25
When Stella reached for her glasses the next morning, her fingers encountered a piece of paper. Frowning, she picked it up and held it close to her bleary, tear-swollen eyes. A check. Her check. For fifty thousand dollars.
She sat up in bed and ran trembling fingers over the surface of the check. What did this mean? Why hadn’t he kept it and cashed it?
His words from last night whispered through her head.
I accepted your proposal because I wanted to help you.
Not because he wanted to be with her, not even for money, but because he pitied her.
Because she was autistic.
Awful emotion spread through her like poison, and she covered her mouth to muffle the sounds coming from her throat. She’d thought she was rubbing off on him. She’d thought she was special. She’d thought he could love her back. But every time they’d been together, it had been nothing but charity. All those kisses, all those moments, all charity. And now that he’d done his good deed, he was moving on.
The pain crushed and tore, destroying her from the inside. She wasn’t a good deed. She was a person. If she had known how he felt, she never would have issued that proposal. She was not a charity case. Her money was just as good as anyone else’s. Why couldn’t he have just taken it?
Swiping at her face angrily, she told herself she was tougher than this. She wasn’t going to fall apart over a man who didn’t want her.
She made the bed with angry jerks of her arms and stomped into the bathroom to floss her teeth. She worked the mint string so forcefully her gums bled. When she closed her hand around her toothbrush, something reckless made her let go and hop in the shower instead. Very deliberately, she reversed her shower routine, scrubbing herself from bottom to top. She wasn’t a robot or a disabled autistic girl. She was herself. She was enough. She could be anything. She could make herself into anything. She could prove everyone wrong.
By the time she left the shower, she was breathing heavily. She was going to do this and do it well. When she was done, she’d be new and fresh and fantastic. She deserved to be those things.
She dried herself off with brisk rubs of her towel, purposefully walked past her waiting toothbrush, and went into the closet, where she pulled on the black dress Michael loved. She didn’t bother with a cardigan. Let people look.
Gazing in the mirror over her sink as she finally allowed herself to brush her teeth, she found her eyes ablaze with determination. Her hair was a wild mess, but she didn’t plan to tame it. She wasn’t in a tame mood. Other women let their moods dictate their actions, change their routines. Stella was going to be the same.
After she choked down a slice of dry toast, she stared at her empty house. What now? Her body raged with the need for action, for change, for violence. There would be no working today. People didn’t work on Sundays. Once the shops opened, they went out. They ran errands. They did things together.
There was no more together for Stella.
She sat down before her glossy black Steinway and lifted the fallboard away from the keys. She automatically played the opening chords for “Clair de Lune,” but the song was too slow and too romantic, and it reminded her of Michael. She broke from the melody after the first crescendo. Instead of letting the music ebb back into gentleness, she took it higher, poured melodic anguish into it. Her throat swelled, and her heart bled into the notes.
That wasn’t enough. She gave the piano her rage. She pounded chords onto the keys in quick succession like storm waves crashing on cliffs. Wave after wave after angry wave. Still not enough.
She did something she’d never done before. Stella had always been gentle. She spoke softly. She didn’t hurt anyone intentionally. She loved music and order and patterns.
She slammed her hands on the keyboard, producing clashing off-key jumbles of notes. A mess of chaos. Loud, loud, louder. Over and over again until her palms hurt, and her teeth were gnashing, and her body shook from sound overload. At that point, she hit harder, warring against the noise and herself.
A snapping deep within the piano traveled up her fingers and into her arms. Only then did she let her shaking hands fall away from the keys. She lifted her foot from the sustain pedal, dampening the residual ringing of the strings. The pained stuttering of her heart filled her ears.
The piano needed to be tuned.
She’d worry about it later. The stores were opening soon, and she wanted to go shopping. For perfume.
The shop was closed on Sundays, but something made Michael go there anyway. He unlocked the front door and stepped inside. After passing by the empty fitting room, he entered the work area in back. There, he scanned the mechanized rack where they hung the dry-cleaned clothes, the walls of multicolored thread, and the green commercial sewing machines.
This place was his mom’s livelihood, and she was incredibly proud to be the owner of such a thriving business. Of all their extended family, she was one of the most successful. Well, she would have been, if not for his dad.
To Michael, this place was a prison. He didn’t want to do tedious fittings and alterations and dry cleaning. He wanted to create something from scratch.
