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Romance.
I don’t give anymore thought to the space around me, as I spin for the car. I’ve got more things to say to the one woman who’s made this possible for me and a life to get on with living. Future. Dreams to find. Maybe I should take a vacation, see some of the world through eyes that give a damn for its existence rather than ones that neither cared for its presence nor thought beyond the realms of the walls I’d built.
The door slams around me, as if shutting myself inside this car is the beginning of starting again. I can still feel the sound resonating, as the car powers up the long drive and out onto open roads. Even the dull smell of heather filling the air around me seems to dissipate with her death, the scent replaced by something more potent calling me home.
Roads speed by, my smile growing with every further mile driven. Feels good to drive now I’m heading the right way again. Home. It’s a thought I haven’t processed for a long damn time. Nothing has been. Perhaps Malachi’s place in some ways. It was a haven, a place to just be alive in, regardless of the torment within it.
Malachi.
My brow furrows for the first time since I’ve been in this vehicle, mind whirling through the events that have led me to this moment. The way he pushed and pulled me around Hannah, telling me that I needed to realise how I felt. The slaps on my back, the smiles. Him fighting me about her going for her swim. Him hunting me down to tell me they were back. Her in my apartment. And then her near lifeless body when I found her at the cemetery, the drugs inside her ones that only he could have provided.
He knew how I’d treat her, didn’t he? He fucking knew and pushed that moment on us all so I would go through my own process in the only place I could take her to make her live.
His number is dialled before I’ve fully thought through what I’m about to say to him, and the phone line engages without any answer other than breath and the sound of a groan.
“Did you orchestrate this whole damn thing?” I grate out, unsure how I feel about it.
“It’s a bit fucking early for arguments, Gray. Let me get a drink first.”
“Did you?”
Sheets ruffle, followed by familiar footsteps walking over the carpet and a clinking glass. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he eventually says, chuckling. “I organise parties, nothing more. On that note, when’s the next delivery coming in?”
“You did, didn’t you?” Fucker.
I turn off the freeway, intent on going to knock some more sense into his head before I get to Hannah. “She could have died. Did you really think that was the best way to make me acknowledge this?”
“Yes. You’re an asshole most of the time. And she’s beautiful. You deserve each other. Did she die?” A woman giggles in the background, a sharp yelp coming out of her soon after.
“Hannah? No. Of course she’s not dead. I got there soon enough.”
“Hero status achieved, but I meant your wife.”
My lips twitch, a low rumble of laughter trying to counter the idiocy of this whole damn situation. “Yes. This morning.”
“Good. Maybe now we can get on with being friends again.” Friends? I half chuckle again at the imagery, as unsure about my involvement with a man who could do that sort of thing as I usually am out here in the real world. “My jaw still hurts, by the way.”
“You deserved it.”
“And you deserved a life. You should thank me.” I nod at that, at least recognizing the sentiment behind his ideas irrespective of the way he went around achieving it. “Good love story. I’ve enjoyed my part in it. I’ll expect a fifty percent reduction in costs on the next shipment. It should cover the mental aptitude I’ve had to exert to make you behave like a human instead of a calculator.”
I smile again, part infuriated by him, and part thankful for his intervention even it was a game to him. “I have to go.”
“Dinner next week? I’m still in Manhattan. And I hate my wife. I might need to talk it through.”
“Alright.”
Maybe. If everything keeps going according to his plan.
Cutting the call, I drive the last of the roads and all but abandon the car in the parking bay next to the Lincoln. There’s nothing else now. No other women. No time other than the time we can make together. We’ll find a path out of this, perhaps able to bury the past behind us where it deserves to be. Just us and a life we’ve still yet to begin.
The cart rides up swiftly, but it seems to take so damn long I find myself pacing the interior like a lone wolf in search of prey. It isn’t until the doors slide open that I get a chance to move forward again and lose the trepidation that’s haunting each step. I don’t even know if she’ll damn well be here. She could have run, chosen something different for herself. And as much as that stings, there’s a part of me that wouldn’t blame her at all.
Silence greets me other than the sound of my own feet. No Letti. Not surprising since I gave a few days off when I sent Hannah here, but no sign or sound of Jackson either. I frown and look around, checking each of the rooms for life. Nothing. I end up calling Jackson for answers, my gaze directed out over the park, and then turning and running back the way I’ve come when he’s told me where they are.
Hailing a cab rather than bother with the car, I spend the minutes it takes to get there considering why the fuck this place was necessary to her. She’s already done this. Finished it before we even started. Death isn’t relevant to us. We’re new now. Reborn from something that held both of us back.
The gates are upon me before I’ve found any correlations or parallels in my head to form logic. There’s no reason for this, just as there was, or is, no reason for me to weep over the grave of the woman I’ve just let go. He was a cunt. An adulterer. A man who had something precious and chose to disrespect it rather than harbour the very essence of her beauty.
