Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Jake had the horrible feeling of his stomach sinking so deeply that it turned into a lead weight anchoring him to the sidewalk. He watched Rafe march away, shoulders tight, steps clipped. It felt as if he were walking away on a much more profound level, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He’d already done it. His stupid, desperate, uncontrollable actions were what had driven Rafe away.
He couldn’t move until a man who had clearly had too much to drink nearly plowed into him as he left the hotel.
“Wha’chit, mate,” the man slurred, sending Jake a nasty look as he lumbered on.
Jake shook his head, immediately ignoring the man. He’d screwed up royally, profoundly. He’d spent the majority of his life screwing up in one way or another, and for what? To get people to like him? To convince people he didn’t care about, most of whom he would never see again, that he was something more than what his godawful family always told him he was.
It needed to stop. Even before coming to England and seeking Rafe’s help, he’d known it had to stop. He’d let things spiral for too long and now he was dangling over the abyss of it being too late. He had to make things up to Rafe first, then figure out how he was going to set the rest of his life in order.
He started forward after Rafe, then thought better of it and headed across the road and back to Cupid’s Arrow. Rafe needed time to get over his initial, justified bout of fury. Going after him immediately would just prolong the fight instead of giving things a chance to simmer down. He’d let Rafe drive home on his own, then he’d approach him to try to sort everything out.
Cupid’s Arrow was as loud and effervescent as it had been half an hour ago, but instead of seeing it as a place teeming with life and possibility, Jake was annoyed by the noise and the immediate attention he gained as he pushed his way through the edge of the dancers in his attempt to find Nally. Someday, he’d have to come back here with Rafe just to have a good time, but now he just wanted to leave.
“Nally!” He had to shout over the thumping music to be heard when he found Nally in a sandwich between two older, buff men. He had his hands in the air and looked like he was having the time of his life as the two, grizzled guys rubbed all over him. Nally Hawthorne definitely had a type. “Nally!”
Nally stopped his shimmying and flirting to turn to Jake. His giddy, pink-cheeked smile dropped when he saw the seriousness on Jake’s face. “What happened?” he shouted back.
The bears he’d been dancing with closed ranks, shifting to half shield Nally protectively between them, ready to beat the competition off with a stick. One of them even slipped an arm around Nally’s waist and glared at Jake, as if to dare him to try to take Nally away.
Nally ate it up, of course. He leaned into the man who had his arm around him and gave the man seductive doe eyes before lifting to his toes to whisper in the man’s ear. The man nodded at whatever he’d said but kept his arm where it was and glared at Jake all the same.
“Where’s Rafe?” Nally shouted, his voice suddenly overly loud as one song ended, before the next began.
“We had a fight,” Jake said, also too loud. “He went home.” The next song started up, the temporary pause in jumping, writhing movement ended, and Jake had to shout to say, “I need you to take me home.”
“What?” Nally blurted, not so much because he couldn’t hear, but because he was incredulous.
Jake moved closer to him, which caused the two bears to puff out their chests and stare daggers at Jake. “I need you to take me home,” he repeated. “I have to make things right between us. I screwed up, and I need to fix it.”
Nally sighed heavily, though Jake didn’t hear the sound. He rolled his eyes, then reached up to grab his bears behind their necks and pull them down so he could talk to both of them over the noise. Jake couldn’t help but grin. For all his elven good looks, Nally had the makings of a man who topped from the bottom.
The bears nodded, phones were pulled out and numbers exchanged, or so Jake assumed, and with a pair of quick, sloppy kisses, complete with a shocking amount of groping, Nally broke away from his dance floor finds and walked with Jake out of the club.
“You owe me for this,” Nally said once they were on the sidewalk, his voice too loud at first as he adjusted to the change in volume. “You really, really owe me for this. I was about to get spectacularly laid. That was going to be my first threesome, my first Nally sandwich.”
