Chapter 43 Rae
RAE
From: Jillian Pierce (jillybeanxo@)
Subject: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU
The flight home is seven hours of exquisite torture.
Lukas sits in the same seat he occupied on the way here, just a few feet away from me, but mentally, we might as well be on different planes or different planets altogether. He opens his laptop before we’ve even reached cruising altitude and proceeds to ignore me completely.
I don’t know what I expected. I guess some kind of conversation, at the very least. Is that really so much for a girl to ask for?
But I don’t even get that. All I get is the steady tap-tap-tap of his keyboard and the occasional grunt when he reads something that displeases him. Not exactly “baring our hearts.”
I turn toward the window and watch France shrink into a patchwork of greens and browns, then disappear entirely beneath a blanket of clouds.
My dress has mostly dried by now, but it’s stiff and uncomfortable against my skin. The flight attendant offered me a change of clothes when we boarded, but I declined. Some perverse part of me wants Lukas to have to look at the evidence of what he did. What he almost did, rather.
Not that he’s looking. But, like, if he does.
I squirm in my seat, and the movement sends a pulse of remembered sensation through my core. His thigh. The pressure. I ground against him like I’d lost my damn mind, like a cat in heat.
Yet I can’t bring myself to regret it.
As the Atlantic passes beneath us, I try to sleep. But every time I close my eyes, I’m back in that grotto, with Lukas’s mouth on mine, his hand in my hair, the hard heat of him pressed against my palm…
When I take you.
Not if.
When.
Somewhere over Greenland, the flight attendant brings me a blanket. I wrap it around my shoulders and stare at the back of Lukas’s head. His silver hair is still perfectly in place, not a strand out of order.
Meanwhile, I look like something the cat dragged in, drowned, took a nibble of, and then decided wasn’t worth eating.
Come to think of it, that’s exactly what happened.
The laptop screen casts blue light across his face. His brow furrows at something he’s reading. Whatever it is, it’s not good news.
Not your problem, I remind myself. He’s made that abundantly clear.
But I still can’t stop watching him.
The hours crawl by. I doze fitfully, dream of drowning, and wake with a gasp. The flight attendant brings food I can’t taste. The sun sets over the horizon. It’s pretty, but I feel absolutely nothing when I look at it.
Finally, the pilot announces our descent. Lukas closes his laptop and tucks it into his briefcase. He still hasn’t looked at me. Not one single, solitary glance since we left the grotto.
The landing is smooth. The plane taxis to a private hangar, where two black SUVs wait on the tarmac, engines running, windows tinted dark.
Lukas rises from his seat and buttons his jacket stiffly. He gathers his briefcase and checks his phone. Only when there’s nothing else for him to do does he turn in my direction.
But even so, he still doesn’t quite look at me. His gaze settles somewhere past my left shoulder. “My driver will take you home,” he says. “I have business.”
That’s it. No explanation. No acknowledgment of what happened between us.
Once again, I am dismissed.
“Of course,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds distant, like it belongs to someone else. “Business.”
Lukas doesn’t respond. He’s already walking toward the door, phone pressed to his ear, barking something in Russian that I can’t understand.
I gather my ruined dress around me and follow.
The SUV drops me at my building just as the last light is draining from the sky. I trudge up the stairs because the elevator is broken again. By the time I reach my floor, my legs feel like they’re made of Play-Doh.
As I fumble with my keys and shoulder the door open, I’m mentally cataloguing the order of operations: shower, wine, bed, existential crisis, repeat. Can’t wait.
What I’m not expecting is the lamp in my living room to already be on.
Or for someone to be sitting on my couch.
The sound that comes out of my mouth is not dignified. It’s more like the primal shriek in a slasher film, right before the final girl gets stabbed through the chest.
“Jesus Christ, Rae!” Jillian leaps off the couch. “It’s me! It’s just me!”
I’m clutching the doorframe because it’s the only thing keeping me upright. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my eyeballs.
“What the fuck, Jill?” I wheeze. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“I almost gave you a heart attack?” Jillian plants her hands on her hips.
Now that I’ve somewhat calmed down, I see her face: She’s furious.
Her red hair is pulled back in a sloppy bun and there are dark circles under her eyes like she hasn’t slept in days.
“Are you kidding me right now? You disappear off the face of the earth for three days—no text, no call, nada, zilch—and I’m the one who needs to explain herself? !”
