24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alyssa
I tucked my letter inside Pasha’s bag and then crept back into the room where he was sleeping. He’d offered to take me to the airstrip, and I’d agreed last night, but the thought of driving there with him, knowing what was coming, made my stomach roll.
Boarding the plane and having to say goodbye in front of other people would be a slow, painful torture.
As it was, I was afraid I’d bawl my eyes out on the flight.
He’d be just down the stairs, and with one cry of stop the plane from either of us, I’d never be able to leave.
And I didn’t know whether he’d truly want me to stay in the same way I wanted to stay.
Gazing down, my fingers itched to run through his close-cropped hair one more time. If I did that, he’d wake up, and I’d agree to a ride, to the public goodbye. I wouldn’t be able to deny him if those light blue eyes had even a hint of the sadness I felt.
Maybe if we’d had more time together, he would have come to love me too. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know how to stay. Would we ever see each other again? Would we ever have another moment like we’d had last night?
When I’d watched him dance with Mia, I’d been so full of pride I’d been sure the emotion was going to burst out, spill all over the floor .
Afterward, when Mia’s friends, including Sarah Telling, had gathered around me and congratulated me on a stunning routine, I’d had trouble focusing on their words.
Had Pasha not poured so much of his time and effort into mastering the steps, learning the routine, the whole dance would have flopped.
I didn’t deserve the credit. He did. A lesser man would not have pulled it off.
He stirred in the bed, and I wiped away my tears, slinging my bag over my shoulder. No regrets. I’d left him the note, and I’d made the most of the time we’d had together.
One of his T-shirts with the word Security emblazoned across it had been tossed across a chair.
I picked it up and held it to my nose. Without giving myself a chance to second-guess my choice, I stuffed it into the side pocket of my bag.
He had them strewn around my hotel room, and I doubted he’d miss this one.
Having the piece of clothing he wore so often might make the ache a little less when I got home.
At the door, I glanced at his sleeping form one more time. The familiar rush of love flooded my body. I hoped he’d forgive me for not waking him. How did I say goodbye when it was the one word I couldn’t possibly utter? Another tear slid down my cheek, and I drew the door closed behind me.
My eyes were so swollen from crying that when the driver turned in to the driveway of my small red brick bungalow, I squinted.
The tall black planters on either side of my door were identical to ones I used to own.
I tried to remember if I’d bought Olivia the same ones.
Had Olivia brought them here? They’d been the first outdoor decoration I’d bought for my house.
Ricky had taken both when he’d left. Particularly spiteful, considering he’d known how much I’d loved them.
Purchasing them, tending to them, had made me feel like a real adult.
With a shake of my head, I paid the driver and hoisted my bag over my shoulder. My keys were buried in my purse somewhere, and I dug around in the bottom until I found them.
When I tried to insert the key, it jammed. Frowning, I tried again. The lock wouldn’t turn. That was weird. I pounded on the door.
“Olivia?” I stepped back and peered in the bay window beside the door, and my heart froze.
Oh, no .
The couch I’d picked out with Ricky the first year I’d owned the house was back against the far wall, and the coffee table I’d spilled nail polish on one drunken night was in the middle of the room. Son of a bitch .
He’d moved back in. Olivia had helped him move back in. I lay on the doorbell, pressing on it repeatedly. “Ricky!”
The door swung back, and Ricky, tall, lean, and dark featured, lounged in the doorway, a smirk on his face. “I figured you’d be excited to see me, but there’s no need to make me deaf.”
“I am not excited to see you. Why won’t my key work?” I held up my keychain.
“Changed the locks.”
“It’s my fucking house. You can’t change the locks.”
“Au contraire.” He removed a screwdriver from his back pocket. “When you don’t need to call anyone to change them, it’s quite easy, actually.”
“You’re not moving back in. ”
“I already have.”
“I’ll call the police. This is my house.”
“What if I said your credit card debt was paid off?”
I eyed him warily. The repayments came out monthly, and another one was due in a few days. “You paid off the rest of your credit card debt.”
“That was one of the conditions for taking me back, right? Our credit card debt needed to be paid.”
“ You paid it?”
