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Elliot held my door as I slid back into the cool interior. Alfie’s presence was immediately palpable and blew Bradley right out of my mind. I looked at him, seeking some affirmation that we were okay. I received none. He turned his head and stared out the window as Elliot started the car. Alfie’s jaw clenched, ticking, ticking, ticking…
We’d only been driving a few minutes when tears blurred my eyes. To be so close to him and have him keep me so far away was torture. It was just a kiss. Just one fucking kiss. Suddenly, he reached across me, his scent enveloped me, my body soaking it up like a drowning person breaking the ocean’s surface and gasping for air. He clasped the seat belt and pulled it across my body, careful not to touch me. He secured me with a sharp click before returning to his side of the car and resuming his stare out of the window. I clutched the seat belt in the places his hands had just been. He was with me. He was still here.
Sixty-Two
Elliot didn’t rejoin us at the suite and that filled me with both relief and anxiety. Alfie and I rode the lift in silence. He hadn’t touched me, he hadn’t spoken. He strode into the suite with purpose whilst I hovered and tried to calm the roiling in my stomach.
I stood in the spot where I’d uttered the words—I kissed Bradley—and watched as Alfie crossed to the small drinks bar, his haunted expression distorted demonically in the glass of the floor to ceiling windows. His back straight and his shoulders stiff, tension emanated from him like a toxic cloud. He poured a tumbler of whiskey, the brand of which I didn’t recognise. I’d never seen him drink whiskey before. Ever. In fact, I’d never seen Alfie drink at all. He turned, his knuckles white on the glass, but just as he lifted it to his lips, he caught me watching him. A darkness flashed in his eyes, something I couldn’t make out. Whatever it was, he slammed the untouched drink down, clearly disgusted with it, himself, and me.
I didn’t know what to do.
His fists clenched and unclenched. He looked like a volcano on the verge of eruption. I waited for it, but instead he stepped out onto the balcony. He couldn’t stand to be near me but hecouldn’t let me go either and the balcony seemed as close to a compromise with himself as he could get.
I tip-toed to the open doors and hovered there, my arms clenched around my body as if I could hold the pieces of myself together.
“Please say something,” I whispered. The tension that usually crackled between us was gone and had been replaced by a void, a great chasm that I’d blasted with my Bradley Bombshell.
“Alfie, please. Yell at me, trash the place, punch a wall if you have to, but please just say something.” The bridge that once existed between us, each slat painstakingly attached until our fingertips almost touched, had fallen away and left us separated, he on one side, I on the other, and my betrayal in between.
The limbo was killing me but then finally, mercifully, he spoke.
“What is it you would like me to say?” He sounded painfully calm. For once, Iwantedhis temper, his domination of my body. Was this his game? To freeze me out and make me crave him?
“That you forgive me.” It was so much to ask, and yet I had to ask it.
“Forgiveness is not in my nature, Lola.” My heart convulsed in panic and I felt desperation creep in.
“Cheating isn’t in mine, yet I still did it.”What if this is it? No, no, no. It can’t be. My desperation grew and it began to speak for me. “Just tell me what to do. You asked me to kneel and I did. You asked me to speak to Bradley and I did, I rejected him. What now? What do you need?”
“Nothing that you are willing to give.” I stared at the back of his head, my mind scrambling for the next thing to say, for anything to stop the silence. The silence felt like a death sentence. “You know, before you had gotten inside my head and changed all of my rules, I would have made you a deal. You needmy forgiveness and I need your agreement to leave with me. I would have offered to trade.” He turned and fixed those piercing greys on me. “What would you have said to that?”
“I would have said you should forgive me because you think I deserve it and not because I’ve traded for it.”
He pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned back against the railing, a faux attempt at nonchalance that would have fooled anyone else, but not me.
“Forgive you without gaining anything in return? That’s bad business, O’Connell.” He gave me a sardonic smile. I hated it.
“Stop playing with me.”
This time he gave a sick laugh that chilled me to the bone. “That’s fucking rich.” His eyes burned me and I squeezed my own shut. I hadn’t seen this coming. I had known he would be angry, but this was brutal and he seemed to revel in it, in hurting me. I hated being on this side of him and I felt a desperate urge to kneel again, to offer him submission in exchange for forgiveness. My knees buckled and I almost did kneel, but I forced strength into them. I had to face this head on.
“You thinkI’mthe one playing withyou?” he continued. “You’ve been stringing me out since the second we met. I have had to drag you and chase you every step of the way, and now you swap me out for another man and then want to swap me back in again all the while holding yourchoiceover my head, your indecision that ensures I behave myself. I can’t do anything to scare you off, can’t step a toe out of line untilyoudecide whether you want me enough to leave with me.” My mouth opened and closed, unable to find an argument. I hadn’t thought of it like that. The idea that I was holding him in this insufferable limbo had never occurred to me.
“That’s not how it is,” I murmured, unable to think of what else to say.
“Isn’t it? You want me, but you won’t leave with me. For me, being with you isn’t even a question, but for you it’s a two week mind-fuck and you haven’t bothered to explain why.” My dream flashed through my mind. College. I wanted it. I was ambitious and I wanted it. He had no idea that it was finally within my reach.Tell him.I wanted to but I couldn’t. I didn’t trust him.
His eyes flashed at me in the moonlight, so much hidden behind them. He assessed me, his X-ray gaze searching mine, looking for anything I kept hidden. I wrapped my arms tighter around myself as if that would keep him out. Before he could catch my dream I shifted, changing the subject.
“Why did you need Elliot there tonight?”
He cocked his head, logging the subject change for future reference, then gave a dismissive flick of his brows.
“I have been known to suffer from poor impulse control.” He shrugged as if the matter wasn’t important, but his words sent a shiver up my spine. That wasn’t the first time he’d told me he had poor impulse control. He’d said it at the Serenity Gardens opening, and that had been about Bradley too.
“Would you have hurt Bradley if Elliot hadn’t been there?” I was unsure if I really wanted to hear the answer.
“I have been a careful and controlled man for a decade now but you have blasted that all to hell, so who’s to say what I might have done. If I had hurt him I can’t say I would have regretted it. The man is a thief. Putting his hands on things that don’t belong to him, taking liberties?—”