I blink at her, still trying to get my pulse under control. “I… what?”
“Three days, Rae.” She holds up three fingers, jabbing them in my direction. “One, two, three. Seventy-two hours. I called you, like, ninety-five times. I texted you so much I’m pretty sure I developed carpal tunnel. And what did I get in return? Nothing. Radio silence. I thought you were dead.”
Guilt overwhelms me. In all the chaos of France, I completely forgot that my phone had been useless overseas. I sure as hell can’t afford an international plan, so all weekend long, it’s been nothing but a very expensive rectangular paperweight.
“Bean, I’m so sorry. I didn’t have service. I was in France.” I pause and frown. “But how did you know I was back…?”
“Because I’ve been obsessively refreshing your location, you ding-dong. The second your cell came back online and pinged a tower, I came to find you. That’s the only reason I knew you were even alive.”
I gawk at her in disbelief, but she rolls her eyes like I’m overreacting.
“I’m a reporter, Rae. It’s literally my job to find people who don’t want to be found.
” She crosses her arms. “Also, you’re my best friend, and I was concerned that Lukas Lazarev had murdered you and dumped your body in the French Riviera. ”
The mention of Lukas’s name makes me squeamish in a way I’m not ready to examine. “Well, he didn’t murder me,” I say weakly. “Obviously.”
“Ob-vi-ous-ly,” Jillian back-sasses. “But he did take you to France. What the hell is that about?!”
Excellent question. Where do I even start?
“It’s… complicated,” I say.
Jillian’s eyebrow arches so high it disappears into her hairline. “You vanished to another continent with a man who may or may not have killed his wife, and ‘complicated’ is the best you can do?”
“Can I at least take a shower first?” I sweep a hand over the swamp-creature aesthetic I’m currently rocking. “I smell like booty.”
Jillian’s scowl softens, but only marginally. “Fine. But I’m timing you. You have fifteen minutes, and then you’re telling me everything. Every. Single. Thing.” She spins me around and gives me a gentle push toward the bathroom. “Go. Tick-tock.”
I shuffle down the hall, my sandals squelching against the hardwood. The bathroom door pulls shut behind me, and I catch my reflection in the mirror.
I look even worse than I thought. My mascara runs in two black rivers down my cheeks, my T-zone is a dermatological disaster, and my hair is—well, the less said about it, the better.
As for this dress, it hangs off me in wrinkled defeat, one strap dangling by a thread, the hem crusted with what I really hope is just mud.
I peel it off and let it puddle on the floor.
The shower is scalding. I stand under the spray and let the water try to sluice away the grime of travel, the salt of the grotto, the lingering phantom sensation of Lukas’s hands on my body.
It doesn’t work, obviously. You can’t scrub off desire.
But I do give it my best shot. I wash my hair twice, condition it once, and spend an embarrassing amount of time just standing there with my forehead pressed against the tile, replaying every moment of the last seventy-two hours. The water is running cold before I finally turn it off.
I wrap myself in my rattiest towel and pad back to my bedroom. Jillian has decided to make herself useful in my absence, because there’s a glass of wine waiting on my nightstand and my comfiest sweats laid out on the bed. I don’t deserve her.
I pull on the sweats and an oversized t-shirt, then twist my wet hair into a messy knot on top of my head. The wine goes down smooth and easy. Too easy, probably, given that I haven’t eaten anything substantial since yesterday.
When I finally make my debut into the living room, Jillian is perched on the edge of my couch. “Talk,” she commands without preamble.
So I do.
I tell her about the vineyard, the dinner, the wine cellar where Lukas almost kissed me and then roared at me to leave. I tell her about the midnight kitchen encounter, the three chimes of the grandfather clock, and how he fled afterward like a bat out of hell.
She takes it all pretty calmly. At least, until I tell her about the grotto.
“He just watched you drown?” Jillian’s voice pitches up incredulously. “He stood there and did nothing?!”
“For a minute, yeah.” I take a long, fortifying sip of wine. “Then he pulled me out and told me he didn’t kill Elena. Not like I think he did, anyway.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“No idea. He didn’t exactly elaborate.” I stare into my glass. “He was too busy grinding me against a tree.”
Jillian chokes on her wine. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah.” I can feel the heat creeping up my neck. “It got a little wild.”
She sets her wine down and drags my hands into her lap. “Sunshine, this is all getting a little wild. I’m worried for you.”