Provocative (Tempting Book 3) (7 page)

S
hortly after we
’d come home, Nathan had hugged me but it didn’t reach the places of me that hurt the most. He tucked me into the bed and then left. I wasn’t sure when he returned, but when I woke at two in the morning, he was fully dressed beside me, fast asleep.

I wandered the house that night, staring at myself in the mirror. Dark circles ringed my red eyes. My hair looked greasy, and my skin was nearly its same pale color. I examined my nails as I washed my hands, finally seeing the blood that caked under my nails. The sight of it made my stomach clench down and I began rubbing at it until my skin was raw.

Downstairs, the ultrasound photo was on prominent display on the fridge. Yet another painful reminder. But I didn’t have as visceral of a reaction to it. Instead, I calmly removed the Nantucket magnet that held it to the fridge and then tucked it into a drawer. At the back of the drawer.

I couldn’t be surrounded by the baby, not when I had lost it.

I grabbed a box of cereal from the pantry and dug a handful into it, pressing the tiny O’s into my mouth.

I wanted to be filled up. Because I felt so empty.

When I pushed the last O that would fit into my mouth, I nearly choked. A fresh wave of tears stung the back of my eyes and a strangled sob wrenched its way from my throat, muffled by the O’s. I turned to the counter and gripped it as the tears slid down my face and cereal sputtered from my mouth.

My stomach ached, my chest heaved, and my cheeks were coated in fresh tears. The emptiness was unbearable.

And now, two weeks later, my cheeks were dry. I spent most of my days staring at the television, waiting for something to distract me. I think I pressed the channel up button on my remote a hundred times, but I lost track of how many times I passed one of the sports channels so it was likely more than a hundred times.

I was wearing yoga pants—not the ones from the hospital. No, those were folded and tucked into a box at the bottom of my closet. Out of sight.

But the internal bleeding hadn’t yet abated. Two weeks after the D & C and I was still grieving, and now, I was alone. Completely alone.

Nathan had resumed his schedule from before, being gone all the time, but now it seemed as if he was gone more than before. I didn’t even bother even leaving a mess in the kitchen for him to find and scold me.

I’d done that for the first week, leaving splatters of milk on the counter, a cupboard door open. I left reminders of my presence all over the house, because it seemed as if me standing in front of him wasn’t enough in and of itself. He hardly existed, moving around like a ghost.

So, after the first week of me leaving messes—begging for him to notice me—I cleaned them up as soon as I made them. They annoyed
me,
because I saw how childish my attempt was.

The house was pristine. Back to how Nathan had it before I moved in. I wondered who the ghost was: me or him.

A sharp knock on the door caused me to jump up from my place on the couch. The remote fell onto the floor with enough force to pop the batteries out.

I looked out the window and saw a small black car parked in front of the house. It wasn’t familiar.

The knock repeated itself and I sighed, flipping the throw blanket off of me and putting my bare feet onto the cool wood of the floors.

When the knock continued, I shouted, “I’m coming! Jesus.”

After opening the door, I just stared. Dark, thick hair met a full beard. The eyes seemed familiar somehow, but I knew as I stared at him that I’d never met him before. His crisp black dress shirt was rolled to his elbows and tucked into dark jeans. My eyes skipped over his muscular arms, taking in his overall aura of being a total bad ass, an aura that threatened an almost exciting kind of violence.

I didn’t let him in, just held onto the side of the door. “Yeah?” I asked.

The man seemed to take me in, eyes sliding over my yoga pants and tank top. I pulled my sleep sweater across my chest.

“Is Nathan here?”

“Nope, sure isn’t.” I began to close the door but his flat palm on the wood stopped me.

“Nathan has a box of stuff for me. I’m here to collect it.”

“And who the fuck are you?” I was annoyed that he was taking up my time and hadn’t even had the courtesy to introduce himself.

He stepped closer to the door and my pulse skipped. This man screamed danger. “Who the fuck are
you
?” he echoed.

“I live here.” I clenched my teeth together.

He laughed, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Of course you do.” His palm on the door pushed and I scrambled to retain control of the situation by pushing against the door.

“Hey, back the fuck off!”

His eyes changed, from light interest to annoyance. “Look, little girl, I talked to Nathan two Tuesdays ago.”

Two Tuesdays ago. When I lost the baby. Where had Nathan been, when I called him? I remembered he was gone, far away. He’d never told me where.

The guy kept talking, oblivious to me being lost in thought. “He knew I was coming into town to get some shit. Move aside.”

