The Ex Effect

Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

Ash

“Is that the plane we’re going in?” I pointed at the small propeller plane. It was a stupid question, though, and I knew it. The words painted across the side that read “Matobo Hills” were a dead giveaway. But I’d decided to err on the side of unrealistic hope.

“You can only access the lodge by plane—it’s not accessible by car.”

“Right.” I looked at the plane again, but was not reassured. “And this is the plane we’re going in? This one?”

The pilot nodded at me.

“And you’re sure it’s safe?”

“I’ve been flying this plane to and from Matobo Hills for ten years. Sure, the ride is a little bumpy at times, but there’s nothing to worry about, I assure you.”

I was not assured. “And what kind of plane is this again?”

“It’s a Cessna Skyhawk.”

“Indeed.”

I walked around the plane. But the more I looked, the less reassured I was. When Max had said private plane, maybe stupidly I’d not imagined something so small. It had a propeller. It had little wheel legs that looked as if they could be snapped in a strong breeze.

“I don’t think it’s going to fit all my luggage and gear in,” I said, changing my tune a little.

“You’ll be surprised how much she can take.” The pilot patted the plane affectionately and smiled at me. I did not smile back. I reached for the sunflower tattoo on my arm and rubbed it gently, trying to ease away the panic that was building inside me. I did this whenever I didn’t feel safe. I hated feeling unsafe. Hated it. And I did everything possible to avoid any kind of potentially dangerous situation. No one likes feeling unsafe, but I disliked it more than most, because of what had happened to me and my family. Because I know that life can simply just end. In a sudden, unexpected split second. One moment a person is sitting next to you, breathing and laughing, and the next second that person is gone forever. I looked down at the tattoo and took a deep breath.

“Okay! Okay!” I said out loud, psyching myself up. At least I wasn’t going to be alone on the plane. If I was going to die in this little flying tin box, then at least I would not be dying alone.

I heard a car and turned. Another transfer vehicle had arrived and this had to be Max. My stomach swelled in anticipation. I was dying to put a face to the man I’d been having some of the nicest conversations with, which had progressed into flagrant flirting with a possible cheese date to boot. The man that I’d decided to temporarily drop my detox for because I had this little voice in the back of my head whispering at me, and a flutter in my stomach that had been there for a while, every time I saw his name drop into my inbox.

The back door of the car opened, and he climbed out. First thing I noticed was his height—he was tall. Next was his physique. Broad shoulders, muscular-looking all over. He clearly worked out. It didn’t surprise me. Everyone who lived in Cape Town worked out. It was a prerequisite for living here, almost a clause in some silent contract you signed when you moved to the Cape. His hair was longer than I’d expected, though. For some reason, I’d imagined a clean, short cut. But it wasn’t. It was slightly shaggy and hung around his face. It was an ashy blond color and had the slightest wave to it. I’d also imagined him to be clean shaven, but he wasn’t. He was bearded. It was not one of those huge hipster beads, but it also wasn’t a five o’clock shadow—it was more a three-day shadow. He was still in profile, pulling his bag from the backseat, but then he turned. He was wearing dark glasses. Strands of hair fell into his face as he ran his hand through his hair, pushing it back with a smooth, self-assured sexiness that dripped off him like a wet sponge being squeezed between your hands.

Holy shit, he was hot!

His walk too. This was the walk of a man that knew where he was going— straight to the bedroom, maybe? He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, Adidas sneakers, nothing like I’d imagined. For some reason in my befuddled mind, Maximillian Adam wore a suit and tie. He did not wear casual clothes that made him look as if he was walking down a beach on holiday and any second now about to peel his clothes off to dive into the sea . . . ( or into someone’s bed ). He got closer to me, still closer, and then something peculiar happened. He pulled his sunglasses off and I saw his eyes.

My breath stuck in my throat. I forgot how to breathe entirely for a moment as I locked eyes with him.

I stumbled backwards. “What the—the . . . what?” I’d lost all words.

The hair was totally different! His physique was nothing vaguely like it had been! The face had become more masculine, beard hiding the lines and shapes of the jaw, but those eyes. Those icy blue eyes. I would recognize those eyes anywhere, because I had stared into those eyes for years and those were the eyes that had made regular, and I must say very unwanted, appearances in my dreams too. He was still walking towards me. The boy, now turned very much man, who had broken my heart and sent me into a cursed downward sexual spiral, was walking towards me with those unmistakable eyes. I had no idea what was going on, what to make of it all, and what I was supposed to do, and then he was standing right in front of me. And if there had been the slightest doubt in my mind, it was all gone.

