Blazed(13)

I watched Blaze with utmost fascination as he savoured every morsel like the meal had been prepared by gods. Food wasn't just a necessity to him, it seemed like a passion he enjoyed almost as much as he enjoyed causing trouble. And he was looking right at me. "Come on, Emmeline, I can hear your stomach rumbling from here. It's not a lunch date if I'm eating alone." Lunch date? The dirty D word was news to me.

"Sorry, I'm just a little calorie conscious," I picked one of small olives from the pizza topping, held it up between my fingers and grimaced, "I can feel myself expanding just thinking about the trans fats."

"Calorie conscious!" He snorted the words and wiped his face on a paper napkin, then his hands on his trouser leg before he folded his fingers under his chin and seemed to size me up. I suddenly felt more self-conscious than before, if that was even physically possible, and shrank down a few inches. "I don't know why you're bothered with nutritional value. You could stand to gain a few pounds. You're in a what? A size eight?" The raging insecurity got worse with his estimate.

"I'm a size twelve. A big twelve," I muttered quietly, discretely discarding the olive in a napkin, "I'm honestly a little chunky."

I'd come to expect any number of reactions to those five words over time. Laughter was the overruling response, followed by eye rolling and a failure to acknowledge. By no stretch of the imagination did I imagine he'd be angry.

"Chunky? You think you're chunky?" If I'd told him I thought I was the Antichrist he might have looked less annoyed. "I thought you had at least half a brain. Come with me."

Before I could say anything, his long fingers had wrapped around mine and I was on my feet, away from the busy dining room, in a vacant side room left open for customers waiting for taxis. Momentarily mesmerised by how fast we'd seemed to have moved, I barely noticed that Blaze was urgently tugging at the hem of my shirt. "Hey!"

"What is this?" He jabbed at the buckle fastened at my middle.

"A belt and a gross violation of my personal space? Are you not familiar with the saying 'noblesse oblige'? You're supposed to be a celebrity, a role model or... something." He ignored the complaint and pressed on, brow creased into three deep lines. "And why might you need to wear a belt? To stop your trousers falling down around your ankles? Might that suggest your clothes are too big?" He continued to mutter his rhetorical questions in a grumble as he foraged around for the size label in my linen trousers. I batted at his hands pointlessly and tried to pull my shirt down further than it could possibly cover. "You put extra holes in this belt...? My god, Emmeline..." And then he stopped completely still in his tracks and lifted my shirt an extra inch or two. The moment I realised what had caught his eye, I tried to twist away, but he snapped my name in a way I couldn't even imagine disobeying.

His fingers traced over the faded silver lines set into my skin from my left hip up, then followed the prominent ridges of my ribcage. Every touch felt like gentle and well-meaning torture, like slapping a child's hands for playing with knives, and it was the shame that paralysed me into place. What would he think when he saw my damage? Would he scold me like so many others and offer an endless stream of pity and bullshit encouragement? Would that be the end of our friendship, because I was just too much of a liability? Or was I now a pet project for him to 'cure'?

I still had no answer when he lifted the fabric further to see more of my ribs and sucked in his breath between his teeth. "Oh Emmeline, who made you feel this way?" It was another unusual reaction and made no way to dragging me from my stupor. The question everyone had failed to ask when it mattered came from a man who didn't know me from Adam, but yet seemed to know me better than anyone.

He regrouped far more quickly than I did, diverting his search for the label to a search for the fabric of my underwear and taking a quick peek under my shirt to check out my bra. "Hey!"

"Relax, I'm just checking they match. I'm taking you shopping."

"I can't affo—" The lie wouldn't come. If I swallowed my pride, I had enough money in a separate bank account to buy a fairly large and needlessly luxurious townhouse. Allowing Henry to siphon some of his wealth into an allowance was one of the few concessions I'd made to get him to agree to me moving out without torturing my mother over my financial situation on a daily basis. He'd gone over the top, obviously, and the account was bound to have accumulated interest. I might not have wanted to touch his blood money, but I couldn't deny that I had it. Not to Blaze. "I really hate shopping."

