LUKE: Complete Series (12 page)

I threw the sheet off and poked the back of his leg with my toe.

He turned around, took one look at my naked body, and shook his head as he climbed on top of me. “All right. Maybe a just a little rooty tooty.”

After a hearty breakfast, and a very hearty afternoon of sex so amazing it should be illegal, Luke left my apartment to get ready for the party. As soon as he left, I began rehearsing my confession in the shower and continued as I blow-dried my hair and applied my makeup.

“Luke, I have something I need to tell you,” I said to my reflection for the thousandth time. “No, don’t use the word
need
. It makes you sound needy. Okay, let’s try this again. Luke, I have to tell you something. No, that doesn’t sound right either.”

Just spit it out, Brina.

I shook my head then pulled my mascara out of my makeup bag. I didn’t need to rehearse my lines. I needed to tell him the truth and I needed it to sound real. Besides, he was going to dump me no matter how I said it.

Luke’s car pulled in front of the curb of my apartment building at 7:50 sharp. I slid into the passenger seat and his eyes slid over me from head to toe.

“You look amazing.”

I smoothed down the red dress I had bought earlier this week specifically for tonight and crossed my ankles. “Thanks. You don’t look so bad either in that tux.” I growled at him and he leaned over to kiss me, but I turned my cheek. “Not on the lips. You’ll ruin my lipstick.”

He shook his head as he pulled out onto the street. “You won’t get away with that much longer looking like that. Don’t forget whose birthday we’re celebrating tonight.”

Not a chance I could forget, though I wish I could. It would make what I was planning to do tonight just the slightest bit easier.

The party took place at the
Four Seasons
in Seattle and was given by Jerry Wilshire, a sixty-something tech tycoon, and his wife. I didn’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect four local indie bands performing while people two and three times my age danced along to the music and feasted on canapés and shrimp. Though I didn’t feel it was necessary, Luke stayed by my side the entire evening, making sure to introduce me as his girlfriend to everyone who wished him a happy birthday.

As the night wore on, the ropes in my stomach coiled tighter and tighter. When Luke was certain he had greeted everyone, we finally took a seat at a table to enjoy some birthday cake in peace.

“Did you choose the entertainment?” I asked, as I fed him a bite of chocolate cake.

He swallowed his cake before he answered. “I did, actually. It’s the only part of this whole charade that I had any say in.”

“Charade?” I asked, as I wiped a bit of frosting from his lip and licked it off my finger.

“Hey, I was saving that for later.” I gave him my best “look of disappointment” and he sighed. “There are fewer than a handful of people here who actually give a shit about wishing me a happy birthday. Everyone else is here for the free drinks and the schmoozing.”

I set down my fork and took a deep breath as I looked him in the eye. “Luke, I have something to tell you.”

My phone rang and Luke looked as perplexed as I felt. I hadn’t heard my phone ring in weeks since I bought the thing and was testing out the ringtones. My phone was
always
on vibrate.

“Are you going to answer that?”

I reached into my purse and pulled out my phone. It was Milo. “Hello?”

“Yes, I hacked your phone to turn on the ringtone. And, yes, your time is up so you are going to meet me in the lobby right now to give me Josh’s phone. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

He hung up and I tried not to appear absolutely terrified as I tucked the phone back into my purse. “I have to use the ladies’ room. I’ll be right back.”

I kissed the corner of Luke’s mouth, leaving a red imprint of my lips, and set off toward the restroom. I looked back a couple of times and smiled as he watched me walk away. The third time I glanced back he was going for another bite of cake and I seized the opportunity to scurry out into the corridor. I raced down the corridor as fast as my heels would allow. I turned the corner and made it to the lobby just as Milo came through the front doors of the hotel.

“You cannot come here and make a scene!” I whispered furiously. “This is a bad time. You need to leave.”

“I’m not leaving without the phone.”

“You don’t even know if there’s anything useful on that phone.”

“Save me the stall tactics, Brina. I’m sure Luke told you what I’m capable of. I don’t think you’d be surprised to know what kind of data I can get off that phone.” He held out his hand and I wanted to vomit. “Don’t make me go in there and break the news to your boyfriend.”

I glanced around the lobby, searching for some sort of escape route, some sort of lifeline, and then I saw it. Just a few yards away, sitting in the center of a coffee table, was a small tabletop water feature. I would throw Josh’s phone into the water.

I slipped Josh’s phone out of my purse and held it behind my back. “If I give you this, you take it with my resignation. I want no part of this. Do you understand me? I want out.”

I waited for him to say the word, but all he did was stare at me with what looked like a semi-frightened expression on his normally smug face. Before I could prompt him for a response, someone seized the phone from my hand.

I turned to find Luke staring at Josh’s phone. “I didn’t think you would actually do it.”

“It’s not what you think. I wasn’t giving him the phone.”

“No, you were just exchanging it for your resignation.” The disappointment in Luke’s eyes made me want to tear my heart out. “I was so certain you wouldn’t do this.”

“I wasn’t going to. I was—Wait a minute. You knew and you never said anything?”

“I was hoping you’d come to your senses.”

“Were you playing me this whole time?”

“Don’t turn this around on me, Brina. You’re the one who walked into
my
office last week. Yes, I knew why you were there from the beginning, but I didn’t think you’d actually do this. Everything you showed me told me you didn’t have it in you.”

“Have what in me?”

“To be so heartless. Don’t bother coming in on Monday. I’ll have someone deliver your things to your apartment. And you,” he said, pointing at Milo. “If I ever see your face again you’re going to wish you never sold your soul to NeoSys.” He shook his head at me as he turned and walked away.

