Gant
‘Elle was there for me financially.” Hale's words dance around my brain. ‘She lent me the money.’
How did she have the money?
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” is still strumming along in the background, and it clicks. The ring. The ring I slid onto her finger when I told her pretending is merely practice.
My doll’s so smart. She got her money and shattered my heart because that diamond is irreplaceable, regardless of it never belonging to me.
“Hale didn’t fire me, so unless you order a drink, you can’t stay at the bar,” she says with an amazing amount of bravado. And naivety.
I don’t give a fuck what Hale says. He may be Beaulieu and Libellules’s king, but his audacity to allow my queen to stand at his side where she doesn’t belong is an unforgivable blasphemy and his word means fuck all.
“Order a drink or get away from the bar,” she snaps. “Now.”
My voice is patient and pleasant even when I say, “Last chance, Dove.”
“Or what? You’re going to finish me off for good? Maybe a bullet through my head instead of glass through my feet this time?”
A shard gets stuck in my throat. It hurts, and it hurts even more when I have to explain, “I’d never hurt you, Elle. Never intentionally. Not ever again.”
“Then what are you doing now? What do you call this?” Her eyebrows fly up, but then they scrunch and…pain contorts her features. “Just seeing you hurts.”
“It doesn’t have to. We don’t have to hurt anymore.”
“ We? ”
“You don’t think it’s torturous for me to see you, standing just inches away from me but I can’t touch you?”
“You just did,” she spits, swiping at her cheek where I’d touched her earlier.
“And it isn’t enough. Aren’t you tired?” I ask genuinely as she stares at me with red-rimmed eyes that match my own. “I’m so tired, dove. Remember what you said? We could rest together, go home together and recharge.”
“For what? More chaos and fuckery?”
“Elle, Please .”
“You’re wasting my time.”
“If we’re together, no time could ever be wasted. It’s called bonding.”
“It’s called loitering . Order a drink, or fuck off.”
I sigh so deeply that my lungs burn as the second-hand smokey air shoots from my nostrils. “Fine. I want fifty.”
She eyes me wearily. “Fifty?”
“Shots.”
“Are you buying them for the house? We’re already giving out free shots-”
“They’re not for the house. Just the bar.”
At her wrinkled expression, I lift my brows expectantly, and she sighs.
“What type of shot?”
“Line up the glasses while I decide.”
She just stares at me. And stares and stares, trying to figure out what I’m up to.
“I thought you were eager to serve me. Or are you just prolonging our time together?”
With an eye roll, she rolls her chair to the rows of glasses behind her. Gathering as many shot glasses as she can, she bangs each against the bar top as she counts to fifty. With a final bang, she settles the last glass between my spread legs, the last available spot.
“Which drink?” she asks, clearly irritated, but she’s looking at me. My baby’s looking at me just like she did every night in the hospital in her dreams.
“I love the way you look at me from this angle. It gives me a glimpse of you that I’ve missed the most.”
“ — ”
“You’d think it would be those tits. Rising and falling on beat, a nipple threatening to pop out at any second but it never does, much to my dismay and my pleasure. No one else can see it and live, but the thought, the threat of the tease — ”
“!”
“But it’s not them. Your tits.” She rolls her eyes at my clarification. “It’s your eyes and not the irises. No, not the windows to the soul everyone drones on about.”
“Probably because you can’t relate. Because you don’t have windows. You have abysses. Voids.”
“It’s the white parts,” I say, ignoring her. “I never thought the whites of someone’s eyes could be so intimate, but you can’t see them in any other position than this one, with you looking directly up at me. The last time I saw them like this was in the greenhouse when you were on your knees, remember? Your lips were tight on my cock, your hair fisted in my palm, my release dripping down your chin and onto those glorious tits, collecting on your hard nipples. It was so white, remember? So fucking white, just like your eyes. They glistened in the moonlight, like two little crescent moons that only lit up for me.”
“I don’t want to hear your erotic fucktard poetry,” she hisses. “What the fuck do you want to drink?”
I smile. “Water.”
Her gaze snaps to the glasses. “You want me to fill all of these with water?”
“No need for you to do it. It looks like rain. Real rain, not Stassi’s crystals.”
“What?” Her eyes flit up to the ceiling. More whites. More pretty white crescents as she focuses on the leaking skylight, Hale had no money to fix. That she had no money to fix.
Then we hear it together, little pings against the glasses, sloshes against the wooden bar.
Her eyes fly to the shot glasses, already filling up as a small curtain of water divides us.
