Читать книгу The Dare Collection 2018 - Taryn Leigh Taylor - Страница 13

THE NEXT MORNING when her phone rang, Maya saw that it was her parents’ home phone number. And ignored it.

She felt guilty about it the second after she did it, but she couldn’t bring herself to answer it. She didn’t want to hear what else was happening back in Toronto. She didn’t want to explain—again—why she hadn’t chosen to stay there to drown in all the pity and embarrassment after her disaster of a wedding day. Not to mention the weather.

And to add to her newfound rebelliousness, she declined to check her email, too. For the first time in...as long as she could remember.

Work would have to get along without her.

That was such a scandalous, insane, brand-new thought that she laughed out loud, startling herself.

Thankfully, she was alone.

Charlie hadn’t snuck away in the night as she’d assumed he would. He’d woken her up, rolled her beneath him and made her scream. Ruinously. That had been when dawn was only just beginning to turn the sky outside pink. He’d flashed that easy grin at her while they both lay there, panting. And then she’d stayed right where she was, wondering if she’d ever fully recover from the things that man could do to her, while he’d sauntered off to her washroom.

She’d heard the shower go on, but she’d been too drowsy and dizzy to do much more than notice the sound of the water. She’d still been lying right where he’d left her, boneless and smiling, when he’d walked back out and pulled his clothes back on.

He’d stamped on his boots, run a careless hand through his hair and then fixed that bright gaze of his on hers. He hadn’t flashed his grin. He hadn’t drawled something to break the mood.

And Maya had felt her heart thump. Hard.

She knew better than to read anything into a moment. A look. She was being ridiculous and she’d told herself so, then and there. He might have spent a long afternoon and the longer night with her, but all they’d done was have sex and eat.

That wasn’t the kind of thing that led to goodbye kisses. Or should.

But she thought a kiss would have been a lot simpler than the moment that had stretched out between them, fraught and hot and shot through with layers of things she was afraid to name.

She’d been wide-awake when he’d left, without saying a word.

Maya had decided that it was unwise to lie about in that bed, reliving the things that had gone on there, all over the wide king-size mattress. Besides, there was no need to relive it when she could feel it in every inch of her body. When she stretched. When she breathed.

Every touch. Every thrust. His mouth and hands on every square inch of her body—

It had been enough to make her dizzy all over again.

She’d taken a shower, sorted out her hair, then had set off into the village.

She’d seen a flyer in the piazza a day or so before, heralding a yoga class at the only larger hotel that was open this time of year. She hurried down through the hotel’s stacked levels, then headed outside to make her way down the tiers of the garden and pool areas, letting herself out at the gate near the shed that now felt like theirs—another thing she knew better than to let herself think. It was a chilly morning with a faint bite in the air, though the sky was clear. But by the time she made it down all the many staircases it took to get to the piazza that was set roughly halfway down the cliffside, she was warm.

And proud of herself, too. Every day she got quicker. Less out of breath. As if all these stairs were changing her the more she ran up and down them.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the stairs that were making her feel so different—electric and intense—inside her own skin.

She slipped into the yoga class just as it was starting, situating herself in the middle of the room and giving herself over to an easy, peaceful hour and a half of stretching. Breathing. Clearing her head and settling into her body.

Making it hers again.

When the class was done, she walked out, pleased to find the day a little bit warmer, especially when she moved from the shadows into the sun. She found herself espresso and a pastry from one of the cafés that stayed open year-round, and then she sat on the broad lip of a fountain. It was at the base of the wide stairs that led up to a pretty church with its bell tower, and Maya thought she could spend a lifetime gazing up at the ancient buildings surrounding the square. Pastel colors accented with iron balconies, all of it faintly weathered, reminding her of the sea in the distance and the long, hot, crowded summers that made the Amalfi coast famous.

Her pastry was flaky and sweet and gone too soon, and still she sat where she was, soaking in the sounds of feet on old stones. The sounds of Italian being spoken all around her. There were Christmas lights strung up that she needed to come back down and admire when it got dark.

