The Love Triangle (BWWM Romance) (18 page)

She took a deep breath and it escaped again with a sob.

I opened my mouth, tried to find something to say. But ‘it’s not what it looks like’ wasn’t true, and ‘I’m sorry’ just didn’t cut it.

“Is this what happened the first time? Is this why I chose Elijah?” she asked me, and her face crumpled.

I shook my head, reached for her but she stepped away from me and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. I dropped my hand again, let it hang by my side.

“No,” I said. “This isn’t why.”

“Nice to know that this kind of pain only happened once, then,” she said and her words stung.

“Please don’t do this,” I said. “It’s me.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But I was wrong. This isn’t you.”

Her sentence didn’t make sense but I didn’t ask what she meant. Instead I focused on her arm.

“You’re bleeding. What happened? What did he do to you?”

Her face changed, drained of emotion until her look was stony and her eyes were guarded. “Right, point fingers. All this bullshit about how he wasn’t the right man for me, what was that? And then you go and do this?”

She turned to leave, but I grabbed her good arm.

“Don’t go, Grace. Please.” That last part sounded a lot like begging, but I wasn’t in a place to do anything else. I’d messed up really badly.

“Go to hell, Justin,” she said and pulled free. I watched her march away. Only after she disappeared around the bend that led to the gate did I realize she hadn’t come in a car. I wanted to jump in my own truck and race after her, be her knight in shining armor, save her. But I’d ruined that image.

I was the villain now, wasn’t I?

I turned around to go back to the cottage. Alice stood at corner of the cottage, hands clasped in front of her, looking at me. She was dressed completely now.

“Well,” was all she said. I sighed and walked to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Who was she?” she asked, following me into the house. I shook my head. How could I answer that? Alice kept quiet. I half expected something, a fight, shouting, something. But it didn’t come. I pushed my hands into my hair and grabbed two fistfuls, tugging at it. I felt like I was going to be crushed under the weight of what had just happened.

“I think I’m going to go,” Alice said and I turned to look at her. That brilliant smile was nowhere to be found, but she didn’t look upset in any way. Her face was very carefully blank.

“You’re not mad?” I asked.

“Well, I’m not happy. But what’s the point in fighting about it? That’s not what we do, really. We just… carry on. Or we don’t. You’re not the kind of boyfriend that does fighting.”

And in a way it was true. I’d never done anything like that with her. Part of it was that I just didn’t care enough. Part of it was that I was numb after losing Grace. And now it had all happened again. Different scenario, same result: she was going back to Elijah.

“Do you want me to call you?” I asked.

Alice looked to her side, out the window, and then back at me.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Justin, but no. I don’t want you to call me.”

I nodded slowly. She turned and walked out of the cottage without saying anything else. It was the easiest, simplest breakup I’d ever gone through. When I heard the car pull away, I sat down on my bed and buried my head in my hands.

Losing her was my fault. Again. It always was.

Chapter 17 - Grace

I knew it hadn’t been like that the first time. I knew we hadn’t split up because he’d been with another woman. Even though that would have hurt me then, it wouldn’t have been so strange. After all, I had been with Elijah.

I remembered it. Somewhere it had come back to me, and remembered him asking me to choose. I remembered him telling me that he wanted to be exclusive. And I remember that I’d thought that no man was going to control me and tell me what to do. What a fool I’d been, pushing him away just because he loved me enough to ask me to be exclusive with him.

Until ten minutes ago, I’d wanted that more than anything in the world. To have a life just with him. Elijah had scared me. I’d run to Shonda who wasn’t home – she hardly ever was, and the only other person I really trusted, the only other person I thought I could turn to, was Justin.

The thought of him with that woman, pushed up against the counter with her thin legs wrapped around him and his hands on her ass made my head hurt. At one point I’d thought that that was what I’d wanted. For Justin to be less serious about me so that I didn’t have to feel so torn about the two men in my life.

Now every time I thought about the fact that I was losing him, or the fact that maybe I’d never really had him, made me want to throw up.

I’d run to him to run away from Elijah. But what had I really run to? And what had I run away from?

Elijah hadn’t hurt me. He’d scared the shit out of me. But he hadn’t hurt me. The blood, well that was a tiny scrape, and that hadn’t been him. It had been the ornament that had shattered when the shelf had come down.

I’d gotten a taxi to drive me to the ranch. I hadn’t asked him to wait for me, because I’d thought I was going to stay a while. But when I called for another taxi, the same person had just turned around and come back, and he’d driven me home.

“Are you going to be okay in there?” he asked me when we arrived at Elijah’s house. The first time he picked me up, he wanted to drive me to the hospital. I refused, insisted it was just something small. When I got back into the car, sobbing, I think he’d given up on the idea that it was something small.

“I’ll be okay,” I said and sniffed, trying to pull back the tears and stop crying. I wiped my cheeks furiously with my sleeve and looked in the mirror. I hadn’t been wearing makeup a lot lately, and at this point I was glad about it. It saved me having to make myself look decent again.

The taxi driver nodded and I paid him before getting out. He was concerned but it was my life. There was nothing else to it. And there was no one else that could fix it. I took a deep breath and looked up at the house, towering and stretching away from me. I was going to go in there, and I was going to try make it right.