Was this guy for fucking real? “Hell no,” I spat, some of the fire that had been gone coming into my voice. “Back up.”

“Nathan!” he hollered over my shoulder.

“What the fuck?” I asked, not intending to say it aloud. “He’s not home. You can come back when he is.” I pushed against the door, but it didn’t budge against his hand. I suddenly felt so fucking stupid for telling him that I was here all alone. His one palm on the door was stronger than my full body weight against it.

“Why don’t you call him? I don’t want to let you in the house while he’s gone.” I wanted to see him prove he knew Nathan—because if he did, he should have his phone number.

“Fine.” He pulled out a shiny black phone and typed a series of numbers in. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t even need to pull up Nathan’s name in his contacts—he knew the phone number by heart.

Who was he?

And why hadn’t Nathan told me about him?

He held the phone up to his ear, but after waiting a few seconds, he hung up. “He didn’t answer.” He stared at me, as if he expected me to still let him in.

Suddenly, he let go of the door, causing the door to give under my weight. I stumbled and he stepped forward so that he was in the house, reaching a hand to steady me. The heat of his hand on my arm was like a brand and I shook off his touch.

He was inside of the house. Shit. Fuck.

“Who are you?” I asked again, pissed to be kept in the dark. I backed up a step, hit the bannister. I tried to remain as if I was in control of the situation as the man looked around.

“When will he be home?” His eyes were narrowed and he turned to look at the driveway. “I won’t be in town much longer.”

I had zero intention of telling him when Nathan would be home, but it wasn’t like I even knew the answer to that. Nathan came and went, and he was often home while I slept and gone when I woke.

“It’s just a box of stuff. Surely you know where it is.”

“I don’t. Sorry.” I tried remaining calm.

Before I could stop him, the guy walked into the dining room and then through the study, looking. I felt so fucking stupid for allowing him to come in.

Following him around the house seemed to be the only thing I was capable of doing. I watched as he opened the closet doors in the study before frowning.

Nathan’s study was off-limits to me. Not that Nathan had specifically said not to go into it, but I could tell—his study was
his.
I made tiny messes elsewhere in the house, but the study was his zone—his place to Zen or work or watch porn or whatever the fuck he did in there.

So to see this guy wandering the room, pulling open drawers and cabinets and looking under the desk, was more than a little disconcerting. I imagined the look of horror on Nathan’s face, knowing that his pens had been shifted out of order on the top of the desk as Elias crouched and bumped into it.

“What the fuck? Do you make a habit of waltzing into the homes of people you don’t know?”

The guy only gave me a glance, an arch of one dark eyebrow before he resumed his search.

“Pretty sure breaking and entering carries a minimum two-year sentence in Mass, jackass.”

He paused, large hands braced on Nathan’s desk top. “Only if I’m armed.”

I swallowed. He looked at me like he didn’t
need
a weapon. The sheer size of him—from his arms to his hands—looked like he could break me in half without even trying.

“Are you armed?”

He lifted a shoulder and some of the frustration momentarily left his face. “Are you going to frisk me and find out?”

Shiiiit.
What in the world could I say to that? Instead of answering, I shifted my gaze to the closet whose doors he’d left open.

To his credit, he did seem like he was looking for something, and seemed to know the place pretty well. I was still pissed that he acted like he had every right to walk around the house, but I was even more pissed at Nathan.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow?” I said when he turned the corner and walked passed me, back to the entry way, hoping the delay would give me time to bring it up to Nathan so that he could get in touch with this guy himself.

He seemed annoyed by the idea. “Can you tell him I stopped by?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him some asshole barged his way into the house.”

His eyes burned when he pinned me with a stare. He didn’t say anything for several seconds, just glared at me with eyes so dark they looked black. And then his eyes flicked to the wall. “This is my sister’s house.”

The answer shocked me. I began to say something, but no words came.

“She spent hours picking and applying that wallpaper herself,” he said, pointing a finger inches from my eyes, to the design on the walls, the design I had always admired, the gently curving lines that intersected before arching away.

“You’re in my sister’s house,” he said before turning and leaving.

After I closed the door behind him, I sank to the first step on the staircase. I couldn’t look at the wallpaper without seeing her. Looking around the house, I saw very little evidence of me. But Diana, Nathan’s first love, was everywhere.

I didn’t think I could feel any smaller than I did in that moment.

