Undone, Volume 3 (20 page)

Ana didn’t love me.
Why was it only then, when she said that she didn’t, that I fully
realized that I did love her? I loved her. How was that for shit
timing?

If I’d clued in
earlier, woken her up in the middle of the night in Mammoth and told
her I couldn’t live without her, would that have changed things?
But it was too late now. Now she’d rejected me, thrown back my
ring, walked off and told me to have a nice life.

Why did everything get
symbolic when you felt sad? The taxi stopped at a light and in the
gutter I saw an old, discarded sneaker. Had that sneaker once been
loved, part of a cherished pair? Had it been surprised when its time
had come to an end? Had it expected it, a hole where the big toe had
poked on through giving it proper warning? I bet it hadn’t. I bet
it had been shocked as hell to find itself alone and forgotten in the
gutter of life.

I knew I was being
melodramatic, looking out at a battered sneaker in the rain and
feeling kinship. But, damn it, I felt exactly like that sneaker. Cast
to the side, laces untied, I’d come undone.

Ana

Through my tears, I
heard a knock on my hotel door. I didn’t know why Lola hadn’t
booked me on a flight until five. That seemed like an impossibly long
time to wait to leave, and now I had company. It had to be Ash. Who
else could it be? But I didn’t think I could handle seeing him
again.

He’d looked so
devastated when I’d ended things at the park. Of course, that was
the whole plan. If he’d laughed it off and said “no problem,
sweetheart” the whole thing would have been a waste. The world
would have learned what it already knew: Ash Black was an asshole.
I’d been the only one out of the loop on that.

A knock again. Keeping
the deadbolt chain on the door, I opened it a crack. Connor.

I sighed deeply. “What
do you want?”

“Hey, now. Is that
any way to greet your old friend Connor?” He leered at me.

“How did you find out
where I was staying?” Only Lola knew, and I’d only told her about
an hour ago. She’d arranged for a car to come pick me up at three.

“Lola knew you might
need a shoulder to cry on.” There was that grin again. It gave me
the creeps.

“I’m not really in
the mood, Connor. Sorry.” I moved to shut the door right in his
face. Such rude behavior from the librarian! But I was long past
worrying about offending Connor.

His foot jammed into
the door quick and fast, stopping me. The chain still held it closed,
though. Suddenly, I felt glad I’d left it on.

“Come on now. Ash is
out of the picture. We can pick up where we left off.”

“What are you talking
about?” This man was disgusting. And why was he so relentless with
me? It couldn’t be because he found me irresistibly sexy. He
surrounded himself with far more X-rated eye candy than me. No, he
must get off on going after something that belonged to Ash. Ick.

“Don’t tell me you
don’t remember, luv?” Now he laid on the Irish brogue thick.
“That night at the party. You were all over me.”

“I was not.”

“Let me help you
remember. Unlock this door and let me in.” He gave me what I
figured he thought was a charming smile. He was a rich and famous
guy, so I guess it worked on lots of people. Not on me, though.

On me, it had the
opposite effect. I got a cold chill down my spine and I remembered,
clearly, when I’d seen that exact smile before. He’d been handing
me a strange-tasting glass of punch at the New Year’s Eve party. It
all came together.

“You drugged me,” I
realized, out loud. “Didn’t you?”

“That’s quite an
accusation.” He stepped back, hands up in surrender, feigning hurt.

“That night at the
party,” I insisted. “You did, didn’t you?”

“Sometimes a girl
needs help loosening up. It was for your own good.” He gave me a
wink. “Am I right?”

I’d show him
loosening up. In a move I later recognized could have gone very
badly, I unfastened the chain on that deadbolt and stepped right into
the hallway with him.

I looked him straight
in the eye. “Connor? Fuck you.” And I kneed him hard in the
groin. Thanks to the YMCA self-defense class my mother made me take
before moving to the city, I got him right where it counted. He
hunched down, cupping his balls with a sad yelp.

“You don’t drug
women,” I told him, summoning my stern inner librarian.

He made a soft sound
like a “meep.”