“Lyss, it’s paid. Check for yourself. Go ahead.” He nodded to the phone clutched in my hand. “I’ll wait.”
After setting down my bag, I logged into my online banking. A lump sum payment had been made the day before the wedding. Had he really done this? A frisson of unease snaked down my spine. What would he expect in return? He’d changed the locks on my house. When I glanced up, Ricky smirked.
“What’d I tell you?” He stepped back to let me enter. “Welcome home, babe.”
I grabbed my bag and slid past him. The mattress that had been lying on the floor was nowhere to be found. “You brought back all my stuff?”
“Yeah, I moved all our stuff back in.” He ran a hand down my back. “Don’t worry. I can look past whatever happened between you and that Russian guy. We’ve both made mistakes.”
“We’ve both made mistakes? The only mistake I made was thinking Olivia had left Kevin. She lied to me, for you, right?”
He shrugged and threw himself onto the plush leather sofa. “We both know you were going to take me back. Your sister just helped us avoid a few steps. Now we can work it out under one roof instead of all the back-and-forth shit we’ve done before. ”
I cringed at how I used to live my life. So unstable. So volatile. Our relationship had gone off and on like a light switch. One day crazy in love, the next absolutely hating each other. The memories were there, but the feelings attached to them were gone.
I stared at the back of the couch, my bag still in my hand.
Truthfully, I hadn’t been sure until this moment that I was really finished with the never-ending uncertainty.
Taking in Ricky’s relaxed, couldn’t-give-two-shits posture on the couch cured me of any lingering doubts.
There was nothing about this situation, this man, that appealed to me anymore.
“I’m going to a hotel,” I said.
“The fuck you are.” Ricky sprang off the couch. “I did what you asked. You told Liv your debt needed to be paid, and you wanted your shit back. Do you know how hard it was to get some of this stuff back? I pawned some of this. I had to go door-to-door.”
I took a deep breath and examined the room.
I didn’t understand how one relationship with one person could change your whole outlook on life.
But it had. As I looked around the room at all the things I used to own, the pieces and people attached to them who’d returned to me, the emotions I’d expected to have weren’t there.
None of it mattered anymore. My heart was still on the island, curled up beside Pasha, longing for him to love me in return.
“Where did you go when you left?” The question had plagued me. I’d called everyone I could think of.
“Doesn’t fucking matter.”
“It does to me.” Did it? Curiosity more than anything. I had a hunch that I never followed through with, couldn’t bring myself to check out .
He glanced at me from the couch before returning his focus to the TV.
“Moved in with Cindy. She gave me an ultimatum. You or her. She was done with me going back and forth. You’re always leaving to go somewhere, so I figured she was the best bet.
Turned out she was a fucking psycho. Always up in my business.
Constant, constant talking”—he mimed yapping with his fingers near his ear—“about things I didn’t give a shit about. So I left.”
I bet he fed the same story to Cindy. Alyssa’s a psycho . In my mind, I saw the conversation with such clarity that I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen him and his attitude before.
“I don’t care about any of this anymore,” I said.
“Hey, hey.” Ricky clicked off the TV, rounded the couch, and dropped the remote on a side table.
“Don’t say that. Cindy just made me realize that what we have is special.
” He cupped my face. “This is what we do, Lyss. We fight and we fuck. I’m back, baby.
No need to throw in the fucking towel for no reason. ”
I tossed my head away so his hand fell, anger rising in me like a tide.
“No reason? You took all of my things. You charged thousands of dollars to a joint credit card. I thought I was going to lose my house. If Mia Malone hadn’t hired me, I would have gone bankrupt.
I couldn’t afford to live. This wasn’t—” I broke off, my anger muddying the water of my thoughts.
“You didn’t cheat on me or come home too late or lie to me.
I had to stand in a grocery store and decide between paying my mortgage and eating. ”
“Come on, Lyss. We love each other. Relationships take work, right? We’ve both made mistakes, but we always come back to each other. ”
We had. For years. Cheating, lying, a drunken slap across the face. We’d thrived on the emotional highs that came from damaging each other, and then we’d fucked out our frustrations.
