Chapter Six
Vince
“Vince, wait.”
I did not expect her to follow me, but here she comes outside in the freezing cold to follow me to my apartment. I steal a glance back, expecting anger or at the very least irritation, but she still looks concerned.
Damn, does this girl have a lick of sense?
I’m a mess; stay away.
Apparently she doesn’t, because she barges right into my apartment like always—but this time after I ransacked hers while hurling nonsensical accusations at her.
I try to ignore her, but she grabs my arm like she can stop me. I’m unimpressed by her efforts, but I guess I shouldn’t be since it works—I stop walking and turn back to face her.
“Carly, just go home.”
“No,” she says, her chin jutting out in a show of stubbornness. “You’re upset.”
“I just tore all your shit apart—who cares if I’m upset?”
“Not all of my shit. A small portion of my shit,” she says, minimizing the damage. “And I don’t care about that. It’s just stuff. You didn’t light it on fire; you just gave me a few extra household chores.”
“Why are you so nice to me?” I demand, scowling at her again.
“I’m trying to be your friend,” she states, still holding onto my arm. “You don’t exactly make it easy.”
“So why do you keep trying? Just stop. No one’s asking you to keep trying.”
She releases my arm and her hands come to rest on her hips. I can tell in her face I’m starting to aggravate her—and it’s about damned time.
Instead of leaving like a reasonable person, she tells me, “Sometimes people who need love the most show it in the most unloving ways. You’ve been needlessly mean to me since I moved in here, so I’m pretty sure you’re starving for something. You’re not likely to find it if you push away every single person who tries to get close. I’ve done nothing to offend you, so I assume you push away anyone who tries to get close. Also, you know, a lot of women get turned off by shit like that back there, and I’m not even sure your face or body can make up the difference,” she adds, pointing toward her apartment.
“You should’ve been turned off long before that,” I mutter.
Shrugging like it’s insignificant, she says, “You can keep trying if it makes you feel safer, but I’m going to keep bugging you. You’re not going to scare me off. I’m going to keep trying to be your friend. I don’t care if you’re one of those Morellis or you’re not. As long as I feel like you need me, I’m going to keep showing up on your doorstep.”
“Don’t say shit like that if you’re not going to back it up.”
Her gaze sharpens briefly. I feel like I’m bleeding a little, just having said that. She finally shakes her head, moving in closer. Now I’m the one who should run for my life, but now she’s the one backing me up against the wall. “I won’t,” she says, simply.
I have no idea what we’re doing here, but it’s hell on my nerves. Her hands tentatively come to rest on my sides and she moves in, her body brushing mine. Then she wraps her arms around me more tightly, rests her head against my chest, and hugs me.
It’s innocent as can be, but it makes my heart rate kick up a few speeds regardless.
I don’t hug her back, but she holds onto me for a full minute anyway. When she pulls back, her blue eyes are clear, maybe a touch optimistic. “Now, we didn’t even get to my favorite red kryptonite Clark episode. Why don’t you come back over so I can convince you this is a good show?”
“You’re something else, aren’t you?”
Smiling, she lets her hand drift down to catch mine. I can’t believe she has the balls to hold my hand after all this, but she grabs it like she has a right to and hauls me back out the door.
I let her. I pull the door shut behind me, and though I’m still confused as hell as to why she even wants me to, I follow the irrational neighbor girl back to her apartment.
---
I stare at the empty notebook lying open on my kitchen table, each empty line taunting me. What I want to be doing, what I need to be doing, is filling it with plans. Jotting down ideas, filing away information.
Instead, I’m making a grocery list.
Carly comes up behind me, bracing her hands on the back of my chair and leaning over my shoulder to peer at it. “Did you forget the recipe? We can just use mine. It’s really yummy.”
“I didn’t forget the recipe,” I mutter.
She straightens. Her hands come to rest on my shoulders, and before I fully realize why, she starts kneading the muscles there. “Why are you so surly today?”
“You’re thoroughly distracting.”
I hurl it like an insult, but she takes it like a compliment. “Thank you,” she chirps, her palms working my back.
My eyes drift shut and my head lolls to the side. “Damn, you’re pretty good at that.”
Now as she works my tense muscles, she leans down, letting me get a whiff of that goddamn shampoo as her long, blonde hair falls over her shoulder. She leans in near my ear and murmurs suggestively, “I’m good at a lot of things.”
It goes straight to my cock.
