His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 5

ELENA

The car was warm.

That was the first thing I noticed — the warmth of it, pressing in from all sides after the cold of the road, and the way it made the drug surge upward all at once, like something that had been waiting for permission. I sank into the passenger seat and the door closed and the world outside went muffled and distant, reduced to the smear of trees and dark beyond the glass.

The man — the driver — didn't speak immediately. He moved around the front of the car with his head down against the wind and got in on his side, and I heard the locks engage, and then there was just the sound of the engine and the wipers cutting back and forth across the rain-streaked windshield.

I pressed my cut hand against my thigh.

The pain was duller now. Still there, but losing its edge, which was not good — I needed the edge.

I turned my head toward him.

He was looking at the road. His profile was hard and clean — strong jaw, straight nose, the kind of face that gave nothing away. His hands on the wheel were steady. Everything about him was steady, which felt, to my fractured nervous system, like the most trustworthy thing in the world.

I needed something to hold onto.

My hand moved before I decided to move it.

I reached across and touched his arm — just above the wrist, my fingers curling around the sleeve of his jacket. He went very still. I felt the stillness travel up through the fabric.

"Hey." His voice was flat. "Don't do that."

I didn't let go. The drug had disconnected the part of me that managed appearances. What was left was something more animal — frightened and reaching for the nearest solid thing.

"I'm cold," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine.

"There's heat coming through the vents." He didn't look at me. "Let go of my arm."

I released him, but the next wave hit me then — a rolling surge that pushed me sideways, and I grabbed the only thing available, which was his shoulder. My fingers found the lapel of his jacket. My forehead came to rest somewhere near his collarbone.

He went rigid.

"Hey—" Sharper now.

"Sorry," I breathed, against the fabric. "I'm sorry, I just—"

I tried to pull back and my body declined. I stayed where I was, half-leaning against him, one hand still twisted in his jacket, my breath coming in shallow pulls. Up close he smelled like rain and something clean and impersonal — a hotel soap, an empty room.

He said nothing for a long moment then he reached up and removed my hand from his lapel carefully, without roughness, and placed it back in my own lap.

"Sit back," he said, with the measured evenness of a man containing his contempt. "And stay on your side."

I watched the road unwind ahead of us and tried to hold myself together, pressing my palm to my thigh every time the drug crested, counting the pulses of pain like a metronome. The silence between us was not comfortable. It had texture — dense and cold and full of a judgment I could feel but not see.

At some point I turned my head and found him already looking at me. Just for a second. His eyes returned to the road immediately, but I'd caught it — that rapid, assessing look.

I wanted to explain myself.

What came out instead was nothing. My tongue wouldn't cooperate. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window and let the cold of the glass press against my temple, and the drug pulled me under.

**

I came back to myself in pieces.

I'm in a cabin. I was sitting on the edge of a bed. The mattress was firm beneath me. The room was dim, lit only by a lamp on the far wall.

The man stood across the room with his back to me, shrugging off his jacket.

I looked at the line of his shoulders, the deliberate angle of his gaze away from me.

I should tell him what happened. And Liam, oh my God! He needs help too! And the wine I had and the men who came out of the tree line... But the words required a coherence I didn't have, and something else — something I couldn't name — made me feel that this man had already arranged the facts to his own satisfaction, and that my version of them would land in a place it couldn't reach him.

So I said nothing.

The drug took the rest of the night.

What I remember comes in fragments, and I have learned not to try to assemble them into something whole.

Warmth. The particular disorientation of a body not entirely one's own. A voice, once, low and uninflected, saying something I couldn't hold onto. My own hands, reaching. The cedar smell of the sheets.

And at some point — the dark outside the window beginning to soften at its edges, the black grading into something almost gray — the clear and absolute knowledge that I wanted to disappear.

**

I woke to silence and light.

The lamp was off. Morning came through the curtains in thin, flat lines — pale and without warmth, the kind of light that exists before the sun has committed to the day. I lay still for a moment with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling, taking inventory.

My dress. On. Torn at the hem.

My hand. Wrapped — someone had found a cloth and bound the cut while I slept, loosely, with the impersonal efficiency of someone managing a problem.

My body. Heavy. The drug had burned itself out and left a deep, bone-level exhaustion in its place, and underneath the exhaustion something worse — a bruised, nameless feeling I kept trying not to look at directly.

The cabin was empty.

I sat up slowly. The room tilted once and settled.

No jacket on the chair. No sound from anywhere in the building. I was, as I had been on the road, entirely alone — except that this time the aloneness had different dimensions. It pressed in from the walls. It had been arranged.

I looked at the nightstand.

The glass of water, empty.

And beside it — a small, neat stack of bills.

I stared at it for a long time.

The money was folded precisely and placed squarely, the way you'd leave a tip on a restaurant table. Impersonal. Settled. The gesture of a man who had calculated what a thing was worth and paid it and considered the matter closed.

My throat tightened.

I picked up the bills — I don't know why, some instinct to remove the evidence of what they meant — and held them in my bandaged hand and looked at the wall where his jacket had been, at the empty chair, at the room's deliberate blankness.

I set the money back down. Stood up. Found my heels by the door, one on its side, and put them on with hands that didn't quite steady. In the small bathroom mirror I looked at my face for a long moment — the mascara long since gone, the careful gala makeup reduced to nothing, just my own features staring back at me. Tired. Young in a way I didn't usually feel. Frighteningly unguarded.

I washed my face. Smoothed my dress as much as it could be smoothed. Rewound my hair into something approximate.

Then I walked out of the cabin into the pale morning, leaving the money where it was.

The road was empty. The trees dripped quietly.

I pressed my bandaged palm once, hard, against my thigh.

Then I started walking.

I didn't let myself think. Thinking required a stability I didn't have yet. I just walked, one foot and then the other, following the road in the direction of the highway sound, which grew gradually louder and then resolved, after another twenty minutes, into a two-lane road with actual traffic — trucks mostly, the early morning commerce of a world that had kept moving without me.

A gas station appeared on the right side of the road. Small, fluorescent-lit, with a single pump and a convenience store attached. A teenage boy was stocking a shelf visible through the window. A car sat running by the pump, its driver inside paying.

I stopped on the forecourt.

I was aware of how I looked. The gown, which had been champagne silk twelve hours ago and was now a muddy, salt-stiffened ruin. The bare feet. The bandaged hand. The particular hollowness of a face that had been through something and hadn't yet had time to arrange itself.

The boy behind the counter looked up when I pushed the door open. His expression cycled quickly through surprise and uncertainty before settling, to his credit, into something careful and kind.

"Ma'am? Are you — do you need help?"

"I need to use your phone," I said. "Please. I just need to make one call."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he reached under the counter and set a cordless handset on the surface without a word.

I picked it up.

My hands were steadier than I expected.

I dialed Liam's number from memory, and listened to it ring, and waited.