Blazed (7 page)

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to know that pissing you off is a bad idea." My eyes snapped up to a grin I immediately and involuntarily mirrored. The thick, large pages covered in my drawings turned one by one at an almost tortuously slow pace, fanning me slightly when they dropped down. "Who's the self-righteous, egomaniacal pedant?"

"Best friend," I muttered, the smile quickly fading. I always found myself getting strangely defensive where conversations about Hunter were concerned, preferring to avoid them completely. The typical reaction of ridicule for being hopelessly attached to a man who thought little of me was quite firmly etched in my mind.

Noticing that the hands invading my art were empty, I forced my gaze down from the emerald eyes boring into the pages and focused on the fractured nub of my pencil. "Was there something I can help you with?"

The hands paused mid-movement. "Aren't you going to ask why I haven't been around lately?"

"None of my business."

"Are you annoyed?"

"No." I shrugged uncaringly and raised a hand to a returning Mrs Reynolds sneaking in from an extended lunch break. "It's just none of my business. So can I help you?"

"Actually, yes." The sketchbook flapped shut in front of me, then the hands splayed out on either side of it to support their crouching owner. There was no option to escape or evade him
— Blaze was back in my domain, gorgeous and stubbornly persistent. "I was hoping for some company for lunch." If he heard my teeth grind, he didn't give it away. 

"I'm not big on lunch." I wasn't big on food in the slightest.

"Smoothies?" 
Oh
. My resolved thawed slightly at this suggestion. He held up a finger to ask for a minute and practically sprinted out to the goblin car I hadn't heard pull up, returning a moment later with two travel mugs.

"I thought you said smoothies?" Travel mugs were something I had only known to come hand in hand with chauffeur driven hot shots' morning coffees on the way into the office. Hot shots like Henry. At one point, when I'd practically survived on black coffee, I'd had one of my own.

Blaze pushed one of them across to me and clipped up the seal over the hole on my behalf. "I did. Super fresh smoothies. I made them myself."

"In travel mugs?"

"Sure. How else would I get them here without spilling them?" Baffled by the lengths he'd gone to just to bring me a nutritious liquid lunch, I shook my head and took an apprehensive sniff of the mugs hidden contents. There was an overpowering smell of banana with an undercurrent of what I suspected might be mango. My favourite.

"How about a flask?" Blaze's mouth opened slightly, but as soon as his face registered his disappointment that I might just be right, he waited until I took a sip and trapped his tongue between two rows of perfectly white and straight teeth. The banana hit my taste buds first, closely followed the odd combination of mango and cherry, then a flavour I recognised but couldn't put my finger on until it's after-burn made me cough. "Did you put rum in this?"

He laughed and shushed me, nodding his head towards the ever pricking ears of Mrs Reynolds hiding just out of sight. "Call it belated hair of the dog."

"How did you know I'd be hungover?"

His head cocked cheekily. "Call it a foregone conclusion on the basis of your admitted self-destructive tendencies." What I wanted to call it was arrogant and annoying. It seemed as though my day was headed down a path towards being a victim of relentless antagonism.

I pushed the mug away with a sneer and forced my attention to fiddling with the shop's old-as-hell computer. He couldn't see the screen
— he didn't need to know that I was being evasive. "Well, thank you for the consideration but I can't drink that at work."

"Isn't it your lunch break?" Blaze took a long drink from his mug and licked the rogue drops of smoothie from his lightly scarred Cupid's bow. The corners of his mouth twitched at my awkward shuffle on the spot. He was just so... hot. "Come for a walk with me. No wheels of any kind, I promise. You
 
can
 walk without injuring yourself?"

"I can walk quite capably, thank you," I shot at him, taken aback by my own temper. Hunter's sour words had left me reeling as always. I forced my tone to soften. "I usually just work through my lunch breaks."

