Fissure (23 page)

     Her eyes were open wide, the fire’s reflection scattering over her eyes. She was looking at me.

     “Thank you, Patrick,” she said. “The past twenty four hours have been . . .” she paused, hanging on an unspoken word, “perfect. I didn’t think anything close to it existed in this life, but you’ve shown me I was wrong. So, thanks.” Her face lined in a grimace as she sat back up. “I know that sounds incredibly lame, but that’s the truth. And I know how important honesty is to you.”

     This was my opening, my segue, my in, if ever there would be one between Emma and me. This was my chance to open my mouth and tell her everything I was feeling, everything I’d felt, everything I wanted to feel forever.

     But that’s when she slipped her hand into mine, studying our entwined hands. And then her conflicted eyes flickered to mine and there was only one thing to say. A single thing I was capable of in that emotion charged stare.

     Scooting over a barricade of boxes and wrappers, I didn’t stop until the length of my side was running down hers. Her eyes held mine, but there was a shift in what they were conveying. I didn’t care—it was too late for me. It had been too late for me one first day of class and one sweet smile ago.

     Forming my hand over her cheek, I closed the space between us. The final space between us, letting my lips take the lead.

     My mouth was greeted with a swish of air and a tense cheek where a pair of lips had been one bad decision ago.

     “I can’t,” she whispered into the fire. “I mean, I
could,
but I’d regret it in the morning. And so would you.” She glanced at me from the side. “I couldn’t stand anything ruining this day when I look back and remember it.”

     “Em,” I started, not knowing where I was going with this.

     Shaking her head, she said, “I wish I could be that girl I see reflected back to me in your eyes. But I can’t. It’s a mirage, what you see.”

     “No, it’s what you are,” I replied, folding my hands together, but I didn’t move a sliver away from her. I wasn’t going to make this easy on her. She felt something too; I was now convinced of it. I couldn’t let it escape.

     She exhaled the breath of a person who doesn’t believe a word being spoken. “If you didn’t devour them all, could you toss me a peanut butter cup?” she asked, everything about her voice and expression pretending nothing significant had happened between us.

     I fumbled around for one and handed it to her, feeling the pricks of numbness entombing me. This had been the first time I’d gone in for a kiss and been denied, and I was surprised it didn’t only suck, it hurt like a cannon had just blasted out a crater in my gut. It ached because this had been the one kiss above all the others where the intensity of my feelings for the other person were guiding me. This wasn’t just sheer physical need, this was an expression of everything I felt at the core of my soul.

     It had been rejected.

     And that hurt.

     Biting into a cup, Emma tossed the rest of the carton aside, staring unseeingly into the fire. I didn’t know what engineering feat could build a bridge long and strong enough to cross the distance keeping us apart, but I wouldn’t give up. I never would, as long as there was hope of my feelings being reciprocated.

     And from the tears I saw about ready to spill down her face, I knew there was just enough hope to keep me going. When they fell, Emma swiped her arm over her face before they could travel far, but fresh ones replaced the vanished.

     “Hey,” I said, nudging her, “you want to talk about this?” I motioned between the two of us and whatever she was or wasn’t upset about.

     Shaking her head, she sniffled. “Definitely not.”

     “All right then,” I said, wrapping my arm around her and tucking her close. “Let’s just let the stars and silence do the talking for us.”

     Her head nodded beneath my chin.

     The embers of the bonfire were smoldering when her breathing steadied from the passage of sleep. Tucking the blanket around us, I leaned back into the driftwood log behind me, just needing to catch a few winks. A few minutes of recuperative sleep to wake up refreshed and ready to continue the fight of forcing Emma to admit there was something special between us.

     And then I fell into the deepest sleep I had in decades.

     As peacefully as I’d lost myself to sleep last night, I jerked awake as violently. I didn’t need to check the location of the sun in the sky, or consult my cell phone, to know what time it was: 7:12 a.m. Too bad I’d forgotten to place a wake up call with my internal clock.

