“Aly…” She stopped me with a shake of her head. She moved too quickly, her reaction to my upheld hands, defensive, but still I tried. “I didn’t know…”
“But that doesn’t matter, don’t you see? It doesn’t matter whether you knew or not, because you’re still stuck in the past. It’s where you want to be.” Aly’s hands shook violently but her tears had dried on her face, letting me know she was either absolutely terrified or in such a rage that she didn’t care about hurting me. “It’s safe for you there. All that damn guilt, it keeps you from facing everything around you. You don’t want to live anymore, Ransom, because life is too damn hard. So you stay in the past when things were easy, where you didn’t have to move past anything, where you could just wallow in your own world. It’s where you are now and I will not stay there with you.” There was an echo on the floor when she walked away, her anger, her frustration thicker than the heat coming from the vent. And I let her walk away from me, knowing that she was right. Why fight for someone who’d given up on you?
“As much as I want to save you like you did…like you’ve done for me, I can’t. I can’t be with you in this limbo of grief and I cannot compete with the specter of Emily. So I’m not even going to try.”
I couldn’t expect her to, right? How could I expect anyone to fight for me, to challenge me to live when I’d given all that up? Over a year, she’d said. She’d watched me from the beginning then. She’d waited all that time for me to leave behind the heartache I’d created.
And now, son of a bitch, she wouldn’t wait anymore.
But then something else hit me. What had she said? As much as I’d saved her? When did I ever…. Oh God. There was a memory, of something that happened before the accident, before I lost Emily… Dammit, it was so hard to recall anything that happened before the accident…. But there was something…
Then it suddenly flooded into my head—a memory of Aly and.... Yes. That asshole in the parking lot, her in the loft. She was the girl who needed a bed. I should have known that. I should have remembered. Why hadn’t I remembered?
I jerked and glanced over my shoulder when I heard the back door slam shut. She’d left me alone, wallowing once again. I’d come there for answers and had gotten what I wanted. But I damn well didn’t like it. I’d looked for an apology and got the bird and, much as I hated to admit it, it was a gesture I deserved.
Son of a bitch, she’d given up on me and I let her. I fucking let her.
Overhead I heard her in her apartment, slamming doors, her heels snapping against the hardwood and then, the rumbled of the pipes as she turned the water on.
Leave her alone. She doesn’t want you. No one will want you again.
I closed my eyes, breathing through my nose to fill my lungs to capacity. She may have walked away, she may have told herself that she wouldn’t try anymore, but I knew she hadn’t given up a damn thing. Not this girl. Those tears told a story. They were real. They were honest, and for the first time in over a year, I was working on a plan.
I had a fight I wanted to win.
She doesn’t want…
“Yeah. But I do.”
19
What’s the difference between past and present? It isn’t just time. It isn’t that memory haunts, that it can cripple. It’s the way we remember that marks the change. I saw him clearly that first day because he was impossible to miss. And every day since that first one in my tiny apartment with Ransom tugging a bulky mattress onto my floor, I hadn’t stopped seeing him just as he was.
Maybe that was the problem. I saw too much and nothing at all.
I’d seen his stoic, beaten expressions and let them soften my heart. I’d heard the harsh clip of his tone when he and Tristian argued and convinced myself that he was defensive because he was scared. Because he was alone.
I couldn’t do that anymore. At least, that’s what I told myself. It was a small mantra to get myself used to the idea of not letting Ransom consume my thoughts. I repeated it in the shower with my hair stuck to my neck and the soap bubbling around my feet. I don’t care, I said over and over until the syllables sounded like the insistent thump of a drum, a melody that I heard as an anthem, one that would stick in my head. Until I was sure that I could manage really, truly not caring about him at all. I practiced it as I toweled off, patting over my skin with my threadbare towels, wrapping the largest one around my body.
“I don’t care,” I mumbled as I stepped out of my tiny bathroom and came to a quick stop.
Turns out I did, in fact, care that Ransom was leaning against the kitchen counter, legs extended, arms crossed. I cared that he stared at me hard, that his eyes took on a look I’d only caught glimpses of when he’d watch over me, likely thinking I didn’t notice. There was something in that look that was more than lust, something I couldn’t clearly define but knew would affect me if I thought on it for too long.
He didn’t move and I couldn’t speak and we stared at each other. Ransom’s blatant perusal of my body, the slick glide of his eyes moving over my wet skin, made me lightheaded, feeling like I was on display but finding it impossible to be upset by it.
Finally, when those black, burning eyes of his settled on my breasts and the single bead of water that meandered in the cleft between them before disappearing behind the wrap of my tight towel, I couldn’t take the silence.
“Me zanmi, you grosoulye bata, what the hell are you…”
“Did you know,” he started, like this was completely normal, like it wasn’t highly inappropriate that I was nearly naked and he was in my apartment uninvited, “that the storage room next door has an old lock?” I shook my head, a little scared to move, more than a little annoyed with myself that I wanted to rip away the towel and give him exactly what his look told me he wanted. “That lock is easy to trip if you know how to do it.” Ransom glanced once at the small access door inside my laundry room. “Tristian used to bring Becca Asbury here before you moved in.”
In my mind, I saw Ransom squeezing his impossibly large body through that access panel door and pushing through the small space that was my laundry room. Why was he going to so much trouble? One glance back at his eyes still focused on my breasts gave me one possibility, but I didn’t put too much faith in that. That was just blatant lust.
“Why didn’t you knock?”
He finally moved his eyes away from my chest, shifting his focus to my face. I found that more unsettling than a slow rake of his gaze over my body.
“I didn’t think you’d let me in.”
When he pushed away from the counter, I backed up, walking into the wall behind me before I managed to stop him. “That’s far enough.”
“Aly…”
“Non. Stop right there.” A small voice in my head, one that sounded a lot like my grann screamed at me for keeping him at a distance. But my body was too worked up just by him being in my small apartment again. Besides, I was still annoyed, still bothered by how everything had ended before it really began. “Turn around,” I told him, flicking my forefinger in a circle to demonstrate. The apartment was too small for more than one person. It was definitely too small for Ransom and me, especially when I was nearly naked.