“Sorry,” Jake said as they strode quickly along the street to where Nally had parked. “I’d make it up to you by doing the job myself, but I don’t think your bears or Rafe would like that.”
It was supposed to be funny, but Nally glared at him. “What did you do to screw things up with Rafe so badly that he abandoned you in London in the middle of the night?”
It was the question Jake had hoped Nally wouldn’t ask, but he knew he couldn’t avoid it. “I lied to him,” he said, starting with the broadest explanation and hoping Nally wouldn’t ask questions.
“How did you lie to him?” Nally pressed on, immediately dashing his hopes.
“Spectacularly. Epically.”
Jake waited until they were in the car and Nally had navigated out of the garage and onto the congested London streets before explaining the whole thing. He hoped that the logistics of getting from the garage near Cupid’s Arrow to the complicated and inadequate roads that would take them back to Hawthorne House would make Nally forget his question.
He had no such luck.
“Well?” Nally asked a good ten minutes after the original question had gone unanswered. “Why am I driving home with you right now instead of being spit-roasted by two perfectly charming barristers?”
“Those two were barristers?” Jake asked, squirming in his seat.
Nally sent him a brief, flat “don’t change the subject” look before focusing on the road again.
“Okay, okay,” Jake said, then took a deep breath. “When I asked Rafe if he would marry me so I could get a visa to move over here, I promised him something in return.”
“Which was?” Nally asked, arching one eyebrow. For someone who was barely twenty-one, Nally could look uncannily like a middle-aged man sometimes. It had to be the aristocratic blood.
Nally cleared his throat when Jake delayed answering.
“Okay,” Jake said, holding up his hands. “I promised him that I could get him an internship working with Hélène Rénard, the renown French glass artist.”
“I know who Hélène Rénard is,” Nally said.
“Then you know how big a deal it is for someone like Rafe to score an internship with her.”
“Yes,” Nally nodded. “It would be the chance of a lifetime.” He peeked at Jake for a second, then looked forward and asked, “So what went wrong?”
Jake swallowed. “We ran into Hélène outside the hotel across the street from the club.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know her,” Jake said, his body going hot. He suddenly felt like he needed to pee, too, which didn’t help the situation at all.
“What do you mean you don’t know her?” Nally asked. “You promised Rafe an internship in exchange for marriage.”
“And I don’t know her,” Jake repeated. “At all. Which Rafe just found out when Hélène stared at me like I was the paperboy.”
Nally frowned. A moment later, his expression popped with understanding. “You didn’t,” he said breathlessly.
“Yeah. That’s the whole problem. I did.”
Nally clenched his jaw and shook his head. “You lied to my brother to get him to marry you by promising something you never had any intention of delivering on, that you didn’t have any possibility of delivering on, and now he’s not speaking to you.”
“That pretty much sums it up,” Jake sighed.
“Were you ever planning to tell him you’d manipulated him into sticking his neck out for you and risking the wrath of the Home Office for marital fraud?” he asked, his voice rising. “Or were you just going to keep telling him that his golden opportunity to work with one of the giants of glass art was right around the corner indefinitely?”
Jake leaned back and rubbed his face, suddenly so exhausted he could barely think. It wasn’t the exhaustion of just one night either. He’d been running on this hamster wheel for most of his adult life and he didn’t know how to get off. At the moment, he was pretty sure he’d reached the point in the viral video where the hamster tripped and went spinning around the wheel, held on by nothing but centripetal force, right before being thrown off into the woodchips.
“I have a problem, okay?” he told Nally, not opening his eyes. “I’m a compulsive liar. I haven’t had an official diagnosis?—”
“A psychiatric evaluation, maybe?” Nally asked bitterly.
Jake opened his eyes and glanced at him. “I have a problem and I haven’t known how to get help for it.”
“Does Rafe know?” Nally snuck another look at him.
