Never Have I Ever (31 page)

But then, he’d told me at the beginning of the trip that the option to part ways was a door, much like the literal one I was being pulled through now, which also remained unlocked.

I breathed out, “Whose office is this?”

“No idea,” he muttered between kisses.

“Should we care?”

“Nope.”

That suited me just fine. This close to midnight practically nobody roamed the halls and fewer were still in their offices at work.

Noah pressed me up against the closing door until it shut firmly behind us. He fumbled in the dark for the lock, his lips never once leaving mine. It snapped into place. He didn’t bother with the lights. Enough of an ambient glow from the city poured in through the windows to bring our shadows out of the darkness and into shapely silhouettes against the tinted glass that we didn’t need harsh florescence.

He pulled me off the door for just a moment so he could grab a handful of my dress and begin to hike it up around my hips.

“Sir,” I whispered as the soft fabric of my dress steadily rose around me, “I keep thinking about what you said before, in Milan; about dismissing me from service. Do you ever think you’ll get tired of me and cast me aside like that?”

“Never.
I’ll never tire of you; I’ll only get more creative.” While the lust in his eyes didn’t recede, a genuine tone of compassion filled those words. “No other woman in the world has been able to do to me what you have, sweetness. I promise.”

Complacency; it’s one of the biggest fears that most people don’t realize they carry. When a party in a relationship becomes satisfied with what they have, knowing they can have it whenever they desire, then they take the whole for granted. They fail to desire any more from their partner and the relationship stagnates. Adventure becomes meaningless. Resentment takes the place of excitement. The mystery they fell in love with has been unraveled and holds no more enticement because there is nothing left to discover.

This was not a moment like that. This moment burned bright in my night sky as a beacon of hope that Noah would be with me forever. My own small forever on the grand scale of the Universe was meaningless to others. They had their own
Forevers
just as they had their own Nevers. For the innocuous forever, which belonged to me during our trek of discovery across the world, the empowerment I grew into thrived. This Forever proved perfect in every way.

That was, until Sydney.

My downward descent into the Nine Levels of Hell almost certainly began with Sydney.

***

August tenth was our final day of vacation. The next morning we’d fly home. Exhaustion crept up on the both of us. Hopping from time zone to time zone every couple of weeks perpetually fucked with our sleep schedules. As much as I enjoyed the time away from the good old US of A, I began to get antsy with the need to sleep in my own bed again.

The pair of us had spent the day lazily hanging out in the hotel room which backed up to the coast of Australia. We ordered room service for breakfast and recounted our exploits while our tired bodies came down off the high of the experience.

Around two o’clock I rummaged through my luggage for a book so I could spend some quality time with myself before I thought about one last plane ride across the Pacific.

“Think I’ll go down to the beach for a little while,” I told Noah.

“It’s fifty four degrees out! This is not swimming weather.”

“Says the man who suggested wetsuits just so we could surf yesterday,” I noted with a chuckle. “Poorly, I might add.”

Noah tilted his head to one side. “You surfed poorly, my dear. I, on the other hand, rocked it.”

“Not according to our instructor. Anyway, who said anything about swimming? I’m just going for the view and to read a bit.” I held up a brand new copy of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
to show him. “All this rest and relaxation has made me need some rest and relaxation.”

“Alone time, you mean.”

“Still an introvert at heart, Sir.”

“Oh, very well.”
Noah crossed the room to give me a kiss. He tucked my hair behind my ear and allowed his fingertips to linger on my jaw. “We’ve reservations for one last nice dinner at seven, though. I want to soak up as much time with you as I can before I’m sucked back into the world of
Corpspeak
. I swear; I’ll choke-slam the first person who utters the words ‘Paradigm Shift’ at me when I return.”

I tapped his chest with the book. “The brilliance of owning your own company is that violence is not required. Firing is always an option.”

“That comes with wrongful termination lawsuits.”

“
Which is better than an assault and battery charge.
”

He shrugged.
“Details.”

I laughed and headed for the door. “I’ll be back at six to get ready.”

The entire adventure seemed like such a dream. Two and a half months of travel in the most ideal of conditions, experiencing the most ideal scenery and cultures with the most ideal man I’d ever met all zipped by at the speed of light. My small
Forever
. It was difficult to believe; come tomorrow, we’d be on a plane back to Los Angeles, and the lives we left behind.

I situated myself on a lounge chair out on the beach. Despite the cold, it was a sunny winter afternoon. I pulled my knitted blue sweater to me and curled up against the cushioned chair to lose myself in literature for a few hours. As much fun as the summer—or winter for that matter now that we were ending our tour Down Under—was, I was grateful for a couple of peaceful moments all to myself to absorb it with the appreciation it demanded. We hadn’t run into any major disasters or mishaps which we were unable to find our way out of yet. For that I was truly grateful.

A woman sat in the sand nearby. She was busily keeping to herself as she forgot the world and drew away the afternoon in a sketchbook. She studied the horizon, the shadows of puffy clouds dancing on the water, and a large private sailboat several hundred yards out at sea. When she was satisfied with her quick glance, she would put graphite to paper again. I glimpsed over her shoulder at her work from my seat ten feet away. For a sketch, it was brilliant. Even in black and white the shading popped so vividly it almost felt I’d be sucked into the scene, was I not already there.

A gentle breeze blew in from the ocean. It tossed her dark brown hair around her face. She fought against it with her free hand to keep her attention locked on her subject before it had the chance to disappear over the horizon. Briefly, she turned her head to one side and I caught her profile. When I did, I thought my heart would stop beating. The way she swept her hair back reminded me of…

No, that wasn’t possible.

