Break Away (Away, Book 1) (5 page)

“Well, I like it. I think it’s cute,” Buffy
said as she straightened holding several DVDs in her hands, then
glanced at him and winked.

I rolled my eyes.

Ian laughed, that low and careless sound
flying into the air. “Hmm, I think your sister may like it, too,
and she doesn’t know how to handle it,” he told Buffy and turned to
look at me. “Am I right?”

“You wish.” I arched my eyebrows and looked
down at the sushi resting on my lap, my Japanese craving suddenly
shrinking. I
so
disliked him. “Gran!” I called, the fury
boiling in my stomach pitching my voice to a louder note. “I need
the…”

“It’s here. It’s here,” Gran repeated as she
stepped inside the living room—which had turned into a living
hell—with a small bowl in her slightly wrinkled hands. She handed
it to me and walked to the solid oak wood cabinet. Several pictures
crowded the cabinet’s surface, some dating the times of her youth
in dull, faded colors, and some displaying flamboyantly the outcome
of her past—us.

Mom and Dad’s pictures were hiding in her
bedroom. She’d decided to veil them from our sight for our own
good. Every time we saw them smiling at us through the glossy
paper, the air in the house became a cold pressure, weighing our
heads and chests with a terrible pain. Whenever the need to watch
those happy glimpses of time clutched our hearts, Gran’s door
always welcomed our hands. Though it’d been only once for me, I
knew Buffy’s fingers had enclosed that brass handle a few times
more.

“You have a letter, Dafne.” Gran said,
pointing to the metallic slinky I’d convinced her to use as a mail
holder. It filled the empty spot where Mom and Dad’s pictures had
been.

“Oh, yeah, I was waiting for it.” I bent
forward and stretched myself to reach the coffee table to place the
plate and the soy sauce on it. While I stood up and peeled off the
blazer, Gran turned and left the room. Buffy seemed to remember
something and followed her into the foyer to speak with her,
leaving me alone in the living hell with the prick of Ian.

I threw the blazer over the back of the
recliner and turned to grab my mail, which wasn’t in the slinky
anymore. Ian was holding it.

“If you don’t want to suffer a slow and
painful death, you better give me that envelope,
right now
.”
I pushed my hand to him, palm up, waiting.

He tsked, waving the white envelope in the
air. “If you ask nicely, I may consider it.”

“Consider it?” I snapped, blushing in
red-hot anger. “There’s nothing to consider. Did you hear me?
Nothing.” I closed the distance between us threateningly, feeling
like a black panther measuring its prey’s weaknesses. “What you’re
holding in your hands is
mine
. And if you don’t give it
back, I’ll kick your ass out of this house no matter what Buffy
thinks. Understood?” I narrowed my eyes to a feline glare.

“You would love to do that, wouldn’t you?”
he said with that wicked crooked smile pulling up one corner of his
mouth.

I ignored his innuendo and rose on my
tiptoes to snatch the envelope, but he waved it back in a flash,
letting me fall flat on my feet with my hands empty. And the fact
that he was about a full head taller than me didn’t help either. I
wasn’t small, he was just too tall. “Give it back,” I said through
clenched teeth.

“Just be a good girl,” he said in a singsong
voice, lowering bit by bit the hand holding the envelope, until it
was leveled to his hip. If he was doing it on purpose or not, if it
was part of some stupid strategy, it didn’t matter. I threw my hand
forward in a mightily attempt, but in the same second, he snapped
back his hand behind him and I crushed against him. The soft flesh
crowning my chest lessened the hard contact, though it hurt a
little. Ian was pure lean muscle; even the ripples of his abs were
obvious under the fabric of his shirt.

Okay, I had to give him that. The guy had an
amazing body.

I pushed away the thought from my mind in a
flash and glared at him more intently, keeping the short distance
between our bodies. My eyes almost shooting sharp ice balls.
“Forget the kicking ass thing. I would gladly cover you up in meat
juice and push you down into a bed of starving ants,” I said
slowly, each word infused with dark fury.

He leaned down his head, placing his face
only an inch away from mine, and whispered, “I'm not afraid of you,
Dafne.” His voice blew into my lips. And that’s not what shot a
shiver up my spine in that moment. Behind those words that seemed
so daring and bold, echoed a sort of promise. A promise of what? I
didn’t know. But it suffused his sharp words with warmth—a
startling contradiction.

