11. Darius
Chapter eleven
Darius
I gave up on the idea of sleep after trying for a few hours. My shoulder was locked up, which was uncomfortable, and no matter what position I tried, I couldn’t drift off to sleep. There were better things to do than lay there, frustrated beyond belief, though. Things like hitting the gym at four in the morning to do some punishing cardio followed by enough shoulder exercises to loosen the bastard up a little, showering and pointedly not jacking myself off to get rid of the damn erection I couldn’t get under control, or telling myself in the said shower that the lesser of two evils was to take care of the problem instead of walking around with a tent in my pants all day.
I could have gone to the office and started work early, dealing with yesterday’s problems that I didn’t attend to because I was busy with Everleigh and her family. And I will be busy again today. But instead, I chose to roll into the nearly empty garage at half past five.
I flick on the lights and stare down at a sea of empty bays and endless concrete. It’s pretty much immaculate in here because I own zero vehicles. I’ve been meaning to get Hans something to drive, but he keeps telling me he doesn’t need anything. There isn’t anything that can’t be delivered here for an extra cost. I assumed he’d want to do some shopping or something in the city, but he always said he had everything here that he needed. So it’s just me, two huge empty bays, and the third one containing one cherry red convertible.
My feet take me there slowly, my leather shoes scuffling over the concrete until I’m there, standing right to the side of the beast. My breathing is already hitched up, and I try to push it out, but it comes out in spurts like a faulty sprinkler system.
Shh. Shh. Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhh. Shh-shhhh-hhhhhhhhhh.
Instead of panting here like I need one of those barf bags that Hans carries around, which, for the record, I don’t actually freaking use that often, I open the door, my hands vibrating like a tuning fork while the rest of me is the messed up music. I leave slippery fingerprints on the door handle because my palms are soaked. Then, I force my ass into the passenger seat and just sit with the door cracked open and one foot on the ground outside. This is okay. I can deal with this. It’s when I swing my foot in and shut the door with a dull bang that things get squirrelly. My lungs lock up and draw themselves up, shriveling to the size of one of those nasty nuts at the bottom of the container that doesn’t look like the others and sure as hell doesn’t taste like them either.
I drop my head in my hands and don’t even attempt reaching for the seatbelt. I didn’t bring my phone to serve as a timer or Hans to rescue me from here if shit gets bad. I just brought myself and my determination to do this.
Because…because I want to.
Because of what happened last night.
Because what the hell could I ever hope to actually offer Eveleigh? There’s a reason I never dated after the accident. I always figured no one would want some scarred-up guy who can’t even cut his own steak, who has to keep going for surgeries, and is never going to be at the top of his physical game again. Hans once told me that anyone would have me for my money. He was serious and sarcastic all at the same time. I could get a girlfriend or a wife in a second if I truly wanted one. I flipped him off at the time, and he rolled his eyes because he was far too honest, and he knew I knew, deep down, that the arm wasn’t the real issue. It was the thing with my brain. Even still, even if I never left the house, I knew I could buy someone’s time and partnership, but that was never what I wanted.
My parents came from old money, both of them, and despite that, they married for love, and they kept that love strong over the years, even after the accident. Even after things became bad for my dad.
“Fuck.” I drop my head into my hands and think about something else. Not my dad. That’s too sad. I hate thinking about how he was at the end. My mom was so strong and so determined to hold us together as a family. Disease is a cruel thing. But diseases of the mind are even worse.
I close my eyes, trying to catch my breath, but that’s a mistake because suddenly, I’m not in my garage anymore. I’m there on the road with my dad that night, saying something. Muffled words. Right, Dad, not left. It’s a right. Then, the world spinning and tilting out of control, the screaming and shredding of metal, the hot, burning pain ripping through my body, the car crumpling, crumpling, crumpling, the glass shattering into countless pieces, the sensation of my own body being torn apart, my flesh being flayed off my arm, the smell of burning rubber and burning skin and the hot metallic, salty taste of blood.
“Fuck, fuck!” I bail fast, my hand shooting out for the door handle. But it won’t give. It won’t open. It’s crushed. This car is crushed, and I’m trapped. “No!” No, no, no, no, no. I’m not trapped. My eyes are unfocused, but I’m not trapped. I can taste copper and salt, but I’m not trapped. Not trapped, not trapped, not trapped.
I push hard on the doorframe before levering myself up and over in a single leap. There isn’t any roof. This car isn’t crushed. It’s not destroyed. It’s not broken. I’m not broken.
At least not until I catch my foot on the way over because I’m off balance and then land hard on my good shoulder and face.
“Oomph!” Ouch! Ouch, that fucking hurts.
“Darius!”
A shout comes from across the garage. I peel my head up because that voice isn’t manly, so it’s not Hans. It sounds a lot like…oh god, it is. It’s Everleigh, and she’s running across the empty bays, her bare feet slapping on the concrete floors.