Which was her intention, obviously. I don’t know why she plays with me like this, but she hasn’t tried to escalate anything, so at this point I let her. It’s not the worst thing in the world to be flirted with on a regular basis by an attractive, affectionate woman who expects no commitment and insists she’s only trying to be your friend.
I have some doubts about that, but I’m ignoring them as long as I’m able.
As she does, Carly changes the subject before I can get skittish. “Every year around Christmas, Laurel and I make batches of Nana’s homemade spaghetti sauce. We have a running tradition of making chicken parmesan for our Christmas Eve dinner, so we make it nice and fresh.” She pauses the back rub to kiss the tips of her fingers like she’s an old Italian man. “Bravissimo.”
I can’t help smiling. Her hands go back to my shoulders and she continues to work my muscles. “What are your parents like?” I ask.
She’s mostly pretty open, but she hesitates there. “I don’t really have parents. I mean, I have a mother somewhere out there, but besides a brief guest appearance when I was in college, I haven’t seen her since I was seven and I don’t care to, My sperm-donor bailed when my mom told him she was pregnant. Laurel and I grew up living with our grandparents. That might be why I like Gus so much—he’s the age group I’m accustomed to,” she says lightly.
“Huh. I guess we have that in common. I didn’t grow up with grandparents—my grandfather was psychotic and his wives died before I was born—but I didn’t grow up with my parents, either. I stayed with my cousin when my father moved away.”
“Older cousin?”
“Yeah. Not old enough or interested enough to be a parental figure, but I did okay without one. None of us really had parents; we just grew up like siblings and figured it out on our own.”
“And you’re not close to any of them?” she asks, understandably surprised.
“I was. I left behind a sister I was close to and a cousin, Francesca. Unfortunately the cousin I don’t get along with is the one who makes the rules, and his rule is I’m not allowed back in Chicago.”
Her hands come to an abrupt stop. I think I surprised her. “The whole city? He exiled you from the whole city?”
“He’ll exile me from more than that if he finds me,” I say, more lightly than it warrants.
“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking,” she adds, quickly. Probably because I lost my shit on her last time this came up. “Why does he hate you so much?”
“I hate him just as much,” I assure her. She goes back to rubbing my back, but I hesitate to answer her question. I can’t tell her what I actually did. “He stole my girlfriend. That sounds… it’s more fucked up than that. It’s too much to explain. He manipulated her and she fell right into his trap. Then she somehow developed feelings for him. She started sleeping with the asshole when we were still together, then she tried to leave me for him.”
“Tried to leave you?”
“I wasn’t amenable to the suggestion.” I feel a little tension come back into my shoulders just saying that much, but I figure I’ll throw out something small and see if it scares her off. I know she made a whole speech about how she wasn’t going anywhere, but she did not know what she was signing up for.
The sure movements of her hands across my back don’t falter this time. If she thinks that sounds a little psycho, she doesn’t say so. “Gotcha. So, you tried to keep her. I take it he was not amenable to that suggestion?”
“Correct,” I verify. “That was the first time he exiled me from Chicago.”
“There are multiple exiles?”
I nod my head as her hands continue to work their magic. “Sort of. The first exile never actually ended, I just disregarded it. I stayed away for a long time, but then I went back.”
“For what?”
“For Mia.”
“Ah.” I can’t quite decipher her tone; I wish I could see her face. With lightness that sounds a little forced, she says, “So, this is the Mia whose shampoo I use.”
“Yeah. She was my only real serious relationship. We lived together for a while. Our relationship was so bumpy and fucked up, I wasn’t real eager to get into another mess like that once I got away. Then I guess I was, but I realized other girls weren’t like Mia and it became a whole different problem.”
“What was so special about her?” Carly asks.
“It’s hard to explain.” I already feel like I shared more than I should have, but her asking about Mia makes me clam right up. I don’t know why, but I don’t want to think about Mia right now. I don’t want to invite even her memory into my relationship with Carly.
Relationship is the wrong word. I promptly ruffle at that thought—relationship isn’t what I meant. We’re friends, that’s all. Not even friends, just friendly. Neighborly. We’re neighborly.
As if to call bullshit on thoughts she can’t hear, Carly dips down to whisper in my ear, “Guess what?”
Her warm breath and her playful voice in my ear combined with her hands still working my shoulders turn me into a ball of arousal. “Hm?” I murmur, since it’s about all I can get out.
“I’m not an idiot. I can grasp the complicated.”
“Why do you want to know about her?”