The quiet did something to her. These hours with no stress, no phone calls, no messages. Day after day without the stress she’d always prided herself on managing so well. She’d never stopped to take the time and wonder who she’d be without all of those things. Without a to-do list that could stretch across the width of Canada. Without too much work to ever truly finish. Without a busy city heaving all around her, rush rush rushing just as she did.

But now that she’d stopped running, she couldn’t imagine starting up again.

Every time she had an encounter with Charlie, it got harder and harder to imagine going back home to Toronto. Whether to her own condo or some other one, assuming Ethan actually did as requested. Maya couldn’t imagine slipping back into her life.

Melinda seemed to think there would be some kind of operatic reckoning when she returned, but the more Maya considered it, the more she doubted it. There would only be as much of a reckoning as she allowed. People could discuss what had happened with her only if she let them. The firm would be alive with gossip as long as both she and Ethan continued to work there, sure. But Maya didn’t have to indulge in any of it.

She didn’t have to talk about her misfire of a wedding at all if she didn’t want to.

It was almost frightening how easy it was to imagine. She could lose herself in the work the way she always had, because there was always more. She could quietly request of her managing partner that she not be put on cases with Ethan, but as that hardly ever happened anyway, there was almost no point in asking. No one would want them working together anyway, as their personal issues were neither good for the clients nor billable.

And didn’t that say everything there was to say about the life she’d so meticulously and carefully built? That she could have a fiancé, then lose him, and it would make so little difference?

That she could get jilted on her wedding day, run off on her honeymoon by herself and have yet to truly mourn what she’d left behind?

Maya tried to find it in her to grieve the loss of her life with Ethan, but she didn’t seem to have it in her. Maybe that was why, when she couldn’t avoid it anymore, she finally allowed herself to think about Lorraine.

Fickle, reckless, messy Lorraine. Maya could come up with all kinds of words to describe her best friend. Or former best friend, she supposed, given what had happened. And all the words she’d choose were true.

But she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she loved Lorraine anyway. She always had and that was the part she didn’t want to admit to herself. Because that didn’t just disappear overnight. She’d caught herself picking up her phone to shoot Lorraine a text or send her a picture more than once since she’d come to Italy. It was second nature after all these years.

Her heart hadn’t caught up to reality yet.

Lorraine had been so much work. There had never been room for too many other friends and never close ones, not with Lorraine there to take up all of Maya’s emotional energy. And maybe there was a part of Maya that had taken a certain pleasure in doing that work. In turning herself inside out for her friend, again and again, with no expectation of return.

Friendship isn’t about measuring everything to make sure it’s equal, she had told Ethan when he’d complained about the Lorraine situation—because there had always been another Lorraine situation. Friendship is about love. The end.

She’d believed that. She really, truly had.

But here in this faraway place that still felt like a fantasy despite the hard, cold stone she sat on, she wondered. Maybe there had been a part of her that had gotten off on loving Lorraine despite everything. Lorraine had been her opportunity to take care of someone else when no one else in her life required it. Her parents took care of themselves with a ruthlessness that was only surprising to people who’d never met them before. Melinda had never needed anyone to take care of her. She took care of everyone else and had made it her calling. It was why she’d become a doctor. Ethan, too, had needed very little in the way of maintenance. Their issues were all in the scheduling, or so Maya had thought. But they hadn’t needed each other.

The only person who had ever needed her—often desperately—had been Lorraine.

Maya had been raised to take care of herself and trained never to expect anyone else to provide something for her if she could do it herself. Lorraine had been the first person she’d met, at eighteen years of age, that she could care for.

Was it her fault? Had it always been leading here? Maya blew out a breath where she sat, then brushed a few stray crumbs from her pastry from her leg. There had been a part of her that had pitied Lorraine. So broken, she had always thought. So lost and lonely. Had that been nothing more than the worst sort of condescension all this time?

Had she done this to herself, one patronizing offer of help at a time? She’d never meant to condescend to Lorraine. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t.

She didn’t mean to do it, but one second she was sitting there fiddling with her empty espresso cup, and the next she had her mobile in her hand again.

