Chapter 6. Alex
ALEX
“Hi.”
Five days of rehearsing my speech for Ophelia, and those are the two letters that come out of my mouth.
I’d like to reach out and snatch them back from the space between us, but I can’t.
She’s frozen in place, staring at me like she’s half a second away from running. “Ophelia, I—”
“Hi?” she whispers, voice hoarse. Just the sound of her aches. “Hi!?”
A lump forms in my throat, sliding down my esophagus until it’s a heavy stone in my stomach.
I’m so fucking sorry.
I run a hand through my hair. “Not my finest work. Fuck, Ophelia. Please hear me out.”
“No,” she croaks, shaking her head. “Please, no.”
I take a step forward. She takes one back. We’ve been here before, on this same path, right after she hid under Carmichael’s couch. Only then, I felt like I was finally on the edge of having her. Now I’m inches from losing her forever.
“Please let me talk.”
“You left me,” she bites out. The very tip of her nose reddens with anger, and I want to ask her how she could dare to do something so endearing while not allowing me to touch her. “You and I are doomed, Alex.”
Right people, wrong universe. That’s what she thinks about us.
It’s bullshit. I need it to be bullshit.
“Come on a drive with me.”
Her spine straightens, shoulders squaring. A determined look solidifies in her gaze, and there’s the woman I fell in love with. She’s so beautiful.
“I’d rather put myself into a blender.”
“I can put some rotating blades in the car, if that’d help.”
“Only if you put your head through them.”
“Oh, you know very well that I’d put my head wherever you ask me to, Ophelia,” I reply, much too quickly.
That has the pink tinge of her nose spreading over her freckled cheeks, and suddenly the low fog that hugs Sorrowsong castle doesn’t feel so cold. “I … that is not … I didn’t mean it like that.”
She’s flustered. The thrill it gives me is dizzying.
I take two cautious steps toward her. She doesn’t bolt, but she does look like she might snap my neck. At least her hands would be the last ones to touch me. “Just let me talk.”
“The time for talking has long passed, don’t you think?”
“No, not really.”
“You’re impossible.”
I chance another step toward her. “Determined.”
“Desperate.”
Another step, and she’s so close I could almost touch her. “Lovesick.”
She flinches at that one, and I’m finally close enough to her to see the hairline cracks in this steely facade she’s put up. She’s pale. The circles beneath her eyes are vicious, every shade of purple a knife to the heart. The hard shell of anger is chipping, and I can see the hurt beneath it.
I’ve been so wrapped up in work, in my sisters, in my mom, in my dad’s disappearance that I hadn’t really appreciated until now what I’ve done to her. Lured her in, spent months convincing her to open up to me, threw it all back in her face.
Jesus fucking Christ, I’m so sorry.
I can see it now, her rebuilding that wall I spent so long dismantling.
But I can’t let that happen. And maybe she’s right, maybe I am desperate, suffocated by the black cloud that just won’t shrink, no matter what I do.
I thought I was doing the right thing by staying away, but it might actually be worse this way around.
The idea of losing her is one thing too many.
“I shouldn’t have left.”
Her laugh is cold and disbelieving. “And it’s taken you this many weeks to realize that?”
I tilt my head back and blow a long breath of smoke away from her, silently asking the universe for help. “That’s not true.”
She’s on a roll now, her tone utterly incredulous. “And the phone number thing?”
“I know, I’m sorry. I had to deactivate my old number. Some-one leaked it. I was going to text you. I tried to text you, I just …”
“Didn’t.”
“Get in the car with me.”
I just need her to get in the car. She can’t run if we’re in the car. The lines between kidnapping and romance seem to be getting increasingly blurred, but oh well. One to tell at our wedding: I held her hostage in my car and forced her to fall back in love with me.
Ophelia shakes her head, so I give up on being fair. “I’ll tell you Mack’s updates if you get in the car.”
That gets her attention. Whisky-colored eyes turn wide and curious. “Why? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
“Tell me here.”
“No, because you’ll run.”
“This is blackmail.”
“It’s negotiation.”
“Fucking hell,” she grumbles, storming over to me.
It’s the greatest victory I’ve had over the past month. My hand lands on her lower back, but she slaps it off as soon as my fingertips make contact with the damp fabric of her jacket.
She’s furious. “Touch me again and I really will shit on your dashboard this time.”