Her hands stop and she wraps her arms around my neck, leaning her head on my shoulder. “You’re still hung up on her,” she states. “I want to know what makes this chick so goddamn special that after years and two exiles from your own home, you still get riled by the scent of her shampoo.”
I scowl at her, unclasping her arms from around my neck and leaning forward to get her off me. “I don’t get riled by the scent of her shampoo.”
“I call bullshit,” Carly states, taking a seat in the chair next to me. “You’ve never wanted to fuck me as badly as you did that night.”
My eyes widen. “You were practically naked. You weren’t wearing panties, and—” I cut myself off, shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter. I told you, I don’t want a relationship. It has nothing to do with Mia. I’m not hung up on her.”
“All right,” she says, too easily. I can see she doesn’t buy it, but she doesn’t want to push. “So, how did exile number two happen?”
Five minutes ago I didn’t want to tell her because I didn’t want to scare her off, but right now I feel like doing just that. “I kidnapped her. Dragged her halfway across the country and hid her from him.” Even though I tell myself I want to scare her off, I stop short of admitting anything more.
That should be enough, but since Carly apparently studied at the Mia Mitchell School of Common Sense, my admission that I kidnapped the last girl I loved doesn’t send her running for the door. Her gaze drops to the table, but she doesn’t retreat.
“Sounds intense,” she says, after a moment. “You must have been in a lot of pain to do something so drastic.”
That’s about the last fucking thing I expect her to say.
“Are you fucking cracked?”
Her eyebrows shoot up in response to that. “Excuse me?”
“I just told you I fucking kidnapped someone.”
“I’ve done stupid things, too. Not that, but…” She shakes her head, watching as I push back my chair and abruptly stand. “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing? What is this? No sane person reacts to shit the way you do. I’m a dick to you, you bring me fucking turkey baskets. I break into your house, you parade around the living room half-naked and talk about break-in fantasies. I tell you I kidnapped a person, you sit at my kitchen table and say, ‘oh, well, you must have been in a lot of pain to do that.’ What is that? That’s not fucking normal.”
Shrugging as if at a loss for how to respond to any of this, she says, “I don’t know, Vince. I’m just trying to understand you. There’s no manual that can adequately prepare me for you. I’m doing my best, all right? What would you have me say? Bad Vince? Should I slap you on the wrist? I mean, I could leave, but you can easily get into my apartment, so that’s not very fucking effective anyway, is it? You tell me what the right response is, if I’m getting it so wrong.”
“You should…” I jut a hand in the air, but I’m at a loss, too. “I don’t know, be fucking horrified. I’ve done horrible shit. Just terrible, awful, no good shit. I’m not a good person, Carly. You should leave. You should extract yourself from whatever the fuck this is and run, that’s what you should do. I just told you I kidnapped the last woman who didn’t want me, for fuck’s sake. What if you change your mind?”
“Well…” She seems to consider for a moment, then she shrugs. It’s so fucking pretty. It’s weird to think it’s pretty, a shrug, but she’s wearing this pink sweater that bares both of her shoulders, her blonde hair is pulled half back, so casually cute… it’s fucking pretty. She’s fucking pretty. It makes my skin crawl how pretty she is.
Then she finishes her thought and makes it worse. Her plump lips curve up a little mischievously, and she says, “Then I guess I’ll just have to adjust my fantasies. Captive fantasies instead of break-in fantasies. Still hot.”
I can only stare at this crazy fucking girl.
She won the conversation with that one sentence, so she pushes back from the table and stands. “You didn’t finish the grocery list. I’m just going to make Nana’s recipe. We can make your mom’s next time. We’ll have a sauce cook-off.”
I still haven’t moved, but she does, moving in close, brushing against me. I don’t understand how she’s still light and playful after what I just said. I half-expect her to be playing me right now, just wanting to safely extract herself. That’s probably the smartest thing she could do. Play nice and leave—then keep driving until she’s back in Chicago, since now she knows that’s the one place I can’t go.
I’m half hoping she does that, but the playful glint in her blue eyes as she runs a hand down my chest before brushing past me to grab her purse gives birth to a million doubts.
She can’t still like me after what I just told her, right? She can’t.
“I’ve done worse than that,” I state. My back is still to her, but I can hear her steps halt.
“Okay?” she says, tentatively.
“I’m just saying.”
We stand there for a moment, back-to-back. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks.
Finally she breaks the silence, saying simply, “So have I.”
I await further explanation or questions, but they don’t come. The next thing I hear is the sound of my front door opening and closing as Carly leaves for the grocery store.