my hand over hers, stilling her. She freezes solid, like I’ve just run an electric current through her body. “Look at me.”

  Her eyes a
re bright when they meet mine. She’s terrified—I can see that plain as day—but there is also a considerable level of defiance in her gaze. I can read so much from that one look. She hates me, but she also doesn’t. She feels what I feel. It’s the last thing she wants and she hates herself for it, but it’s there. Whatever reason has brought her into my life, I know that her heart is in turmoil right now, and she’s suffering. And things are definitely not going according to plan. “You know me,” I say. “You can’t look me in the eye and say that you don’t. You don’t want to talk about this, I know that with every bone in my body, but you carry the same pain as me. It’s not something either of us can hide. We…our pasts…they’re interwoven. And I think perhaps our future’s might be, too.”

  Panic flashes across Essie’s face. I can imagine the cold, shocking blast of adrenalin hitting her stomach, making her feel like it’s dropping through the floor. Not once have I acknowledged the fact that I know perfectly well who she is. Not once have I breathed a word about the fact that I’ve known for years who she is and where she works. And not once have I even implied that I know she’s here for a reason. She has to have known all along, but in the short time we’ve spent together, it’s been an unspoken specter, hanging over us. Like the ghosts of our dead relatives, guiding our hands, watching over our shoulders, breathing down our necks. I get the feeling her ghost is more hostile than mine. I never met her brother, obviously, but I doubt he was the same man in life that he appears to be in death. It doesn’t take much to figure out that Essie carries him around with her like a burden, a burden that’s slowly strangling her, killing her piece by piece. My ghosts are mere shadows that follow me from room to room, building to building, not speaking, not commanding anything of me. Just existing there on the horizon of my consciousness, quietly judging everything I do.

  Essie laughs suddenly, pulling her hand out of mine. “This is our second date, Mr. Callahan. I think talking about the future might be jumping the gun a little, don’t you?” She’s all flippancy and shiny white teeth, but I can see the fear in her eyes. She can’t hide it from me.

  “No. No, I don’t think so. I think that the strands of both your future and mine will be forever linked, whether we like it or not. Trauma generally tends to do that to people, for better or for worse.”

  We stare at each other, neither one of us looking away, and this feels like the first honest communication we’ve shared. Eventually, she breaks, looking out of the window, over the Chicago skyline lit up against the night.

  “You said at the restaurant the other night that you didn’t get along with your brother. With Alex. Do you…do you miss him?” she asks softly.

  “No, I don’t. I miss the idea of him, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the idea of a big brother. Someone to look up to. To spend time with. Someone to share a strong bond with. A bond you just can’t have even with the closest of friends.”

  “But you…you didn’t share that with him when he was alive?”

  “No, we didn’t. We hated each other. To me, he was pushy and arrogant. And he thought I was lazy and lacked drive. He couldn’t understand the decisions I made, or why I didn’t want to be exactly like him. If he were still alive, we’d still be at each other’s throats, ready to kill one another. With him gone, it’s easy to romanticize what it would be like if things hadn’t gone the way they did. I’m not a fool, though. We just weren’t compatible as people.”

  “I was compatible with my brother,” she whispers. “He was my best friend. When I lost him, I lost everything.” Even though her voice is muted, there’s so much anger contained within it. I don’t say anything for a second. I think that if I do, she’ll explode and all of the poorly restrained rage she’s wrestling to keep inside right now will come bubbling to the surface.

  I eat my food, drink my wine, let her regain a sense of herself. When the tension in the room seems to dissipate, I say something she probably isn’t going to like.

  “I know you loved him, Ess. I’m sure he loved you, too. But did you really lose everything when he left you? Did you lose your strength? Your fight to survive? Your determination to better your life? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look that way. It looks to me that you’ve built a solid platform for yourself. You have a great apartment, a great job. Close friends who support you. I know there’s a huge hole in your life where Vaughn should be, but you still have so much more than you believe you do. And, if you want to, you have me as well.”

