That One Moment (Lost in London #2)(52)
Vi’s eyes trail from my face, to my bare chest, to my unbuttoned trousers where my white Calvin Klein boxer briefs are revealed. Finally, she looks up at me, shaking her head and answers, “Sort of a favour to an old neighbour. She passed away last year and the family couldn’t take care of him, so I offered. She was a huge Batman fanatic, so technically his full name is Bruce Wayne.”
I half smile. “What a great name for a dog. Does he have super powers? Aside from the ferocious tackling and licking?”
“If by super powers you’re referring to giant-sized craps, then yes, he is powerful,” she huffs a laugh and drops down on the seat next to me, mindlessly pulling her shirt away from her to dry.
I scrunch my nose up. “Oh Bunny, you always manage to surprise me.”
“What on earth is with the bunny nickname?” She pauses her action to place her hands on her hips. “Is it a term of endearment? Or shall I start calling you the schoolyard bully?”
“It’s a compliment,” I chuckle. “You like to stamp your foot when you’re frustrated…like a bunny…and I find it sexy as f*ck.”
She raises her eyebrows with excitement. “I can’t decide if I find that creepy or charming.”
I chuckle good-naturedly. “I do my best to walk the line in all things creepy and charming. Like right now, I’m not even staring at your sexy nipples that are showing off clear as day through your tank top. Never mind, I lied. Now I am.”
Her eyes turn to saucers and she crosses her arms over her chest. “Shit, I had forgotten.”
“No need to be shy now. I became well acquainted with your nipples last night if you recall.” I waggle my eyebrows at her suggestively.
Her eyes narrow. “Are you this cheeky to all your girls?”
I cock my head at her in surprise. “Are you my girl?” I’m not asking because I’m shocked. I’m asking out of genuine curiosity. I want her to be my girl with every fibre in my body. But there’s a layer of me that wants to repel away from her and everything she represents to me.
She swallows hard. “I didn’t mean…‘Course I wasn’t inferring…We’ve just started—”
“Look, Vi. I’ll stop you right there,” I start, twisting so my feet are back on the ground and we’re facing knee to knee. “I need to talk to you before we go any further with whatever this is. I’d rather just be open and honest about my past, which, surprisingly, comes rather natural for me when I’m talking to you.”
“Surprisingly?” she asks just as Bruce trots over to her for a fondle. She mindlessly pets him while looking intently at me.
“I don’t know if it’s therapy that’s changed me or you specifically, but I never liked sharing things about myself. I never did it, as a matter of fact…ever. I just kept things bottled up. Even with Reyna, whom I considered my best friend back then. She knew relatively nothing about me.”
“What is the story with you and her? What kind of friends were you if you didn’t share things with one another?” she asks, her eyes tightening around the edges.
“The physical kind,” I reply honestly, watching her reaction carefully and feeling slightly annoyed that I don’t see the green-eyed jealousy I was hoping for. “Rey and I always had this way of just mucking through life together. Like a soldier on the battlefield…It’s all a lot less scary when you have someone standing right beside you on the front lines. But all of a sudden, or at least it felt that way to me, Rey wanted out of the dark place we’d found each other in. She started pulling away from me.”
“Reyna fell in love with Liam.”
I shrug my shoulders and shake my head at the fact that Vi is completely oblivious to the pain those two names together caused me while I was in rehab. “Yes. That’s exactly what happened. I wasn’t even aware that Rey and Liam had a history of some sort. Did you know Liam used to date my sister, Marisa, back at Oxford?”
“I had no idea.”
“Well he did. I don’t know the details…It’s probably a story that could fill an entire book. Regardless, it is funny we’re talking about Rey right now, considering she’s a large part of day one on my countdown.”
Vi’s eyes widen. “Your final countdown day? How so?”
I sigh heavily, feeling that familiar aching in my chest that I feel every time I transport myself back to that night.
This is it, Hayden. This is the final day of your countdown challenge from Doc. You’re strong enough for this. Don’t hold back now.
“The night of the gala, I was completely trashed. As you know from the other days I described, things had been going from bad to worse for me. I’d been drinking most of the day because I had it in my head that I was going to do it that night. I was going to kill myself.” I pause, swallowing hard. Damn, those last two words are still hard to say. “But I started having second thoughts. Namely because of Reyna and how awful we’d last left things. So I thought maybe if I saw her just one last time, something would click. Something would make sense again. She’d see me differently, or I’d see myself differently, and I could get out of that place in my mind.”
“But it didn’t work,” Vi says softly. Her eyes are trained on my cuff-covered wrists.