It was him.

I managed a garbled, “What the . . . fuck? Fuck!” before the unimaginable happened. The unimaginable that sent me right back in time fifteen years ago. I stepped backwards, trying to move away from Logan, but the general shock of the moment had me shaking and my knee simply buckled under me. I felt myself falling backwards, and in that slow-motion fall, I imagined how painful it would be to hit my head on the tarmac. As I was contemplating this, something tightened round my wrist. As if a time-machine had been turned on, I was in the corridor at school all over again, the new boy catching me as I almost fell to the floor. The cute new boy grabbing me by the wrist, hoisting me up until we were face to face, eyes locked and falling in love at first sight as we disappeared into each other’s gazes.

He pulled me up. The tarmac was getting further away, but he was getting closer. No, this was not happening. I refused to let this happen. Not this time.

I pulled my arm from his tight grip, yanking it free with such force that my whole body began to fall. And now it was my face that was rushing towards the tarmac.

This was really, really going to hurt. But then I felt two big hands round my waist and my whole body stopped falling. My heart was thrashing inside my chest, adrenalin pumping so hard that it took me a few seconds to realize that I was now suspended, in a dangling position. My fingertips were touching the tarmac—it was all very reminiscent of a few nights ago, when I’d found myself dangling from a chair.

“Shit,” I hissed under my breath, and looked backwards over my shoulder. I knew exactly what kind of position I was in and what view I was currently presenting. It was all very doggy-style-esque, only this time the man whose groin was pressed into my ass was my ex-boyfriend. I stood up as fast as I could, my back smashing into what felt like a solid wall. It was his chest. I froze.

“You okay?” His mouth was so, so close to my ear. Too close. Our bodies were pressed up against each other in the most intimate way possible, his hands still on my waist. This was exactly what I’d been trying to avoid with all my stepping and pulling—and look where it had landed me. Right back to thirteen years ago.

Oh God, he smelled good.

“Ash, are you okay?” he asked again.

“L . . . L . . . Logan?” I heard myself say.

“Hello, Ash.”

I looked down at my waist. His hands had grown. His fingers wrapped round me so completely and I . . . I . . .

“Get your hands off me!” I pushed myself away and then swung round to face him. And this time I found the words.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

He smiled at me. And despite how much he’d changed in other ways, I recognized that smile. It was slightly obscured by the beard, but it was the same. That little lopsided smile I used to tease him playfully about. The one that gave him a deeper dimple in his left cheek than his right, which I’d thought was the cutest thing in the entire world. Those dimples had once made him cute and boyish, but now they were gone, covered by that beard and there was no longer anything cute and boyish about this man standing in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I whipped my head around, frantically looking for Max. Where was he and why, oh why the hell , was my ex-boyfriend here?

“Are you looking for Max?” he asked, his voice familiar. Deeper now, but something about the rhythm and pacing of his words was the same.

“How do you know him?” I reached down and squeezed my waist. Hard. Hoping I would squeeze away the feeling of his hands there, which seemed to be lingering like an echo that would not stop repeating.

He looked down momentarily and his hair—fuck, he had great hair, the kind of hair a woman wants to grab hold of—tumbled into his face. And then he looked up again and locked eyes with me. “ Icy blue meeting warm chocolate .” Cheesy and nonsensical, but that’s what we used to say. And now here he was, looking at me in the exact same way he’d looked at me when he’d first caught me at school all those years ago. But that was an entire lifetime ago.

“I’m Max,” he said softly, his smile nowhere to be seen now.

“No. You’re not. I’ve been speaking to Max for nearly a month now. Not you. What the hell is going on here? I don’t understand.”

“You’ve been speaking to me.”

“No, I haven’t. Your name is Logan M. McAdamson Junior. Not Maximillian Adam—” I stopped and blinked in confusion.

“I dropped the Mc and used my middle name, sort of.”

“Your middle name is Maximus.”

He smiled at me. “You remember how much I hated that, and how you teased me that it sounded like a pompous old guy’s name.”