She falls to her knees in front of me, her hands at my shoulders, and carefully picks me up as I pick myself up along with her. She doesn’t blurt out a string of questions. Questions about what’s wrong, why I’m on the ground, and why my face is soaking wet—holy shit, it really is soaking wet. Why is it soaking wet? Questions about why my lungs are like balloons, inflating and deflating as I gasp for oxygen. She just sets her warm hands on my shoulders, tucks her fingers into the sleeves of the hoodie she’s wearing—it’s something with some college letters on the front that her mom and sister must have brought her from home because I didn’t supply that in her wardrobe—and mops my face with it. She cleans me up, and shit, there might be blood because I practically hit the concrete face first, and I’m probably going to owe her a new hoodie after this. Then, she wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me into her, which effectively silences the runaway thought train surging off the rails of my brain.
She smells like summer, vanilla, and peace.
“Fuck that car,” she whispers near my ear as her fingers thread through my hair.
“Did you see me faceplant?” I don’t want to ask it because it’s so damn embarrassing. What I do want to do, though, is taste her here, right by her earlobe. I think about how sweet she tasted last night in the kitchen. I don’t taste the fear, panic, or the ashes of my old life anymore. I just taste her. I also can’t smell the metal of blood. I just smell her. Wrapped around me with her sweater that smells like fresh laundry soap and her hair that smells like flowers and pears. My lungs are better, not a rancid nut, but a good nut.
“Yeah, I did. You weren’t in your office, and I found Hans in the hall, and he said to try here. I wanted to talk to you before anyone got up.”
“Awesome. I’ve probably started off the conversation in a great way.”
I pull back and grasp Everleigh’s hands in mine, turning them over to inspect her sweater. No blood. That’s a good sign. My face is throbbing enough that there could have been copious amounts of it.
Her smile is there, wobbly but real, and I can tell she’s nervous. She has something she wants to say. I wonder if she slept at all last night, either, or if she was on fire like I was. I blamed it on my shoulder, but that wasn’t just it at all. I just jacked off in the shower an hour ago, but I’m already rock fucking hard again in slacks and a white dress shirt because that’s what I put on for the day—my home office power attire.
“Here, we’ll start again.” She brushes her sunshine gold hair back over her shoulder and keeps twirling it while she looks at me. “Good morning, Darius. How did you sleep? Bad? Yeah, me too. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I wanted to, uh…not be in my bed. Alone. I had a cold shower this morning, but it didn’t help because no amount of rationalizing my way out of this is working. I know we shouldn’t, and it can’t happen because this isn’t…this isn’t a relationship. It’s a very fragile friendship, and that should be enough for me. It has to be enough. Is our truce still good? Even if you haunt my dreams, I want it to still be good. I mean, still stand. A friendship truce. Because that’s safe, and it makes sense. I think anything else will just lead to confusion and hurt, and blah, blah, blah, complications, blah, blah, blah, bad things. But, that being said, I don’t want you to think I didn’t, uh, that it wasn’t…because it was. I just…this is for the best. I think. I don’t want to hurt you.” She brushes the flat of her hand over my cheek. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. We both got what we needed out of this and an unexpected friendship besides, and I think that’s amazing.”
I want to grasp her hand and brush kisses over her knuckles. I want to turn her hand over and inhale at her pulse point, inhale her skin and the clean, fresh scent of her. To suckle her finger into my mouth. I want to fold her under me and strip off those jeans she’s wearing, wrap her legs around my waist right here on the garage floor, and sink into her warm heat while she moans and writhes and cries against me because it’s good. So fucking good.
“My feelings aren’t hurt. I understand.”
“Do you?” She’s so solemn, so worried. She bites her lip a little, and my eyes are drawn there. I can’t help but think about kissing her again. Instead, I kissed the concrete earlier, and that’s the only action my lips are going to be getting.
I’m used to keeping my shit to myself or Hans because I trust him, and when one does things like shave a person and follow them around like a shadow, they become quite endeared, but I find myself saying something. Saying words that make it through the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. Words that sound like, “I’m worried I’ll never find love unless I buy it.”
Yup, I must have said it out loud, and it must have been what I think it was because Everleigh gets this look on her face like that jar of peanut butter from last night turned out to be rancid when we opened it, and she got the first sniff. Rancid PB is seriously gross.
Everleigh tilts my chin up, her forehead creased with worry lines, and her eyes burning clear through me. “Darius, you won’t ever have to buy love. You…anyone would like you. You’re a fantastic person.”
“But most people won’t see past the money, the big, slightly creepy house, the private jet, the fact that I walk everywhere, and my fucked up arm. It’s just fucking hopeless.”
“Are you lonely?” Everleigh’s face is so kind that I can barely look at her because it makes my chest hurt.
