Chapter 34 The night that didn’t happen #3
It isn’t Night but Nori, a surprise I totally welcome right now. I haven’t spoken to her since the evening she did tarot readings for me and my friends.
Nori: Hey, Violet. How are you doing?
Violet: A little upset at this exact moment, but I am absolutely amazing otherwise. How are you?
I hesitate for only a second before typing the rest.
Violet: There is so much I have to tell you. Do you remember my reading? You said I’d meet the love of my life soon. Girl, you were so right. I’ve met him.
Nori: And you’re fine?
Violet: Absolutely. Why?
Nori: I don’t know. I was driving when I had this strange feeling that I should check on you.
I smile. Nori had once mentioned that she sometimes gets premonitions that arrive without invitation, and she finds them impossible to ignore.
Violet: I’m absolutely fine. Don’t worry.
Nori: Good. That’s good.
Violet: We need to hang out soon. There’s so much I want to tell you.
Nori: I’m so happy for you, Violet. I can’t wait to hang out and hear everything about the love of your life. But tonight, you take care of yourself just a little extra. Okay?
Something about the way she says it makes me pause. Maybe Mother Nature is giving her a signal about my failed date.
Violet: I will. But I think the worst of today is already behind me, Nor. Thank you for worrying about me, and I can’t wait to see you soon.
I slide my phone into my bag and step out into the night air, glancing once at the moonless sky before pulling my collar up against the chill.
I’ve barely taken three steps when a familiar face looks back at me from the driver’s seat of a parked car.
Rowan Teager.
What is he doing here?
I walk closer, as we’ve already made eye contact and turning away now would just be rude.
“Rowan, hi.” I stop just outside his door, summoning a smile. “It’s such a surprise seeing you all the way out here, so far from Cherrywood.”
But he doesn’t look surprised. He looks the way he always does, uninterested and distant, and today, maybe even a little angry.
“Are you here alone?” I glance around, half expecting Archer to materialize from somewhere nearby. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without Archer.”
And then I notice him.
Rowan, who is always composed and buttoned-up, looks completely disheveled. His perfectly styled hair is a mess today, as if he’s spent the last hour dragging his fingers through it in frustration. His jacket is gone entirely, and the top button of his shirt is undone. His tie…
My breath stalls.
His distinctly purple silk tie is sitting loose at the collar.
Is this a coincidence?
But then suddenly too many things start overlapping in my head.
Night’s profile name. Rowan’s silence.
Night’s closeness to his brother. Archer’s constant presence around Rowan.
Night’s work with words. Rowan’s media empire.
Night’s unease when discussing people. Rowan’s downright avoidance of anyone outside his family.
Crap.
I can’t stop staring at Rowan, trying to fit his face over the image of the man I’ve silently and completely fallen for.
I must have stared for far longer than normal, since Rowan’s brow lifts in that signature expression that usually reads as mildly irritated. Except tonight, with his hair disheveled and his collar open and that purple tie loose at his throat, it doesn’t read as irritated at all.
It reads as heartbreakingly and unfairly handsome.
Focus, Violet.
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “I asked if you were alone, then kept talking, and now I lost my own question.” I pause. “Are you alone? Or… are you meeting someone?”
Of course I can’t just ask him outright. Are you Night, the man I’ve been falling in love with for three months?
He answers in his signature way. One nod. Then two.
I glance into his car, my eyes searching for anything that would confirm or reject my suspicion. But there’s nothing.
“I hope your meeting went better than mine,” I say carefully. If he was here to meet someone, he never came inside. My gaze had been fixed on that door all evening, and Rowan Teager, with his purple silk tie, had definitely not walked through it.
“This place is too nice to leave without eating.”
I wait for him to confirm or give me an explanation of why he’s outside, but he doesn’t.
“Well, I guess I’ll say good night.” I reach up automatically to push my hair back from my face, and something shifts in his expression as he follow my movements.
His grip tightens on his phone, and the screen comes alive.
My whole world tilts.
The image on his lock screen stops my breath completely.
Rowan is my Night.
Rowan is my Night.
The proof I’ve wanted is right in front of me.