I shook my head vigorously. “I still don’t understand what’s happening here, Logan.”

“I’ll explain it all to you, but we do have to go now.” He pointed to the plane, and I’d almost forgotten that we were meant to be going anywhere.

Then something hit me as I eyed him up and down, looking so cool, calm and collected. “Why don’t you look shocked to see me?” I paused and let the implications of that sink in. “Wait, you knew you were going to see me?”

He nodded.

“You knew who I was this entire time?”

“No, not this entire time, but when you told me your real name and sent me your ID .”

“That was two whole days ago!” I stared at him in absolute shock.

“And trust me, two days ago I was just as shocked as you are.”

“You’ve known for two days and you didn’t tell me?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when we’re on the plane.”

I shook my head. “No. Explain it to me now. I need to know what’s going on here. I explained my name to you, so why are you no longer Logan Maximus McAdamson Junior?”

“Because I didn’t want to be Logan Maximus McAdamson Junior anymore after my dad had an affair and left my mom and decided he no longer wanted his existing kids either. That’s why I changed my name.”

“Oh.” I was totally taken aback by this response. It had not been at all what I was expecting. “Fine. Okay. Sorry. But still, you should have said something the second you knew it was me.”

“I know I should have.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Would we be standing on this runway right now if I’d told you? Things didn’t exactly end well between us . . .”

I scoffed, shock beginning to give way to anger now. “End well? Are you serious? They didn’t end at all—you just disappeared. I haven’t seen or heard from you in thirteen years, and now here you are standing in front of me with a different name and . . . Oh God . . .” I put my hands over my eyes as if trying to make him disappear again. “We’ve been, you and I . . .” I couldn’t get the words out they were so utterly horrifying.

“Flirting,” he said matter-of-factly, and I took my hands off my eyes and looked at him again.

“Did you know it was me when you were being all flirty and suggesting semi-something-cheese dates?” I asked.

“You were flirty back.”

“That’s not the point. I didn’t know who you were.”

“I only found out who you were two days ago, I swear.” He took a step, a stride, closer to me. He looked stern and serious and, damn, so damn sexy. “I honestly had no idea who you were until you sent me your ID . I’m not lying.”

He wasn’t lying, I knew what he looked like when he was lying and I kind of hated that. I hated that I knew this stranger standing in front of me so well that I could tell whether or not he was lying.

“God!” I exclaimed, and squeezed my waist again. Why did I still feel his hands there? I walked round in a small, tight circle, shaking my head, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Sorry, is there some kind of problem here?” the pilot asked. I swung round and glared at him too.

“You could say that,” I said to the pilot, stopping my second circle.

“What’s the problem?”

I looked around—why, I don’t know. Maybe looking to pull some kind of sense of all this from the world around me. But the tarmac and the sky and the bird pecking on the grass were not going to give me any answers that would help my mind sort through this bizarre moment.

“We really need to get going,” the pilot said.

I bit my lip and nodded once. Then nodded twice, three times. Each nod an attempt to spur me on.

“Ash, come on. We can talk about this all on the plane,” said Logan. The way he said my name, Ash, was exactly like he used to say it and I did not know how to feel about it. No, actually I did. Angry. That’s how I felt.

“Now you want to talk?” My voice came out loudly enough for the pilot to hear. I didn’t care. “Last time I wanted to talk, you just vanished. And now, more than a decade later, you want to talk!”

“I’m not the same kid who didn’t want to talk to you then.”

“Clearly.” I ran my eyes over him. He was no longer a kid. The man in front of me didn’t have one vaguely kiddish thing about him. He was all man, and I was all anger.

The pilot cleared his throat in that uncomfortable way a person does when they know they shouldn’t be listening to what’s going on. “I hate to break up this . . . reunion, but we really do need to get going.”

“Ash,” he implored me in a soft, soothing voice and I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want his soothing tones right now. They were having the opposite effect on me. I found everything about this situation, and about him, as soothing as an annual cervical smear test. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I must have looked a little deranged right now as I inhaled slowly, held for three counts, and then exhaled for six.

I was a professional. I had a job to do. A very important job. So clearly I was getting on a plane with whoever the hell this guy was. I opened my eyes and looked at the pilot, giving him a big smile.

“Lead the way,” I said to the man and walked after him as confidently as I could, despite the very less than ideal situation.