The Beginning of Always (26 page)

She had no idea how badly.

Sudden shame flooded me and disgust raged through every nerve even as my boner stiffened harder at the thought of her quivering under me. I made myself sick.

“Dammit,” I muttered and shook off Florence’s arm and blanket. I needed to get out of here. I needed to leave, to go somewhere, anywhere. I stood up, pushing her off until she fell back onto her bed.

I grabbed my jeans and hastily pulled it on, ignoring the pain in my leg.

“No!” Florence cried out, but I didn’t look at her. I bent down to seize my torn shirt.

My fingers had just grazed the fabric when a weight was thrown onto me and I froze. Florence pressed her cheek against my naked back and tightened her thin arms around my chest, her nails digging into my skin. I was breathing heavily and my heart was strangled, tied into knots. Florence’s breath heated upon contact, the condensation from her exhale dampening my skin.

“Alistair. Don’t go. Stay. Please. I want you to stay here with me.”

My heart skipped at her words, but …

“You can’t be here.” Mom’s eyes were cold. “Go away.”

“You think anyone likes you? That Reynolds likes you? Why would she? You’re nothing but a homeless bastard.” Kevin spat on my face. “A bastard no one wants or needs.”

“Don’t lie to me,” I seethed through my teeth. She didn’t want me. She didn’t need me. How could she possibly need me in her picture-perfect life? Everything I touched turned to shit. Everyone who came near me eventually recoiled in disgust.

I was garbage. I was nothing. I was worthless.

Florence scratched deeper into my skin, tearing away at my very essence. She pulled me even closer as her head shook back and forth against my exposed back.

“Stop it! I’m not lying Alistair. Please, please. Don’t go. Please.” Her voice shattered and her hot tears slide down my skin. “Don’t leave again. Don’t go.”

Florence gave a shuddering sob that punctuated her words. “Don’t …”

I stared out the window at the beginning of a sunset flooding the horizon. The trees painted dark silhouettes against the sky and the world was so still, so quiet outside.

My heart ached with want. I so desperately wanted to believe.

“Please,” she whispered. Her fingers dug into my chest, scoring deep into my soul.

Her lips scalded me as she spoke.

“Please. Stay. Stay with me.”

It was over.

She had me.

For always.

Chapter 14

I
woke up even more confused than when I’d gone to sleep. Not factoring in the soft throb of a mild hangover, the sunlight brought a spotlight to the previous night’s events. I groaned and rolled over in bed, pulling the comforter over my head.

The time at the bar was too intimate, too vulnerable. A strange sense of embarrassment grew in me and my face heated. I couldn’t believe I’d told him about Thailand, couldn’t believe I’d opened up to him.

I recalled the way his lips had felt against my hair, his strong arms around me.

A silent scream rang through my skull.

“Always.”

My eyes popped open and I hurriedly tumbled out of bed. I needed to get a move on if I harbored any hope of breaking free of this mental treadmill of mine.

I brushed my teeth, vigorously and with snapping motions to shake my thoughts out of my brain and the sensation of Alistair off my body. By the time I finished flossing, Alistair was nothing but a bad dream of a bad evening out.

At least that’s what I told myself as I got dressed.

With a shake of my head, I exited my bedroom and padded to the kitchen. I rounded the corner from the hallway to the living room and just barely avoided running into a bare foot jutting out from the couch.

I skipped back with a curse on my lips.

“Geez. Nicolas?” I peered down to Nicolas’s sprawled form. He was still in his hospital scrubs, facedown in the pillows so only the back of his shaven blond head was visible. A mild grunt and a moan emanated from the pillows at my question, and his hands flailed weakly in response.

“Mmm. What?”

“Your foot almost clotheslined me over.” I shoved at his foot with an index finger. “Move it.”

Nicolas’s foot twitched and then swung around wildly, just barely missing contact with the side of my hip.

“Ow!” I dodged his attempt to blindly kick me and retreated to the safety of the hallway. “Very nice, jerk.”