     “Emma,” I said, shaking her arm. She hadn’t moved from the shape she’d taken curled around me last night. Her face was a kind of tranquil that was sacrilegious to break, but I also knew missing class was a more unpardonable sin in her eyes. “Emma,” I said again, louder.

     Her eyes snapped open, taking in the scene around us like she didn’t remember how she’d found herself the better side of horizontal, in my arms, wrapped in a blanket.

     “Good morning,” I said, sliding a piece of hair behind her ear. “It’s after seven. We better get moving if we’re going to get you to class by nine.”

     Horror chased away the confusion lining her face. “My first class is at eight!” she yelled, scrambling out of my arms and bolting upright.

     Of course she’d be a member of the one percent of college students who elected to take the earliest class they could take. “It’s going to be okay, Em,” I said, popping up with less zeal. “The world will continue to turn if you’re fifteen minutes late.”

     “Not if I miss a test that starts promptly at eight on the dot,” she snapped, running towards the house like she was an impala being chased by an army of hungry lionesses on the Discovery Channel.

     “Crap,” I muttered. I didn’t need to give her any more reasons to stay her distance from me. “Okay, go get changed and grab something to eat and I’ll meet you at the car,” I yelled across the sand at her, tossing empty wrappers and crushed graham crackers into the paper sack.

     “No time,” she yelled. “Meet me at the car now!” She paused in the doorway, sending a warning look at me. “Or else I’m stealing it.”

     I didn’t need any more encouragement. Leaving the remains of s’mores and a just missed kiss behind, I sprinted through the sand after her.

     She was fastening her belt by the time I’d locked up and snagged a couple of breakfast bars from the cupboard. “It isn’t hot, nor particularly delicious, but it’s something,” I said, jumping in and handing her a bar.

     She grabbed it and nodded her thanks. “Drive fast.”

     Sliding my aviators into position, I slammed the Mustang in reverse and grinned. “You’ve got the right man for the job.”

     Bracing one hand on the dashboard and the other on the armrest, she said, “I hope so.”

     Leaving two streaks in the driveway, I was already at seventy by the time I rounded the corner a block down. Emma’s hands didn’t move from their location, like she expected fingertips gripping vinyl surfaces would be her saving grace if we were in a head-on at one hundred and some change.

     Once we were on the freeway, I pushed the Mustang to its upper limits and, once the cars moving in the same direction as us were streaking like the cars going the opposite direction, I knew we’d make good time.

     When we screeched onto the campus, she checked her cell for the three thousandth time and let out a relieved sigh.

     “Drop me off at my dorm. I’ve got to grab my bag and throw on a fresh pair of clothes that don’t reek of campfire and men’s deodorant,” she said, sniffing at the shoulder she’d had tucked into my fresh, not-too-shabby smelling armpit.

     “You got it,” I said, taking a hard right, so hard my tail-end drifted behind us, cutting an ugly bald spot through a patch of pristine Stanford grass. Hopefully my family’s alumni status and giving over the years had accumulated enough influence to overlook one grass terrorization.

     “Thanks for getting me here so fast,” she said, a hair clip between her lips as she tore through her hair with her fingers. “And thanks for not killing me.”

     “Speed is my priority,” I said in an authoritative voice. “Preservation of life is an added bonus.” I rolled to a stop at the front curb of her dorm hall, already feeling the pain of separation.

     Fighting her hair into the clip, she grabbed her purse from the back, pausing as she grabbed the handle.

     “And thanks for everything else,” she whispered, looking everywhere but at me. Throwing the door open, the morning air careened into the car, taking on a chill that had everything to do with her leaving me. I couldn’t let her out of my sight without telling her everything I’d been keeping from her. Everything I should have told her last night before she was in a rush to get to an exam in fifteen minutes.

     My timing, as always, was impeccable.

     I grabbed her hand at the last minute, pulling her back down. She looked over at me like I was mad. “What are we doing, Em?”

