Authors: Corri Lee
"What?"
Chris snorted grumpily next to me and scanned the room for a glimpse of Blaze. There he was
, stood at the bar draped in a loose white cotton shirt and pinstripe trousers. "You should really drop your standards, Emmeline. Guys like that won't care about your quest to chase impossibly high standards and ideals because they think they have it all. He'll be expecting exceptional and preferential treatment because he's a pretty-boy with a loaded wallet and you'll end up in another one of your funks."
"I'm already in one of my funks, Chris. She's been following me around all day." My pulse started to race when Blaze turned at the bar with a tray of six drinks and began to weave between the tables towards us. "And if you recall, I do drop my standards. Frequently. Don't tell me our nights together haven't been memorable because I'll call you a liar."
I stood when Blaze reached our table, and met his unusually cool gaze with one of my own, rife with confusion. Why had he come back? He looked fantastic, the shirt fitting the contours of the body I had spent an afternoon writhing against. God, I wanted him, and not just physically. I'd been so distracted by his disappearance that I'd been oblivious to the dull ache that had manifested in the depths of my chest in his absence
— the acute need he'd left behind. It was a craving unlike any I'd ever known, and my point of relief stood only a foot away, looking stunning and smelling like expensive cologne and hot sex. He hadn't showered.
"You look surprised to see me," he murmured so only I could hear.
"You left."
"I couldn't stay
— couldn't fall asleep next to you and wake up with you in my arms. That would have been bad for both of us. But I couldn't go either." His voice cracked with sincerity, and I knew that he was one man who would be nothing but honest with me. I treasured that aspect of him. "No matter how many times I leave, I'll always be back. Remember that. So, is there room for one more in your coven?"
Nervously, I turned back to my four friends for their verdict. Esme and Jonathan were almost dancing in their places while Chris and Daniel shared aggrieved expressions, anticipating the inevitable disaster that would befall me. Daniel saw it, the bigger picture in the way our bodies leaned together and the fearful glint in our eyes. Chris saw nothing but an impending repeat performance of the keening and sobbing Hunter left behind when he visited, provided by a new source. They would always be standing on the sidelines waiting to be tagged into the ring.
And as Blaze took the seat next to me, I knew that when that firestorm of a disaster hit, we'd be thrown into a full blown mutiny. That table was too crowded now. 'Us' and them packed into a booth that wasn't nearly big enough for all our complications.
THE WARM, GENTLE buzz of voices and aura of serenity in
Esme's
that night was deceptive. Heartbroken lovers laughed with friends like they weren't in pain. Addicts tended to their vices like they wouldn't shake and sweat for them tomorrow. Enemies drank together as though the bad blood could be sweetened with anecdotes and recalled memories from times past. The sick and depressed faked smiles and lied about just how ill they were.
And, as normal, all of their flaws centred into me, the culmination of all that misery sat next to a man who settled into my surroundings like he'd donned camouflage and infiltrated us from the inside out. I suppose he had.
Blaze and Esme gossiped about a cartoon they'd both worked on as voice actors, Daniel and Jonathan quietly discussed dinner arrangements, while Chris and I sat, turgidly silent, watching them all but barely aware of what was happening. His tense quiet boiled down to little more than feeling like he had been, once again, overlooked as anything more than a source of dry wit and like minded humour. This was his usual pattern— pinning hopes on the unlikely and brooding when a miracle didn't happen. He didn't understand that even though he wasn't my first choice of bedfellow, he was still a very huge and vital part of my life. I might have lowered my defences one or twice, but I never gave off any impression that I wanted him for anything more than studding services. Manipulative, maybe, but he knew where he stood. That didn't stop him hoping.
"I don't think the big guy likes me." Blaze's hand slid discreetly over to my thigh and squeezed as soon as Chris left to collect his round from the bar. The action was so instantaneous that it seemed like he'd been holding off on purpose until it was 'safe' to touch me. Negative vibes had been flying around so viciously that it should have been obvious that Blaze might have felt like I'd been marked as forbidden territory.
Jonathan laughed quietly and shook his head into an impressively large glass of brandy.
"Don't take it personally. He shows that kind of contempt for anyone who thwarts his nightly attempts to pillage the Deep White South. Tonight it's you, tomorrow it'll be someone else, then someone else and someone else until Emmy has a dry night and he begs for his turn against Esme with the flip of a coin." Hearing that out loud by someone else was uncomfortable— my somewhat promiscuous behaviour— worse knowing that Blaze heard it too. If he was any other man, he'd be disposable. As it was, I wanted to keep him around but I wasn't in the mindset to change any habits for him. He was less in my life on a guest pass and more of a VIP with a membership card like only four other people, but that didn't mean that the menu, entertainment and venue would change for him. There would be no gaps and breaks in my normal life when he wasn't around, and if he expected there to be, we were already at a painful impasse.
"And what if my day trip becomes an extended holiday?"
"Emmy would never... You
have
seen the scars right? Doesn't it bother you?"
"Of course it bothers me. What kind of person would I be if I was cool with someone I cared about being in such a bad place that they felt like hurting themselves was the only option? But if you're asking me if I can accept it, of course I can. As long I'm not the person that's causing that kind of self-loathing."
He turned his gaze onto me, that same scorchingly intense gaze he'd hit me with before he left my flat. All of the blood in my body rushed to my face and the deepest depths of my stomach knotted and contorted, much like the way I felt in a crowded room— claustrophobic, out of breath and horribly self-conscious. The smallest of smiles kissed the corners of his mouth when I mouthed an apology and sagged back warily. What was I doing so wrong? How could he say he cared for me knowing that I was, for want of a better word, a slut?