Nicolas gave a huff of laughter and stilled his legs. He rolled over slightly so I could make out the profile of his jaw and mouth. “Whatever, I barely touched you,” he mumbled. “Don’t be such a wuss.”

“Go to bed. Sleeping on the couch every night isn’t good for your back.” I had found him on the couch more times than I had found him in his room. I’d peeked into his bedroom the other day and the bed was neatly made, piled up high with laundry.

Nicolas rolled over fully so he now lay on his back. He cracked his eyes open at me. They were red and bloodshot, and he had deep, almost blackish-purple bags under his eyes. “What are you, a doctor?”

I leaned my elbows against the back of the couch. “No, smartass, but it doesn’t take a doctor to see you’re exhausted.”

Nicolas mumbled something under his breath and threw his forearm up to cover his face. I gave him one final poke in his belly and he curled his body up in protest with an impatient grunt.

I went to the kitchen and called over my shoulder, “Want a toaster pastry? Coffee?”

There was a short lag before Nicolas’s answer. “No coffee, and I ate the last pastry when I got back this morning. Aren’t we getting brunch?”

It was a bit past nine. We had agreed earlier in the week that we would get brunch on the weekend, but with the way Nicolas was, I was wary of dragging him out on a Sunday morning.

“Yeah, we can still go, but when did you get home?”

“I got off around four, so probably rolled in around four thirty.”

I opened the cupboards and surveyed the sorry state of edibles. All that was in there was an empty pastry box knocked over on its side. I needed to go grocery shopping, stat. “Don’t you want to sleep some more? You only got a couple hours.”

A grunt from the other room. “I’m fine.”

I grabbed the empty box and tossed it into the recycling bin, then filled two glasses of water and carried them to the living room. I handed one to Nicolas, who leaned to his side and groaned, but took the glass from me.

I flopped down on the couch across from him and threw my cell phone on the coffee table.

We sat in silence for a while as Nicolas sipped his water, his gaze in his cup. Just as I was going to ask him what was wrong, he gave a deep sigh and said, “Hey, tell Tracy I’m sorry I got all moody the other day.”

Where was this coming from? Was this what he was torn up about on the inside? When Nicolas glanced up at me, I smiled, adding a comforting tone to my answer.

“She’s a big girl, she can handle it.”

Far from being comforted, Nicolas slouched further and shook his head. “Yeah, well, I got uncomfortable. But I still shouldn’t have acted like an asshole.”

“Sure,” I said. I studied Nicolas for a moment, then added, “Why did you get all touchy about that question? It’s not that big of a deal that you take pictures.”

Nicolas grunted and shrugged his broad shoulders, but he clearly averted my gaze. He scratched the short beard growth along his jawline. “I don’t feel like getting into it now.”

“Or ever.”

“Probably.”

“That’s not healthy.”

Nicolas scoffed loudly. “No offense, but you’re hardly one to preach to me about a healthy state of mind.”

I dropped the line of questioning with a sigh. “True.”

Nicolas drained the rest of his water and stood up abruptly. As he made his way to the bar, he asked, “So how’s the article with Alistair?”

Now it was my turn to give a scoff and a laugh. “Talking about things I don’t want to get into now …”

Nicolas didn’t answer, but pushed aside some picture frames to reach towards a row of bottles against the wall. He grabbed one, Macallan scotch, and uncorked it.

I watched his movements, then said, “Honest?”

“Honest,” Nicolas said.

I sighed and leaned against the cushions. “It feels strange. It feels like we’re going … like something is going on. As if we’re moving back towards how we were before.”

“Yeah?” Nicolas cocked a brow as he poured himself a drink. I eyed the scotch in his glass.

“Isn’t it a bit early for boozing?”

“You’re changing the subject,” Nicolas said.

“Only because I don’t want you to get wasted before ten.”

