Scandalized(72)

“I know,” he says immediately, but the next words take a bit longer for him to put together. “I hate—hate—how that happened. It was chaos. If I could do it over, I would have come directly to you.”

I don’t say anything to this. Having to leave the suite quickly wasn’t really what hurt. I like to think he was protecting me, even if it was disorienting and painful. What hurt was how he cut me off, didn’t answer my calls, and the Please take care he eventually gave me as a shitty parting gift.

But maybe what hurts most of all is how it feels like he’s sneaking up to my front door and leaving a bag without knocking. How painful would it have been to open my door and see that there, knowing he’d been here and left without a word? It would be worse than if he’d just kept all my things.

Tears, hot and burning, threaten at the back of my throat. I’ve done a pretty good job since Friday of stitching myself together, but I need him to go. All weekend I convinced myself that if I ever saw his face again, it would hit me differently. I would associate it with the betrayal of not getting to explain myself, of not getting the benefit of the doubt. But standing this close to him, it isn’t like that.

Even when I’m furious, his presence fills me up inside. I resent knowing that if he would only hug me, we would both be okay. The hollow space in my heart is uniquely Alec-shaped. The line of his neck, the curve of his mouth, the angle of his jaw—these are all odd comforts. So is the soft, steady gaze that held me like an anchor whether he was listening to me talk about work or pinning me on the razor-thin edge between pleasure and desperation. Those dark, searching eyes saw through me from the first moment they met mine in the airport. There wasn’t one second where Alec Kim didn’t look straight into the center of me, taking me in all at once. And he kept looking like what he saw there lit him up inside.

It’s how he’s looking at me now, too. It’s wild to think he can still manage this fa?ade after the way he shoved me away in our first moment of crisis. My heart squeezes painfully, closing a shutter on tender feelings.

“I meant what are you doing here, in LA,” I say. “You said you were leaving on Friday.”

“I couldn’t.” He swallows audibly. “I had to—” He stops, reaching up to scrub his face with a frustrated hand. His eyes turn a little wild. “Have you been out all night?”

I am astounded at the nerve of this question. He told me to pack up and leave, shut me out on the phone, stayed in LA after he told me he was leaving, and now he wants to know whether I’ve slept somewhere else?

“Yep,” I say, daring him to ask where I’ve been.

But he doesn’t. He turns his face away, jaw clenched, nostrils flared, and I realize he’s struggling to not cry. “Okay,” he says, finally. “Not my business.”

What is he thinking? That he’s catching me at the end of a walk of shame? He knows better. He knows me better. If we weren’t currently at DEFCON-1 in our emotions, he would guess that I’d been at my parents’ place. This is the insanity of our circumstances taking hold of his adrenaline and dumping it like gasoline into his bloodstream.

“I didn’t want to sleep in my bed.” It’s all I’m willing to give him. “The last time I was there you were with me.”

Alec reaches up, pinching the bridge of his nose, covertly wiping his eyes. “I get it. I changed hotels for the same reason.”

Don’t break, I tell myself when he confesses this, imagining the insanity of him even trying to leave the Waldorf Astoria, let alone check in somewhere else. He would be absolutely mobbed. What on earth would make it worth it?

Alec shifts on his feet, clearing his throat once and then again. I fix my attention on the ground between us, trying to unchain everything I’m feeling, separating anger from sadness from fear from longing, binning them into different spaces in my body so I can make room to breathe.

When he speaks, his words are hoarse. “I’ll never be able to apologize enough for how I behaved on Friday.”

He’s probably right, and there’s nothing for me to say. I wanted to talk to him, to help him fix this—help us both fix it—but he shut me out. All my words have dried up.

Silence yawns between us. “To be honest, the entire affair was a mistake,” I say with careful control. “Your career is a mess. I’ve been fired.” He barely reacts, and my anger flares. “The moment I saw you at the hotel room in LA, I should have turned around and walked back out.”

I don’t look at his face so I can’t be sure, but I imagine Alec staring at me like he knows it would have been easier to split atoms in my fists than to walk away from him that morning.

Not that it would have mattered anyway—someone still took photos of us in Seattle. I was screwed from the very beginning.

“I know you’re angry,” Alec says, “and I get it. I absolutely get it. But I was in an impossible position. I needed to figure out a plan with Sunny. I couldn’t just…” He falters. “I couldn’t just lay her story out there to save my own ass, like it was that simple.”

I’m still so mad, I’m not even willing to own the fact out loud that it would have been easier to handle all of this if I’d included his account in the write-up. Because with a couple days’ distance—even feeling messy and hurt—I still don’t regret my instinct to try to protect the people I love. I don’t regret only using information I got cleanly.