Chapter 8
Eight
Faye
When’s your family coming by to take care of you?
One second, I’m thinking about my two favorite things: books and my favorite fictional characters.
And don’t tell anyone, but even though I don’t like watching it—like really don’t like watching it—my hockey boys are my favorites.
They’re sweet and strong with wicked minds and very skilled…parts.
And then they’re whooshed right out of my head…
By my past.
So suddenly it feels as though my torso has been flayed open, my insides torn out, leaving my wounded heart to bleed out on the floor.
Because it hits me right then.
What the fire means.
What I’ve lost.
Not just my computer or my favorite pair of cozy lounge pants or my special edition hardcovers.
But Nana’s recipe book and my baby album and the pictures of my parents and the necklace my mom had intended to put on me just before I walked down the aisle at my wedding but never got the chance to because instead she gave it to me on her death bed.
And Fluffy’s—my grandma’s pup, who really became my dog when I moved in to take care of her after Nana got sick—collar and her ashes because she passed not long after Nana did and the tiny clipping of hair the vet saved so I would never forget the exact golden shade of her fur.
I didn’t just lose my home.
I lost everything.
I close my eyes against the sudden onslaught of emotions, the tears burning the backs of my eyes, clogging my throat. I clench my teeth, trying to hold back the sobs, and I don’t even realize I’m clenching my hands into fists too until I feel warm fingers on mine.
“What is it, Red?” he murmurs.
“Red?” I ask quietly.
“Your hair.” He tugs a strand, and my eyes fly open to see him wearing a rueful smile. “Not very original, I know.”
Baby had phantom fingers sliding down my spine.
But Red…Red is more.
Red is different.
Red is a nickname personalized for me (however original or not). But it’s not just a token endearment.
It’s…
Yeah, it’s more.
“What is it, baby?” he presses.
There those phantom fingers go again, stroking, caressing, drifting carelessly up along the insides of my thighs.
“Why do you keep calling me, baby?” I ask, ignoring the sensation.
Definitely ignoring the shiver that wants to skate over my skin in response to his husky question.
Instead—and I’m not saying this is remotely healthy—I slap a lid on my past and stare up at him, waiting for him to answer me.
Waiting and watching.
There’s an interesting play of emotions crossing his face.
I’m not sure I can tease them out—maybe a bit of guilt, maybe some fear, perhaps some resignation. But there is one I’m certain of…
Heat.
And that seems to be the emotion he settles on.
Mostly because he murmurs, “You know why.”
I mean…I know why one of my MMCs might be here, might have heat sliding through his emerald-green eyes.
But it doesn’t make sense.
I’m me.
He’s him.
And…maybe something that makes me feel even worse than the fact that I’m me and he’s him is—
“Aren’t you with someone?” I ask quietly.
He withdraws his hand and the loss of that contact, that closeness is…
Well, I don’t want to think about why it hurts.
“No.”
Okay, so the ex is the ex.
Something unfurls in me…at least until I remember what I saw in the kitchen just yesterday.
“A woman then?”
Something else crosses his face—and it’s not heat. “No,” he says. “I don’t have a woman.”
“Right,” I mutter, that piling on, adding to the wealth of shittiness currently swirling around my insides, setting the lid I’d slapped on it earlier rattling, threatening to bounce itself free, to allow those emotions loose again.
“What?” he asks, and I don’t miss he’s looked away from me, his gaze dropping to his lap.
There’s all the proof I need.
He’s lying.
He has a woman in his life and yet, he’s here with me.
What. A. Jerk.
And I know I should focus on keeping that lid secured, on keeping myself together.
Especially when he’s asking dangerous questions and I’m close to the edge, close to losing it in front of this man who is him.
While I’m me.
But I don’t.
Because instead, when he orders, “Tell me, Red,” the fire inside me bursts free.
That tone.
Him presuming to order me around—
The lid flies free.
Hits the floor with an ear-shattering clang.
“I saw you!” I snap. “You were with that woman in your kitchen just last night! And now you’re sitting beside me, making no sense and you’re touching me and calling me baby and looking at me with heat in your eyes like she didn’t exist.”
I know what it’s like to feel that way.
To disappear so completely no one sees me.
I felt it when my dad died, when my mom lost herself in her grief.
I felt it again when my mom passed, Nana doing her best to go through the motions for me, but knowing that with just the two of us, we wouldn’t ever be the same.
Then I felt it again when she was diagnosed, when she slowly wasted away, when I eventually lost her too.
And I felt it…
No, I feel it right now.
This beautiful man sitting next to my bed, touching me then not, and lying to me.
His eyes spark with anger and I brace.
Because the emerald depths have flash frozen.
He opens his mouth.
But his words are so damned far from what I expect—which, for the record, is a harsh retort designed to shove me firmly back in my place—that I can’t breathe for a second.
I can’t think.
Then I absolutely lose hold of the sadness inside me.
So when he says, “That woman is my wife,” I burst into tears.
Like a complete and total psycho.