He excused himself
and slunk over to the bar, turning every woman's and some men's heads as he travelled the distance. That kind of spellbinding effect seemed to be universal and for that I was grateful. I had no desire to become
that
girl who mooned after a man because she'd bumped uglies with him. It wasn't my style.
Esme leaned over to grip my chin and pull my eyes away from what looked like a dangerously serious conversation between Chris and Blaze.
"Why did you apologise just then?"
"I just felt like I had to. Didn't you see the incomparable fury in his eyes? Jesus, not even Hunter looked at me like that when they sectioned me."
"Incomparable fu— ... My god, you can't see the forest for the trees, can you? Open your eyes, Emmy. That man up there is the forest." I shook my head at her blankly and received a raised eyebrow in return. "Get used to his face because you're going to be seeing a lot of it."
WHAT concerned me is why that statement didn't concern me. When I pictured night after night of drinking in Blaze's company, taking him home and falling asleep next to him, I didn't feel sieged like I should have. I felt... indifferent. It already seemed like normality when this was really only the first night of what was forecast to be many. He was too close but I couldn't bring myself to hate it. A crazy little piece of me thought that he might just be the person who broke the curse of unrequited affection Hunter had hung over my head.
"Cupcake?"
"Hmm?" The sudden blast of giggles around me alerted me to the stupid mistake I'd just made. "Oh! Oh god..."
"Might catch on." Blaze slid onto the seat next to me, one leg up on the velvet between us, and held out a dainty cupcake iced in pale pink butter-cream and a white sugarcraft rose. "But I was asking if you wanted this. They're good, maybe the second best thing I've tasted today." He bit down on his lip and flared his eyes at me, sending a delicious shudder right through my veins. I knew he was thinking about what else he'd tasted that day and just the memory made me want to claw at the cushioned seat next to me.
"I'll lick butter-cream off anything, you know." I narrowed my eyes at him, trying not to break the seductive ruse with a squeak. "Call it an indulgence."
"Miss White, you're incorrigible."
"Surely you mean 'encourage-able'? And I'm almost certain that if you save that cupcake for later when I'm far drunker, you'll have a few choice words of encouragement for my greedy mouth."
"Cheque, please." His eyes twinkled brightly in the soft light of the candles I'd learned to keep a safe difference from when he was around. The barely containable urge to reach up and stroke his face made my fingers twitch with unfamiliar adoration. After only eight days, he'd come to mean so much to me and left a heavy footprint on my life. If I never saw him again after that night, I'd never be able to forget him and his smile, or his laugh, or his frown. I suspected that his memory would haunt me just as Hunter did, and that alone told me enough to know that I'd come out of this hurting. It might not be today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point I'd have to face the repercussions of trying to touch an untouchable man.
I glanced sideways at the table and caught my miserable, distorted reflection in my glass. Daniel pushed it out of my line of vision when he realised how furiously I was staring at it.
"She's not here, Emmy. Not anymore."
"Who?" My eyes looked up to meet Blaze's though my head didn't move. Yet again, I prayed for a distraction.
"Just a small ghost from the past. An unwelcome face who tells her lies."
"Lies?"
"Truths." I closed my eyes and resigned myself to confessing to the hallucination. Better it came from me. If he stuck around, he'd find out sooner or later. Sooner meant the inevitable hole he left behind might be smaller. "The shadow of my teenage self telling me that I'll always be
—"
"A
little bit ugly, a little bit frumpy, a little bit socially stunted, a little bit fat and a whole lot boring." Esme, Daniel and Jonathan recited the prose in unison, having heard it themselves a thousand times before.
"Lies then." Like I hadn't heard that platitude often enough for it to be meaningless. Blaze ignored my muttered 'whatever' and squared himself to the table, effectively turning away from me. That was it then... He understood what had been chasing me all afternoon and it was just too neurotic for him. "I happen to find you quite fascinating and easy on the eyes, and I think we... hammered out the fat, frumpy thing this afternoon." Did he really think it was that easy?
"You still think I'm socially stunted though?"
"Yes." He tutted mockingly. "Not so much as a thank you."
"For the lunch I didn't want, the clothes I didn't ask for, or the entirely too public 'hammering'?" I saw his eyebrow raise and cheeks lift into a sly smirk. "I'll thank you with butter-cream."
"Phew!" Jonathan fanned himself theatrically with a cork drinks coaster and swooned against Daniel's shoulder. "It's like watching my parents all over again and I heard how hot it was in their bedroom!"
"Is that what turned you towards the frilly paisley pink side?"
"It helped. What did you say to Chris anyway?" At once, we all turned our attention to the unusually empty seat next to me, then to the sullen figure slumped over a whiskey on the rocks at the bar. "It's not like him to prop up the bar. Especially when we're all spitting feathers over here."
Blaze shrugged and raised his glass to his lips, pausing to speak. "I told him that I enjoy the scenery of the Deep White South too much to stay away. That I'm planning on renting a log cabin there to concrete my intentions of visiting frequently until such a time when both a permanent place of residency becomes available and I'm in a more comfortable position to retire there." He took a small sip of his drink. "More or less."
"Well was it the more or the less?" I blurted my words out in a rush, feeling my face return to the shade of red it seemed to visit far to often around Blaze. It sounded suspiciously like he'd told the most protective of my friends that he was going to hang around until our complications stopped obstructing the way to what? A happily ever after? He'd be waiting a long time.
"Less," he laughed, ignoring the three anxious faces sat across from us, "but less is more. At least I know how you feel about the matter now. Don't worry." He dipped down to my ear so his lips brushed the lobe. It was the closest he'd been since he'd arrived to light up my dark evening and reminded me just how lost I felt around him. "I have a guarantor."