“And stay the hell
away from me.” I took one last look at him, recognizing he posed no
threat. None at all. And I headed back into my hotel room. Where were
the cameras when you needed them? I would have liked them to have
captured that shot.

A couple hours later, I
found out where all the cameras were. The airport. Somehow they’d
found out when I’d be leaving town. Thanks, Lola. Guys with cameras
swarmed around me, asking for a quote. I was the heartbreaker now.
Why had I done it? Had I left Ash for Connor? Inquiring minds wanted
to know!

I kept my head down. I
just needed to get past security. But then, I saw Ash. In a baseball
cap pulled down low, he’d had the bad idea of meeting me there,
too. He stood looking impossibly gorgeous and rumpled and distraught
with his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble
gave him a rakish edge. I knew how good it felt to kiss him with that
rough scrape.

Click! About a thousand
cameras went off, realizing they were getting two for the price of
one. This couldn’t be happening. Was Ash’s appearance staged,
too? I shook my head as he approached, trying to warn him off.

“Ana, just give me a
second,” he pleaded.

“Why are you here?”
I hissed, continuing to try to push my way through the throng. I
didn’t have any bodyguards to help me. I did have my YMCA
knee-to-the-groin trick, though, and I’d use it again if I had to.

“You won’t answer
my calls. And Lola wouldn’t tell me where you were staying.”

“Great, she told
Connor but not you?”

“She told Connor?”

“Yes, she told
Connor. Your best friend. The date-rape king.”

“What are you talking
about?”

“Ask him.”

“Ash! Over here! Ana!
Are you giving him a second chance?” Voices called out to us,
making it nearly impossible to speak ourselves.

“Just give me a
second?” he asked urgently. Pulling me over into a corner, he
shielded me with his body. The way he had in Paris. I shouldn’t be
thinking about Paris. I needed to think about the conversation I’d
overheard at the cabin.

“Ash, you don’t
need to pretend anymore.” I spoke as loudly as I dared while
photographers still swarmed around us.

“But I don’t want
you to go!” He spoke loudly, clear enough for them to get every
word.

In frustration, I
wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down so I could speak
in complete privacy. I tried to ignore how good he felt against me,
the way his smell made my knees go weak. “I heard you in the
kitchen talking with Connor. About how rough these weeks have been
with me. How much it’s sucked and how you can’t wait for it to be
over so you can go back to how things used to be. So you can stop
pretending. I know.”

I pulled away and he
looked at me with a perfect expression of hurt confusion across his
handsome features. “What? It’s not like that.”

“Cut it out, Ash.”
This was getting cruel now. I knew he was supposed to play the part
of the heartbroken, jilted lover but he had to know when to stop.

“Listen, I don’t
know what you think you heard but—”

“What I think I
heard?” I shook my head. “Ash, I know what I heard.” A man with
a huge zoom lens on his camera even though he stood just a foot away
jostled me with his elbow.

“You two gonna kiss
and make up?” he asked, snapping away.

I turned my head and
started pushing my way past him. Ash grasped onto my arm, trying to
slow me down, but I’d had enough of manhandling and scenes.

“Let me go.” I had
to yell it so he could hear. It came out sounding angrier than I
felt, but maybe it was better that way. If I let myself sound too sad
it would open up the floodgates. I just needed to make it a few more
steps.

Ash dropped my elbow. A
TSA agent took his place, ushering me in past the cordoned-off
section for passengers with boarding passes. I shouldn’t have, but
I let myself take one last look behind me. It was almost like
watching something sink into the ocean as Ash got surrounded,
flooded, covered by fans and paparazzi. In seconds, I couldn’t even
see him anymore.

I told myself that was
for the best.

§

I blocked Ash’s
number on my phone. There wasn’t any point in dragging it out. And
it turned out, he seemed to agree. I heard absolutely nothing from
him. Sure, calling and texting were off the menu. But there had been
a time, not that long ago, when people had still managed to make
contact with one another even without cell phones. Ash did not make
that effort.

I heard from his
attorney, Nelson, refreshing my memory about all the details in the
NDA I’d signed. I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone about
anything that had happened.

