Chapter Twenty
Twenty
I spend five minutes in my car at the curb outside my apartment on Sunday morning.
Just working up the energy to climb the steps, to go inside and face a laptop with a résumé that needs to be updated, face a suitcase full of things I had at the hotel, face a bed that I last slept in with Alec beside me.
The optimism and elation of Friday morning feel like they happened a decade ago. My parents wanted me to stay a few more days but I honestly could not handle the weight of their concern on top of my own terror about the future.
Under normal circumstances, I would have immediately recognized the shadow on my doorstep.
If my brain wasn’t full of heartbreak and insomnia, I would know the broad expanse of those shoulders, the narrow taper of the waist. I would recognize the baseball hat, the black T-shirt, black jeans.
And in particular, I would see the hand carefully lowering a royal-blue shopping bag to my apartment doormat and remember that I claimed that hand as mine just over a week ago.
But it takes a beat for my conscious brain to turn on—long enough for me to instinctively say, “Um, hello?”—and as soon as the words are out, awareness hits, and my heart splinters into a thousand pieces.
I would bolt back to my car if my feet weren’t cemented to the ground.
I never expected to see Alec again. Thirty-six hours ago, he told me he was flying home to London and made no indication that we would ever speak again.
I spent the weekend running until I had bloody blisters on my heels and strict orders from my mother to sit my ass down.
But every time I did, I immediately wanted to get up and drive home to pull my Batphone out of the trash and see if he’d called, already knowing he hadn’t.
Alec freezes with his back to me and then slowly turns.
He fumbles to pull off his sunglasses, and the moment his eyes are visible, I feel the reaction to his appearance like a fist to my solar plexus.
He looks terrible. His skin is sallow; stubble shadows his chin.
His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, perfect lips cracked.
I’m unable to easily describe what this does to my heart. The only way to blunt the instinct to move to him and hold him is to tear my eyes away from his face.
He clearly didn’t expect to see me, either.
“Gigi.” His eyes do a quick scan of my body.
I bet I look a lot like I did in the hotel lobby in Seattle, but this time I want to shove the truth of it in his face.
My hair is wrapped up in a greasy, messy bun, eyes bloodshot and flat.
My limbs are shaking from overuse and exhaustion.
I direct the question over his right shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m…” He gestures to the bag. “You left some things at the hotel.”
I release a sharp, abrupt laugh. Boy, did I. My trust in men. A desire to love again. My career. Oh, maybe also some clothes. “I was instructed to pack up pretty fast.”
“I know,” he says immediately, but the next words take a bit longer for him to put together. “I hate—hate—how that happened. It was chaos. If I could do it over, I would have come directly to you.”
I don’t say anything to this. Having to leave the suite quickly wasn’t really what hurt. I like to think he was protecting me, even if it was disorienting and painful. What hurt was how he cut me off, didn’t answer my calls, and the Please take care he eventually gave me as a shitty parting gift.
But maybe what hurts most of all is how it feels like he’s sneaking up to my front door and leaving a bag without knocking. How painful would it have been to open my door and see that there, knowing he’d been here and left without a word? It would be worse than if he’d just kept all my things.
Tears, hot and burning, threaten at the back of my throat.
I’ve done a pretty good job since Friday of stitching myself together, but I need him to go.
All weekend I convinced myself that if I ever saw his face again, it would hit me differently.
I would associate it with the betrayal of not getting to explain myself, of not getting the benefit of the doubt.
But standing this close to him, it isn’t like that.
Even when I’m furious, his presence fills me up inside.
I resent knowing that if he would only hug me, we would both be okay.
The hollow space in my heart is uniquely Alec-shaped.
The line of his neck, the curve of his mouth, the angle of his jaw—these are all odd comforts.
So is the soft, steady gaze that held me like an anchor whether he was listening to me talk about work or pinning me on the razor-thin edge between pleasure and desperation.
Those dark, searching eyes saw through me from the first moment they met mine in the airport.
There wasn’t one second where Alec Kim didn’t look straight into the center of me, taking me in all at once.
And he kept looking like what he saw there lit him up inside.
It’s how he’s looking at me now, too. It’s wild to think he can still manage this facade after the way he shoved me away in our first moment of crisis. My heart squeezes painfully, closing a shutter on tender feelings.
“I meant what are you doing here, in LA,” I say. “You said you were leaving on Friday.”
“I couldn’t.” He swallows audibly. “I had to—” He stops, reaching up to scrub his face with a frustrated hand. His eyes turn a little wild. “Have you been out all night?”
I am astounded at the nerve of this question. He told me to pack up and leave, shut me out on the phone, stayed in LA after he told me he was leaving, and now he wants to know whether I’ve slept somewhere else?
“Yep,” I say, daring him to ask where I’ve been.
But he doesn’t. He turns his face away, jaw clenched, nostrils flared, and I realize he’s struggling to not cry. “Okay,” he says, finally. “Not my business.”
What is he thinking? That he’s catching me at the end of a walk of shame?
He knows better. He knows me better. If we weren’t currently at DEFCON-1 in our emotions, he would guess that I’d been at my parents’ place.
This is the insanity of our circumstances taking hold of his adrenaline and dumping it like gasoline into his bloodstream.
“I didn’t want to sleep in my bed.” It’s all I’m willing to give him. “The last time I was there you were with me.”
Alec reaches up, pinching the bridge of his nose, covertly wiping his eyes. “I get it. I changed hotels for the same reason.”
Don’t break, I tell myself when he confesses this, imagining the insanity of him even trying to leave the Waldorf Astoria, let alone check in somewhere else. He would be absolutely mobbed. What on earth would make it worth it?