  This is a dangerous move on my part, but I’m so sick of skirting around things. I’m sick of pretending we’re strangers who don’t know a single thing about each other. And I’m sick of pretending that I’m not already invested in her if she wants me to be. For a full fifteen seconds, Essie remains silent and immobile. I hold my breath, waiting for her to react to my words; she takes a deep, deep breath and then sighs, sucking her bottom lip into her mouth. “Like I said, Mr. Callahan…this is only our second date. Perhaps we should wait to figure out what we hate about each other before we start figuring out what we want.”

  I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed. Right here and now, this is the perfect time for us both to lay our cards on the table. Get everything we want to say off our chests. Be free of it once and for all, but it seems as though Essie is determined to cling onto every last dark secret. I smile sadly at her. “Okay. I won’t say another word about it.”

  “Did you hate each other even when you were kids?” she asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “You and your brother. Surely you got along when you were just kids.”

  “I suppose we did. We were okay until high school, in fact. Then we both met the same girl and things got complicated.”

  Essie lifts one corner of her mouth into a bemused smile. “Ahhh. A girl. Of course. Who was she?”

  “Her name was Hannah. She was the first girl either of us ever loved.”

  “Alex wanted her?”

  I nod. “And she wanted me. It didn’t exactly go well.”

  “He hated that she chose you over him?”

  “Yes. He never forgave her, or me for following through when I realized that she was into me. It was more than just being into each other, though. We were in love. If it had been anything else, I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have been with her. I would have let him have her and kept my mouth shut, and found someone else to be with.”

  “But you were infatuated with her? If you loved her so much, what happened with the two of you?”

  “She died.” I let the information past my lips in a clipped, hard tone. I don’t like talking about Hannah. Really don’t like talking about her. But with Essie, I have to be an open book.

  She nod, and then eats another mouthful of food. Before she slides the fork past her lips, she says, “How?”

  “Car crash.”

  She stops chewing. Stares at me with wide eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “I think he was distracted when Hannah smashed her car into that telegraph pole.”

  “So your Alex, your parents… they weren’t the first people you lost like that?”

  “They weren’t, no. But there was ten years between her accident and Alex’s.” This isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend the evening with Essie, going over old wounds and trying to convince her to tell me about Vaughn. On our date the other night, she never mentioned her brother’s name, but she hasn’t pulled me up on the fact that I used it just now. That says a lot.

  Essie props her elbow up on the table and rests her chin in her cupped palm. Her thick, loose hair flows over her shoulders, and her skin is perfectly smooth and clear. She looks so perfect just sitting there. Not perfect like she’s been airbrushed within an inch of her life. Perfect in that she is exactly who I want to be sitting across from right now, even if we are dancing around such difficult topics.

  “Sorry if this is getting morb
id,” I say. “Car accidents are probably the last thing we should be discussing right now.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “We all have a past. We’ve all done we wish we could undo. Had things happen to us or the people we love that we wish we could take back. Sometimes, I think the entire human race spend their lives regretting things. There isn’t a single day that goes by without it being the worst day in someone’s life, somewhere in the world.”

  “But maybe the best day ever for someone else as well.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, maybe.” She doesn’t seem to want to concede to that one. I’m betting I could count on one hand what Essie would consider her good days since Vaughn died, but I’m determined to change that.

  “Tell me about your brother,” I say.

  For a second I think she’s going to refuse me. That she’s going to completely close off. I’ve witnessed it before, after all. She furrows her brow and presses her lips together, but then she leans her head back and lets out a long sigh.

  “I would be dead if it wasn’t for my brother,” she says. “Vaughn was, by far, the best person I knew. Not to say that he was perfect, he wasn’t, but when everyone else left me or forgot about me, he was always there. I always knew I could count on him for anything. We didn’t have it easy growing up. We were in and out of shelters and always struggling to make ends meet. That’s just how it was for us. But no matter how bad it got, I always knew that it would be okay if we were together.” A sad smile pulls at her lips. “That sounds corny as fuck, but it’s true.”

  I shake my head. “That doesn’t sound corny at all. It sounds like you two meant a lot to each other. He sounds like a great guy.”

  “He was.”

  We sit there for a few moments, neither of us saying anything, and the truth lies there between us like a suffocating shawl. I break the silence, unwilling to let the awkwardness to win out. “Want to watch a movie? I just got the new re-mastered Blu-ray of Bladerunner. If that’s not your cup of tea, I’m sure we can find something else on Netflix.”