My legs shake as I turn and lower myself into my car. My hands tremble as I reach for the ignition, aware of him watching me. On his screen was my grandmother’s ring, the photograph I’d taken in this very car.
He’d made it his wallpaper.
My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat.
Did he find out I was Purple? Is that why he didn’t walk through that door?
Night had panicked once, when I floated the idea that I might be someone he already knew. Is the thought of me being Purple so devastating for him?
The idea tears through me.
Doubt closes in from every direction until my eyes drop to my phone, which I must have pulled out at some point without realizing. His last message is still there.
SilenceInMidnight: I’m so sorry about tonight, Purple.
I exhale slowly.
No. He doesn’t know I’m Purple. His absence wasn’t because he thought I was Purple but because I, Violet, was inside.
Rowan is the most private person. Of course he doesn’t want to be seen with a date.
He waited out here in the cold for me, Violet, to leave so that he could meet me, Purple.
The irony is almost unbearable.
I can’t sit here any longer and draw out the suspicion, so I turn the ignition. My hands tremble against the steering wheel. I steal one last glance at Rowan, but he isn’t looking up. He’s staring down at his phone, probably waiting for a message from Purple. From me.
My mind is in such chaos right now, true to my name.
I don’t know what to do with any of this. Any other time, I would have called Elodie or Daisy or Willow, let the words spill out of me until they made some kind of sense. But Night is no longer a shapeless idea, a name on a screen.
He is now a person. A person my friends know. A person who flinches at the very idea of being discussed or made into a story. I can’t do that to him.
Rowan and I are such freaking opposites. How the heck did an algorithm that boasts so much accuracy match the two of us?
But then I stop thinking of him as Rowan Teager and start picturing him as Night instead. The hesitant, vulnerable man. For him to join FYS, an online matchmaking website, was nothing short of a miracle.
Has he even told anyone? Most likely not.
Why else would Archer have made those careless jokes about me and online dating that night, if he had any idea his own brother was on the same platform?
Oh, Rowan.
No wonder he panicked when he realized I was inside. But how—
My car.
That’s why he asked about it. But while demanding honesty, Rowan had asked the wrong question.
As I merge onto the highway, a loud horn tears through my thoughts.
Crap. Crap. Focus, Violet.
I shouldn’t be driving. I’m too agitated, too emotional, too tangled up inside my own head to be anywhere near a highway right now.
I hadn’t even planned on taking the highway tonight.
My eyes drop briefly to the overnight bag sitting at the foot of the passenger seat. There’s a new pair of silk pajamas, a sexy but cute black bra and panties set, and tucked in the inner pocket, a small box of condoms.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly planning on having sex with Night on our first meeting, but who knows how the night would unfold.
We might be strangers, but we were close in ways that had nothing to do with having met in person.
So, if the night had carried us somewhere neither of us had planned, if it felt absolutely right in our hearts to make love, I hadn’t wanted unpreparedness to stand in the way of that.
But now, imagining Rowan finding that box, heat floods my cheeks so fast I have to close my eyes.
Which is exactly when it happens. The horn rips through everything.
I don’t have time to think or do anything at all. There is only the blinding wash of headlights in my peripheral vision, before the force of it hits me.
The sudden impact doesn’t feel like anything at first, but then there’s glass everywhere, a loud shriek of tires and a sickening crunch. I only distantly understand this is all happening to my car, which is folding around me like paper.
I try to scream, but the sound gets lost somewhere in my throat.
My head snaps sideways and connects with something hard, and for one terrible moment the world goes white. Not dark, but blazing white followed by pain.
There’s something wrong with my arm. I try to move, but as the pain starts to soften, everything swings, like a boat rocking on still water.
Things start to blur. Thoughts arrive slower.
I can hear something like an engine still running somewhere, or maybe that sound is inside my own head. I can’t tell anymore. I can’t tell anything anymore.
The white is softening to gray at the edges.
Focus, Violet.
But I can’t. I can’t focus.
The gray is spreading, pulling at the corners of my vision until there is nothing, absolutely nothing, left to see and understand.