Why? Because I had nothing else left. Between Justin and Elijah, both were assholes. But Elijah at least was an asshole that would look only at me.

I scraped what courage I had left together, and walked up to the door.

Elijah was in his office where I’d last seen him. The door was open and someone had cleared the broken pieces of glass. The housekeeper, was my guess. The books were stacked neatly in piles on the floor and the shelf stood against the cabinet. The only damage seemed to be done to the clips that held it up.

He looked up at me and his eyes didn’t focus right. He had his fingers wrapped around a whiskey tumbler but it was clean and empty. In his other hand he held a bottle of whiskey that was almost empty. He held it around the neck and sucked on it every now and then. The glass really was just an afterthought.

“Elijah?” I asked. He looked up at me.

“You came back,” he said.

I nodded. His eyes slid to my arm where the blood had caked around the small cut, and his face crumpled a little bit before he visibly pulled himself back together again. I shook my head. I didn’t want him to concentrate on that, on what had happened. I wanted him to concentrate on me.

“I didn’t think you were going to come back,” he said again and the words came out lopsided like his tongue was uncomfortable speaking them.

“Where else would I go?” I asked, and it sounded a lot more romantic than I meant it. I really didn’t have anywhere to go anymore. He pushed himself out of his chair, searching for his balance and finding it just before crashing to the floor. He walked to me in a jagged line, pressing on the desk until he was too far to use it as support.

He was very drunk. In a way I felt like this was my fault. He’d been waiting for me for a long time, putting up with my issues and never pushing me.

When he reached me he leaned into me, and his face came up very close. The smell of whiskey was thick on his breath and I couldn’t breathe through it. I took a step back.

His face changed, confusion or hurt bleeding away to something harder and colder. He took another step closer to me but that smell made me feel like I was suffocating. It was a smell I knew very well. Too well. I backed away again.

“Don’t run away from me,” he said and his voice was louder than it should have been.

“You’re drunk, Elijah,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. I just wanted him to stop trying to walk to me. He was almost climbing on top of me.

“Don’t do this to me again,” Elijah said, and his words were slurred, full of emotion that wasn’t there a moment before. Again?

He took another step to me, pushing my back up against the wall. His face was barely an inch from mine and I was losing it. I put my hands on his chest to push him away, and his face changed, anger taking over his features from before until his face was just a twisted mask of rage. That face. That smell. Those eyes.

Something inside me snapped and I screamed. Where I’d been numb I suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline and I pushed out from underneath his wide frame. He tried to stop me but I was scared and he was drunk and I got away. He lost his footing and fell. I ran out of the office, down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom where there were no windows. The only way through was the door and it was harder to get into.

I clawed at my head, the pain was sharp and intense. I pulled my knees up to my chest and jammed my forehead into the line between them, feeling the hard bone of my knee caps on either side.

Since I’d met Elijah I’d believed that his work face was different than his social face. In the office he was a tyrant. Everyone feared him. Those that didn’t know him well enough, like the HR department that never really got to see his face, even knew that he wasn’t the person you wanted to meet in person.

But outside of the office he was all grace and charm. Everyone around town respected him. I would even have gone as far as saying that they loved him to an extent. Elijah Wilson was a name most people had heard, and they always felt honored to be in his presence.

When I was paraded around on his arm as his girlfriend, I got looks of admiration. I was the one that had gotten into the mansion, into his pants, into his pocketbook. In the beginning I used to love that attention. I loved the way the crowds parted for me just because they knew I belonged with Elijah.

After my fallout with Justin, I’d gone to him and showed him what it meant to be his. And he’d accepted me and suggested I move in with him. I agreed, and we’d been living together two months.

At work it wasn’t the same thing. I wasn’t revered because I was with Elijah. I was pitied. I walked past the employees in the cafeteria and they all fell quiet, and once I was past, their conversation would pick up. It wasn’t hard to tell that they were talking about me. But why would that bother me if I’d gotten what I wanted? I lived in an amazing house with a man that doted on me and I didn’t have to want for anything.

I came home late Friday evening. Elijah had left the office earlier to go to a meeting in Dayton. I didn’t know that we knew anyone in Dayton that would benefit Magna Solutions, but he’d insisted that it was important so I’d seen a client without him. I knew what he wanted from the meetings. I’d known how to seal it without him.

“I’m home,” I called into the quiet house. The smell of cooking hung in the passage to the main bedroom. I put my briefcase on the bed and kicked off my shoes, massaging my toes. I’d been in the heels a lot longer than I usually was.

“Elijah?” I called when I’d gotten dressed. There was no answer. “Baby?” I walked back down the passage. When I reached the office, the door was closed. I knocked and there was no answer. I hesitated for just a moment before turning the doorknob.

“Elijah, honey?” I asked again, pushing the door open. I heard scrambling, like he was doing something in a hurry. When I had the door open all the way and I could see him, everything looked wrong. He sat behind his desk, pen in his hand, tip poised over a blank notepad. He looked guilty, his eyes beady and shifting from me to the door behind me to his desk and back again.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. I frowned.

“I live here, remember?” I asked. He shook his head like he only realized what he’d said now.