E
very single day
for the last two weeks, people kept interacting with me. They waved when they passed, some even spoke to me. Judging from their reactions, I must have been speaking back, nodding appropriately and giving the kind of reactions that they expected. But I’m not sure how. Everything was gray and fog. And I didn’t know how to get out of it, how to clear my eyes and my head. I definitely didn’t know how to clear my heart.

This loss, this visceral, jagged thing that had been punched through my chest, was different than when I’d lost Diana. I’d never seen it kick through Adele’s stomach, seen the movement of her stretched-out skin. I didn’t know what color hair it had. If it was a boy or a girl. I didn’t know anything about the baby except it was mine, and I loved it. But knowing that I loved it didn’t change anything. There was no physical loss on my end. It was all mental. Every single second of the day, I had to remind myself that it had happened, like the ticking arms of a clock.

It’s gone.

It’s gone.

It’s gone.

It’s gone.

Every time the big hand swept past another hour, I felt it through my bones, through every centimeter of my skeleton.

It’s gone.

With mechanical moves, I unlocked my office and closed the door shut behind me. I kept the lights off, because I didn’t really even want anyone to know I was here. The sun was hidden behind angry, gray clouds, the kind that only winter in the northeast can provide. It felt appropriate, like my office had become a dank cave for me to hide in.

And that’s precisely what I’d been doing. I was hiding.

Hiding from my home, and from Adele.

It was irrational, but I was incapable of looking at her without seeing her fear and anxiety about the baby. How the fuck could she have not loved it instantly? How the fuck could she not have been counting down the days until we got to swaddle it and cradle it in our arms?

I sank into my desk chair, the brown leather creaking under my weight. My eyes fell shut while I listened to the sounds of my colleagues out in the hallways, just outside my closed door. We’d had a faculty meeting, and I snuck out a couple minutes early, just so that I could lock myself in here unnoticed.

Even in the darkened room, the picture of Adele screamed out to me when I opened my eyes again. Letting out a deep breath, I leaned forward to snag the edge of the frame.

I knew every inch of her face, like she’d been seared into my brain. The way her chin fell to a sharp point and the tiny freckle underneath her right ear, I knew every piece of her. But staring at her picture, I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d shed a single tear about this.

By the time I got home the last week or so, she was always in bed. And if she was faking sleep to avoid me, she was the best goddamned actress I’d ever met. No, her breathing was deep and even, her face untroubled. Every single night.

Did it carve out her insides knowing that the thing inside her was just … gone? That the tiny little heart that we’d heard in the doctor’s office just stopped? Because it did mine. Every day I felt the edges of the knife scrape along my skin. It was dull and painful, scooping away bits and pieces of me with every pass.

“Fuck,” I whispered under my breath, fully aware that no one would hear me anyway. You’d think because I’d lived with grief once before and had managed to shoulder that burden that I’d be far more prepared for this.

I wasn’t.

Loss wasn’t something cumulative. It wasn’t something that got easier with familiarity. And I was so fucking familiar with it.

But for some reason, this particular loss was stripping me of my ability to talk to Adele. To open the fucking bottom right drawer of my desk.

And I was starting to hate myself because of it.

I loved Adele. I loved her so much. That hadn’t changed, hadn’t lessened in the slightest, but I knew that my hesitancy was firmly rooted in the fact that I was afraid of her reaction if I reached out to her. If I asked Adele to grieve with me in this, what would she do?

I’d never know if I didn’t just man the hell up and do it.

The casters of my desk chair squeaked when I spun in place. When I started pulling open the bottom drawer, I only stopped for a heartbeat before opening it all the way.

The blanket was the first thing I saw, and I lifted it out with a shaking hand. My nose burned when I set it on my lap to pick up the Harvard onesie and the bath towel.

With bricks settling in my stomach, I had to face the realization that I had done nothing to lower the wall between me and Adele when it came to the pregnancy. Not once had she asked me to hide my excitement from her. Not one time.

I could have brought these things home, could have talked with her about the things I couldn’t wait to do.

Buy books for the nursery, and the good shit too, not just crappy little simple stories. Our baby would have had the best fucking children’s library in the country.

Go for walks through our little neighborhood as a family.

Go to the park on weekends.

Take him or her onto the perfectly manicured grounds at Harvard and be able to see them grow up in such a spectacular place.

The first tear hit my cheek before I even realized I was crying. Jamming the heel of my hand under my eye, I clenched my teeth together as tightly as I could manage.

An entire fucking future. Gone.

And I was sick of mourning it alone. I wanted to do it with Adele.

