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After I saw what I did that day, I worried I’d have nightmares, or horrible replays on a loop in my head watching Alistair literally kill someone right in front of me with his bare hands. I worried it would change how I saw him, or erase that safe, homey feeling I have around him.
I needn’t have worried. Because if anything, after witnessing that, I only feel safer around him. Even more protected, like he’s a fortress built around me. I haven’t once looked at Alistair since that day and seen “murderer”.
I’ve just seen a dark knight in black armor.
My dark knight.
But it’s on the third day of my hotel staycation when the cracks in the walls I’ve built around myself and my dark knight begin to appear.
The first one is stupid, and it’s my own fault for prying, and I know it’s dumb and something I should just brush off. But when it happens, all I can feel is a green, jealous twisting sensation inside my chest.
It starts when Alistair is over late one night, having a video chat with Taylor, who’s still in Chicago. He’s sitting in a chair by the glass doors out to the balcony, his headphones in as he chats away with her. When he roars with laughter, I look up from the book I’m reading. At first, I just grin, looking at him—at the way the corners of his eyes crinkle, and the smile lines in his perfect jaw. The way his eyes glint with both a promise of danger and a genuine happiness.
But then my eyes shift to the reflection of the laptop screen in the glass behind him. My lip retreats between my teeth as I see Alistair laughing away, with Taylor’s face on the screen laughing as well.
Taylor’s gorgeous, stunning, successful, powerful face. Alistair’s gorgeous, stunning, successful, powerful face.
Merde…
It’s like there’s a little piece of Camille inside me—a tiny snippet of her batshit crazy that somehow lingered in the womb and managed to infiltrate my own DNA. I know—I mean, I know—from just watching them together and from the abundance of gossip at Crown and Black surrounding the three name partners that there is nothing romantic between Alistair and Taylor. Nor has there, allegedly, ever been. I’ve even heard him and Gabriel casually refer to Taylor as “their sister”.
But ultimately, she’s not Alistair’s sister. She’s a wildly beautiful, confident, successful woman seemingly without a shred of baggage who works in very close proximity to Alistair. Whom he’s known, closely and intimately, since law school.
Right after he forgot about me.
I know. It’s ridiculous. But again, it’s like there’s a little piece of Camille in me. Because when I see the two of them cracking up and making each other laugh so easily over video as they chat about things clearly unrelated to work, the jealous monster inside of me rises up and snarls.
The monster’s still lingering inside me the next day. It’s early evening, and I’m sitting in nothing but a pair of panties in the kitchen area after a marathon fuck-fest with Alistair.
I glance over at him and grin to myself. He’s not exactly all smiles, but he’s also not the dark thundercloud that walked through the door a few hours ago.
Apparently, there was a…physical altercation with Ansel at the Crown and Black offices today. Alistair won’t tell me what it was about. But, I mean, I can guess.
The long-term problem isn’t just that he hit a client, or that he broke said client’s nose, or even who the client is. It’s that he’s now been reported to the New York State Bar Association, which long story short might result in him temporarily losing his license to practice law. It would be bad for him and horrible for the firm.
So I’ve spent the last two hours fucking him silly to take his mind off that.
“You’re so wrong it’s embarrassing,” he grins at me across the kitchen. We’re taking a small break for much-needed hydration and snacks. Which is how we have ended up here in our underwear playfully arguing about Star Wars, of all things.
It’s also not lost on me when Alistair glances meaningfully at the can of lemon seltzer water in my hand, rather than a drink.
I haven’t had one in days. A real drink, that is. And I have to say, it feels good.
I know probably everyone with a problem says this at some point, but I’ve truly never felt like I really had “a problem” with alcohol. Or at least, I never had a problem with alcohol that “just snuck up on me”. Or “got the better of me”.
I know I had a problem, because I did it on purpose. I did it to escape and to dull out the life I was forced to live. And it’s almost as if the more I’m unchained, by Alistair, from that life I don’t want to live, the less need I feel to dull out the world around me.
Or maybe, as nauseatingly cutesy as it is, I’ve just found a new addiction that is far more fun than drinking.
Alistair.
“It’s ‘Luke, I am your father’,” Alistair grins, rolling his eyes. “This is indisputable.”
I snicker, shaking my head. “Objection.”
“Overruled. It’s like the most famous line in the original trilogy.”
“It’s the most famously misremembered line in the original trilogy. The actual wording is ‘No, I am your father’.”