Yes, I’m lonely. I was lonely for her before I even met her. I was lonely for her when she went to Philly to see her family, and I was loneliest for her last night without her in my bed. “Was it bad last night and the friend zone I don’t want to jeopardize what we found truce is code for I suck?”
“No.” She strokes my cheek. “No, it’s not code for that. Believe me, I’d really like to kiss you right now.”
“After you just saw me freak out and face plant?”
“Especially after that. I bought the car for me, and I should never have asked you to sit in it. This isn’t helping. If you want, I can try to help you find something that does, though. You don’t have to force yourself to go through this. It’s terrible.”
“And you still want to kiss me even after knowing all the other stuff?”
“Yeah. I wanted to kiss you last night. And I still want to kiss you now.” She hesitates. “Maybe- let’s just stick to our truce. Just friends, okay? This is hard enough as it is. But after the six months is over, well, who knows? If we still feel the same way, maybe we can go on some dates then.”
My heart leaps and pulses and pounds and sings, even if six months from now is a really long time. Alright, so it’s more like five and a half, but even just a few hours without Everleigh is torture. Regardless, she’s giving me hope. I can respect what she’s saying, and I can understand the logic in it. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before. I didn’t really know how lonely I was until she came into the house, and my usual bubble of solitude was shattered. It should be annoying. But she’s not. I should find her to be nothing more than a complication in my life. But she’s not, and I don’t. I shouldn’t want her the way I wanted her all night. But I do.
“In Philly or in Chicago?”
She laughs, and her nostrils flare in the cutest way. She backs up a pace, which is gut-wrenching because I miss her closeness. I miss the way she looks at me like I’m more than just Mr. Money Bags Galore Times a Thousand. Like I’m more than a tragedy because that’s the way most people who knew me before look at me now. But Ev? Sure, she looks at me like I’m rich, but she also knows my shoulder sucks, and my head is a bit of a mess, and she still wants to know me anyway.
She still likes me anyway.
“I have to warn you. Before I came out here, I heard my mom and Heather talking in the guest room. They were both already up, and the cat was screeching in there. When I say talking, I mean they were actually hotly debating about what to do, given that it shredded every set of drapes in the room, the covers on the bed, and also took a rather suspect-looking crap on the rug.”
I choke back a laugh, but the sound vibrates up my throat anyway and comes out like a hiccup. “Hmm, what exactly does a suspect crap entail?”
“You’re not mad?”
I stop trying to stifle the laughter. She was honestly afraid I’d lose my shit over some drapes, a blanket, and a rug? I have to remind myself that we come from different places. I’ve always had money to do whatever I want, but expensive things don’t mean the same to Everleigh. Also, her mom and sister are guests in my house. She looked like she was dying a little inside when she warned me that something might have been ruined.
“I’m sorry,” she says, waving her hands in the air. “I’ll pay for everything. I promise.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“But those things were expensive, Darius.”
“Hey, it’s all good. I am worried about the cat, though. It might have gotten a clean bill of health at the vet, but I think I should call someone and have them come to the house and sedate it to give it a proper spa treatment and cut its nails. It seems rather deadly to let the hellish beast loose and shred parts of your family that can’t be replaced as easily as the curtains.”
Everleigh’s eyes get shiny with tears, and I worry that maybe I’ve overstepped and she thinks spa day is actually code for bringing in someone who is going to do away with Satan the Little Evil Pants Cat, but then she impulsively surges forward and kisses my forehead. Her lips are petal soft and so fleeting. It turns my boner problem, which had kind of solved itself when I face-planted on the concrete garage floor, into a real issue again.
“Thank you,” she whispers before she scrambles up to her feet and offers me her hand. “Let’s go have breakfast. I might have done some recon and popped my head into the kitchen before I came out here, which likely wasn’t a good idea, but I wanted to scope out if anyone knew what happened in there last night, but nothing was up, and your chef is super nice. He’s like, really nice. We’re having waffles because they’re your favorite. There’s whipped cream and fruit toppings and some kind of chocolate involved. So I think we shouldn’t be late for breakfast.”
I take Everleigh’s hand and let her help me up, which is mostly me shoving my own ass off the concrete. “I agree. Okay, I’m coming.”
“And you’re going to abandon the sitting in the car idea, and we’ll find something else?”
She’s so genuinely worried that I just nod, even though I’m not entirely sure I mean it. Maybe for now, I’ll abandon it. But in the future, who knows? Maybe not.
We head out of the garage and walk into the house. My head is buzzing, thanks to the knock against the hard surface, but I don’t think it’s just that. I’m starting to think this woman is an angel who dropped out of the sky and right into my life because it was bland and dark and sad. Her smile is certainly angelic, her sunny hair, blue eyes, and heart-shaped face are angelic, and her body is also angelic because it’s made for devotion and adoration.
Waffles used to be my favorite food.
Then I met Everleigh.