It wasn’t until the line started ringing in her ear that her stomach dropped and the reality of what she was doing kicked in. But then it was too late. Even if she hung up, the phone would record the call.

Maya shut her eyes, tipping her head forward as if that could ward off the foolishness of what she was doing.

She heard Lorraine pick up, though there was nothing but silence. One beat, then another.

“I didn’t think you would call me. I didn’t think you would ever speak to me again.”

Lorraine didn’t sound quite like herself. She sounded distant and shaken, maybe. Or maybe that was more wishful thinking on Maya’s part.

She lifted her head in the piazza and watched the clouds move in above the bell tower of the ancient church that commanded the far side of the square. “I haven’t decided.”

“Is that what you’re calling to tell me? That you haven’t decided whether or not you’re ever speaking to me again?”

“Ethan had his chance to explain.” Maya was proud of how cool she sounded. How unaffected. Thank God Lorraine couldn’t see how she shook where she sat. “Of course, some of that was lost in the unfortunate business of canceling our wedding an hour before the ceremony started. I think there was an explanation in there somewhere, but to be honest, it’s a blur. And I’ve known you a whole lot longer.”

Another long pause. The Lorraine Maya knew would have been weeping, because she was always weeping. Anything she felt, she cried out in great sobs, tears tracking down her cheeks in rivers.

But maybe all of that had been an act. It was entirely possible she’d never known Lorraine at all.

“We didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said, just when Maya was starting to think she wouldn’t say anything else.

“But you see, you must have meant to hurt me,” Maya said. Softly. Very, very softly, the words were coming out of her, though she had no idea where she was going—which was counter to everything she had ever learned about the art of argument in law school. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Because if you didn’t want to hurt me, you wouldn’t have. It’s that simple.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t...”

Maya waited. But it didn’t seem as if Lorraine was going to speak again. Or maybe she was fighting the same wallop of regret and self-recrimination, guilt and fury, that Maya was.

She could feel that stinging at the back of her throat again, like a scream that had nowhere to go. And then something far bigger than a scream rolled into her. Through her. A grief so big and wide and impossible that she wondered it didn’t tear her apart where she sat.

The rain started then, little drops that felt like a tickle, but she didn’t move.

She remembered their first day at university. When all the hubbub had subsided, they were left alone in the room they were expected to share for a year. Maya could see Lorraine as she’d been back then as if she was standing before her all over again. Lorraine had been almost gangly then, though Maya could see that only when she looked at old pictures. At the time she’d thought Lorraine was beautiful, so enviably skinny where Maya was curvy, with the long, straight black hair and dark olive skin of her Persian father and light green eyes of her French-Canadian mother.

This is going to be great, eighteen-year-old Maya had promised the stranger before her, who had struck her as terrified. Maybe she’d made that up, too. Maybe she’d caused all of this from the start. We’re going to be best friends.

And they had been, which wasn’t to say they’d always gotten along. Some years, Maya had wondered if they only even spoke anymore because she had made that proclamation. Maya had followed the path that had always been laid out so carefully before her. Lorraine had...drifted. Maya had remembered their first day a thousand times since then, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with irritation. She’d wondered what would have happened if they’d been placed with other first-year roommates instead of with each other.

But today, on a rainy afternoon in a tiny fishing village in Italy, the memory made her nothing but sad.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said again.

“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Maya replied. “Because you did.”

And that grief was too much in her voice, so she ended the call. She waited until she was sure her knees wouldn’t give out on her, and then she stood. The rain was coming harder now, but there was a part of her that welcomed it. Rain on her head felt...right, somehow. She ran her espresso cup back into the café, then found herself outside again, and she couldn’t tell if the rain was in her face or if her eyes were blurred for a different reason.

She half walked, half ran for the little tunnel dug out beneath one of the buildings, this old village like a labyrinth built vertically, twisting and turning and piled high on itself. She plunged herself into the shadows, only to find that escaping the rain didn’t make her able to see any better.

Maya let out a sound she didn’t want to admit she could make, then picked up her pace. She kept her head down, telling herself that people had cried on these stones since the days of the Roman Empire. Her grief over one or two relationships that had ended terribly—and all at once—was nothing compared to the things others must have cried about here.