Nicolas gave a loud grunt and crashed roughly back on the couch. “I got home right before sunrise after a twenty-hour shift. The only thing that got me through was the thought of pancakes and Macallan. Don’t start, Flo, I’m stressed to death.”

I canted my head and studied Nicolas closer. The bags under his eyes appeared darker under the emerging sunlight coming from the window, and he was starting to develop a deep furrow of stress in between his brows.

“You should have told me. Look, let’s move this to dinner so you can get more sleep. I always knew being a resident was rough, but you really need to take care of yourself.”

Nicholas nodded absentmindedly at my comment while raising the glass to his lips. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Dad’s been talking me through it. He says the first year of residency is intense, but I’ll survive. Besides, we said brunch, so we’re getting brunch. I shouldn’t be sleeping until three p.m. anyway.”

“You need to sleep.”

“Whatever,” he muttered right before he took a generous swig of scotch. Even though the need to say something rested on my lips, I knew I was the last person to tell him how to work his career. At least he wasn’t going to torpedo it with some foolish nostalgic rendezvous.

“Well, how can I argue with that scintillating argument?”

Nicolas rolled his eyes at me in a completely exaggerated and juvenile manner. “Are we getting pancakes or not?”

I picked up my cell phone and pocketed it. “Fine. Where do you want to go?”

“Blueberry ones—that place with the best blueberry ones.”

Nicolas and I took a cab downtown. We exited to a sea of people milling about outside the doors of the restaurant, and I gave a small sigh as I wrote our name and number down on the clipboard. I flipped the page over, and spills of names raced up the sheet in front of us.

As I trudged down the sidewalk, I spotted Nicolas hunched beneath an awning, rocking slightly back and forth on his heels with his attention to the ground. The sullen expression on his face hadn’t lightened. A pair of college-aged girls in hoodies were pointing at him in not-so-subtle gestures, their heads together amidst giggles.

“It’s probably going to be an hour wait, maybe longer,” I said when he came into earshot.

Nicolas shrugged and crammed his hands into his jacket. “Want to get some coffee first?”

“Sure. I saw a place down the block.”

We walked to the coffeehouse in silence. It wasn’t tense or uncomfortable, but the happy-go-lucky Nicolas that had met me at the airport had all but disappeared, and in his place was the high school Nicolas—moody, prone to stress and snappy with impatience.

When we got to the coffeehouse, Nicolas ordered a large black coffee. He hadn’t said a word the entire walk and was still deep in thought when we exited.

It was only when we returned to the front of the restaurant that Nicolas spoke up.

“So what were you saying about Alistair? The article isn’t going well?”

I didn’t want to talk about Alistair, but I supposed if that was what Nicolas wanted to talk about, we could go there.

“Define what you mean by ‘going well,’” I said.

“You define what you mean by not going well.”

I glanced at my watch—we still had thirty minutes to burn. I stopped underneath the awning and turned to Nicolas. “I almost kissed him last night.”

Nicolas gave a low whistle, his eyes perking up slightly and the weight on his face lifting a bit. My own drama seemed to take his mind off whatever his was. “What the hell?” he said.

I shoved my hands up between us in a stop gesture. “No, no. Wait, I need to give context. I was a bit buzzed and he took me to the Carlyle Hotel—”

“A hotel?” Nicolas said in a louder voice. “Did you gu—”

“No,” I said firmly, cutting him off. “He took me to a bar there, Bemelmans Bar. He bought out the entire place so it was just him and me. We only stayed an hour or so.”

“He bought out Bemelmans on a Saturday night? That’s a swanky spot.”

“Yeah, well. Anyway, you know what a lightweight I am. I had some wine at this disaster of a business dinner he took me before the bar, and I had a drink at the bar. Also we didn’t really eat anything all night. I wasn’t drunk, but I was buzzed enough to let him hug me.”

“A hug, you say?” Nicolas’s mouth quirked up with the barest hint of mischief.

“It was more like he held me. You know. In that intimate, couple kind of way.” I mimed an awkward embrace with my arms in the air in front of me.