“Yes,” Jake said, feeling glad that he could say something that might redeem him a fraction in Rafe’s brother’s eyes. He liked Nally, liked the entire Hawthorne family, which he still couldn’t believe, and he hated the sick feeling in his gut that he’d let them down. “We’ve talked about it before. It probably comes from my need to please people and not have them call me a perverted faggot who’s going to hell, like everyone, including my parents, did all through my childhood.”
Nally’s tight body eased a little, and what Jake could see of his expression in the dark of the road showed a little sympathy.
“Whatever started it doesn’t matter,” Jake went on. “I’m trying to break the pattern. I like Rafe. I really like him. I think I’m falling in love with him.”
Nally snapped a quick, wide-eyed look at Jake.
“I don’t want things to go on like this,” Jake said. “Yes, I fucked things up royally, but I want to change, I want to be a better man. For him.”
Nally clenched his jaw as he made a turn onto the highway that would take them the last stretch home. “I want to believe you,” he said, “but that sounds like a line from a Hollywood movie. How do I know you’re not just lying to me and telling me what you think I want to hear so that I think you’re the good guy again?”
Jake winced. “I know I haven’t earned your trust,” he said. “If I had it in the first place, I know that’s broken now and that I have to earn it back.”
“Right in one,” Nally grumbled.
“I don’t know how to do that other than to keep moving forward with things,” Jake went on. “I’m falling for Rafe. I still want to marry him, and yes, that’s still for selfish reasons. But I want to make it worth his while in any way I can. And I?—”
He stopped, shocked by the words that had been about to come out of his mouth. He hadn’t known how he felt until just that moment, and he wasn’t sure he trusted those feelings one bit.
“I like your family,” he went on, speaking slower and really listening to himself. “I’ve never had any sense of family the way it’s supposed to be until meeting the Hawthornes. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve never had to consider anyone outside of myself and the very few people I trust. I don’t want to let any of you down.”
Silence filled the car as they drove on. They were far enough from London proper that the highway was sparsely traveled. It was just the two of them and the occasional pair of headlights going in the other direction. The darkness was disorienting enough that Jake felt suspended in the moment.
“I want to believe you,” Nally said at last, calmer but still firm, “but I have to protect my family, too.”
“I know,” Jake said quietly. “And I’m glad you feel that way. I want them protected, even if that means protecting them from me.”
Nally nodded in reply, but that was the end of the conversation. Neither of them said anything else as they finished the drive to Hawthorne House.
The majestic, old building looked as ancient as its bones as they approached it near two in the morning. During the day, the modernizing renovations were more prominent, but at night, in the shadows of the wee hours, the black silhouette brought the age of the house to the fore.
“Hawthorne House isn’t haunted, is it?” Jake asked as they got out of the car and headed to the family door.
“It’s definitely haunted,” Nally said, marching ahead of him.
“Have you ever thought of bringing in a ghost hunter?” Jake asked, following him.
Nally didn’t answer. He unlocked the family entrance, which Jake had never known to be locked before, but which made sense in the middle of the night, and didn’t look back at him as he headed down the hall to his flat.
Jake sighed and rubbed his face, then headed in the opposite direction, toward his flat. He was at the end of the hall with the stairs, and after hesitating near his door for a moment, he changed his mind and headed upstairs, then down the hall to Rafe’s flat. He didn’t want the whole thing hanging over the two of them for a second longer than it needed to. He’d screwed up, and he wanted to make it better immediately.
He reached Rafe’s door and knocked quietly.
Nothing happened.
He knocked a little louder, then glanced up and down the hall, worried about waking the other family members. When Rafe didn’t answer his door, Jake tried the handle.
Of course, it was locked. Of course.
Jake sucked in a breath, checking the hall again, and knocked louder. “Rafe?” he called out quietly. “If you’re up, can you let me in so we can talk?”
He held his breath, listening. He even pressed his ear to the door to try to hear inside the apartment. He swore he heard movement of some sort, but it was faint and didn’t last long. It could have been Nally’s ghosts.
