Last Kiss (29 page)

“Well?” I asked after the third phone call.

He frowned, his eyes darting as he seemed to debate whether he should confide in me.

“Don’t keep me in the dark on this,” I said bitterly. “Please.”

His shoulders sagged and he let out an apologetic sigh. “Michelis won’t talk to anyone but Reeve.”

“And Petros?”

“Knows nothing. I’m sorry.”

Reeve called as well, every two hours, to give me updates and make sure I was all right. He and his men came back to the house when it got dark but went back out with flashlights after they’d refilled their water and food.

I managed to doze for a couple of hours during the night with her pillow clutched tightly in my arms and the feeling of loneliness in my bones.

It was just after dawn when they found her.

Reeve woke me, waited for me to sit up and wipe the sleep from my eyes, then delivered the news, straight-faced and even.

She’d washed up onshore with the tide, her body bloated, her face so swollen and deformed she was hardly recognizable. The damage to her bones suggested she’d hit the rocks, either because she’d fallen from the cliffs above or because the ocean had slammed her against them. Her arm had been scratched or cut, deep enough that she’d bled and not long enough before her death that she’d scabbed over. Despite how deteriorated her remains were in just one day in the water, the message was clearly legible –
Not Yours
.

Not Reeve’s, I supposed it meant. Not mine either. Not anyone’s. Not anymore.

When the tears began, silent torrents that flooded down my face, Reeve reached for me, put his arms around me, and held me as I drowned his shoulder in grief.

I’d mourned Amber’s death once before, in private, mostly, with no one aware of my pain except for Joe. It had been nearly impossible to put on a happy face when my insides had felt like they’d been ripped to shreds.

This time, I had full support in my heartache. I had a shoulder to cry on. I had someone to grieve with me. And all I wanted was to be alone.

We went back to the mainland the day after she’d been found. My new apartment was ready, but I had a feeling Reeve would protest if I told him I wanted to be there, and I didn’t feel like arguing. So I stayed with him in his LA house. I slept with him in his bed. I spoke as little as possible, in one-word sentences and grunts and nods. I did nothing but try to survive.

The funeral was held four days later. Reeve arranged everything with austere strength, encouraging as much or as little input as I felt up to. Numbly I picked out flowers and an urn and selected a charity for guests to donate to in her name. There were more people at the service than I’d expected. People I didn’t know. Friends and acquaintances of Reeve who had met her when they’d been together. Besides a few men from the ranch and Reeve’s staff, the only people I knew in attendance were Reeve, Joe, and my mother.

Her mother was invited but didn’t show. I guessed it was easier for her to pretend that Amber had died long before, or maybe that she hadn’t ever existed at all. I didn’t mind Mrs. Pries’s absence. I liked being the sole representative of Amber’s family. We hadn’t shared DNA, but as far as I was concerned, we were as close to family as it gets.

“She called me,” my mother whispered during the service. She patted my hand, a gesture I supposed she thought was comforting. “The other day. She left a message on my machine. I saved it for you.”

“I know, Mom. I heard it, remember?” It was the message that had brought Amber back into my life. It had been left on my mother’s old answering machine late the previous summer. Months passed before she even mentioned it to me. Now it was May and it was both frustrating and upsetting that her dementia made her think that Thanksgiving was “the other day.”

Her brow furrowed in confusion, an expression she wore often these days. “I don’t know where the machine is since the move. It was important, I think. We need to find it.” She began to stand, and though I pulled her back down, she seemed on the verge of a public tantrum.

Reeve put a hand on my knee, silently asking if he could help. It was Joe that managed to calm her. “I think I know exactly which box it’s in, Ms. Barnes. Let’s watch the rest of this beautiful service. I’ll help Emily find it later.”

I mouthed a
thank you
to Joe and spent the rest of the hour thinking about that message, the one where she’d said Blue Raincoat, and I changed my world to come to her rescue. I wondered what would have been different if I’d never heard it. Then I wondered what would have been different if I’d heard it earlier or if I’d not gone after her or if I’d never met her in the first place. I wondered if I’d ever actually known her like I thought I had. I wondered if I could have fixed her if I’d been less broken myself.

But I could spend hours and days and years on what-ifs, and whatever better scenarios I created in my head, it wouldn’t change anything, and I’d still be without her now.

