Actual Stop (20 page)

I ran the group through the paces at lightning speed and stopped at my desk only long enough to enter the PT scores into the mainframe before dashing off to the locker room to shower and change into more appropriate attire.

Throughout my career, I’d learned to come to work prepared for anything. Running, swimming, shopping, clubbing, walking around Central Park, a last-minute foreign-dignitary visit. I had outfits for every occasion on hand that I could slip into in a New York minute. And on days like this it meant I could get ready at the office without having to stop home first, which meant I’d be able to see Allison sooner. Not that I was looking forward to that or anything. Nope. Not at all.

I stepped out of the office, trying to walk and answer an email on my BlackBerry at the same time. The guys had been at the bar enjoying the wheels-up party for a while, it seemed, and they were demanding my presence ASAP. I was in the middle of sending them a message that I was on my way and to calm down, when my personal cell phone rang, scaring the hell out of me. I’d been working so hard I hadn’t even looked at the thing for days. Everyone important who could possibly need to talk to me also had my work cell-phone number, so I hadn’t given it any thought.

I glanced at the display. Hmm. Private caller. Rory again? Probably not. She never bothered to block her number. Besides, she should’ve been napping before her night shift.

“Hello?” I said as I continued to fumble clumsily with my other phone in my left hand. I dropped it and let slip a muffled curse as it skittered across the sidewalk.

“Hey,” was the quiet reply.

My heart stopped beating and shriveled to something the size of a walnut as I recognized Lucia’s voice. I sucked in a harsh breath, and my throat burned from all the car exhaust and diesel fumes I’d just inhaled. “Hey.”

“How was the visit?”

“Fine.” I bent to retrieve my erstwhile phone.

“Everything went okay?”

“It did. Thanks for asking.”

“No problem.”

My mind was working overtime. What could she possibly want? I thought she’d been abundantly clear two nights ago that she never wanted to speak to me again, so the motive behind this encounter escaped me completely. But I didn’t appreciate the unpleasant feelings she was stirring up. My insides were wilting, and my chest felt like it was being crushed in a vise.

“So how are you?”

“I’m good. You?” This was insane. I wished she’d just get to the point. I still felt terrible that I’d hurt her, but I certainly hadn’t done it on purpose, and my guilt was now taking a backseat to annoyance. She’d called me. She obviously wanted something. But what? I had neither the time nor the inclination to listen to her yell at me some more.

“Good.” There was a long pause.

“Are you okay, Luce?”

I heard a heavy sigh. “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, oh, hell, I don’t know.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I think we should talk.”

“What’s left to say? I think you covered all the bases pretty well.”

Maybe that was mean, but she’d effectively wounded me with the insults she’d so callously slung my way. She’d injured me pretty badly, in fact, and, frankly, I wasn’t eager to open myself up to any more emotional battery. I wasn’t sure my fragile ego could handle it.

“How about ‘I made a mistake’?”

“A mistake about what?”

“About you. About us.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, so you have a past. Everyone does. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for a visual reminder of that fact, and I overreacted.” A beat. “Plus, I was pretty drunk when I came to see you, so I wasn’t exactly rational.”

I gaped at my reflection in the glass of the adjacent building. I looked about as shocked as I felt. She had to be kidding. The words “heartless” and “emotionally bankrupt” still echoed loudly in my head, leaving deep scores. I couldn’t even begin to find the words to describe the damage her accusation of me purposely trying to make people fall in love with me for my own amusement had caused. She couldn’t seriously expect me to just forget about everything she’d said the other night and go on as if nothing had happened.

“I stopped by your apartment a couple times to have this conversation face-to-face, but you weren’t home.”

“No. I’ve been busy. Working. You know, the visit.”

“Oh, I know. I wasn’t saying anything.”

“Okay.”

Another long pause. “I’m sorry, Ryan.”

“You feel what you feel. I can’t change that.” I wished she didn’t, but I couldn’t really argue with her. Feelings were feelings. Right or wrong, they just were. I didn’t have to like them, but that wouldn’t make them go away.