Carefully laying the items back in the drawer before I left, I briefly wondered whether I should let her know I was going to be home earlier than she probably expected me. The fact that I even
had
to question it pissed me off all over again.

While I walked out of the building, I tapped out a quick text,
On my way home. I’ll make some dinner tonight if you haven’t already eaten.

Perfect. I tried to imagine her reaction to seeing it. No doubt, she’d wonder if I’d lost my mind. We’d barely spoken in two weeks, let alone shared a meal. But I was just as culpable in where we were now as she was, so if one stupid text and one meal together were steps that I could take to cross the distance between us, then I’d do it.

Traffic was a fucking nightmare, so it was a solid thirty minutes later before I finally pulled into the driveway. Everything was dark in the house save one lamp in the family room, so I knew she was awake, despite the fact that she hadn’t responded to my text.

An unfamiliar flurry of nerves swirled through my stomach when I walked through the garage door. Everything was quiet, and for a moment I wondered if maybe Leo was had picked her up or something. Normally, she’d let me know, but I couldn’t say for certain that she would have after the last two weeks.

I dropped my leather briefcase next to the kitchen island and stared at the immaculate counters. Adele had been so messy and absent-minded right after the miscarriage, but I hadn’t said a damn word because I’d been too afraid that she’d think I was criticizing her.

But in the last week, every time I came home, the house was as clean as I’d ever seen it. I hung my head, bracing my hands on the counter.

What a selfish fucking idiot I was. Of
course
this was affecting her. It was right in front of me, and I was just the dick who hadn’t seen it. Probably because I hadn’t wanted to see it.

“Adele?” I called out.

“In here.”

I turned the corner and had a massive déjà vu moment. The last time I’d done this, turned the corner to find her on the couch, I’d had grocery bags full of stuff and she’d ended up banging the hell out of me. And just like that day, she was curled into the corner with a blanket over her legs. Only this time, she was staring up at the staircase with a look on her face that was so blank, it made my stomach drop.

Her face was pale, like the blood flow had never fully returned to normal. Her hair was limp around her shoulders, but she was still so damn beautiful that I ached. But for the first time since I’d met her, I had no fucking idea how to bridge this gap, how to get back under her skin.

So like a fucking tool, I cleared my throat and asked the worst question in the world. “So, how was your day?”

Adele didn’t even blink, just continued staring at the staircase. Okay then. Shaking my head, I moved to sit on the couch by her feet when she finally spoke.

“Did you help put up that wallpaper?”

It was my turn to blink. Repeatedly. Because what the hell?

“I, uh,” I shook my head again, turning to look at the thing in question. No, I had not helped with that wallpaper, because I was completely convinced that it would look terrible. Not long after we’d moved in here, Diana had brought home a stack of books and kept showing me pattern after pattern in the hopes that it would change my mind. But then then she found the one she wanted and decided she didn’t care if I liked it or not. A week later, I’d come home from work to find the wall half done and the smuggest smile on my wife’s face when I grudgingly admitted that it looked nice.

Naturally, that lead to me fucking her against the wall. I pinched the bridge of my nose before I looked at Adele again. Her face was still void of any expression, but there was color on her cheeks while she waited for me to answer. Why? Why would she even want to hear this?

“No, I didn’t,” I finally answered and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say, because her eyes turned frigid. I dropped onto the couch with a weary sigh. “Why do you want to know?”

She stared at me for a long moment, and then shoved the blanket off her lap and stood. Fucking hell. Instead of stomping away like I expected, she walked over to the banister and looked up at the wall again. Maybe she was drunk. It would explain a lot.

“I’ve always liked this pattern,” she said so quietly that I barely heard her.

“That’s … good,” I guessed. Possibly. Because what the
hell
? Pathetically, I didn’t want to disrupt whatever this was, because we were actually talking. And I missed her voice. I plain missed her.

“My day was interesting.” Adele pivoted to face me and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. My eyebrows lifted in question when she didn’t elaborate. “Someone stopped here for you while you were at work. It was a very enlightening visit.”

Never good. My options of who it could have been, given the closed-off body language that she was handing me, were definitely not good.

“Who was it?” My voice sounded so tired to my ears, and I had nothing left in me to try and do anything about it.

“I met your brother-in-law today.”

“Oh, fuck.”

Adele smiled, but it wasn’t kind. It was tight and uncomfortable. “How ironic. That was pretty much my reaction too.”

Fucking Elias. That
dick.