That was it. I had been anticipating this moment for days, but I never anticipated it would feel like this—as if I’d been ripped in two. He knew this whole time and he still believed I would do the right thing. And I would have if he hadn’t interrupted me.

Milo put his hand on my shoulder. “Do you need a ride?”

I smacked his hand away then made my way toward the hotel entrance. “Fuck off, Milo.”

7

Five weeks later

“Are you ever going to turn on the TV? I need some background noise.” Jill glared at me from the other end of the kitchen counter where she was busy sorting through my junk drawer for stuff to throw away.

Tomorrow was moving day and I hadn’t finished packing. I had been putting it off due to a crazy superstition that, if I finished, everything that had happened in the last five weeks would suddenly be true. It was true whether or not I packed, but I couldn’t afford to pay for a moving company anymore, so I enlisted Jill to help me finish sorting through my stuff before the landlord came by tomorrow and physically booted me out.

The only good thing about this day was the amazing June weather. With the front door open and the sound of the water fountain outside trickling in on the breeze, I might eventually succeed in pretending I was somewhere else—or someone else. On second thought, it would probably take more than a few drinks or some serious hallucinogenics to achieve that level of nirvana right now.

“I can’t. Every time I turn on the TV someone’s talking about it,” I replied, as I wrapped a dinner plate in newspaper and tucked it into the bottom of the cardboard box at my feet.

I was referring to the developers’ conference, of course. It was all anyone was talking about these days: What was Luke Maxwell going to unveil? What was Blaze and how was it going to change the world?

Just thinking of the word Blaze made my stomach flip and twist and, well, just about every circus trick a stomach could do. I couldn’t bear to turn on the TV and see his face. Five weeks felt like a heartbeat in the world of extreme heartbreak.

I gazed across the kitchen floor at the boxes and shook my head. “I can’t believe I’m moving back in with my parents.”

“You wouldn’t have to if you had taken that job with the medical supply company.”

“Call me crazy, but I do not want to spend the foreseeable future sitting in an office drawing up marketing plans for catheters.”

“No, you’d rather sit in an office answering phones and opening packages, because that’s a much better use of your business degree.”

“Answering phones wasn’t my main job. I was a competitive intelligence officer.”

“Face it, Brina, you sucked at it.”

“I blew my last assignment, but I did
not
suck at my job.” She raised her eyebrows at me and I sighed. “Man, I really sucked.”

“You need to go to that conference,” Jill insisted, for the twentieth time this week.

“I’m about as welcome at that conference as a giant cockroach wearing a NeoSys T-shirt. Can we please talk about something else?”

“Knock, knock.”

If I hadn’t just wrapped the dinner plate I was holding in my hands I would have thrown it at my front door where Milo stood wearing, no kidding, a NeoSys T-shirt.

“Speak of the fucking devil. What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize,” he said, stepping into my apartment without my permission.

“Apologize for what?” The truth was I had already shifted the blame for what happened at the party onto myself. “You were just doing your job. We were all just doing our jobs.”

“That’s no excuse for what I did.”

“I expected nothing less from you. I’m over it.” I grabbed a glass out of the cupboard and began rolling it in newspaper. “I’m more angry with myself than anyone else.” I dropped the wrapped glass into the box and hoisted myself onto the counter to reach the top shelf. “The thing that stings the most, the worst part of all of this, is that I was about to tell him everything right before you called me. Not to mention the fact that I had a million chances to tell him before then and I hesitated.”

“Even the best of us choke sometimes,” Milo replied, as he began pulling spices out of the cabinet behind me.

“I always hesitate.”

“Brina, honey, you know I love you so please don’t take this the wrong way,” Jill began, and I immediately looked over my shoulder at her. Her round face was wrought with concern. “You have got to stop blaming yourself for what happened to your brother. I have seen you beat yourself up for eight months and I’m really starting to worry. What Ryan did had
nothing
to do with you. You have to believe me.”

“Okay, sure, I believe you. If you say it, it must be true.”

“Don’t pull that shit on me, Brina.”

“No, don’t
you
pull that shit on
me
. You’re the last person I would expect a lecture from. You have no idea, no fucking
clue
what it is like… living with this.” I slid off the counter and down to the floor where I buried my face in my knees.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she knelt next to me and grabbed my hand. “I’m only saying this because it’s killing me to watch you fall deeper into this hole. Honey, you have to stop this. You
are
allowed to be happy.”

I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked her in the eye. “I
was
happy.”

“I know.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, before I stood up. “But I can’t go to that conference.”

Jill shook her head as she went back to sorting through my junk drawer. A few minutes later, she held up a small purple box of pills. “Do you need this?”

“Not anymore. You can’t get pregnant from a vibrator.”

She chucked the box at me and Milo’s eye twitched. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but you’re making a big mistake. And I’m willing to help you fix it.”

I let out a shrill laugh as I wrapped another glass in newspaper. “You’re going to help
me
?”

“I’ll take you to the conference to talk to Luke.”

I laughed even harder this time. “You’re even less likely to get in than I am. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

“It’s so obviously
not
over,” Jill replied, throwing me a deadly look.

“Yeah, Brina, it’s obvious there’s something…
special
between you two.”

The injured expression on Milo’s face when he spoke the word “special” made me think that maybe he truly believed that.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you both, but there is nothing special between us. We were two people who happened to have amazing sex. That’s it.”