"Emmeline..." He sighed and rounded the desk to heave me to my feet. It didn't matter that I tried my best to be uncooperative and went lax and jelly-legged, he pulled me up effortlessly and so quickly I had to grab onto his arms for support. His biceps were solid and thick with muscle. Instinctively, I knew my cheeks must be pink. "I didn't—" Blaze coughed to clear his voice of the sudden, unexpected huskiness. I smirked. There was no way he was immune to the sexual tension. "I didn't come here to be told no. Humour me."

He had no idea how little me and humour had in common.

WE mingled with the frantic flow of businessmen pacing to lunch meetings, sightseeing tourists and lecture skipping students roaming the packed out streets. The slight fuzziness left by the rum smoothie did little to ease my growing panic in the unfamiliar situation
— thrust into a finite tidal wave of unknown, scrutinising faces flooding my senses with harsh, judgemental stares. Every single one of them watching me, rating me, identifying my flaws and failings with passing glances faster than I could process. My feet began to fail and I could feel myself lagging behind, battling to anchor myself with both hands clasped around my travel mug. 

The majority of my life from adolescence had been spent seeking to avoid anxiety-ridden scenes like these.
Central London on a Friday lunchtime was my worst nightmare and a small, dark, neglected piece of me missed the ostentatious but peaceful suburban palace I'd grown up in, with it's tall imposing walls, looming security gates and pre-approved guest list.

The foreign sensation of an arm wrapping around my waist grounded me slightly and slowed the surge of strangers who almost seemed to part for us. No, not us. They parted for the Adonis who had picked me up like, what? A pet project because I was commitment-phobic?

"Hey," Blaze whispered down at me, driving me to look up and find his eyes beating down on me like two shimmering green comets. Even though he'd spoken so quietly, his voice was still louder than the roar around me. "Are you alright?"

"I don't like crowds," I muttered, "sorry."

"Don't apologise." His arm tensed around me and he pulled me closer to his body, fingers kneading into my left side tenderly. All of my breath got trapped in my chest and my brain shut out the rest of the world around me. The combination of dumbfounding fear and unexpected comfort kept my feet moving when I might have crumbled to the floor in a heap, and before I knew it the streets began to clear and quiet. Blaze had damn near guided me safely through Hell.

He pulled me into an
 inconspicuous restaurant and up a staircase with ornately carved spindles to a sheltered mezzanine area overlooking the street below. I was sure I recognised the red table cloths that matched the immaculate parasols from a magazine. My anchoring travel mug was prized from my grip and set down on the table in front of the chair he ushered me into by the shoulders, and a glass of water crammed with shell shaped ice cubes quickly placed next to it.

"I don't have time to be here, Blaze. I have to go back to work." The idea of having to traverse through that crowd again made me feel sick. I was suddenly grateful for the water in front of me and made a hasty grab at the glass.

Blaze pulled his chair around the table to sit next to me rather than opposite and pulled the lank ends of my ponytail over my shoulder into his hand. "You have plenty of time, we were only walking for ten minutes." How was that possible? It had seemed like so much longer. "Well, you're not wearing it down but it's much better this way. His fingers combed through my tethered hair gently. I didn't even try to hide my frown at what he was doing— treating me tenderly the way Daniel had done every time I was having a 'saga'. He didn't like the word 'relapse'. 

I caught Blaze's fingers in my fist and slowly pulled them away. "Are you always so hands on with people?" He gazed at me like he didn't understand, rubbing his thumb over the pale knuckles trapping the rest of his hand.
 

"No," he said eventually, "at least I don't think so. I don't really think about it and analyse my actions before they happen
— I'm the type to go with the flow. Life is too short to second guess your every move."

"Does your 'flow' usually come with a side order of
 cliché?" He grinned at me and rested his free hand on my knee. 
Holy crap...
 I really wished he'd just bed me then disappear back to whichever smoking volcano he'd erupted from eight days earlier. "You're very intense."

"Am I making you uncomfortable?"

