20
Dean
End of August 18
H e watched the taxi drive away with Ella in the back. He shook his head – more at her than himself. Dean knew grabbing her up on the stage for a speech was over the top, and he knew she would hate him even more than she already kind of did when he kissed her. Let alone feeling her behind. He couldn’t help himself, though. She had dangled herself in front of him the other day, and he’d wanted it.
Though he was an idiot, and he shouldn’t have done it.
The crowd wanted it, and she had agreed to act like a proper couple for the night, Dean thought that would have been part of it. But her creating a scene by pushing him off and running had ruined the whole thing. She didn’t even have the decency to just kiss him back for a moment and let it go. No, she had to arouse suspicions. Made worse by then storming out of the house and kicking off out the front of the house as if people weren’t watching.
He knew she was going home to Matthew. There would be no way she wouldn’t tell him about what Dean did. But the funny thing was that all three of them shared the knowledge that even if Matthew could do something about Dean kissing Ella, he wouldn’t win. Dean and Ella were engaged, and if he wanted, all he had to do was click his fingers, and he could get Matthew eradicated once and for all.
But his heart hurt at the thought because he knew Ella would hurt.
“Dean, what is going on?” Martha approached him. He noticed his mother had also approached.
“Ella… she’s not feeling well, so she’s gone home,” Dean lied. He knew they weren’t convinced.
“I’ll go let your father know.” Amelia nodded at him and retreated inside. Martha stopped him as he made his way back inside, his jaw clenching and unclenching in annoyance.
“That was your first kiss together, wasn’t it? She didn’t want it?” Martha asked him. He looked at his future mother-in-law with pity and wondered if she knew her daughter was in love with someone else; he could break it to her at that moment, give her all the information about Matthew, and break her. But something inside him stopped the words from escaping.
He was allowing Ella this indiscretion until the week before the wedding; then he would tell her that he knew, and she needed to break it off. She would hate him; would ask again for an open marriage, and would probably try and find one last way to get out of the wedding. He wasn’t na?ve to think she wouldn’t, but nothing, nothing, would work. Even if he had to keep her at home, under lock and key until the day they would exchange vows, he wouldn’t let her go. He would not let a silly, little, immature teenage romance impede his money or his company.
But those words kept going around in his mind: ‘That’s it, I’m done.’
It was doing strange things to his heart, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.
∞∞∞
When the party was finished, Dean looked at his phone as both sets of parents settled for coffee around the dining table. All thirty-three of his calls had been ignored. He sent one last message to Ella to tell her he would contact her in the morning, and he pocketed the phone again.
They needed to clear the air; even if he enjoyed it, she didn’t, and if he was to keep her on his side, he would have to apologise. The thing was, he hated to see her hurt, and he didn’t think about that when he was doing what he’d done.
“We need to discuss Ella’s… behaviour tonight,” Anthony addressed them all. Dean couldn’t shift the faintest, weirdest uncomfortable feeling that prickled up his spine and around his neck that they were just treating her like an unruly child. Sure, she had embarrassed Dean, and to a slight extent, the four of them, and it would send ripples of rumours throughout the office on Monday morning – but even Dean knew that would be easy as hell to control. She was still a human, and the more Dean thought about his actions, the more he could see that while he didn’t regret them, they made her uncomfortable. And for that Dean, to an extent, didn’t blame her.
He was confused. It had taken him five and a half hours, and thirty-three empty calls to Ella to realise that maybe he was treating this entire thing badly.
‘That’s it, I’m done.’
She had looked so defeated, so hurt. The way her face wasn’t angry, she wasn’t upset. She was… disappointed. Defeated. She looked so done.
The words kept going round and round like a hamster on a wheel. With every line, it broke another string in his heart.
Maybe he needed to look at this again. Dean wanted the money, the company, and the woman he loved at his beck and call, that had not changed.
But maybe he had been treating Ella all wrong. They had been friends once upon a time; he had chased her around the house while she giggled, he had picked her up when she fell, he had – platonically – kissed her cheek when she had been hurt, he had bought her alcohol on the sly, he had been her protector. They shared baths, her first tastes of alcohol, her first drunken experiences, they had shared secrets, and yet there Dean was, treating her like a piece of meat he’d caught on a Friday in a nightclub.
No wonder she had run off to Matthew so many times, after the way he’d been treating her. Spying on her, trying to keep her away from him subtly…
He needed to talk to her, and fast.