There was no reception when the service was over. The guests left and I sat by myself in the room with her ashes while Reeve settled up with the funeral home. Just her and I alone together for the last time. I didn’t know what to say to her. We said so much to each other the last time I saw her. So much and yet not enough. All those years apart she’d been alive in my head, always present even when she wasn’t there physically. Her voice had been as clear as my own when I’d gone about courting Reeve, and there had been many times that I’d wondered if she weren’t already dead, wondered if it were her ghost speaking to me.

But now she was really gone, and her voice was silent and I’d never felt so lost or alone.

It was a sign of what needed to happen next in my life. It was finally time to move on.

Footsteps sounded behind me, and when I heard someone sit two chairs down, I didn’t need to look up to know it was Reeve.

I let out a long slow breath. “It’s over.”

“Yes. It’s over.” He sounded as tired as I felt. “We just have the scattering of the ashes, if you still want to do that, but when you’re ready. No rush.”

I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time in weeks. Maybe the first time ever. When I first saw him, I’d thought of him as mysterious and dangerous, a playboy who cared only about himself and his own wants and needs.

That wasn’t the man sitting with me now, a man who cared for me in ways that I’d never imagined a man would. Ways that weren’t sexual or materialistic.

“I mean us, Reeve. I mean it’s over between us.”

If he were the type, I imagined that he would have rolled his eyes. “Don’t be —”

I shifted to face him, cutting him off. “I’m not.” I was calm, in control. Barely, but it counted. “I’m not emotional or ridiculous. I’m not being melodramatic. I’m not making snap decisions. I’m not being anything but completely serious. This is over. We have to be over.”

“Why?” He was equally calm, and it suddenly seemed absurd that he’d even have to ask and that either of us could be so restrained as we talked about the woman who’d been such a crucially important person in both our lives.

I burst up from my chair. “Because she’s dead! Because I was with you when I should have been with her.” I’d barely spoken since her death, but that had given me plenty of time to think. “Because I can’t be certain you had nothing to do with it.”

His eyes widened then immediately narrowed. “You think I had a hand in Amber’s death?”

“Why were you already dressed that morning?” I’d turned that fact over and over in my mind and hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

He sighed. “I told you. I woke up. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

“So you got dressed? And then went back to sleep? Why would you do that?” I wouldn’t let myself imagine what else had happened – how, while I was packing, he might have woken and slipped into her room. I wouldn’t imagine it but it sat there in my head, like a door with a spotlight above it, begging for me to put my hand on the knob. Whatever was on the other side was as pervasive in my mind with the door closed as it potentially could be wide open.

Reeve stood, strengthening his response. “I went to my office, okay? When I got back to my room, I was tired, and I didn’t bother getting undressed again.”

“You didn’t notice Tabor wasn’t around when you went out?” It was an unfair accusation – I hadn’t noticed the guard absent from duty when I’d first gone in to see her either.

“No. I didn’t. Forgive me for being distracted.” There was bite to his words, the first hint of bitterness he’d shown me since her death.

“Distracted by what? Me?”
By the fact that we’d just spent the whole night fucking?
“So it’s my fault?”

“No.” He took a step toward me, a bit softer now. “I’m not blaming you. Of course I was still thinking about you. But I was distracted by what I was doing. I went to my office to send an e-mail and that’s all I was thinking about.”

I didn’t want him soft. I wanted him hard. I wanted to fight. “What e-mail? To who?”

Frustration flooded his features. “Does it matter? Even if I opened up my account and showed you a time-stamped e-mail, it would only prove I sent an e-mail. I could still have done whatever it is you think I did to Amber then, isn’t that right?”

There it was. Point-blank. “Well, did you?”

“I shouldn’t have to answer this.”

There was a familiar glint of pain in his eyes. I’d seen it before, when I’d questioned his involvement with Missy’s death. It made me feel cruel to ask again, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice.

Which was the whole problem between us.

“You know what, Reeve?” I pushed back the lock of hair that had fallen from my bun. “It doesn’t matter what your answer is. Because whether you never tell me or whether you tell me you did or you didn’t, there will always be this dark cloud hanging over us. She will pervade any bit of happiness we have. We will always be star-crossed and impossible.”

He moved toward me again. “That’s emotion talking right now, Emily. That’s going to go away. Right now we need each other. Don’t push me away. Please.”

He was right there, in front of me, asking me to reach out or let him reach out to me. Pleading for me to accept his love, again. Always.

