Edge of Darkness (21 page)

The next few weeks were neither good nor easy, a reality Ember resigned herself to with a certain amount of gratitude. Nothing should ever be easy or good for her, a fact she’d forgotten in her state of temporary insanity brought on by falling in love.

Love. Her mind flinched from the word like an abused dog, expecting a kick.

Things had returned to “normal.” She was back working at the bookstore and volunteering at the shelter on Sundays and three evenings a week as they continued to be overloaded with unwanted house cats who were being euthanized by the hundreds. Had she not been quite so numb, it would have sickened her, but she accepted this too with the resignation of someone for whom horror was a daily part of life.

Marguerite was furious with her for not signing over her shares in the bookstore and had threatened to never speak to her again if she continued to refuse. This suited Ember just fine. She didn’t know why Christian hadn’t withdrawn the offer, but he hadn’t. It stood as further testament to his character, which was so much finer than hers she felt like an insect in comparison, like something that should be smashed underfoot.

But she wouldn’t sell. She knew the reasons behind his offer to Marguerite were motivated by misplaced affection for her. And even if he were too much a gentleman to withdraw the offer the way he’d withdrawn his affections, she wouldn’t take advantage of it.

Now if she could only figure out a way to return all the money for her rent.

It came to her one night as she was cleaning out a cage at the shelter. Holding a filthy litterbox in one gloved hand and a pooper scooper in the other, she froze.

She had to move out of her apartment.

It was so simple she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it sooner. If she moved out, all the money would go to the cystic fibrosis foundation Dante had designated in his contract with Christian. She could help other children like Clare. It would be, in some small way, a payment toward an unrepayable debt.

It wouldn’t be recompense, but it would be something.

That very day, Ember found an apartment on the other side of town near the docks, in a rundown building with thin walls, bad plumbing, and questionable locks. As she signed the paperwork with her new landlady—a sour-faced old woman with a mouth like a prune and a withering stare that shot laughter from the air like a clay pigeon—she wondered briefly if the group of surly young men lounging around the entrance giving her hostile, assessing looks would murder in her in her sleep or merely beat her unconscious before they rifled through her handbag for drug money.

Either way, she didn’t care.

Asher, however, was not quite so laissez-faire about the situation.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said as he stood in the kitchen the day she moved in, gazing around her new apartment with his hands on his hips and his face blanched in disgust.

She imagined the word “kitchen” with air quotes around it, because it was little more than a gouged stainless steel sink, a dwarf refrigerator the color of a rancid avocado that rattled and wheezed, and a hot plate crusted with the remains of what looked like a cooked squirrel. Or maybe the fur was just growing from the layer of black mold that lurked beneath the heating element.

“Home sweet home,” Ember replied flatly to Asher’s cry of horror as he gingerly lifted the corner of an ancient placemat on the scarred wood dining table and a roach scurried out. Asher swept it to the floor and crushed it with one stomp of his Prada-shod foot.

“Ember, there is no way you’re living here!” he snapped. He swept an arm around in an angry, jerky motion. “Look at this place! You’re going to catch the plague from the rats living in that couch”—he jerked his chin toward the sagging, faded, plaid sofa in the “living room,”—which, judging by the frayed holes in the cushions and the small black piles of droppings on the floor around it, did indeed appear to be home to a large family of rodents—“or you’re going to fall through that hole by the window and wind up in the apartment below. Which is probably occupied by a gang of meth-addicted parolees, if the crew hanging around outside this place is any indication of the quality of the tenants!”

To be fair, the hole in the floor near the “window” wasn’t large enough for her to fall through. A large cat, perhaps. Maybe a small dog.

“It’s perfect, Ash.” Ember’s voice was as hollow as her heart.

Asher gave her a sharp look, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. He crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head. “Why don’t you tell me what this is
really
all about?”

Ember avoided his penetrating gaze and moved to the small, dirty piece of leaded glass that passed for a window. It overlooked a narrow, dark alley. The abandoned building on the other side was surrounded by chain link and barbed wire. There were little patches of grass growing on the roof, which in some places was caved in; the wood structural beams showed through like bones.

“Nothing,” she lied.

“Okay, I call bullshit on that.”

She turned back to find Asher staring at her, the look on his face clearly telegraphing his disbelief—and more than a little anger.

“I couldn’t afford to live in Dante’s building anymore, that’s all. This is what I can afford.” She looked around the dirty, dreary room and added, “Believe me, it’s perfect.”

The “for me” she left unsaid.

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of a dog barking furiously a block or two over and the sporadic metallic clanging of the empty soup can a rag-draped homeless man was kicking down the alley below.

Then Asher lowered his arms to his sides and accused in a low, shocked voice, “You’re running away from him.”

“What? Who?” she replied, in a futile attempt at avoidance.

“Supermodel Asshole,
that’s
who!” he shot back. In three long strides he was in her face. His own was turning red. “What the hell did he do this time?”

She sighed, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “Oh, Ash. He didn’t do anything. This isn’t about him. I just couldn’t afford my old apartment anymore. I swear.” She let her hand fall and looked into his eyes, trying with all her considerable acting skills to keep her face entirely devoid of emotion. She’d practiced this look for years, and had perfected it on the endless rounds of therapists her father had insisted she visit, before they all gave up on her for good.

He studied her face carefully, then said softly, “Yeah, I’m going to have to call bullshit on that, too, honey.”

