Chapter 6
BETH
“Ethereal”
“What?” I asked, my lips morphing into a grin despite my struggle to suppress it.
Kenzo watched me with a look that was all too familiar. He would usually look at me like that when he thought I was about to fall foolishly in love again.
“You seriously need to look at the mirror.” He lifted one hand from the steering wheel, flipping down the vanity mirror. “You are redder than a fucking tomato.”
I caught my face in the said mirror. My eyes were wide and shining, catching the reflection of the sun hitting the mirror. The redness crawled from my neck to my cheeks, engulfing my face in flames.
“Wow,” I breathed, fanning my face with my hands, but I only turned redder. “He saw me like this?” I shared an embarrassed glance at Kenzo. “Looking like a fucking beetroot?”
He chuckled, rolling his eyes. Then his gaze directed to the rearview mirror where he caught the shadow of the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
Snow White. He had looked and sounded rich. But it wasn’t the kind of rich that was loud and obnoxious. It was the type that hummed quietly beneath the skin. Like when he breathed, he breathed gold.
He smelled of old money, too, rolled up crispy notes folded in a briefcase, and shiny diamonds sleeping in a velvet safe.
“Honestly, I love everything about you but the fact that boys, or in this case…” His gaze returned to me, a heavy sigh breaking out of his lips. “…men are your absolute weakness.”
“He’s…” I trailed off, my face burning as the strange, rough, yet intoxicating accent from earlier slipped through the cracks in my memory.
I turned my neck in a really weird and awkward way, just to catch another glimpse of him before he would slip into his car, return to his world that was a universe apart from mine.
And almost as if he sensed us watching, he paused, hand braced on the door of the car, and turned. His gaze lingered, but I couldn’t tell what was going through his mind. Then just like that, he disappeared into his car, the door slamming shut, sealing him inside.
For some reason, my heart dropped. I wanted to turn back time.
To that moment by the twin lamp post, where I babbled and he listened, where he watched my stylus glide over the screen like I was doing the most interesting thing in the world.
Where he talked to me like I mattered… and looked at me like I was out of the ordinary…
or maybe that wasn’t how he looked at me.
Maybe I was delusional. Maybe it was all in my head.
I glanced at my phone that laid on my lap. The screen light hadn’t gone off. The number I just dialed and saved as Snow White stared right back at me.
What were the chances that we would ever meet again?
Today was one of the few best days of my life. To think I didn’t want to come to this book signing earlier even though I’d planned this event with Kenzo two weeks ago. He was my able chauffeur. But this morning, I was exhausted. I was always exhausted anyway. I just wanted to stay home.
But Mother was home today. Her presence was suffocating.
I couldn’t spend the day with my sanity intact if she was home, awake.
So I decided I would rather plunge myself headfirst into an event I had never attended before, mingle with people even though I wanted nothing but only my own company, than have to share oxygen with Mother for the rest of today.
The plan was for Kenzo to go through this whole thing with me. Help me carry books if I decided to spend the 300 pounds I just got from an art commission on more romance books about men who were only but a dream.
But he got a call that there was suddenly a football practice. And Kenzo didn’t joke with his precious football. He said he would go and come back to pick me up.
I couldn’t work with the new plan. I had never gone to places alone in a long time. Kenzo was always my shadow, either he was at my front leading me or behind me guiding me. Whenever I was at a strange place without him, I would develop a sudden anxiety attack.
I wanted to hop back into the car and leave with him. I didn’t see any point in getting a book signed by one of my favourite authors. And when he refused to take me and left me there, I was so pissed. Irritated.
I sat at the park’s bench, refusing to enter. I was pulling my tablet out to finish up the artwork I had been working on for days when a black car swerved in. It came with an aura that would make you pause to see the regal entity that would probably emerge.
A soldier had stepped out from the passenger side, armed, brooding, lethal and seemingly built for war. His steps made the earth beneath him shiver as he walked to the back and pulled the door open.
Curiosity wouldn’t let me dare look away. I watched, waiting, excited for some reason. Then he emerged, skin pale but glowing under the sun, frosty hair glinting like white silk under a candle light.
He looked familiar. I had met him before. Fitz’s Lit and Brew. Kenzo and I’s one stop when we needed a caffeine refill. He had seemed scarier then, unapproachable, cold. But he was enigmatic. Just like right now, though softer, human, ethereal.