That was fine by me.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about Ash. And once it was
clear that I wasn’t going to say a thing, and I wasn’t in Ash’s
life any more, the paparazzi left me alone. Within a week back in New
York my status officially returned to Not Interesting.

I wish I could say that
I didn’t cry. Or maybe that I didn’t cry a lot. Or at least that
I never ugly cried, with big fat tears and making the kind of face
even your mother thought twice about loving. But I did all of that.
For the most part I managed to save it for nighttime. But the walls
in our tiny Brooklyn apartment weren’t exactly thick. My roommates
knew, more than anyone, how torn up I felt.

At work, thankfully, I
kept busy. Little kids kept you on the hop and I was grateful for all
the distractions. January was the height of flu season. I had more
than one kid throw up on me. It was hard to remember your heartache
when you were cleaning up vomit. I may have been the only person in
the world grateful for stomach bugs, but there you had it. That’s
how low I felt.

We got word that our
library branch wasn’t going to be shut down. That was all. No news
about 20 years of funding or grand plans to start a whole-scale
remodel. I didn’t know if Ash had kept his side of the bargain or
not and, sadly, I didn’t have it in me to find out. I knew I could
call his attorney and he might verify whether the fund had been
established, but I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to move on.

And to move on, I
needed to stay busy. I took on more piano clients, devoting Saturday
afternoons to lessons. The few times one of my teenage students asked
if it was true that I’d dated Ash Black, I was able to answer with
complete honesty that it had all been a publicity stunt. There’d
never really been anything between us.

Most Sundays, I spent
up at my parent’s house. They had my back, as always. My father
grumbled about rock and rollers and my mother muttered and threw salt
over her shoulder, cursing the past and praying for the future. They
assured me that Ash wasn’t worthy of me. This was good riddance,
that’s what this was, and I was off to bigger and better things,
preferably in the form of a nice, churchgoing Russian engineer ready
to settle down and start a family.

My Aunt Irina took it
the worst. She got mad, really mad, and if it wasn’t for her
deathly fear of flying I think she might have hopped on the next
flight out to L.A. and given Ash a piece of her mind. I feared for
him the next time he did a show in New York. I had no doubt Irina
could work her way past security if she set her mind to it.

I was grateful when the
Super Bowl finally arrived. I didn’t watch much TV, but you never
knew when a pop-up ad would make its way into a streaming service and
announce The Blacklist, halftime spectacular! The few times I hadn’t
managed to avoid seeing Ash’s image, it had felt like a slap across
the face. Even though I knew every shot was staged, every photo the
result of wardrobe and stylists and makeup artists and lighting
crews, he still looked so goddamned hot. It wasn’t fair.

Apparently the show
went well. Everyone loved them. I avoided the whole thing, declining
the couple of invites I got to attend Super Bowl parties. On the day
of the big game, I’d never been more grateful for my oddball
roommates. Liv rejected everything about football, from the male
archetype it propagated—whatever that meant—to the corporate
branding across every frame. Jillian just wasn’t much of a sports
fan. What she most liked was cooking up apps, and Liv and I were more
than happy to eat her tasty concoctions while binge-watching
Game
of Thrones
. Jillian declared the series too violent for
her tastes, but I still caught her craning her neck to watch the
naughty bits. Liv celebrated the death of every main character. And
me? It kept my mind off of Ash Black, and that was saying something.

After the Super Bowl, I
didn’t hear a word about The Blacklist. I certainly wasn’t doing
internet searches, but I was 24. I had friends. I heard about shows,
bands passing through. Nothing.

It was almost eerie how
everything returned to normal. It was like those three and a half
weeks with Ash had never happened. Everything returned to exactly the
way it had been.

Until March. I was in
our tiny kitchenette when I heard the song for the first time. In
Ash’s unmistakable deep, growling voice, the haunting melody I knew
so well gave me chills. It was the song he and I had played together
so many times, first in Santa Clara, then in Paris, then in his
mountain cabin, each time morphing it, growing it into what it was
now.