Ember lowered her forehead to his chest; he wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on the crown of her head. After a moment, she said tiredly, “I know you won’t believe me, but Christian didn’t do anything wrong. He was the best thing that happened to me in a long time, Ash, and
I
screwed it up, not him. If you only knew how generous he really is, how thoughtful…”

How right he is to hate me.

She shivered and pulled out of his arms. She went back to the window, wrapped her arms around herself and stared up at a fat, glossy crow circling lazily in the slate gray sky above. Asher stood where she’d left him, and though she wasn’t looking at him she felt his eyes like two hot pokers boring into her back.

“This isn’t on him. So let it go, okay? Don’t pick on him anymore. Let’s just pretend the whole thing never happened.”

She hadn’t told him what happened between them; she’d barely mentioned Christian’s name at all over the past few weeks, and only when Ash had asked for updates. The only update she ever gave him was this: we’re not together.

End of story.

“I don’t like this, Ember. I don’t like this one bit. You’re holding something back from me, and you’re obviously lying to me about your reasons for wanting to live in this dump. And, if I may say so, your face looks like a thousand miles of bad road.”

Ember’s lips twisted to a wry pucker, but she didn’t have the energy to be really offended. “Gee, thanks.”

“Thank me when I’m done,” he shot back. “You’re dropping weight like it’s going out of style, you’ve got spooky haunted house eyes and those bags you’re incubating beneath them look like they’re going to hatch something evil. So please be straight with me: what the
hell
is going on with you?”

His voice grew softer, and definitely more worried. “Are you sick?”

Lovesick. Heartsick.
Soul
sick. Sick with grief, and regret, and an ocean of self-hatred, cold, black, and infinite. Yes, she was very, very sick indeed.

She was all of those things and much more, but aloud she only offered him a weak, “No, I’m not sick, Ash. And there’s nothing wrong. I’m just…I just needed a new apartment, that’s all. Everything’s fine.”

There was another long silence. Suddenly the sound of Asher’s footsteps pounding toward the front door made her turn in surprise. He yanked open the door and paused on the threshold, staring back at her with an expression that fluctuated between rage and disappointment.

“You know something, Ember? I always knew you had things you didn’t want to talk about and I was okay with that—I accepted you just like you accepted me; the Full Monty, no questions asked. But I never thought you were a coward. Until now.”

Her mouth dropped open as pain lanced straight through her chest. Through the hand that flew up to cover her mouth, she whispered a choked, “Ash!”

“You don’t want to tell me something, that’s your prerogative. But we’ve been friends—good friends, I thought—for years, and you have the nerve to lie right to my face—multiple times now—when I want to help you. Which in my book is a big ‘fuck you, Asher.’ So I get the hint; you don’t want my help. But I’m sorry, I’m not going to hang around and watch you waste away and wallow in this depression like a pig in shit, without any kind of inkling of what the hell is happening, or without being allowed to help in some way. Do you have any idea how…how
impotent
that makes me feel? How frustrating that might be for me? Or are you too busy feeling sorry for yourself that you can’t see past the end of your own nose?”

She stood there in shock with her mouth open, heat burning her cheeks.

But he wasn’t quite done yet.

He said, “I am so tired of people feeling sorry for themselves. Sorry for their shitty parents, sorry for their shitty friends, and their shitty jobs, and all the shitty things that happen every day in life to everyone, but somehow everyone seems to think their particular brand of shitty is the shittiest of them all. But you know what? There’s
always
someone else who’s got it a thousand times shittier than you. So suck it up and quit your bellyaching and try focusing on someone
else
. It might make your problems seem a little bit better in comparison. Or if not, at least it will make you less of an asshole!”

Breath left her lungs as if she’d been punched in the chest. Her eyes filled with tears. She began to stammer an apology, but Asher held his hand to his ear and snapped, “What’s that? I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over your tragic past!”

Ember cried, “What the
hell
, Asher?”

He stared at her long and hard. Behind his glasses, his dark eyes burned. “You didn’t invent suffering, Ember, no matter what happened to you. And just because you’re suffering doesn’t give you the right to lie to your friends and make them feel useless and unwanted. People who care about each other help each other out when they’re hurting, they don’t
shut
each other out. That’s what you do to people you don’t really give a shit about. Which, coincidentally, is how you’ve made me feel. Congratulations on losing your only friend.”

He turned to walk out the door, and she crumbled.

Sobbing his name, she ran across the room and flung herself at him, catching him off guard so he stumbled against the wall. With her arms wrapped around his neck, she sagged against him and cried like a baby into his shirt, blathering apologies and a long, incoherent description of what had happened between her and Christian, interspersed with background story of what had happened that fateful day in New Mexico.

By the end of it, he was crying, too, and her troll of a landlady shouted at them from the end of the hall to shut up or take it inside.

They went inside.

He held her tightly, leaning against the back of the closed door, until her crying stopped and she hung limp in his arms.

“I’m so sorry,” he said in a broken voice. “I didn’t know…I had no idea—”

“Please don’t apologize, that will only make me feel worse,” she whispered. “I don’t deserve any sympathy. I should have been locked up for what I did. They should have locked me up and thrown away the key.”

Or worse.

“Did the police…why didn’t the police…”

He hesitated, and she lifted her head and looked at him through swollen eyes. He couldn’t say it, but she knew what he meant: Why didn’t they arrest you?

“Technically they couldn’t. There wasn’t enough…my blood alcohol level…something went wrong with their test and it came back negative. I kept telling them—I told them as soon as they got there and the paramedics took my blood but it didn’t work.”