There was no point in trying anymore that night. Jake pulled back from the door and slumped down the hall, heavy with defeat.
He couldn’t keep going like this. This wasn’t the life he wanted to live. He hated the constant feeling of dread as he waited for his lies to catch up with him. He’d told so many, especially in the last ten years. It was a miracle that he still had any clout in the glass world. Hélène wasn’t the only person he’d pretended to know or the only name he’d slipped onto his resume and hoped no one would check up on.
His entire career was a carpet of exaggerations and outright lies. Rafe was right about him upstaging him in Corning. He’d pushed his way in front of so many other deserving artists to grab someone’s attention first because deep down, he believed he was shit and they wouldn’t notice him unless he snagged attention first.
It had to end. As he settled back in his flat, stripped out of his clothes, used the bathroom, then flopped straight into bed, he knew it had to end. The lies stopped now, and as soon as the sun came up, he would put as much effort into making things right with Rafe as a way to start the next chapter of his life as he’d put into concocting wild falsehoods to smooth over the pain that he’d spent his life desperately trying to bury.
The sun came up sooner than Jake was ready for. He’d barely slept at all and definitely didn’t feel rested enough to drop to his knees and beg Rafe’s forgiveness, but life rarely waited for the best moment before happening.
He dragged himself out of bed, showered and dressed, then made himself a cup of instant coffee. Instant coffee was an insult to the bean, but that seemed to be all that British households had in his experience. He couldn’t eat anything to go with it, and by the time he ventured out of his flat and began his search for Rafe, and maybe some knee pads and lip balm for all the groveling he knew he had to do, his stomach was sour and his nerves frayed.
He found Rafe way sooner than he expected. It was Saturday, which meant no classes at the arts center, since it was still summer, but as Jake walked into the front hall, wondering if the office would be open so he could use the coffee maker, Rafe was there.
They both stopped dead at the sight of each other. Rafe was walking out of the corridor on the other side with a box of something that must have been delivered the day before. He looked as rough as Jake felt. His eyes flashed with intense emotion for half a second before his expression turned guarded.
“Morning,” he muttered, then walked on toward the front door.
“Rafe, I’m sorry,” Jake jumped after him. He wanted to make his apology quickly and earnestly. “Can we talk?”
Rafe stopped just inside the door with a sigh. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before stepping to the side to set his box on a display table near one of the windows. “Fine,” he said, crossing his arms. “Talk.”
It wasn’t the reassuring start Jake had hoped for. Rafe was still angry. Whether anything he said would make the slightest difference depended on how angry.
Jake took things slowly, gathering his thoughts and really thinking about what he wanted to say as he closed the distance between himself and Rafe.
“I want to make things better between us,” he said, trying to keep himself calm and resist the urge to spin whatever tale he thought would bring Rafe back around to his side. He met Rafe’s steely eyes and went on. “I fucked up. Badly. I’m more sorry for that than you can know. I’m afraid to say anything because I don’t trust myself not to fall into old habits and make shit up to fix things. I don’t know what to do. I just know that I have to make things right, one way or another.”
He was seriously worried that he might throw up, the moment was so tense. Coffee had been a terrible idea.
Rafe drew in a breath, arms still crossed, just staring at him. Jake’s hands went numb. His lungs burned with the need to say something and expel air. His brain shuffled through a dozen different platitudes that might make Rafe smile again. He wanted to desperately to talk his way out of the situation. Anything would have been better than just standing there with Rafe watching him. But if he wanted to have a chance of proving himself to the man he was increasingly sure he loved, he had to say and do nothing.
Finally, after what felt like a decade, when Jake was about to crack, Rafe breathed in like he was going to say something.
He never had the chance to speak, though.
A knock on the front door snagged both of their attention, snapping the moment. They turned in tandem to find Hélène Rénard rapping on the front door’s window, then cupping her face to the glass and peering inside.
“ All? !” she called through the door. “Good morning. I see you. I have come to view your glass.”