Tied to the Tycoon (20 page)

Ava rolled her head around, like he’d just told her one of those lies that was so blatant that either the liar or the one being lied to must be stupid. “You
tried?
You had it in mind? Jackson, you can’t try to control someone and respect their boundaries at the same time. Those things are mutually exclusive, you utter asshole.”

He reached for her again, completely out of ideas. She jumped away. “You don’t get it. If you try to control someone, Jacks, you don’t respect them. And you can’t…”

She stopped, her anger suddenly giving way to tears. She took a moment to fight them back, and when she looked at him again, her blue eyes were cold and clear. “You can’t love someone you don’t respect.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, the frustration coming back to him. How could she possibly think that? After everything he’d done? “I do respect you. I do love you. Ava, come on. I always have.”

“How would I know any of that?” All the fury and tears had gone from her, and what was left was a quiet, calm shell of sadness. This was the most terrifying incarnation yet, he realized, because it looked final. Stable. Settled. His engineer’s mind recognized equilibrium when he saw it, but this was an equilibrium that locked him out.

“Seriously, Jackson,” she said again. “How would I know any of that? You push me all the time to talk to you, to open up to you, but you don’t do the same with me. You don’t tell me anything. You mastermind all these…these stunts, but how am I supposed to know if what I feel with you is real and not just wishful thinking if you don’t open up to me, too? That it’s not just…that I’m not just convenient for you, until something happens and…”

Ava stopped herself, putting her hand to her face, and he was reminded of how much he still didn’t know. How much he’d thought she was going to share with him. He had the terrible suspicion that maybe, just maybe, he’d triggered something, something she’d seen before. Something he didn’t know about.

“How am I supposed to trust you? And then you do something like this.” She motioned sadly at the busted up door in the next room. “I mean, Jackson, this is
nuts
. And I have to wonder at all that stuff I don’t know, and if I’m just crazy to ever think of trusting you at all.”

Jackson didn’t have an answer. Panic that someone he cared about might be hurt or might have left him wasn’t new to him; and neither was the fear that he had lost control of himself, that he’d crossed a line. In fact, both of those fears were distressingly familiar, and it hurt him profoundly to know how badly he’d fucked up today. He’d been working on himself for a long time, but it hadn’t been long enough. He’d crossed a pretty severe line, and it wasn’t ok.

But it had not occurred to him before that there was a disparity between what he craved from Ava and what he was willing to give. And it had never occurred to him that she might want to know the things he didn’t tell people about; it was just a given to him that he had to keep them hidden. But now that she pointed it out, it did seem pretty damn obvious.

Jackson was accustomed to seeing all the angles of a given problem before anyone else. The genius wonder boy didn’t have much experience in being flat out wrong, or being caught off-guard. He wasn’t very good at either.

“But I love you,” he said stubbornly.

“I can’t see you right now,” Ava said. “I don’t… Please don’t take this the wrong way, Jackson, I’m just…I’m just scared. And I don’t mean physically, necessarily, I just…I don’t feel safe.”

She lowered her eyes, like she knew how badly that would hurt him and didn’t want to see it happen. And nothing had ever hurt him like that.

She didn’t feel safe.

It felt like someone had scooped out a big part of his insides and now he was slowly collapsing in on the cavity to try to dull the hurt. He wanted to find someone to beat the shit out of him, because it would make him feel better, it would feel right, and he was sure he deserved it. The gaping maw of grief kept getting bigger and bigger the longer he stood in that room, looking at Ava while she wouldn’t look at him, until he just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to make his unwilling feet move.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, and left.

chapter
21

As soon as Jackson stepped off the plane, he felt it. He always felt it when he came back to Cushing, Oklahoma: the past, weighing down on him, clamoring for his attention. He’d begged his mother to move, but only half-heartedly. She had friends there, as well as memories, and now that his father was truly gone—dead, not just on a bender somewhere between security jobs, but dead and gone and not about to bother anyone ever again—he supposed there was nothing for her to worry about.

