Pink Ice (7 page)

             
While I was drooling and fighting with myself about this hot man I stepped over a carpet and made some noise.
Fuck!
They all stopped talking and came to me. “Doll, you are up.”

             
“I heard some noise and wanted to see if you had arrived. How was your day?”

             
He came to me and put a strand of hair behind my ear. “Getting better.” It was a fantasy, we still had the same issues of that horrible Friday, but he was acting like an adorable husband. And God knows I needed to explore the fantasy as long as I could. In a completely vulnerable moment I needed a safety net, and selfishly I was using him. “Let’s take you to our room baby, I’ve missed you all day.”
Our room?
Picture some hearts in the place of my eyes.
Oh God!
I had missed him so much. But then you can’t miss someone who left three hours before. I was becoming a clingy, demanding girl.

             
Pathetic and sad, I needed to get better, soon. I needed my job, my high heels, my house, but mostly I needed that mouth on my mouth and those amazing hands all over me.

             
I was not even good in this ‘little house’ fantasy, I didn’t cook and I looked terrible when he got home, I sucked at this 50’s housewife fantasy.
Just as predicted. You are
not even good for that!
Mrs. Danvers was the woman ruling the house and I was no one to interfere with that. And the only thing Dylan wouldn’t accept from Mrs. Danvers, was the only thing that he wasn’t accepting from me either.

             
I was getting fond of Ms. Danvers. The next day she came to me. “A beautiful day Katherine.” She was cleaning, cheerfully and eagerly while I was working in the library. After a thousand tries, finally she was calling me by my name.

             
“If you say so I believe you, Mrs. Danvers. I haven’t gone out for a long time now.” I was barely moving my eyes from the laptop. Dylan hadn’t discovered my home office hours, and Mrs. Danvers was too nice to be a snitch.

             
“It is so great to see this place back to life! I can’t believe I get to see another lovely lady at that desk again.” That caught my attention, so I sent my email and turned to her.

             
“Is it true? This place remained closed for that long?”

             
She stopped and turned to me, her white hair in an elegant bun and her navy blue suit reminded me of my British nanny. “Yes darling, when Dylan found out about his parents he was in boarding school. He came to identify the bodies, grabbed his things, remained in school and then went directly to Harvard. My poor boy, that was the worst day of our lives. That’s why he hates the hospital where you stayed, that was the place. Since that day he hadn’t spent a night in the city. Just quick visits and flying at night.”

             
I couldn’t follow that, why would he have an apartment if he never stayed here before? “He never slept in his apartment?”

             
The sweet lady patted my hand and smiled. “I didn’t even know he had an apartment here before. He always stayed in the Waldorf Astoria.” Speechless, I was so stunned that I just smiled and went back to my laptop. This perfect man couldn’t spend a night in the city until he met me? Talk about a buzz for my fragile ego. All those times that I rejected him came back to my stupid, stubborn head! I wanted to cry and travel in time, both things equally impossible to me.

             
“Katherine I need to vacuum this room, would you go to Mr. Berkeley’s office meanwhile?” I started to put my stuff away, but she stopped me. “It will take me a minute, you don’t have to hide your things.” She winked at me knowing that there was no way Dylan could be aware of my working hours.

             
I took advantage of the time I had, I needed to talk to my Copy Editor about a terrible ad they had sent me. Soon I was completely lost in my discussion. “Michael, you know better than thinking those words are appealing! The only person that will blush about that is your mom! We need the big guns, this is an amazing sexy brand and you are wasting our opportunity.”

             
I didn’t even feel when the phone was taken away from my hand, so when I turned to meet a pair of blue daggers I was shocked. “What the fuck is this Katherine?”

             
His voice was dangerously angry and hot. Without thinking about it I tried to take the phone from him. He walked away from me and raised his hand to make me fight for the phone. “Dylan, I need to finish that, I’ll explain it to you later.” I started to walk towards him, but he walked away. He was making me run after him all around the office. There’s a reason why my mom always forbade me to run in public, I’m too clumsy. But I needed to finish my call, so I went to him, cornered him against the desk and pushed him back trying to remove the phone. Of course, I ‘accidentally’ pushed my body as close to him as I could. My poor, or nonexistent, physical resistance was appearing, I was breathless and doing the softest attempts to drag air into my lungs.

             
Before I knew it, I had my back against the desk, my legs pushed wide open and my arms over my head. Dylan dropped my phone to the floor, but let’s face it, long ago this had stopped being about the phone, and looked at me. The perfect lips came to my face, breathing over me, and then they got close to my ear. “It is taking all my self-control not to take you right now, but you are still too weak and hurt to do that. I know that if I touch you, I won’t be able to stop myself. So the next time you do this, I don’t give a damn if I have to take you back to the hospital, because the way I want you will take you back there, Katherine. So don’t you dare tempt me again, ok silly girl?”

             
The hospital wasn’t that bad after all…
He wanted me, he was just afraid of hurting me.
Thank you Baby Jesus!
Of course that was the obvious reason, but my insecure brain had thought a thousand other things. This gave me the strength I needed. I removed myself from under his body and decided to do something that I had been dreading.

             
“Dylan, we need to talk.” Terrible words that only us, women, find necessary.

             
“What do you want to talk about Katherine?” He was having fun with my involuntary reactions, my face was red with embarrassment and my breathing was funny after our little encounter. Giving space to our bodies, he sat on his dad’s leather chair and stared at me.

