CUL-DE-SAC (On The Edge Book 1) (15 page)

CHAPTER 16

Xan managed to get his body under control
during the drive back to his place and he was whistling when he entered the
club through the back door.

He even chuckled, remembering Catalina’s
ire at his purposeful avoidance of using her name.

He wanted to throw her out of balance and
keep her in this state as long as possible so he could enjoy her the way he
planned to.

He had no doubt they were going to meet
again and the very fact she told him they shouldn’t tipped the scales.

She could try to pretend there was nothing
between them, but the sexual pull nearly took his head off and now he was set
on having Miss-Cool-and-Collected until he satiated this sudden hunger she
evoked in him.

From his perspective his interest was
utterly on her, she really shouldn’t try to pin it on him.
“You are back.” Tony’s voice intruded his trail of thoughts.
“Didn’t realize I had a curfew.” Xan smirked, hating the fact of living in the
club anew, even if the situation was temporary.

He enjoyed his independence too much, grew
too used to it to let it go again and answer to anyone.

From the displeased line of Tony’ lips it
was obvious he was not in the mood for Xan mouthing off to him.

Too bad, he thought. He was not in the mood
to hear whatever his boss’ problem was but it seemed they were both doomed to
live through disappointments tonight.

They walked toward Tony’s office and Xan
noticed no female was decorating it with her presence tonight. It could mean
that the Cul-de-sac’s owner didn’t want a witness for his meetings and
activities or was simply not in the mood.

Neither bode particularly well because he
was known to be in the mood.
Always
.

Xan shrugged, more focused on recalling how
soft Catalina’s skin was under his palm than his current surroundings.
“Are you even listening to me?” Tony snapped and Xan looked at him.

No, not really but he didn’t think it wise
to say out loud when there was a nervous tick in Tony’ clenched jaw already. He
knew the meaning behind the action intimately recognizing it as one step
preceding a fit of temper.
“What is it about?” He wanted to know.
“I saw you canceled your next fight.”
“So?” It wasn’t the first time and he had never explained himself before in a
similar situation.
“Were you injured?” Tony’ gaze slid to his jaw and Xan knew it was the only
visible sign of his last encounter on the ring.
“Enough to be wary and make me want to sit the next one out. You have other
fighters.” Xan reminded him.
“None of them is you.” That was the truth and they both knew it. “You seem in a
good mood and those things usually bug the hell out of you,” Tony noticed.
“And you always tell me there is going be the next one. So cut the crap and
tell me what is going on.” Xan folded his arms.
“I wonder if it has anything to do with the photographer chick.” Tony shrugged
and Xan looked at him, incredulous.
“Keeping tabs on me, T?” He asked quietly.
“Always have, my man, you told me she was taken care of. Did something happen
to make you believe otherwise?”
“She is no danger to the club.”
“Ah, so your interest is purely personal. Can’t blame you, she is a sweet piece
of ass.” Tony agreed and Xan barely stifled the need to plant a fist in the
other man’s face.

It was fine and dandy when he thought the
same, but it was losing its appeal when he heard someone else talking about Cat
so… objectively.
“She doesn’t concern you.” He bit out.
“But you do and everything that affects you affects me and the club. Fuck her
and move on. You don’t have time for distractions.”
“I can manage my time just fine, fuck you very much. Stay out of my business, Tony.”
The warning in Xan’s voice was very clear.
“Do you think a woman like her would look twice at someone like you, Xan? She
can’t even fathom all the things you had done. Our world doesn’t mix up well
with her bougie
2
lifestyle, my friend.” Tony looked sympathetic, which only felt like an
additional blow to Xan.

And unlike punches received on the ring, he
couldn’t fight it off. That didn’t mean he had to agree either, he thought, and
felt pain in his jaw not even realizing he clenched his teeth so strongly.
“You know dick about squat.” He told him.
“And yet I still know more than her.”

Xan clenched his fists and stormed out of Tony’s
office, silently congratulating himself for not wrecking the tidy workspace the
way he wanted to.

But his self-restraint faltered and left
him after he closed the door to his room. Xan gazed at the unmade bed, raw and
cracked walls, shoddy shelves. It didn’t matter his apartment was much better
that that. This was his reality for many years.

Hell, this was where he came from, he blew
out a harsh breath.