But I didn’t want to disintegrate from anger anymore. I didn’t want to rage and cry and scream. I wanted to be cradled in someone’s arms, to look deep into their eyes, and to thrive on happiness, on joy, instead of on sorrow and heartache. I didn’t want to self-destruct—I wanted to grow.
Ricky wasn’t someone to grow with.
“What we had doesn’t work for me anymore,” I said.
“That’s bullshit.” He threw out his hands.
“You know what? You gotta do it this way? Fine. Go to a hotel. We can do this push-pull thing where you pretend you don’t want me.
You can be mad.” He snatched up the remote and collapsed on the couch again, hitting the power button for the TV.
“One way or another, we’ll get back together. ”
Most of me didn’t care what he thought about me or about my feelings. I was done with him. On Monday, when my lawyer was back in the office, I’d call about my options to get Ricky removed from the house. I couldn’t stay there if he was here.
Ricky was sneaky, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night with his hand slithering up my nightgown, trying to coax me into forgiving him, falling back into our pattern.
I’d never said “no” to him, no matter how vicious our fights.
I wasn’t sure he’d accept being turned down when he was already hard and ready.
Wasn’t worth the risk. When he was cornered, his temper flared.
Instead of staying to argue, I turned on my heel, walked out the door, and closed it behind me .
With a sigh, I searched the street. No taxis wandered my residential neighborhood, so I headed for the bus stop. On my way, my phone pinged in my pocket.
Hope you loved your surprise at home!
Sadness and anger warred in me. My sister was so out of touch with reality, and she had no understanding of what my life had been like in the last few weeks and months. She’d rarely asked, and even when she did, Olivia often skimmed over my triumphs or problems.
I rubbed my face. Maybe Ricky and I had once had the same pattern as Olivia and Kevin—fight, make up, fight some more, make up harder—but I wasn’t the same person who’d left on tour.
My phone pinged again.
You left without saying goodbye.
My stomach dropped, and as I stared at the message, three dots appeared. What else did he have to say?
I wish you’d said goodbye.
Tears sprung to my eyes, and an ache bloomed across my chest. I wanted to tell him about the letter, but if he read it now, he’d feel like he needed to respond, and I didn’t want him giving me kind words. I wanted to know he meant them, felt them, that, like me, he thought a future was possible.
He’d know I saw his messages, so I had to write something. While I tried to think of words that were honest but that didn’t plead for him to love me in return, I called a cab. At the closest bus stop, I waited for a ride, his message open on my phone. What could I say?
The truth.
I didn’t know how.
I sent the message before I could second-guess myself and then tucked my phone into my purse.
Tomorrow, I’d deal with getting Ricky removed from my house, and then I could go back to my heartbreak.
For now, I couldn’t dwell on something I couldn’t change.
Maybe Pasha loved me. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, our relationship had given me a gift.
I would no longer be willing to settle for a man who destroyed my self-worth and made me question my sanity. Love shouldn’t be a battlefield.
Later that night, when I put on Pasha’s shirt, the word Security brought a smile to my face. I pressed the fabric to my nose and breathed in the last of his smell. In bed, I opened my phone and stared at his message.
Could I call him? Should I? God, why hadn’t we talked about what we were going to do after I left? Was it okay to contact him? I had no idea if he’d found my letter yet.
My career meant I left men behind all the time, but I’d never felt like this, as though a piece of me were still in Bellerive, as though that piece might not ever make its way back to me again. My longing for him ran deep, a well full of unfulfilled wishes.
On the screen, I typed, I miss you . My finger hovered over the send button. What then? He was there. I was here. Instead of sending the message, I closed my phone and tossed it out of reach, onto the other double bed beside mine.
I wanted to know I was enough, maybe even more than enough, and forcing him to give me crumbs wouldn’t satisfy either of us.
I turned out the bedside lamp and stared at the ceiling, remembering the solidness of him sprawled out in the bed beside me, the weight of his arm across my stomach.
Every night with him had been like stepping inside a warm house after I’d been out in a blizzard.
I’d relished the happiness in the minutes and hours doing nothing, doing everything, existing in a space with him.
Now, alone in the dark, I wished I’d savored every moment just a little bit more.