Footsteps on the roof alert us to a dark figure, one with long, flowing hair. Bae. He’d stayed for the party, but he was off to South Korea in a matter of hours.
Now that’s a fucking friend.
“Good thing you lined the bar,” I say as more water bursts down, overflowing the glasses. I jump down in front of the bar as Elle scoots her chair back, knocking into the shelves behind her and rattling the rows of glasses that go up to the ceiling.
“Stop it!” she glares at me through the downpour. You’re going to ruin the floors. Hale just — ”
“Betrayed me,” I hiss. “I don’t give a damn about that traitor and his DIY’s.”
“He’s right about you.” She shakes her head. “You’re a horrible friend.”
Me? A horrible friend? After what Hale’s done?
But then, I think of the missed calls. Of Aria having to drag me out of the penthouse to come here tonight, and Elle’s words twinge at my heart. Just a flutter.
I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t a traitor like Hale.
I’ll fix the damn roof a fter she comes with me.
“Elle, I’m so tired.” My eyes burn as a reminder when I say it. “Let’s go home, and the rain will stop.”
“You’re touched in the head.”
“You’ve fucked it in. Please .” I extend my arm through the rainfall, but she only recoils into the glasses again.
“No!”
“Fine, Rose. I tried to be patient, pleasant , but fucking fine. You want to play, so let’s play.”
“Rose? Wrong girl. And I’m not playing.”
“Jealous?” I ask, an incredulous chuckle escaping my lips. Does she really think I’d call her some other girl’s name? That I could ever mistake her?
“Over someone like you? Never.”
My jaw ticks with my heart. “Last chance.”
She gives me a look. “You already said that.”
I take my open palm back that I’d extended toward her and clench it into a fist.“So we’ll play.”
“ — ”
“Call me Jack. Bae will open that skylight in thirty seconds and we can recreate Titanic when the furniture starts fucking floating. I assumed the ring didn’t cover any roof repairs. Looks like I was right.”
Her lip trembles, actually trembles, for him .
You’re ruining all of Hale’s work. Even if you’re pissed at Hale, what about your other friends? It’s not just Hale’s grand opening. It’s Zedd and Stassi’s party too.”
I scan the crowd but can’t find a single one of them.
“Do you see them anywhere? Here’s the thing, Elle, at this moment, you’re right. I am a shit friend because I don’t care about anything or anyone but you. All I care about every day, every hour, every second is having you. My mind can’t settle, can’t comprehend anything else. Fuck anything else. You . It’s always been you. It’ll always be you. Not the blokes. Not my father. You. Come with me, or we can float on the headboard together. Hale has beds in the backrooms, and I know how we both can fit.”
She snorts. “Like I’d want to fit beside you. I’m more like Rose than you think. I’d watch you freeze to death, then rip your dead palm from mine. You’d barely disappear beneath the water before I’m blowing that fucking whistle and moving on.”
Another smile stretches my lips. “Just like Rose, huh? So that means you’ll let me creampie you on a cruise in a car after I’ve painted every inch of you?”
“How could you even be, Jack? You’re rich like Cal. The man I’d leave for my true love.”
“Your true love? You just said you’d barely watch him make it to the ocean floor,” I snort. “At least Cal was your fiancé.”
“ Was . She hated Cal. Just like I hate you.”
“But Jack’s gone, and Cal and Rose are still here.”
“And she ignored his ass the moment they touched land. She threw that sapphire into the sea like I threw your diamond into the pond. The pawn shop.”
More pieces of my heart flake and chip off. I’d destroyed the letters. Tossed the jewels wherever they landed, but it wasn’t until the paper had disintegrated and days had passed that I realised how much I would rather have them, even if they aren’t mine.
“Love what you did with the place with the money,” I say, eyeing the chandeliers that sparkle as brilliantly as that diamond before resettling my gaze on her again. “But a leaky roof can destroy it all, can’t it? In a matter of minutes.”
The water’s dripping down the bar, creating a soft symphony against the freshly stained floors.
She watches the waterfall, and a choked, frustrated sigh leaves her throat. “You can’t just get your way. You can’t just have me.”
But I can.
“I respected your wishes. I gave you space even though it killed me. It killed us both.”
“Delusional.”
“You should see the way you look at me, Elle. You want me to. You just won’t let yourself have me. Six days. A thousand hours. I can’t do it any more. I won’t.”
“You don’t get to decide when time’s up!”
“Yes, I do. I told you I’ll do anything to keep you.”
Water bursts down between us with full force, and the crowd jumps back, shrieking.
“ Anything . And I’ll destroy everything just to get to you. Don’t you get it?”