He was still staring at me with great
intensity, the emerald in his eyes deep in exasperation. This was
entirely new, this almost intimate approach, which was the thing
that jolted me out of my confusion and opened my eyes to the hidden
machinations inside his infuriating mind. I’d forgotten who I was
facing.

“And I’m not affected by you, Ian,” I
muttered pushing my face closer, the tip of our noses nearly
touching. “You can work your ways through people to lure them to do
your every wish and need, but like I’ve told you a zillion times
before, I'm
not
one of them.” It wasn’t that he was trying
to seduce me or anything like it—he
was
my sister’s
boyfriend, and not even he, an innate Casanova, could’ve fallen
that low—he just wanted to break my ice-solid defenses down so he
could prove to himself that even an ice queen like me weakened to
his presence. He needed his massive ego to be pampered whenever he
was around me, and that, I think, wasn’t a pleasant feeling for a
guy like him.

“That’s not wh—”

“Well,” Buffy’s sudden flat voice cut him
sideways, but we didn’t pull away, just kept glaring at each other
like tigers on the verge of clawing at their victims. “If it wasn’t
because of the hostility glowing in your eyes, I would’ve thought
you were about to cheat on me—both of you.”

At that, Ian stepped back and turned to look
at Buffy. Taking advantage of his distraction, I swung my hand
forward and finally snatched the envelope from his hands. He gave a
little gasp of surprise and then let it go with a soft shake of his
head. He reached Buffy’s hand and pulled her into his arms. “Where
were you, babe?”

I mimicked his words with a grimace, the tip
of my tongue escaping past my lips like a four-year old. Since Ian
was giving me his back, he didn’t notice—he might’ve felt it
because it’d been as sharp as the tongue of a poisonous snake—but
Buffy did, with a roll of her eyes over his broad shoulders. “Were
you stealing Dafne’s PETA mail again?” She looked up to see him.
“Why can’t you two just get along like civilized people?”

“Let’s not talk about her, okay? It’s a
waste of time.” He leaned down and kissed her.

If it’s such a waste of time, then why do
you stick your nose in my mail asshole,
I thought with a
frown.

After a few seconds, the merging of mouths
started to get so intense and so…nauseating that I had to sit down
before I would see the contents of my stomach splattered on the
rug. “Oh, get a room, would you?” I snapped, annoyed while
squeezing a piece of sushi between the chopsticks. “If you’re more
interested in each other’s throats than watching a fascinating
movie, then please… go far, far away and release me from this
torture so I can eat happily.”

Ian stopped immediately, as if he’d been
paying more attention to my words than kissing, as if he’d been
expecting me to utter them, and spun to look at me, pulling my
sister in front of him to embrace her from behind. “I'm enjoying
myself,” he said with a self-contented smile. The bastard. “We can
take it to the couch.” He lowered his head and pressed a kiss on
Buffy’s neck without taking his eyes from mine.

Cocky, are we?
I pulled up the handle
on the side of the recliner, popping out the leg rest, and
stretched out as if I was a pharaoh waiting for the juicy grape to
be placed in my mouth. Though instead of the grape, it was the
squared piece of sushi. I ground up the soft concoction slowly,
deliberately, taking my time to show him my lack of concern. And he
got it. He smiled with a low snort and shook his head in
amazement.

“None of that,” Buffy said, wriggling out
from his arms and reaching for the DVD cases she’d left on top of
the small shelf. “We still have to choose which movie we’re going
to watch—and it’s going to be tough. All of these are so good…” Her
voice faded as if with admiration while checking each case.

By the way she was knitting her pale
eyebrows together and sighing mutely, I knew we were doomed to
watch an excruciating chick flick. On my way here, I’d hoped some
mysterious energy, pooled somewhere in the blackness of the
universe, had broken barriers of speed and infringed our atmosphere
to pour down some logic into Buffy’s brain, but apparently, it was
too much to ask. Now I was going to be trapped for about two hours
in girly fiddledeedee stuff, cheesy lines and oh-so-cliché
plots.

“Great,” Ian said as enthusiastically as I
felt, throwing himself on the couch. “So, what are the
options?”