Not that it helped.

And when she nearly slammed into a person coming in the opposite direction, she tried to duck around and lunge for the rainy, gray daylight a few feet away—

But he caught her.

And she knew it was Charlie in the same second she came up hard against his chest.

The last thing in the world she wanted to do was let someone look at her. Especially this beautiful, lazy, entirely too relaxed, American handyman she never should have met, much less touched.

“You look a little too serious for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation,” he said, the low rumble of his voice reminding her of a motorcycle or one of the Italian sports cars that took the winding roads through these villages much too fast. She could feel it inside her, like an earthquake.

It made her eyes blur even more, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more just then, her or him. Maya swiped at her eyes and focused on Charlie, scowling at him.

He was too beautiful. He wore a leather jacket against the weather and looked like something out of an old movie with his perfect mouth, that golden beard over his perfectly sculpted chin and the rain making his blond hair both darker than usual and brighter where the gray light caught it.

“This is an accidental vacation,” she threw at him, that scream in her throat making her voice harsh. “It was supposed to be my honeymoon. He broke the news that he wanted my best friend instead while there were already guests waiting in the chapel. I decided that was humiliating enough and came here. Where sometimes I can’t tell if it’s raining on me or if I’m grieving something that obviously wasn’t real in the first place.”

His grip got tighter. His eyes blazed, the blue almost too bright and fierce. Then his mouth firmed into a hard line.

“Sounds like you had a lucky escape,” he said, and then he very carefully released her and took a step back.

And as betrayals went, especially lately, this one hardly made the list.

But something inside Maya snapped. She actually felt it crack and was amazed he didn’t comment on the fact she was now ripped wide-open right there in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no modifying her voice. There was no containing this or making it sound calm when it wasn’t. “Is that more information than you wanted? Am I too much? Too intense?”

“It’s not my business.”

“I just made it your business.”

Charlie’s gaze went glacial. “Maybe if you go lie down or hang out in that pool of yours for a while, you’ll feel better.”

She laughed at that, a wild, unhinged sort of sound, and it was amazing how little she cared that she was making a spectacle of herself out here where anyone could happen by and see it. “Really? You think a nap is going to make me forget my called-off wedding and the fact the two people who were supposed to love me the most in the entire world were betraying me behind my back for who knows how long?”

He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender that, on him, looked like an invitation to further aggression. Maya doubted he’d ever surrendered to anything in his whole life. Something she would have said about herself, too—until now. Because there was something about Charlie that made her question her own strength. There was something about him that made her want to pile all her problems—and herself—on his big, strong shoulders and let him carry it all.

She’d never felt that way about Ethan. They had called their relationship a partnership and they’d both taken the egalitarian nature of it very, very seriously. She had expected Ethan to take care of himself while she did the same.

The fact she was imagining things she’d never known she wanted about a man who very obviously wanted nothing to do with her unless she was naked just made her...a little insane, maybe. Or more insane.

“Do what you want, Maya” was all he said.

“This is not my problem” was written all over his face.

And Maya, who prided herself on her control under all circumstances and had made that control the foundation of her entire life, lost it.

“Forgive me for ruining all the lazy, easy sex with no conversation. What a buzzkill.” Her voice was scathing. “Don’t worry, I get it. You’re perfectly happy to fuck me silly, but heaven forbid I admit I have a feeling. I understand that’s terrifying even when it isn’t about you.”

He was still studying her in that predatory, watchful way of his that should have made her nervous. But if it did, she didn’t care. “None of this is about me.”

Maya laughed again, and this laugh was even worse than the one before, wild and obviously, inarguably upset. “You’re absolutely right, Charlie. It’s not. You’re nothing but a quick route to oblivion, and really, I’d rather chug a bottle of vodka. It has more emotional intelligence, and guess what? The hangover is a hell of a lot more fun.”

And she wheeled around, tears nothing but a memory though her temper was racing through her like wildfire, and tried to put as much distance between her and her latest mistake as quickly as possible.