Alec shifts on his feet, clearing his throat once and then again. I fix my attention on the ground between us, trying to unchain everything I’m feeling, separating anger from sadness from fear from longing, binning them into different spaces in my body so I can make room to breathe.
When he speaks, his words are hoarse. “I’ll never be able to apologize enough for how I behaved on Friday.”
He’s probably right, and there’s nothing for me to say. I wanted to talk to him, to help him fix this—help us both fix it—but he shut me out. All my words have dried up.
Silence yawns between us. “To be honest, the entire affair was a mistake,” I say with careful control. “Your career is a mess. I’ve been fired.” He barely reacts, and my anger flares. “The moment I saw you at the hotel room in LA, I should have turned around and walked back out.”
I don’t look at his face so I can’t be sure, but I imagine Alec staring at me like he knows it would have been easier to split atoms in my fists than to walk away from him that morning.
Not that it would have mattered anyway—someone still took photos of us in Seattle. I was screwed from the very beginning.
“I know you’re angry,” Alec says, “and I get it. I absolutely get it. But I was in an impossible position. I needed to figure out a plan with Sunny. I couldn’t just…” He falters. “I couldn’t just lay her story out there to save my own ass, like it was that simple.”
I’m still so mad, I’m not even willing to own the fact out loud that it would have been easier to handle all of this if I’d included his account in the write-up.
Because with a couple days’ distance—even feeling messy and hurt—I still don’t regret my instinct to try to protect the people I love.
I don’t regret only using information I got cleanly.
“So why did you bother staying in LA?” I ask. “Why aren’t you in London, figuring it out with Sunny?”
He stares at me and then blinks away, jaw tight. I wait another few seconds for an answer before I realize one isn’t coming.
Whatever, I think. Say your piece. Be done.
I swallow, pushing the next words out. “Your loyalty to the people in your life is one of the things that I love most about you.” He snaps his attention back to my face.
“But what about me?” I ask, and the dam breaks.
“You decided to protect your sister, and I understand, but you threw me away so quickly. When things first started with us, the story was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. But then, all of a sudden, you were the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. And here I ended up with neither.”
Alec sucks in a shaking breath, nostrils flared. “I know.”
“You told me you were going to do your best to make me love you,” I say, “and then twelve hours later had me get my shit out of your hotel room and told me you were leaving town and to ‘please take care.’ I realize I’ve only had you for fourteen days, and Sunny is your blood, but it still tore me in half to be thrown away like that. You could have at least talked to me.”
He opens his mouth but closes it again. I expect him to argue, but he says only, “You’re right. I could have.”
“I’m so glad I left the Batphone here,” I tell him, and he takes this like a shove to his chest. “I would have been checking it constantly. It would have killed me to see you this morning, knowing you were in town this whole time.”
“Gigi—”
I cut him off, pointing to the bag on my doorstep. “You thought I was inside, didn’t you? You weren’t even going to talk to me. Did you just swing by here on your way to the airport to leave my crap on my porch?”
Alec blinks away, staring at the ground. “I think you’re making a lot of assumptions right now.”
“You know what? I don’t actually care what you think anymore.”
In response to this, Alec bites his lip, nodding like I’ve hit my target.
A horn honks at the curb, pulling his attention to the open stairwell as he says, “I wish we could just go back in time to Seattle and decide to stay there for two weeks and fuck everything else. This has been the best two weeks of my life and the worst three days of my life.”
This truth hits with startling accuracy.
I hate how the easiest and most passionate relationship of my life has been trashed by circumstance.
I hate the way Alec is taking the hit. And I hate that the thing I admire deeply about him—his sense of duty to his family, to the public—means that he’s doing exactly what everyone who knows him knew he would do.
Alec never gets to belong to himself. Except with me, I realize.
This thing that hurt me so acutely after our first night is now the deepest truth between us: He’s been real with me from that very first minute in Seattle.
He knows I can handle myself. He doesn’t have to be my protector.
Suddenly my anger dissipates. I can’t let it be like this if this is the last time I see him.
He looks like he hasn’t slept or eaten. I remember hating Spence enough to not even want to see his face but that isn’t the case here.
I can hate Alec and myself and this situation forever, but I don’t want angry silence to be my last memory of him.
“Have you slept? Eaten anything?” I study his face, his posture, his rumpled clothes. He doesn’t look like any version of Alec Kim I’ve ever imagined. “You look terrible.”
His eyes search mine, and I remember what he asked me in the hotel that first day in LA—can see the question in his eyes right now: How mad can you be if you’re looking at me like that?
I feel it, too, that I’m not glaring at him with anger, but watching him with carefully protected adoration. I blink and startle in surprise when tears streak down my face. I didn’t even realize I’d started to cry. Alec takes a step closer, but I immediately take a step back. “Don’t.”
“Gigi…”
“I’m not going to invite you inside.” I swipe at my face. “I can’t.”
Alec nods. “Probably a good idea. I wouldn’t want to leave if I went inside with you.”
Confused, I chew my lip, fighting the way a sob wants to rise up and rip out of me. Right now, he looks like he loves me.
“Okay,” I say. “Have a good trip.”
“Read what I wrote,” he says, nodding to the bag.
Alec takes a step forward and bends, pressing his lips to my cheek.
When he straightens, he lifts his eyes up and over my shoulder and seems to throw an anchor there in the distance, needing something to propel himself forward.
I stare at the shopping bag, listening to his footsteps as he jogs down the stairwell.
I curl my toes into the soles of my shoes to keep from following after him.
A minute later, an engine starts, a car pulls from the curb, and this time, Alec Kim is really on his way out of LA.