But as warm and tempting as he was, I couldn’t accept. His love was the sun, and I was ice, and even though it felt so good to melt in his presence, I didn’t recognize what he’d changed me into. I didn’t know who that person was. All I’d ever been was what Amber had made me into. I didn’t know how to be anyone else.

I folded my arms across my chest and took a step backward.

Taking that one step said everything it meant to say. The pain in Reeve’s eyes spread throughout his entire expression and posture. “You said you trusted me!” he snapped. “Was that a lie?”

“I don’t trust myself anymore, Reeve! I thought I knew what I was doing. I told her I loved you, and she told me to leave, and I said I would, and I meant it, but then I spent the night in your bed anyway.” I was spouting stream of consciousness, barely recognizing this was the first time I’d actually admitted to loving him or to the secret I’d kept from him since she’d told me to go.

He toughened, the twitch of his left eye the only sign of emotion. “You were going to leave? After we were together on the island?”

I didn’t even consider backtracking. It was time to lay everything out on the table. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she told me to and that’s how it worked between us – she told me what to do, and I did it.”

“I don’t get you, Emily.” That simple statement pushed the knife farther into my gut. I’d thought that he was the one person who had understood.

“And that just validates why we don’t belong together.”

He shook his head, rocking backward as though he were too angry to continue the conversation. Just as I thought he might turn to leave, he twisted back at me. “How do you still let her have that much power over you? She’s gone. You’ve been released. But you’re like a victim with Stockholm syndrome, still defending her, still looking to her to tell you what’s ‘allowed.’ When will you see that you don’t need her to tell you how to feel about things?”

I hadn’t cried throughout the entire service, and suddenly, now, my eyes burned and my throat constricted. “You’re one to criticize someone for using their power.”

“You’re right. I like having things my way and there are certain places in my life I demand that. And if that’s what you need, someone to tell you how to dress and what to say and where to live and what to drive and how to fuck, then I can be that for you.”

He bore into me with wide eyes, a single finger raised to enunciate his point. “But I’m not going to manipulate you into choosing things that will make you unhappy. I’m not going to allow you to stop being a woman who can think and decide for herself. If that’s what you get off on, then you’re right, we need to be over.”

Once again he turned as if to leave, then spun back around. “She didn’t die because you loved me, Emily.”

A tear rolled down my cheek. “But maybe she died because
you
loved
me
.”

“Oh, Jesus. This is talking in circles.” With an abrupt burst of rage, he kicked at one of the wood-slat folding chairs. “I loved her, too, remember?”

I twisted my lips, trying to hold in the sob. “It’s not the same.”

“It doesn’t matter if it was the same. I loved her, and I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her like this.”

“How am I supposed to believe that?” The shitty thing was I
did
believe him. I’d always believed he loved her, but our argument had spun out of control, as arguments do, and I was speaking out of pain. I was picking at the places that I knew were his weakest. “You let her go off with Michelis in the first place.”

“And how was I supposed to stop her?” His subtext was clear –
I’d kept her and you weren’t happy, I let her go and you’re not happy.
“Do you want to hear that I blame myself for this? Because I do. I do, and I have to live with that, but I don’t believe that my punishment should be living without you.”

I flinched because I
did
believe my punishment should be living without him.

He walked toward me. “Do I need to prove myself? Should I go after Michelis to show you how upset I am? He’s the one who was responsible, and we both know it. Should I meet with him? Settle things once and for all?”

I folded my arms tighter around myself. “It’s what she wanted you to do. Maybe you should.”

“What do
you
want me to do?”

I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know the answer. Did I want him to avenge her? Maybe. Did I want him to start a war with a man who had more power than he did? Maybe not.

“See, that’s what this is really about. You said it earlier – you don’t trust yourself.” He closed the distance between us as he spoke, cornering me. “You don’t have faith in your own opinions. You don’t think I had anything to do with her death, and you don’t think I should confront my uncle about this, but you still can’t speak up, can you? Your whole life is a reflection of this. It’s why you waited so long to put your mother in a good facility. It’s why you have a job that’s beneath you. It’s why you can’t get the guts to go audition for something you believe in. It’s why you’re stuck, and why you’ll always be stuck because you’re not capable of making your own decisions.”

His words were bitter and painful in their accuracy. I raised my hand to slap him, but he was faster than I was, and he caught my wrist before I made contact. He held me like that, his fingers both heat and ice where they touched my skin, his eyes searing into me with righteous indignation and conviction.

I held his stare. I held it, my lips tight, my body rigid.
See
, I said with my eyes.
You use your power against me too.