He might have acquired a taste for finer
things but it didn’t change facts. They were as unadorned and merciless as the
world he was born and raised in.

Xan grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a
neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City but in the past it was nothing like
what it was today. Its gritty reputation kept real estate prices below average
and kept… most people away, unless they were poor, desperate, or both.

Like Thorpe’s family was.

The name ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ first appeared in
print in 1881 when a
New
York Times
reporter went to the area
with a police guide to get details of a multiple murder. He referred to a
particularly infamous building at 39
^th
Street and Tenth Avenue as
‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and said the entire section was probably the lowest and
filthiest in the city. Later the name was expanded to the surrounding streets
and eventually the whole area.

The most common version about the origins
of the name though traces back to the story of a veteran policeman who was
watching a small riot on West 39
^th
Street near Tenth Avenue with his
rookie partner. The rookie was supposed to have said, "This place is hell
itself," to which the veteran cop replied, "Hell's a mild climate.
This is Hell's Kitchen."

There were also other versions, but no
matter what the name stuck and was portraying the bleak reality of the place on
the dot.

It once was a bastion of poor and
working-class, but Hell’s Kitchen’s proximity to Midtown has changed it over
the last two
or
three
decades of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

Xan hadn’t been back there for years now
and in his mind it was still the same crappy place he dreamed to escape from as
much as his father’s control.

Eventually he did escape both, but no
matter how many miles he put between there and now, he couldn’t deny both were
still part of his bloodstream and there was no escaping that.

Tony wasn’t that far off the mark, he
thought.

Why did he care what someone like Catalina would
think of him? Why did her initial opinion bother him and why did he go to such
lengths to prove to her he wasn’t as bad as he introduced himself to be?

The real question was: whom was he trying
to convince about it
–
her or… himself?

He wasn’t that bad, he admitted inwardly,
he was
much worse
.

He kicked at the pair of dirty jeans lying
on the floor since the previous day right where he dropped them and paced the
room, feeling like he was in a cage. He hated closed spaces without even the smallest
window to breathe the air through.

It felt too much like jail or at least his
idea of it. Prison was his father’s reality and Xan had sworn to himself when
he was but a child it was never going to be his own.

Thinking about his old man filled him with
unadulterated hate followed by viciousness, and it seized him in its embrace
until the pressure became unbearable. His fist connected with a wall.

Pain was his old companion, the most loyal
friend when he had no other, but it wasn’t enough to take the edge off so he
beat it against the wall again and again, washing his knuckles in crimson.

He hissed out a breath when a fresh, much
stronger wave of pain crashed into him, sobering him up instantly.

He looked at his bloody hand as if it
didn’t belong to him or maybe he felt too detached from himself.

He didn’t know anymore.

He walked toward the washbowl and opened
the tap with cold water.
“Fuck!” He gritted his teeth when the coolness poured over his battered hand.

His fingers were throbbing but that was
nothing as long as he could move them. He had suffered far worse injuries and
didn’t want to think it had never been by his own doing so far.

He glanced into the mirror hung above but there
were no ghosts to look back at him, just his own troubled reflection. Yet he
knew his eyes reflected every damn mockery that had ever been hurled his way by
his father.

He wasn’t good enough. He should have never
been born.

And now Tony’s voice joined the choir, he
thought, and smashed the mirror with his pulsating fist.

The glassy surface seemed to bend inward
just to explode from its frame and pour the sharp shards around him in
dangerous rain.
“Good going.” Xan muttered to himself, washing off the blood once again.

He was used to taking care of himself, not
that he had another option since there was no one to do that for him, he
thought.

He dug out a bandage from his handy first
aid kit and wrapped it around his hand, not caring much about making it pretty.

He smirked, thinking his own stupidity was
going to put him out of the ring for quite a while, making Tony so much happier
he already was.

Not that Xan gave a flying fuck about Tony’s
happiness at this moment.

He grabbed the keys to his car and with the
wallet still in the back pocket of his jeans, left the room, the club and the
whole world he didn’t want to be a part of at the moment.

***

Xan’s parting words kept replaying in
Catalina’s mind long after he was gone himself. They accompanied her when she
was taking a hot bath, which failed to relax or calm her. They were present
when she was working on final touches of the spur-of-the-moment study she took
of a half-withered rose bouquet she received after the exhibition.