His presence commanded undivided attention. People stared—women mostly. And if he noticed us watching, he didn’t react. He seemed to be in his own world as he stared up at the building, almost as if contemplating his presence, like he wanted to turn around and leave…just like me.
Then finally, he entered.
And I followed.
I fucking followed him like he attached an invisible string to me, pulling me along.
One moment I was staring at him, tempted to walk up to him for God knows what for, and the next, he was doubling over, about to pass out from a panic attack, and I was the girl who saved him.
“So…” Kenzo trailed off, snapping me out of my train of thoughts.
“What?” I raised a brow at him as he started the engine of the car, slowly pulling off.
“What’s it going be?” he asked, glancing briefly at me. “You guys seemed pretty cozy. You exchanged numbers or something?”
“Yeah, I took his number.”
“You like him?” His brow soared high. Like he couldn’t believe I actually could like him. I mean, did he see the same person I saw?
“He’s cute.”
“Every male gender is cute to you.”
“Yeah, but this one is super cute.” I nearly giggled, and a flash of intense amber eyes that reminded me of autumn lingered in my memory.
Besides Kenzo’s ocean blue, the man’s amber were the prettiest and most enigmatic eyes I had ever seen.
If you had ever seen an ember caught in a dying flame, you would know what I was talking about.
His eyes and his skin had the startling contrast between the sun and the moon. Eyes, the sun. Skin, the moon.
“You don’t know him, Beth.” His tone was soft, carrying a gentle warning. But was I ever careful with this heart of mine?
“We’ve met him before, though.” I murmured, like that changed anything. Like the two meetings, first one being just one line exchanged between us meant we were bound by the hips now.
“Really?” His brows furrowed as he turned the wheel to the left, making a smooth U-turn.
“I get it, you aren’t really good with remembering faces but come on, Kenzo.” I couldn’t believe he didn’t remember him.
“He’s got the face and the appearance of someone that you can’t just forget.”
He didn’t answer me. Silence stretched between us. Maybe he was working through his memory, trying to fetch that one encounter.
“Regardless.” He broke the silence with an underwhelming point. “We still don’t know him.”
“But he’s really…”
“Pretty, I know.” His slender fingers almost tightened around the wheel, flexing, a way of working out his frustration. “Tell me, what’s his name?”
His name.
Right. I didn’t catch his name. How did I skip that? Shouldn’t the exchange of names come before that of numbers?
“About that…” I trailed off sheepishly.
“You don’t even know his name.” He shook his head softly, disappointed, and I could swear I saw a victorious grin touch the corner of his lips daintily. He thought he won.
“Well, I didn’t get to ask,” I mumbled, but not defeated.
He released a noise from the back of his throat.
It sounded like a silent grunt of disapproval.
Like he was so tired of my excesses and recklessness.
But my heart was the only thing I owned.
The only thing no one had taken from me.
Why wasn’t I allowed to be a bit reckless with it?
Why couldn’t I just explore for the sake of it?
Did his name or where he came from really matter? Hardly. The worst thing that could happen to a girl had already found me, way before I knew what the colour of the sun was. If he was a bad person, there was nothing he was going to do to me that I hadn’t had a share of before.
“He’s like way older than you.”
I rolled my eyes. Oh, please. Say something else, friend.
“You don’t even know his age.” I pointed out, shaking my head. His points were really weak as far as I was concerned.
“It doesn’t take a genius to know he’s fucking old.”
“You’re talking like he’s 60 or something,” I scoffed, relaxing into the chair, my eyes closed. “Besides, wasn’t Rowan older too?”
Honestly, I didn’t think age was a problem to me anymore. Be 50 or 100. Just show me the littlest of kindness, let your gaze soften when your eyes would fall on me. I would be clinging to you like my fucking lifeline.
I didn’t care about age or status. Girls who were favoured got to make choices. I was cursed, broken and dirty. I wasn’t lucky enough to decide what I wanted in a man or didn’t. I had always just taken whatever I found and called it mercy.
“But he looks…odd,” he said warily, almost as a whisper, as if he was a ghost here and could hear us.
“I think the word you’re looking for is unreal,” I argued.
“No,” he stated. “Weird.”
“Ethereal.”
“Weird, Beth.”
“Unique.”