     “Well,
I
am going to class and
you
are probably going to go pass out on the quad for a couple hours until you commence your inventive forms of cat calling,” she said, smirking at me as she made another go for the exit.

     I held her hand in mine, not because I wanted to, but because I absolutely, positively could not let her go.

     “What are we doing?” I repeated, looking at her with the anguish I could feel manifesting over every piece of me.

     Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “Something we shouldn’t.”

     That cut deeper than last night’s rejected kiss had. “Why not?” I whispered.

     “You know why.”

     “No, actually I don’t,” I replied with a ferocity in my voice reserved for rare situations. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

     Her drifting eyes settled on mine for an instant before they turned away. “My life just doesn’t work with you in it--
I
don’t work right when you’re in it.” Her jaw was set, but it couldn’t deflect the effect the sheen her eyes had taken on. I was getting close to something if it brought tears to the surface. I couldn’t back off now.

     Knowing this, I shoved ahead, knowing the road immediately in front of us wasn’t a pleasant one.

     “Liar,” I said, gripping the steering wheel so hard I was in danger of ripping it off. “We made a promise that we’d be honest with each other, and you can’t be honest with me if you can’t even be honest with yourself.” That came out harsher than I’d intended, evident as I felt sick to my stomach after saying it and the way Emma recoiled from me like she couldn’t put enough space between us.

     “I’m the liar?” she asked, her eyes forming slits. Her hand pulled away like mine was made of acid. “Tell me, Patrick Hayward—wealthy, supposedly reformed playboy, good at everything, too beautiful to be real—why are you so interested in me?” she asked, yelling every third word.

     “Huh?” she added when I didn’t answer. “A girl from the other side of the tracks who’s going to spend the rest of her life there if she screws up just once. Once!” she said, pointing at me. “So why, champion of honesty, why is someone like you so interested in someone like me?”

     I’d not only never seen Emma so emotional before, I’d never heard her say so much in one breath.

     “What do you mean?” I asked, turning in my seat.

     “Dammit, Patrick!” she shouted, slamming a fist into the dashboard. “The question is so simple even you should be able to get it. Why are you pretending to like me?”

     Three things crippled the speech right out of me. The second curse word I’d heard from her, PG-13 rated as it was, her insult to my intelligence, and her assumption that I was pretending to like her. It didn’t make sense, none of it did. That could have been the reason I was unable to form a word, let alone an intelligent reply.

     “That’s what I thought,” she said, staring at me like she could see right through me. “Hypocrite.” Lunging out of the car, she spun back around and, leaning down, she said, “Leave me alone.”

     “No,” I said, gripping the steering wheel again.

     “Leave. Me. Alone.” And then she slammed the door and ran away like she couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

     I watched her leave, all the way until she disappeared inside the building. My eyes lingered on the spot she’d disappeared.

     “No,” I whispered to no one.

The first couple hours after that were rough. I’d gone back and forth between chasing after her and professing the way I felt about her in every detail—down to the way I lost my sense of balance when she tilted her head back and laughed—to getting the hell away from here and forgetting I’d ever met Emma Scarlett.

     I ended up hanging in my car past lunch time, once I settled on finding the middle ground between running away or becoming a certified stalker. On my way to Psych, I still hadn’t decided on the best way to smooth things over.

     I considered ignoring her, leaving her alone as she yelled at me to—pretend she didn’t exist—but I was wise in the ways of women and I knew
pretending you don’t exist
was the final straw that would break the back of the relationship. It doesn’t matter how pissed they are with you, never unleash a full scale ignore attack on a woman you want to make up with—classic rookie mistake.

     What I wanted to do when I walked in that class was stand up and ask the professor to put a clamp on it for a few minutes while I professed to an auditorium full of students how bad I had it for Emma and how I was a ruined man if she didn’t feel the same way. Yeah, something along those lines . . .

     I knew that, while I was one for theatrics, Emma wasn’t. She would be mortified if I unleashed a can of I’m smitten in front of her classmates. Then I’d be even deeper into the quick sand I was already smothering in.