Was she lying to both of them?

Maybe she was, but she really didn’t think
that seeing him again was a good idea. The strong physical reaction she had to
him was a proof of that enough, wasn’t it?

It didn’t require a genius to understand
this was exactly why he found it such a prime idea though, she snorted inwardly
to herself. He was a man after all and at least in this, it didn’t matter that he
was not the type she spent her whole life surrounded by, Catalina thought.

She went out on the terrace and sat on one
of the deckchairs, wrapping herself in a sweater and raising her camera to her
eyes.

The day was long gone now and the night
that crept to take its place forced the sun to kiss the surface of the ocean
before drowning in it, repeating the same ritual as always.

There were not many people on the beach to
be seen now and that usually made her job so much easier. Tonight should have
been the same, Cat thought, lowering the Nikon, deciding to look around with
unreliable eyes instead.

Everything felt wrong tonight, pulling her
away from the reasons why she attempted it in the first place.

She wanted to
work
.

She wanted to
relax
.

She wanted to
think
.

She wanted to
dip into oblivion
.

She wanted…
something
.

But
something
was exactly what
seemed out of her grasp, she decided.

Her thoughts were drifting elsewhere,
reminiscent of a jigsaw puzzle, coming together and falling apart again after
not finding any rooting.

She felt disturbed, not knowing exactly
why. Yes, she was lying to herself after all, she sighed.

She knew exactly
why
.

Seemingly everything was just like any
other given day or night, but she felt altered after dinner with Xan.

Dinner that didn’t take place but something
else happened, she thought.

In a matter of barely two hours, he made
her feel more alive than she had felt throughout her entire life and it was one
of the reasons why she was scared of it, of him and didn’t want to see him
again.

He drew her in without the smallest effort
on his part and as she proved already, she had exactly zero self-restraint when
it came to him.

She looked down at the camera in her hand,
the one he gifted her with. She didn’t think she was particularly a selective
person, but when it came to her gear she could be considered a very demanding
one.

It always took her forever to get used to a
new camera, but the one from him fit right in as if it had always been a
natural extension of her hand. She wanted to know why
he
felt so
familiar to her while he was anything but that.

Cat groaned and closed her eyes, trying to
see her surroundings without looking. A trick she had learned some time ago
usually helping when she was unable to focus properly.

To no avail.

She knew she was the source of the problem
even if it was beyond tempting to blame it on dozen other reasons.

There was magic in the salty air she
inhaled, in the sound of the ocean lulling her.

Yet it was all a fragile thing devoid of
its soothing qualities.

The sky was dark and dotted with stars, the
water fathomless and magnetically enticing.

But the hues of darkness were all wrong.

Everything felt too bottomless and
magnified to a degree where it stopped being enjoyable, becoming dreadful
instead.

Catalina couldn’t understand what made her
feel so raw and jaded inside but she knew that whatever was happening, pictures
were going to show her lack of composure rather than portray the reality of the
night.

She blew out an angry breath, disappointed
with her shortage in the concentration department.

Her skin felt pulled tight over her bones and
they were too brittle to carry her weight. She wrapped the sweater around
herself even tighter but it was not the cold that bothered her.

She glanced at her wristwatch when the
melody of her doorbell reached her over the terrace. She hoped it wasn’t Chloé
because she didn’t have enough energy to answer her friend’s questions about
how her date went.

She snorted walking toward the door.

It was almost ridiculous to call their
going out a
date
although it ended with a kiss that nearly swept her off
her feet.

She really had to stop thinking about that
part, she told herself, but when she opened the door she saw nobody else but
Xan on the other side.

She wanted to ask what he was thinking,
coming back after she clearly told him not to, but then she noticed his hand.

It was battered and wrapped in a bandage in
a way which said likely he was responsible for the haphazard dressing himself.
It was marred by a dark stain of blood standing in vivid contrast to the
whiteness of the band, making it very clear the injury
–
whatever the nature
of it
–
was very fresh.

Questions could wait, she decided. Any kind
of reproach was pushed aside and replaced by worry.
“Please come in so we can take care of it properly.” She said and stepped
inside without hesitation, not seeing anything strange about the fact that of
all places, he chose to come to hers.