Say the Word(14)
It made me instantly sad. I mourned for the boy who once was, and for the part I’d played in his destruction.
I watched as his gold-flecked irises widened in shock as he recognized me.
His gaze roamed my face, lingering on the smattering of freckles on my nose before sweeping down my body in an almost predatory manner. Once, he’d known every curve and imperfection of my body more intimately than anyone. His hands had touched every secret part of me, unraveled me, set me on fire, and brought me to my knees begging for release more times than I cared to count. I’m not sure what expressions crossed my face at that moment – probably nothing good — but his own feelings were concealed from my view. Besides the initial shock I’d seen in his eyes, I couldn’t read him at all.
The silence stretched for an uncomfortable amount of time. I could sense Cara in my peripherals, looking from me to Sebastian, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from him. I was drinking him in, yearning for a flicker of understanding or recognition to appear in those bottomless eyes. But, when they finally finished their perusal of my body and his gaze returned to my face, I was discouraged to find nothing but flinty anger and indifference in their depths.
I averted my eyes, unable to bear him looking at me like I was a stranger or, worse, someone whose very presence was abhorrent to him, and turned to stare at Cara. I cleared my throat and broke the silence.
“Lux,” I said in a shaky voice. “My name is Lux Kincaid.”
“Well, Lux,” she sneered. “You should pack up your desk cause you’re pretty much f*cked once I call your boss. Right, baby?” she asked Sebastian.
I turned my eyes back to him fleetingly, wary of his response. His eyes hadn’t moved from me, and he didn’t answer Cara. He just stared at me with that intense, scrutinizing look, as though he were trying to see inside my mind. Vitali’s Chaconne played out its final aching notes from the overhead speakers, the violin echoing into silence as I stared back at him. When the final chord faded, to my absolute horror, I felt my eyes well up with tears.
I couldn’t be here, looking at him – at what I might’ve had. It hurt too damn much. I was about to make a run for the stairwell when I heard the blessed sound I’d been waiting for – the chime of the arriving elevator. Dashing the tears from my eyes, I spun around and stepped into the empty car. As I pressed the button that would take me down to the lobby, I was powerless to stop my eyes from wandering back to Sebastian.
Cara was hanging on his arm, pouting and whining about me, no doubt, but his hands hung limply by his sides and he made no move to comfort her. We stared at one other, two strangers bound eternally by a shared past of lies and broken promises, and I wanted to throw myself into his arms. I wanted to bawl like a baby and take it all back – all the distance and the hurt, the deception and shattered trust. I wanted to erase the past seven years and kiss him until he forgot how I’d destroyed us.
But I didn’t, and I never would.
Our gazes stayed locked, tears slipping silently down my cheeks, until the elevator doors slid closed and I collapsed back against the wall. I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs, couldn’t quite bring the blurred elevator doors in front of my eyes into focus. Detachedly, I realized I was having a panic attack, but I was too overwhelmed to care much.
As the elevator began its descent away from Cara’s shrill voice and Sebastian’s inscrutable expression, my mind blanked of everything but one word, which I chanted internally like a deranged, hysterical mantra.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Chapter Six
Now
I walked, unseeing, the twelve blocks back to my neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen.
Usually, I love where I live. It’s a funky blend of recent graduates yearning to stretch their wings beyond the clutches of academia, young overworked professionals fighting to make it in the dog-eat-dog New York job force, struggling actors who give up food so they can afford to live three blocks from the Theater District, and artists who work all day as waiters or baristas so they have a paycheck barely large enough to cover the cost of new canvases and oil paints. They fill the air with their youth and exuberance for life, and the neighborhood pulses with a vitality like nowhere else I’ve ever been. The atmosphere is frenetic with movement; people rushing down the avenues with their feet on auto-pilot and their eyes trained on their smartphones, jay-walking with an ease only a native New Yorker can master, with one hand clutching a latte and the other casually flipping off a beeping cabbie.
It’s the polar opposite of Georgia, where the only things more syrupy than the summer humidity are the sugar-coated southern manners that are laid on thicker than homemade vanilla cake frosting. The day I toured my apartment with the realtor I’d slammed into a stranger as I wandered down 46th, my tourist eyes tilted up to the sky to take in the soaring cityscape. I remember being filled with a nearly perverse sense of glee when the stranger simply glared at me and barreled by. In Jackson, such a collision would’ve turned into an hour-long affair of apologies and small talk about the crop season, local weather patterns, and, of course, the latest gossip about whatever man had been spotted sneaking back into his own house at three in the morning with lipstick stains on his collar.
That Georgian out-for-a-Sunday-stroll pace I’d grown up with left me unprepared for the fast clip of the city, and I fear my first few weeks living here I’d wandered around like a lost little girl without her mommy — an image aided in no small part by my short stature and wide-eyed wonderment at the sheer scope of the Big Apple in all its glory. Still, for a southern girl cut adrift from her rural roots, I figured I’d done pretty well adjusting, considering the fact that after only a few short months of living in Midtown I could stiletto-sprint and cabbie-curse with the best of them.