I cleared my throat so I wouldn’t choke on my words as I tried to get her attention. “Excuse me,” I said as I lowered my book. “That’s a beautiful sketch.”

She turned to me then, and I about lost all composure. High cheekbones and a small chin on her heart shaped face made her a vision of beauty. Sparkling brown eyes smiled the same as her warm lips did. She was thin and lithe and the spitting image of the woman pictured on Noah’s mantle.

“Thank you very much,” she said with an American accent. “It’s just a rough draft though. I’ll take it back to my studio to paint it properly tonight.”

I must’ve looked so pale and taken aback I was surprised I managed to form a coherent thought much less a coherent sentence after seeing her. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare. You just look strikingly familiar.”

“I don’t know about me,” she laughed, “but I have a few paintings up at local exhibitions around Sydney.”

“But you’re American,” I noted.

“Born and bred,” she confirmed. “I moved here a few years back to start up my career in art.”

“This is going to sound really weird, but is your name Selene by chance?”

The woman twisted completely around to face me, her glowing smile never fading. “That’s me. Selene Reynolds. Are you a fan of my work?”

Well, yes and no.

“Sort of.
Weird question number two then, forgive me for it,” I trailed off, uncertain of whether I really wanted the answer to my next inquiry while she looked at me expectantly. Once I found myself, my ever-present desire to know the answer to every mystery I was presented with
won
out. “Do you know a man named Noah Wellington?”

All of the light in her face drained into a frown. She didn’t respond, just looked down at the pencil in her hand and began twisting it between her fingers nervously. It was a terrible question to just dive into without talking to her longer than sixty seconds, but I had to know.

“You do,” I said.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” she replied somberly. “I never imagined I would meet anyone here who knew it.
Small world.”

“You’re her, aren’t you?” It was hard to believe my own eagerness. I slipped my legs over the side of the reclining chair and sat forward. “You’re Noah’s Selene. How can you be here…
”

She sort of winced when I associated her with him. She took a deep breath and looked back up at me. “When I’m dead?”

That confirmed it. My heart both soared and broke in the same instant. The meaning behind this encounter; the terrible moniker of fate or destiny or whatever I wanted to describe it as was gut-wrenching and wrong. Things like this never came to pass. This moment was an impossible thing stacked upon a mountain of impossible things.

“For starters,” I said at length. “What happened to you? He really thinks you’re dead.”

“No,” she corrected with a stern scowl. “He
knows
I’m dead. It needs to stay that way.”

My face was a theme park of confusion. “Why? You being here, it—it could solve so many problems. You can answer so many questions. You can put his mind to rest.”

Or, I thought, he could go back to her. After all we shared and all that training to belong to him, he could very well tire of me and rekindle the flame with the woman who, for all intents and purposes, was his first love.

Selene’s face suddenly exploded into shock as she whipped her head around to check for anyone else in the area. “Wait. He’s not here is he? Noah. He’s not here.”

“N-No—he’s back at the hotel. Why?”

Selene started to gather up her art supplies and shoved them into a tan satchel at her side. “I’m sorry, I have to go. Please, don’t tell him. He can’t know. Not ever.”

“Selene, wait. What happened?”

She didn’t pause for an instant while dodging my questions. “What was your name?”

“Piper,” I stammered it out. “My name’s Piper Minogue.”

She stood and dusted the sand off her jeans. “Piper, you seem like a nice girl. Please, you can’t tell him I’m alive; for your sake and for his. Have a good day.” She nodded at me and adjusted the satchel hanging at her hip as she started off down the beach.

“Hang on. Selene!” I shot to my feet. Not to chase her, I was far too much of a coward for that, but to try to persuade her. “Noah was a wreck when you died. He’s gotten night terrors because of you!”

She didn’t slow down. “That’s his guilt. He tends to let it eat away at him. With people like you around I can imagine they’ll fade quickly.”

I hadn’t thought about it up to that point but, since we left California, Noah had been terror-free.

Still, I wanted answers. “He keeps your picture in his apartment, you know.
Right on the mantle in a place of honor!”

Selene spun around and walked backwards down the path. The wind cut between us, mussing our hair indiscriminately as she kept moving farther away. “Good to know!”

Goddamn her for walking away. Goddamn me for not forcing my legs to move forward. Goddamn my brashness most of all!

“You can’t just run away!”

“You’d think that, but it’s what I’m best at, Piper!”

“Why can’t I tell him you’re alive?”

Curiosity was the only driving force behind my asking. Some base part of me recognized that she was my rival. I was insane to try to convince her to stay and talk. I was an idiot to want to tell Noah that his dead ex-girlfriend was alive and well in Australia. As much as her fake death had destroyed his psyche beforehand, it might shatter him completely to know the truth. And, if it didn’t do him in, he might want to look for her. If that were the case, I might lose him. But then, I’d always been honest with Noah in the past. I wondered if I could bring myself to lie to him about something as massive as this.

“It was nice to meet you,” Selene called back with a smile. “Now forget me, Piper Minogue!”

How was it possible, in all seven billion people occupying the world, I’d run into a dead woman? On top of that, a dead woman of whom I knew. As a human being, the exchange frightened me on a level I wasn’t aware I possessed. As a scientist, I should have realized there was no such thing as coincidence.

Setting aside the probability and statistics for a second; how the fuck was I supposed to keep this from Noah? Better yet, how was I supposed to break it to him when he eventually discovered this that, not only did she fake her death, but that she didn’t want to be found by him?