     During my last strides down the hall towards Psych, I finally settled on a plan of attack.

     I’d just go with the flow. I’d do what felt right at the time and hope my gut, that had rarely steered me wrong before, wouldn’t let me down when it really counted. Not the most elaborate plan, I knew, but I figured it was better than getting naked, lighting myself on fire, and screaming
I love you, Emma Scarlett
down the hallway.

     I pulled open the auditorium door a few minutes past the hour, trying to outsmart the sneaky fox that I hoped was still icing his face back at prat hall. However I was going to proceed with Emma, I knew it would go smoother if her idiot boyfriend wasn’t around.

     I grunted as soon as I stepped inside, of course he wouldn’t be gone on the day I really needed him to be gone. And of course he’d be sitting right beside her in their favorite seats in the back row. He glanced back as the door whined closed and I would have guessed he hadn’t noticed me, until he dropped his arm around Emma’s shoulders. A tad purposeful in his possession, but it was going to take a helluva a lot more to run me off.

     Ty’s fingers barely had time to curl into her skin until she wagged her shoulders, shoving his arm away with her hand when that didn’t work. She aimed a glare at him I thought was strictly reserved for Patrick Hayward.

     Whether this was a simple lover’s quarrel or the beginning of the end, I didn’t know, but I did know you didn’t waste a crack—no matter how temporary—in a relationship you were trying to end. I didn’t have time to reconcile how much of a monster that made me seem or justify I didn’t only want them to break up because it was best for me, but because it was best for Emma, before I marched down that last aisle and slid into the open seat on the other side of her.

     I leaned in to her. “Can you forgive me for being an idiot?” I whispered, glancing between her and Ty, waiting for him to realize I’d slipped into the seat next to the woman he was all territorial over. “Again?”

     My attempts at playing it light and making a puppy dog face went over as well as I hoped it wouldn’t. Her glare turned from Ty to me, and I don’t think I was mistaken when those eyelids seemed to drop further.

     I leaned away a bit, and that’s when the worst bodyguard in the history of them noticed me.

     “Pick another seat, dickweed,” he growled, reaching behind Emma and shoving my shoulder.

     I blew a burst of air out my mouth. “Wow, a name I haven’t been called yet. You must have been hard at work on that one all weekend. That must describe while you’re looking especially ugly today.” Grinning my provocation, I continued, “By the way, double black eyes is a great look for you.”

     He shoved my shoulder again, harder. “You’re about to have a pair to match if you don’t move away from my girlfriend.”

     I squished my face into a
puh-lease
expression. “From the looks of it, your girlfriend might be catching on to the well-known fact that her boyfriend is a monkey’s uncle.”

     I was too focused on Ty, too set on taking out everything raging inside of me, or else I would have noticed Emma’s shoulders tensing to the point of snapping, her face flashing red with her own emotions firing inside. That would have been the wise way to expend my energy, on calming her instead of enraging Ty, but at this point in my male show of dominance, I wasn’t being wise.

     “Emma’s not going anywhere,” he said, his mouth twisting up. “And the next time you lure her to your place, for any duration of time, you’re a dead man.”

     It was a casual expression any male who’d hit puberty had thrown around, but something intentional in Ty’s words made me believe he wasn’t bluffing. Unfortunately for him, if he came at me with a death sentence, I was invincible to most things manmade, and I wasn’t a man who bluffed when handing out death threats. I’d killed men, many of them, and while it wasn’t a badge of honor I wore on my chest, it wasn’t something I was ashamed about either. I’d never killed a man who had ceased deserving life, and Ty was getting dangerously close to winding up on that list.

     “If she comes back, I’ll be all open doors. And arms,” I said, for her, not him.

     However, she didn’t look like she was hearing anything but a couple of imbeciles throwing insults around, above, and between her.

     “She won’t,” Ty said, his jaw muscles about to pop through his skin.