“I don’t though. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

My gut twisted painfully, and my hands shook a little in my nervousness. “I don’t understand.”

“All that stuff I said. I didn’t really mean it.”

“Then why’d you say it? It had to have come from somewhere.”

“Well…I was drunk, like I said. So I wasn’t thinking.”

“There must’ve been something behind it. People don’t just say stuff like that for no reason.” I desperately wanted to believe her. I longed to accept her excuse and chalk it up to alcohol-induced stupidity, but I couldn’t.

Lucia sighed. “I was hurt, and I guess I wanted you to hurt, too. When I thought about it the next day, I felt awful. I accused you of some pretty horrible things.”

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t. Not really. But I didn’t know what else to say just then. This whole conversation was confusing. I needed time to think.

“It’s not even remotely okay. I’m sorry.”

I nodded, even though we were on the phone and she couldn’t see me. I tried to wrap my mind around the exchange and get a handle on all my conflicting feelings.

“I mean, it’s not as if you went out of your way to seek her out, right?” she went on when I didn’t reply.

“No. I didn’t.”

“So she came to you. What, did she want you back or something? Because I wouldn’t blame her.”

Her halfhearted stabs at teasing or flattery went right through me without making a ripple. “No. She came here for work. We were partnered up for the visit. That’s all.”

“And you guys didn’t fool around or anything?” Her voice was oddly strained.

“No.” My answers were flying out of my mouth automatically at this point. My mind was a complete blank, and I was numb.

The silence stretched taut between us, and as I considered what she’d just asked me, something clicked in the back of my mind. Loudly. Unwilling to accept it, I replayed the words against memories of the expressions on her face the night we’d broken up, seeing the situation with new eyes.

Over the past day or so, a little voice had been telling me something hadn’t exactly been on the level about the conversation Lucia and I’d had. Now I knew why. I’d assumed the anguish I’d seen on her face had been pure. I’d thought it was because I’d hurt her by failing to live up to her expectations. It hadn’t seemed particularly rational, but I’d been unable to come up with a better explanation. I only just now realized that something else had tainted her accusations.

Guilt.

“Ryan?”

“Huh?” My head was spinning, and I was pretty sure I was about to vomit. I sat down hard onto the corner of a cement flower box. It was either that or risk my legs going out from under me.

“Okay, you’re right. I totally deserve this. After the way I treated you, I don’t blame you for wanting me to grovel a little. And you know what? I’m fine with it. I miss you terribly, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to earn your forgiveness. Just tell me how I can make it up to you, and it’s done.”

“Oh, Luce,” I whispered, unable to draw the necessary breath to speak louder. “Tell me you didn’t.” I bent over and rested my elbows on my knees, dropping my head as low as I could. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do when you felt like you were going to pass out? Or was it the crash position for a plane during an emergency landing? I couldn’t remember.

Lucia hesitated. “Tell you I didn’t what?” But the self-reproach lacing her tone confirmed what I already knew.

My heart shattered, spewing painful emotional shrapnel every which way as I finally understood exactly where Lucia’s fears about Allison and me had come from. It was the oldest story in the world. Human projection.

“It was Jessie, wasn’t it?” My voice was quiet, and for a long moment, I wasn’t sure she’d even heard me.

“Ryan, you don’t understand—”

“What, Luce? What don’t I understand? That you came over to my house the other night to accuse me of cheating on you, when it was
you
who’d been unfaithful? Tell me what I’m not getting. Because it seems pretty clear from where I’m standing.”

I clenched my jaw, and tears welled in my eyes as a razor-sharp whip of pain wrapped itself around my middle. I trembled and opened my eyes wide in an attempt to dry the drops before they fell. How the hell could she do this to me? And how could she claim I was the heartless one afterward?

“Listen, Ryan, when I came to see you, I was upset. I’d seen you looking at that woman in the diner, and I was hurt so I—”

“So you spent the afternoon fucking Jessie?!”

“No, that’s not it at all.” Lucia’s voice shook, and she sounded near the edge of desperation. “I was devastated to see the way you looked at her. I mean, seriously just sick over it. You have no idea how painful it was to see your tender expression. So, Jessie took me out after requals to have a drink, you know, to help calm me down, so I could decide what to do.”