“I can only apologise for what she did tonight, Anthony. I will discuss it with her tomorrow. I can only assume she’s gone home to sleep. It’s best for everyone if we let it be for tonight, and deal with it in the morning,” Adrian responded. Dean agreed with the man for once. Nothing good would come out of talking to her now, even if she responded.
Quinn.
He hadn’t even thought of her in all of this, Dean realised. Maybe that told him something; she wouldn’t be happy when she heard about what happened earlier that night.
“I will talk to Ella tomorrow,” Dean offered. “She’s more likely to speak to me, anyway.”
He knew he had to be in full panic mode in the morning; if he knew Ella anymore, he knew tonight would have been the final straw for her in all this mess.
∞∞∞
“Dean, you’re a fucking idiot,” Quinn scolded him. He’d barely been in the house an hour when she demanded to know what had happened.
“Yeah, thanks for the pep-talk,” he scoffed before knocking back a glass of whisky.
“I mean, do I need to be worried—”
“Fuck’s sake, Quinn.”
“Well, this is getting out of hand, isn’t it? I know we can’t, you know, fully be together, but you kissed her. Touched her? Dean, when you told me you needed to ‘up the ante’ or whatever, I didn’t expect this to happen—”
“Shut up,” he snapped at her. She was being… rude to him, and he wasn’t going to sit there and take it.
“Dean.” Her tone turned soft, and he softened himself when she snaked her arms around his middle. Her scent wafted into his nose, it danced its way into his brain and took hold. “You told me that you love me, not her. Maybe it’s time to give up on the deal.”
But the thing she didn’t know was that Dean was now resistant to her charm. She was only good for one thing. He held no real love for her; he only wanted Ella. Quinn was only giving him what Ella refused to, and after the scene earlier that night, the illusion was shattered. Now he’d kissed her, and though Ella didn’t love him, Dean didn’t want another woman.
“I get it, Quinn, you hate this. So do I. But it’s going to happen, so you’re gonna have to make peace with it. Make your decision and either stick around or get out.”
She stiffened. The past few weeks had been difficult for Dean; he had been trying to get rid of her for a while. She was good for one thing only: sex.
All he ever heard was how it was for Quinn and how she could not carry on like they had been if it meant she got pushed to the side. The other night, she had thrown the idea around that he could kill Ella off after a week or two and make it look like an accident so they could be together, and everything would still work out. Dean knew he would never have it in him to do such a thing; he loved Ella. But that was precisely why Quinn had suggested it, and he knew it. Jealousy was a powerful thing, just like love.
Killing was in his father’s nature – and even then, he would hire someone to do his filthy work. Dean was on the other side of the spectrum, and everyone knew it.
It was that day that he’d tried to push her away, but it wasn’t working. Just like tonight was for Ella, he knew this was his last straw as well.
“I know how hard this is—”
“Do you, Quinn? Because all I’ve heard recently is how this affects you. All I ever hear is how you feel and what you want. I’m trying to do three things here: keep my company and job afloat, juggle Ella and her shitstorm, and you. Let alone adding a fucking wedding to that. You think you have it hard? Imagine what I’m going through. Or even what fucking Ella is going through. I might despise what she’s doing but she has it fucking harder than you!”
He didn’t have to turn around to know she was scowling at him like a child. He sensed she had some feelings for him, but since coming back into his life, he knew she was after his money, and that was why she stuck around. Whatever they had back at university was long gone. She was annoying and seemed to stick to him like fucking superglue. But he couldn’t deny she was good at scratching the itch that came whenever he thought about Ella. All he had to do with Quinn was kiss her neck or buy her something small from the local jewellery shop and she would undress. She stuck around for it, and he was satisfied every night. For now, it was a mutually beneficial relationship.
They both knew they were slowly creeping up to the end of the line. He wanted Ella and they both knew it. But her heart was firmly secured with the orphan boy he loathed.
Loathed was a bad choice of word, Dean knew. He was just plain jealous.
“Maybe it’s best if I leave and come back—”
“Don’t come back.” Dean felt the proverbial apron strings snap when his words escaped. He hated doing it because he did love Quinn at one time, but it was a long-lost love, the one that got away. If he didn’t stop things at that moment, he never would, and he knew it would not end well for anyone in the future.
She didn’t say anything to him, she just packed her things and walked out. It left Dean with a sense of impending doom as to where things would go for him next.