My eyes tracked down to his hand still on my knee, warm and alien, but... "No." I answered honestly. He frustrated me, intellectually and sexually, but once the sand he persistently kicked in my eyes settled, I was no more uncomfortable at that moment than I had been when he'd dropped me off at my flat and said a friendly goodbye. "You say you go with the flow, and yet you go out of your way to avoid women."
 Except me...

He shrugged. "The irony isn't lost on me but I know where to draw certain lines. However, may I snoop?"

My automatic reaction was to smirk. "You're asking my permission? I thought you had me pegged."

"I do." He pulled his hand free of mine to wave to a waitress hovering around the doorway out onto the mezzanine. She approached us, all luscious curves and auburn haired, and curtseyed politely as she delivered a sandwich to the table.
 
Curtseyed?
 I waited until she was out of earshot before I laughed at her. Yes, she was definitely one of those women Blaze sought to avoid. "Something funny?"

"Not at all. You were snooping?"

He held out the plate, offering to share his sandwich, but I shook my head firmly to decline. "It's really more seeking supplementary information in regards to an observation."

"Spit it out."

He sighed and ran a finger over the small scar on his upper lip. "Your so called friends— Esme and the egomaniacal pedant— they really seem to talk down to you."

My mouth dropped open an inch. "And?" I got a very pointed look in return for my snapping before he turned and took a large bite from his sandwich. He wanted to know why, of course he did. "It's concern," I sighed, "I suppose it's hard for them to treat me like I'm at my best when they've seen me at my worst."

"Relapses?" He stared blankly at my look of horror. How much had he heard? "You work in a bookshop, Emmeline— a usually empty bookshop, and the guy talks so loudly that you may as well have just had your phone on speaker. I wouldn't want to go to his wedding either if he spoke to me like that." Ignoring my obstinate grunts of objection, he pressed on. "Your other friends don't talk to you like that." 

"No, they don't." My mind cycled through the motions of the affinity I shared with the other men in my life. Daniel and Jonathan had struggled to find acceptance over their sexuality and Chris had been dealt a pretty shitty hand in the self-esteem stakes. It didn't take much to knock any of us down to rock bottom, and until you'd been there yourself, you just didn't understand how it felt. "They know what it's like to be damaged goods."

"Damaged goods!" Blaze snorted, but didn't pursue the conversation further. Instead, I watched him snarf down his sandwich with quiet enthusiasm and silently tended to my internal war wounds. I 
was
 damaged, inside and out, and it wouldn't be long before that damage spread. I was too far gone to fight it.

EVERY DAY I saw the same face. That washed out, beady eyed, chubby cheeked face caked in chocolate and smudged make-up.
 

Why are you trying to make yourself look pretty, freak? Everyone thinks you're ugly. You're ugly, fat and everyone hates you. No matter how hard you run on that treadmill, you're always going to have a big doughy backside and five chins. Six years of this and you're still wearing the same sized jeans you wore when you left school. Even the fat chicks are embarrassed to see you in the plus size section. Maybe you can cut it out. Maybe you can remove that fat yourself and stitch it back up. You'd do anything for him, wouldn't you? Just make it go away. Nobody would ever know...

No matter how sharp my tongue was, she stood there sadly and took my insults without ever answering or looking away. She was as bored of hearing it as I was of saying it, but somehow we needed each other. She needed to hear it and I needed to be heard. We were gluttons for punishment. Words were meaningless with no action and neither of us could act alone. 

If you looked at us side by side, you'd never guess that we were two sides of the same coin. You'd never understand why we stood so close together. You probably wouldn't even realise that she was there...

"HEY, EMMELINE!" THE loud voice at the door of 
Double Booked's
 bathroom made me jump out of my skin like I'd been caught with my hands in the cookie jar. "You have five seconds before I barge in through this unlocked door, White— I have your boss' permission. Wake u-up!" My chubby company returned my quizzical look at the sing-song voice. She wanted to know why Blaze had intruded on my workplace two days running too.