She did like her cruises, though. Jackson grinned. He was about to send her on another one, this time to the Bahamas. She’d done Alaska in the summer, had sent him about a million pictures of glaciers. It made her so happy, and he liked to see her face when he gave her the tickets. He tried to do that as often as he could, but sometimes he just sent them in the mail, too busy with work to get away from the city.

Now was an especially crazy time to leave New York. The ArtLingua launch party, which they’d set up as a New Year’s Eve party, was the hottest ticket in the city, thanks to their publicist, Arlene. Every art star and tech guru in the city would be there, or would try to be. He should be excited. In just one day, he’d be on the verge of the next triumph, another step up on the road to…where, exactly?

That was part of the problem. He’d done what he’d needed to do, proved he could start and run a world-class business. He’d built something he truly believed could help people, a new thing that had not existed before he had conceived of it. And after this launch, he’d be even richer than he already was. He’d be a veritable star.

And he just didn’t give a shit. None of it mattered without Ava. He was like a ghost, a shade. Not even half of himself without her. Especially knowing it was his fault, knowing he’d hurt her. Scared her.

Knowing she didn’t feel safe.

Jackson had walked around the office on automatic, doing things that needed to be done, even if he didn’t really need to be the one to do them. The launch really had gotten to the point of planning where it was out of his hands—he was just micromanaging because he couldn’t be at home. She’d only been with him a short time, but already he could feel her everywhere. Could see her everywhere. Christ, he even thought he could smell her. He’d walk into the kitchen to get something to eat, and would remember her bent over the counter and the longing would seize him ferociously, and then be replaced by grief just as quickly. It wrecked him every time. He didn’t eat for two days until he finally started ordering out at the office. Even then, he wasn’t hungry. He only ate to appease his employees, who were starting to get worried. Jackson Reed was a hollow man.

And that’s why he’d come home.

He tried to shake it off on the walk to the rental car, turned the radio up all the way as he drove off. But once he got on those familiar roads, it was just no use. He knew those roads so well he didn’t need to think about it, didn’t need to occupy his brain, and thoughts of Ava rushed right back into the empty space.

Jackson pulled into the familiar driveway and just sat in the car. He’d come here because he needed help, because he needed to talk to the only person in the world who would understand what he was afraid of, but now he found that he dreaded doing just that. The idea of telling his mother, his own mother, that he’d frightened a woman? That he’d made her feel unsafe? He could barely face the possibility himself. Telling his mother… The thought that she might look at him and have the same fear Jackson did—that she might look at Jackson and see Jackson’s father—then he’d know for sure it was true. That right there ranked as his worst nightmare, hands down.

Jackson leaned his miserable head on the steering wheel. Ava had said she couldn’t trust him if she didn’t know him, couldn’t just trust how she felt. Which frustrated him all the more, because he had trusted her just based on that feeling, hadn’t he? Based on their connection?

But you didn’t trust her enough to tell her about any of this, did you?

The irony was, he kept his past to himself for precisely that reason: he didn’t want to frighten people. Especially women. And keeping things from Ava Barnett had had the exact opposite effect.

“I fucking hate irony,” Jackson muttered to himself. But there was no use being scared. He’d have to face all this crap. He had just steeled himself and opened the door when he heard the front door creak open.

“Jackson!”

Emmie Reed stood with her baking apron on, flour on her cheek, and her hands on her hips, pretending to be put out at an unannounced visit, but failing to hide her delight at the same time. Jackson gave her the biggest smile he could, and he was genuinely happy to see his mother. He had to brace himself as he watched her limp down the front steps, as he always did, remembering not to wince. Every painful step reproached him for not being able to stop the beating that had caused it.

“Mom,” he said, and wrapped his big arms around her.

“Let me go,” she laughed. “I’ve got to roll out this crust before it warms up enough for the gluten to do its thing and ruin it. Come on, come on, let’s go!”

Jackson followed behind her dutifully, not having understood most of what she’d said. His mother was a prolific baker, testing out recipes and contributing her own on various cooking websites with a kind of competitive zeal that Jackson admired. She’d get a flinty look in her eye when she was onto something good, and then Jackson would get a package in the mail full of something delicious. It worked out for everyone.