He went to the bureau at the back of the room and pulled out the small drawer he reserved for his sketchpads. The book on top felt cold and familiar under the pads of his fingers, the paper soft. He sat at one of the worktables and opened the book to a blank page, set his pencil tip down.
Usually, he started the clothing design first, the collar and shoulders, sometimes the waist if that was the focal point of everything. The face was usually just an impression, a profile, the curve of a jaw. Hands and legs were quick pencil strokes, just vague ideas. Today, he started with the face. It was the only thing in his mind.
Those eyes and the heavy fringe of lashes. Arching eyebrows. That nose. Those kissable lips. When he finished, Stella stared at him from the page. He’d captured the essence of her perfectly. His hands knew her every line.
Her likeness was enough to make the blood rush to his throat, and he dug his phone out of his pocket and checked it for messages or missed calls.
Nothing. Just like the other ninety-nine times he’d checked today.
She’d said she would stalk and call, and he was messed up enough to want it. If obsession was all he could have from her, he wanted the works. The more drama, the better. Maybe they’d have no choice but to get back together.
The screen on his phone blacked out, and cold reality sank into him. Her obsession hadn’t been strong enough to stand up in the face of his family’s criminal past, not on top of all his other drawbacks. It really had been just practice and sex.
His phone buzzed with an alert from the agency app. Someone had booked him for this Friday. For a second, he thought it might be Stella, and bright happiness flooded his being. Even knowing everything about him, she still wanted him. He clicked through the screens on his phone as fast as he could, but when the app loaded, he saw it was someone new. His stomach dropped.
There’d been a time when he’d liked the variety his escorting assignments provided. Now, his body crawled with revulsion at the mere idea of touching someone else, let alone kissing or having sex with them. He felt . . . permanently pair-bonded, like a goddamned swan. Only the swan he’d chosen hadn’t pair-bonded back with him.
Why would she have?
Look at all the people he’d fucked. What had he accomplished with his life? What had he really done? A lot of dry cleaning, that was what. He was nothing. Good for a test drive, but not to take home. He should be proud he’d helped bolster Stella’s confidence and proven he was better than his dad, but he was a selfish ass, and all he wanted was more of her.
In the foreseeable future, she’d be pleasuring another man—that shit Philip—in the precise way that drove Michael out of his mind. Her hands would touch another body, her mouth would—
He crammed his palms into his eyes and breathed away his gut-churning nausea. If she was going to fuck other people, he would, too. He’d go right now. He started to stand, but paused. It was Sunday morning. Not trolling time.
And he physically could not.
Touching another woman right now would make him vomit. Or worse, cry like a baby.
He was having a hard enough time keeping it together as it was. His eyes burned, and his throat ached, and he hurt everywhere. No women. Not unless they had soft brown eyes and a shy smile and loved economics and made the sweetest breathless sounds when they kissed him and—
Fuck. Enough already. He clawed his fingers through his hair and tried to squeeze thoughts of Stella out of his head.
Toughen up and soldier on.
But he was tired of being tough and soldiering on. He’d been doing it for three endless years. He was trapped here, trapped in his life, trapped in never-ending debt. Trapped by love.
That was his problem. He always loved too much. If he could just tear his heart out and stop feeling, he would be free. A frenzied kind of madness gripped him as he stared down at his sketchpad.
Whispering a silent apology in his head, he ripped out the picture of Stella and tore it straight down the middle before shredding it. The pieces floated to the ground like leaves from a dying tree. Then he flipped to the front of the book. Sun-saturated mornings with Stella had inspired the white and yellow dress on the page. It was his absolute favorite. He tore it out and destroyed it. And the next design. And the next. All of them. Then he went to the bureau in back, grabbed all his sketchpads, and threw them in the trash. After that, he opened the large bottom drawer where he kept the projects he’d been working on in secret. Gritting his teeth, he ripped the fabric apart, seam by seam, garment by garment, dream by dream.
When he’d finally destroyed everything that could be destroyed, he stared at the carnage on the floor and spilling from the garbage.
It had worked. He felt nothing now.
He walked to the sewing machine he usually used, sat down, and considered the pile of unfinished clothes next to it. A few pairs of pants needed hemming, dresses needed to be taken in, and a jacket had a torn inner lining. They were all clothes someone else had designed. Someone else’s vision.
Might as well finish all of it. Maybe he could give his mom more time off this week.
He started to sew.