I stuff my hand into my pocket, trying to distract myself from the desperate need to feel the warmth of her skin. “Duly noted.”
She stops in the parking lot, where I unlock a black Land Rover, parked beside Belladonna’s Bronco. “Where’s the dark green one?”
“Uhm …” I scratch the back of my neck, remembering I really am trying not to get a restraining order. Better not tell her I sit in it most nights. “It was a rental, remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” she mumbles, looking a little disappointed. Hope inflates between my ribs. Maybe she thinks about that night as often as I do.
She shoves my hand aside when I go to open the passenger door for her, yanking it open herself.
Her expression is thunderous. “No, Alex. I’m not …
” Her tone switches from angry to the kind of patience you’d give a toddler who’s struggling to understand something, which feels even worse. “I’m not yours anymore.”
I hold two hands up and step back, trying to act like that statement wasn’t a serrated blade to the neck. She goes to get into the car but stops, turning to face me. “Don’t touch me. Don’t talk about us. Don’t take this as a reunion. Tell me about Mack and then let me out of the car.”
“Okay,” I whisper. I don’t allow myself to feel disappointed. It’s more time with her than I deserve, and I know she’s just protecting her heart.
If anything, I respect her for it.
She climbs into the car, and I walk around and do the same. She’s as far to the left of the seat as she could possibly be, shoulder pressed against the window.
Still, with her in the car, safe and unharmed and within arm’s reach, I take my first full inhale since the second week of January.
“That morning, when I woke up and saw what had happened—”
“You’re already in violation of rule two.”
A ragged growl of frustration leaves me as I start the engine. “Seriously?”
“I’m not here to talk about us. And there’s no need to drive anywhere.”
I reverse out of the parking spot, ignoring her protests. If I drive away from the castle for the whole Mack story, we’ll have to fill the silence for the journey home.
“This is kidnapping!” she shouts, reaching down to fiddle with the gear stick. I hit the brakes. I told her months ago that I wanted to kidnap her, so she can’t really claim ignorance.
“Ophelia, what the fuck are you doing?” I ask, as she probably mangles the transmission of the rental car.
“Putting the car in reverse.”
“When we’re doing twenty miles per hour?”
She lets out a cry of frustration, flustered and angry. A red tinge sweeps over her pale face, and I fall in love all over again, painfully and violently. “Why is this thing so hard to move?”
“Because my foot isn’t on the clutch.”
“Put your foot on the clutch, then.”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
She tries the passenger door—locked, obviously, that’s rule number one of kidnapping—and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Alex!”
My tone is butter soft. “Ophelia, my darling.”
She goes quiet as I drive out of the university gates and onto the bumpy country lanes beyond.
The roads are icy, but the car has four-wheel drive.
I revel in the feel of her, the heat of her body, the cinnamon smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing.
“I’m so angry with you,” she says, eventually.
“Yeah, well I’m not delighted with that article you put together and failed to tell me about,” I say, now that I have her trapped. “But I thought we could discuss this like adults.”
She laughs bitterly. “Where was this logic when the article went live? Tell me about Mack.”
I rub my palm over my jaw, the stress I’d momentarily forgotten coming back tenfold. “Brendan traced the texts you’re getting back to Sorrowsong.”
“I know. The pictures of me are taken here.”
“They’re sent from here, too.”
If I thought she couldn’t get any paler, I was wrong. “But … that would mean … your father is here? In Sorrowsong?”
God, I hope not. The thought has kept me up at night, but it feels so remote, so unlikely. “What makes you so sure it’s my father sending these?”
“I’ve barely spoken to another human for four years. Surely, I can’t have many more enemies. It has to be him. I mean there are other options but … he’s the only person who’d want me ruined.”
My expression must betray the fact that I disagree, because a long, tired sigh mists the window on her side, her solemn gaze fixed on the naked branches outside. “You don’t think it is.”
“I think it’s beneath him, tormenting you like this.”
A small smile cracks her frosty expression, and there’s that little glimmer in her eye. “Wow. Thanks. Gonna add not hot enough to be cyberstalked to my list of attributes.”
“You’re definitely hot enough to be cyberstalked. Too hot, even.”
“Aww,” she says, swishing her hair. “Maybe if you got a haircut, you could be cyberstalked, too.”
My laugh bubbles out of me, surprising us both. I don’t need to look in the rearview mirror to know I look a mess. I run both hands through my hair, trying to rescue it. “Better?”