             
To lose some nervousness I walked around the office moving my hands more eagerly than needed. “About us! About this! About how you keep acting as if we’re the same, as if something had changed from our last encounter.” My head betrayed me and my voice sounded more affected than what I intended. “Nothing has changed!”

             
“Everything has changed!” He was shouting just to pair my voice. The world stopped for a moment with his loud voice. “I almost lost you in that fucking hospital, so no. I am sorry if I don’t give a damn about your stupid problems with me, Katherine!”

             
He was affected, I was affected; this was a tricky subject for us. I needed to get the control back. “Dylan, I am sorry that you witnessed that. God knows I would have never wanted you to go back to that hospital.” He didn’t know that Mrs. Danvers had told me about the day his parents died, but my mouth was taking its own path. “But I still want the same things I wanted that day, and you don’t. Nothing has changed. A change of heart like this is impossible.”

             
“Katherine, I was scared ok?” His voice was loud again. “I always received everything in exchange of nothing. And then you came and asked for everything from me. I didn’t even know if I had anything to give.”

             
“And now you know?” My voice was barely a whisper, as if my words could stop him from talking.

             
“No, but now I know I would rather die than live a day without you.” I lost my breath with those words. But he continued as in a trance. “After my parents died I never cared for anyone. Spencer, Mark, everyone in my life has a professional relationship with me, a real link. You, you are different. I care for you, and you can run whenever you want. God knows you’ve done that enough. A relationship had never been in my plans, and then you came and change everything.”

             
I answered with all the pain in my heart. “Things are just the same now Dylan. I want things you can’t give me!” My heart was slow, stupid and new, so it couldn’t be trusted to make decisions on its own.

             
I was still walking around the room and I knew too well that I was probably going to be sent home anytime soon. Against all my predictions, he took my hand and dragged me between him and the desk, forcing me to face him. “Katherine I can’t live without you, so I don’t care how I am going to have you, I will. And if that means that at some point I will have to buy you a little house with a white picket fence, I will happily do it.”

             
He wanted me, he wanted me to be his.
Fuck…
“How can I say I am yours if I’ve always been free?” The no filter quality of my brain was on, I swear I was talking without considering the facts.

             
“Katherine, I know you are mine. Otherwise I wouldn’t be feeling this need inside me.” His hand softly took mine.

             
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
I got what I wanted, but there was still something bothering me, so I went for the girly aspect of the situation. “But you let me go, we were done…You gave up on me!” I was shouting again. It was stupid but my fragile self-esteem was having doubts. I know! It was dumb! But what if he was just afraid because of the accident? Pity love is the worst kind of love.
Love? You silly girl, this is not love.

             
“Don’t you ever say that again! I never let you go! I gave you space, and time, because I thought that was what you needed. I thought you were scared too, and that we needed to think. But don’t you dare, for a second, think that I will leave without a fight.” He calmed himself trying not to appear as menacing as he was at that moment.

             
“Why didn’t you come after me?” And that’s the moment when I became a silly girl to the eyes of the world.

             
“Because I’ve been running after you since the day I met you. For once I wanted you to come to me.” The little smile on his face was a sad one, almost a disappointed one.

             
“You knew that was not going to happen.”

             
“I had hope.”
Oh my God! And I just sent you to hell again!

             
“But I never did that.” My face looked at the floor avoiding his gaze.

             
“No,” with his finger he made me face him by pushing my chin. “But you needed me, and that is enough for me.” This time his smile was a little more warming. “I have already admitted I was scared about what you told me that day, so I thought we needed time, just that, time. That’s why Joe stayed with you all the time. I was letting you calm down. I thought you needed to think about us.”

             
If I could control my lachrymals, I probably would have forced them to cry then. But since I can’t do that, I just lowered my voice. “I thought you had left me.” I tried to put myself together, but my mouth wouldn’t take it. “Dylan this is crazy! You didn’t even take the time to know if you liked me! You just went after me blindly!” In my head this was the end, so better go big or go home, right?

             
“Three weeks.”

             
“What?”

             
“I gave myself three weeks to forget about you.” Of course I thought about the three weeks since the ‘Chicago Whore’ debacle. As if he was reading my thoughts he interrupted me. “When I met you, I thought the appeal was just that you had said no. Then I told myself it was the fact that you are so different from my usual choice. So after our weekend in San Antonio, I gave myself time, the first week I slept with women that were supposed to look like you, when it didn’t work I went for the opposite, my usual type of woman, Barbie blondes with no more expectations than have me drooling. The last week I just slept with the most beautiful women I could get. When I couldn’t get you out of my head I took a plane and went to the Advertising Gala. You were mine since that day, my head knew it and I just needed to make you believe it.”

             
Say what?!
He came to New York for me… Erase the sleep around part, and this would be a perfect speech. “So you never left me…”

             
He came closer to me and took my face between his hands. “I am not a quitter Bianchi.”

             
I bit my lip, I truly thought he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t. I was about to combust, so to distract my brain I went for other answers that I needed. “What happened that day? When did you get to me?”

             
Without talking he took my hand and directed me to a leather green couch that was in the corner of the office. We sat down and he put his arms around me, after taking a couple of deep breaths he started. “I was working when I received the call from Joe, he had lost you on the road and he was worried. He told me you were driving like a crazy woman and that he couldn’t find you.” His eyes were blaming me, I had been the irresponsible one. “I had already arrived at the airport when he called me to tell me he had found your car and that it was destroyed.” His silence was only interrupted by the terrible heart beat I was feeling on my back, as if he was reliving the whole day.