"Well tough." He grabbed my hand again and pulled me back to our table, pushing me down by the shoulders into my seat. "But first you're going to eat. You're not even a size eight. If I see you calculating calories, I'm just going to pin you down and feed you that way."

I was damned if I was going back down that path.





Five





I MUST HAVE eaten my body weight in garlic bread before Blaze let me leave the table of the pizzeria, feeling sleepy, overstuffed and greasy. As I'd expected, the food was delicious, but there were enough people in that dining room to stop me losing myself in the flavours. It felt like I had a captive audience as ever, watching each bite eagerly with their fingers gripping into the wooden table tops, wondering if this mouthful would make the girl so slight erupt like an emetic volcano. They knew that much was inevitable— I was positively green when we slumped back out into the big, wide, crowded world.

Blaze had at least had the decency to exercise his pushy concern in a way that didn't make me feel observed. Even though I knew he was considering all the reasons why I might have such a dire appetite and a torso like road kill, his insistence that I ate what he'd served onto my plate was gentle, unlike the army drill sergeant attitudes that had been utilised by just about everyone else. What he'd laid out hadn't been excessive, but enough for me to struggle. Like a child, he enticed and bribed me to keep eating until he could tell that it would do more harm than good. I didn't clear the plate, but I'd eaten. That seemed to be good enough for him.

And I'd eaten for no reason other than to wipe the anxiety off his face. I'd never cared before, why did I care now? For him? Not even Hunter's 'encouragement' had worked as well as Blaze's.



A part of me had dared to hope that he was joking about shopping, but the looming buildings of Oxford Street slipping back into view squashed any of that fruitless optimism right down into the ground. Blaze ignored my audible groan and pulled me into a department store that was too bright and too frantically loud. Finely-polished women wearing too much make-up swirled around us dressed in fine black tunics. As soon as they spotted him, they gushed with almost disgusting streams of salesmanship jargon and far too obvious lust for him. Like I had when Jonathan had joked about roping him into their gay soiree, I began to feel unjustifiably territorial. My grip tightened around our already linked fingers— a way in which Blaze preferred to walk with me. I wouldn't lose him to one of those super sleek jezebels, even if he wasn't really mine to lose.

Our pace didn't slow until we found the women's department, full of svelte housewives and rubbernecking teenagers who pointed and whispered between themselves. Don't worry, they're not interested in you, the fat girl whispered next to me, pointing incredulously at scrap of material that barely qualified as a skirt, nobody is ever really interested in you. My pace stalled, though not enough to deter Blaze from an energised trawl of the shop floor, picking up garments at random and slinging them over the arm that joined with mine. They were all so small and in sizes that surely wouldn't fit. The styles were all super urbane like the stranger in the suit or daringly low cut and revealing, so far removed from the comfort zone of my linen trousers and work shirts.

After a ten minute surge of power shopping, I found myself shoved into a dressing room. In fact, I found myself shoved into several dressing rooms in several shops that provided less than complimentary lighting and mirror combinations, and pumped loud obnoxious music into the building via loud speakers that always seemed to be right over wherever I stood. Sensory overload.

"You know what really frustrates me about you?" Blaze called to me through a curtain that barely covered the gap into the small vestibule with mirrors on all three solid sides. I pulled it across and waved a hand at the outfit I was wearing— a denim skirt that showed far too much leg and some kind of chiffon sleeveless shirt, both in a minuscule size six. I was being forced to seriously reconsider how I dressed myself.

"Everything I imagine."

"Other than everything." He grinned and gave a thumbs up to the outfit, just as he had for nearly every other outfit he'd forced me to try on. The stack of bags behind his feet was embarrassing, and we'd never stopped to pay for anything. It had all materialised, already packed and ready to walk out with when I re-emerged from the dressing rooms wearing my own trash-sack clothing. I would undoubtedly analyse the hell out the situation at Esme's that night. "I never know what you're thinking. You must be a real nightmare to date."