“Hey, mind the shoes!” I told him after
swallowing a sushi bite. “Gran doesn’t…”

“…like people dirtying her couch. I know.”
He kicked out his lace up ankle boots, which I’d been told, by my
fashionista sister, had cost more than four Benjamins.
And let’s
get real. That is just plain ridiculous.
The Buttero boots—I
think that was the name of the crazy brand—were pretty cool. But
paying that unreasonable amount of money for some straps of leather
and laces was plainly over the top, and it said a
lot
about
the person who wore them. He clearly didn’t know the value of
money—and of an animal’s life.

“Murderer,” I told Ian after glaring at his
boots.

“What?” he asked, puzzled.

“You’re contributing to animal’s
slaughtering just because of your narcissistic needs. Don’t you see
how repulsive and selfish that is? What if
you
were the one
being skinned alive just because someone was looking for human
leather in your exact shade? Would it be fair if they ripped you
out from living only to fulfill someone’s greediness?”

“Oookay, don’t turn all the veggie psycho on
me.” He held up his hands as a barrier. “Those boots were a gift. I
can’t control what people’s mind or wallet tells them to buy.”

“But you
can
control what you’re
wea—”

“Stop,” Buffy called exasperated. “Could we
please focus?” she said, wiggling one of the movie cases in the air
as to bring our attention to them.

“Sure,” Ian shrugged. “I just don’t
understand how an
animal planet disciple
can talk about
going to hell if you wear leather when she’s eating crab,” he said
without looking at me, sprawling on the couch with one of his legs
dangling from the side.

“Are you pea-brained?” I said with a deep
frown, spoiling the smoothness between my eyebrows. “What part of
being vegetarian didn’t you understand? And even if I wasn’t,
this”—I maneuvered the chopsticks into the roll and plucked the
small piece of whitish meat—”isn’t real crab, you idiot.”

“Jesus, it’s like going back to preschool.”
Buffy sighed, slumping down her shoulders.

“Oh, yeah—a sexy veggie. Is that why PETA
writes you every month?” he asked, looking at me this time. “Are
they trying to convince you to pose for their naked campaign or
something?” He ended with a small wicked smile.

“I don’t know if I should be flattered or
disgusted by you thinking I'm sexy.” I pulled up my eyebrows in
surprise, though a pip of self-satisfaction was blossoming in my
stomach. It was good to know that a guy like Ian appreciated my
looks.

“Don’t give yourself too much credit. I just
can’t imagine any other reason why they would write to someone so
heartless and cold. You love animals, yeah, but you’re not the type
of person who would actually
do
something for them. It’s
more of a vocal thing—explanations, advices, arguments,
whatever—and not a physical thing. You wouldn’t leave the comfort
zone of your ice palace to help others. That’s just who you are,”
he added, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, like
saying what the sum of one plus one was. “And doing something like
that
would suit more your personality. It’s
more…self-centered.”

His words stung. Badly. I shouldn’t have
cared what his vision of me was, or how stone-hearted he thought I
was, but I did. Deep down inside, I did. Not because it was him,
but because that’s how everyone perceived me—except for Gran and
Linda. It was a reminder of how perfectly well-done the four ice
walls enclosing me were, mirroring the image of an unfeeling person
through the hard surface of pretense. Inside those walls, it was
just me. There was no ice queen waiting to strike, or itching to
cast frostbites. Only the real Dafne sheltering herself from the
tearing brutality of the outside world.

Ian wasn’t that far away from reality. I
didn’t like to leave the comfort zone inside those walls. It was
safe. But the flurry of pain and need curling above that topless
icy shelter, like a gathering storm of cries and tears, called my
heart to jump out from it at times, pushing me to help those who
were in a greater need of shelter. The Humane Society of Berryford
and PETA were my short escapes from that cold enclosure. And most
recently, a boy named Ayo from Yoruba, Africa, had joined those
breakouts, too.

Did they know I was doing all of this? No,
and I didn’t want them to. Did Gran know about this? Yeah, she was
the one receiving the mail.

“Well, sorry to disappoint you, but not even
me—the Queen of Icytopia and Egotopia—would show my goodies for the
entire world to see,” I told Ian, masking the hurt with sarcasm.
“Believe it or not, I like better the
physical thing
and
doing something more
personal
than doing something that
narcissistic. And anyway, in case you didn’t know, those campaigns
are only for celebrities.”