But to get to the kitchen, they had to go through the whole house. Jackson normally went straight to the kitchen door to avoid this. Walking through the old house brought with it the same assault of memories Jackson had felt upon touching down in Cushing, but about a hundred times stronger. He hated it. He’d watched his mother get pushed down those same damn stairs. He
hated
those stairs. Jackson caught himself actually hunching his shoulders, as though readying himself for an attack.

His dad still ruled this place, even from beyond the grave. It didn’t seem fair.

He relaxed noticeably when they got to his mother’s warm kitchen, the center island cleared off and covered with flour, a big hunk of dough in the middle of it. Emmie Reed didn’t waste any time and went right ahead and started working on the dough.

Without even looking up, she said, “Now tell me what the hell happened.”

Jackson grinned. He’d gotten his mouth from his mother, that was for sure.

“It’s a woman,” he said.

His mother looked up, waiting for him to go on. “Of
course
it’s a woman, Jackson. None of ‘em have ever driven you back here ‘til now. What happened?”

He sat on a kitchen stool and sighed. “Ava Barnett.”

His mother’s eyes sparkled. “I remember that one.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. She was the only one you got excited to tell me about. If I recall correctly,” Emmie said, looking up from her flattening crust, “you were not actually an item back in the prehistoric era, or whenever it was. I take it that has changed?”

“For about a minute, yeah.”

Emmie rolled in silence for a time while Jackson watched her work, replaying the last few days in his head and trying to figure out how to explain it all to his mother. Finally, Emmie lost her patience and rapped the rolling pin on the counter to get his attention.

“Are you gonna tell me or not?”

Just out with it, Jackson
.

“I scared her.”

Emmie looked at him. “What do you mean you scared her?”

No going back now.

“I mean I got angry, I got scared, because I thought she was leaving me, and I went to her apartment, and…I was wrong. I was all wrong. Mom, I’ve worked so hard, I’ve been so scared that I’d be like him, and now…”

Jackson couldn’t finish. What else was there to say? He stared down at his hands, the hands that had busted in Ava’s door, and experienced a fresh wave of self-loathing.

“Jackson Reed, look at me.”

Jackson hadn’t been scared like this since he was a boy. And he was scared now that he’d turned into the man who had scared him then. If he saw it in his mother’s face, he’d know beyond the shadow of a doubt. He looked up.

His mother said, “What happened? Specifics.”

“I was upset. I shoved against her door, and it just—it gave way. It’s not an excuse. I broke open her damn door, and scared the crap out of her. And before that I tried to…I don’t know, micromanage everything. I was awful, Mom.”

His mother had tears in her eyes.

She said, “Listen to me. Of course you have some of him in you. He was your father—it can’t be helped. But you are not him. How could you even think that?” She laughed mirthlessly, wiping her eyes with the back of her arm, her hands still covered in flour. “You’ve made choices to be good, to be kind, to learn how to deal with your temper. You did that all on your own. You’re the man you decided to be, Jackson, and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

“I didn’t do it all on my own,” he said quietly. “I had help.”

“Well, whatever. You did it. Now what did Ava say?”

“She says I tried to control her. That I don’t respect her.”

His mother gave him a long look. “Was she right?” she said evenly.

“Of course I respect her!” Jackson said, his voice getting hot. Then he looked at his mom. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Well, that was a yes,” Emmie said, returning to her crust to add a little more ice water. “You are a control freak. What else do you expect, growing up the way you did? With what I let…”

His mother paused, frozen mid-stroke in her crust rolling. This was what she did to get a hold of herself when she got emotional in front of her son. He knew to let it pass.

At last, she put down her rolling pin. She said, “You had a more chaotic upbringing than I would have liked for you, Jackson, and yes, that has helped to shape you. You’ve turned most of those experiences into strengths, but control in relationships is dangerous. So you screwed up. Big deal. So fix it. You’ve worked so hard to become the man you are, and you should be proud of that, but what on earth makes you think that you’re
done
?”