“And you guys got drunk and had sex. I get it. Thanks for sharing.”
I will not throw up; I will not throw up; I will not—

“Ryan, please.”

“Please what?”

“Please don’t be angry with me. It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I was just in so much pain, and when she touched me—”

“Ugh. Spare me the details. I can work out for myself exactly what went down.” The words tasted bitter on the back of my tongue, and the irony of the phrase I’d just used definitely wasn’t lost on me.

“No, Ryan. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that for a few precious minutes, I forgot how bad you’d hurt me, that’s all.”

“So this is my fault? I pushed you to fuck her with my—what was it?—oh, my emotional bankruptcy. Is that it?”

Lucia let out a huff on the other end of the phone while I focused on gathering all of my wild and raging emotions together and packing them into a neat little ball that I could bury somewhere, never to be seen again, if I could possibly help it.

“No. I just—I just wanted not to hurt. That’s all.” Her voice was small and sounded far away, but that may have been due to my dizziness. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t care.

“I gotta go, Luce.” My ears were ringing, which made my own voice sound hollow and vacant. It matched my insides perfectly.

“Ryan, please. I’m begging you. Can we at least get together and talk? Grab dinner or something? I hate that I hurt you.”

Hurt. Huh. Sure, probably, once the blissful numbness finally wore off, I might hurt. A lot. But right now, my pain had receded, leaving me empty except for a very distant ache in my chest. I didn’t even have it in me to cry.

“I’ll call you.” It was the best I could give her. At the moment, I didn’t want to think about her, let alone see her. I needed the perspective that distance and time would give me before I could even conceive of having a conversation with her.

“When?”

Her obvious despondency didn’t move me. “Dunno. Later.”

I was about to take the phone from my ear and hang up when she rushed on. “I have your phone.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t paying attention the other night, and I grabbed your phone instead of mine when I left.” A beat. “Guess we should’ve put stickers or something on them the way we always talked about, so we could tell them apart, huh?” The joke fell flat. But it did explain why Rory had such a hard time getting ahold of me earlier.

“Guess so.” In the past, our having identical phones and always getting them mixed up had been comical. Not so much anymore.

“Are you busy? I could meet you so we could swap back.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Um, I’m sort of on my way somewhere.” Well, that and I had less than no interest in seeing her.

“I understand.”

I could tell she assumed I was going out with Allison, and I didn’t feel compelled to clarify my evening’s plans. Huh. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was heartless. Or maybe I was simply childish. Either way I didn’t reply.

“Well, maybe we could meet up tomorrow,” she suggested.

“Sure.” It actually sounded like the worst idea in the history of ideas, but I really wanted my phone. “I’ll be in the office all morning giving PT tests, and then I have interviews for the rest of the day. I’ll call you when I’m free. We’ll work something out.”

Maybe I could get Meaghan to meet her in the lobby and do the switch for me. That was unbelievably cowardly, but I was seriously considering it, strength of character be damned.

“Okay.”

Silence again. I was done with this conversation.

“Good night, Luce.”

Her voice was small as she replied, barely a whisper. “Night, Ryan.”

I hung up and sat motionless on the cement planter in front of my office building for an eternity. The skin on my forehead and cheeks tingled and buzzed. I closed my eyes in an effort to center myself, but the second I did, I saw vivid images of Jessie touching Lucia, kissing her, sliding her hand—

Tears prickled the backs of my eyes, and I snapped them open. Okay. I could do this. No need to fall to pieces. Lucia and I had broken up a few days ago, so I’d had some time to get used to the idea. I wasn’t any more thrilled about it today than I’d been when it’d happened, but I wasn’t in shock anymore. Getting weepy or emotional now was pointless because nothing had changed. Except everything had.

I took a series of deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling in long, measured movements, willing myself to calm down. It helped. A little. I concentrated on feeling the air as I drew it into my lungs and then expelled it. Nothing and no one else existed for me outside that moment.