Anyone but Alex (The English Brothers Book 3) (25 page)

“
I—I’m still thinking about it.” She sighed. “But, I miss London. So much.”

“I know
, baby, and I’ve been thinking about it too. Let’s go for a visit. I’ll take a few days off between Christmas and New Year’s. You can use your ticket. We can spend a few days and still be home by the first of the year.”

“Can you take that time away from work?” she asked, leaning her chin on his chest
and catching his eyes.

“
Sure. Christmas week’s usually quiet. Listen, I know how much you love to travel. We can go back and visit as much as you want, Jess.” He swallowed, and Jess could tell he was gathering his courage to say something important. “But, when we come home, I want you to move in with me.”

Her mouth dropped open as she stared at him, speechless
.

H
e’d promised her, the first night they made love, that he’d come up with a plan for them, and he had. And on paper, it was a good plan: move in together, live in Philadelphia where they both had family, visit London frequently. They’d share the apartment that she’d grown to love so well, and it even included a volunteer position at ICA arranged by Barrett. Alex had figured it out for them, and thoughtfully too. He’d figured out a way for them to stay together.

So, why didn’t Jess jump for joy? Throw her arms around him? Yell yes in ten different languages? Why did she feel so
dreadfully scared and sad?

“Jess?”
he prompted.

She forced the same smile she used to give Brooks when he told her to apply herself at school or try harder on the tennis team. “Wow. That’s a plan.”

Alex leaned up on his elbows, shimmying back against the pillows behind him so he could sit up straight. Jess rolled onto her side, propping herself on her elbow to look up at him, and he searched her eyes, crossing his arms over his chest.

“
Though not, apparently, a plan you like,” he said softly, disappointment and unpleasant surprise making his voice tight. “I’ve never asked anyone to live with me. I thought you’d be happy.”

“I…Alex, I…” She wet her lips, looking down at the crisp white sheets where they’d just made love. “I
do
want to live with you. I love you so much.”

“But you don’t want to
live with me
here
.”

“I miss home,” she said softly. “I miss the Tate and my friends and my little flat.
I miss the food, if you can believe it, and the pubs. I miss Paris or Stockholm for the weekend. I miss my life there…
terribly
. Philadelphia feels so complicated. My brothers are still so angry with us, and…” She sighed, looking down again, as her voice trailed off.

“And what?”

Her eyes cut to his. “You
know
what.”

His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. “You knew what you
were getting into with me, Jess. You knew about my past.”

“I know,” she said, her voice breaking because she felt so miserable. She could feel the change between them—
the tough questions they couldn’t answer, the insurmountable issues that even love couldn’t conquer on its own.

“Y
ou insisted you could handle it,” he said quietly, hurt infusing his voice.

“I thought I could.”

He clenched his jaw like it hurt to swallow. “But you can’t.”

A tear rolled out of the corner of her eye and plopped onto the mattress as she shook her head. “It’s changing me.”

He flinched, his face a study in worry and pain. “What do you mean?”

“Alex…”
She smiled wistfully. “At home, I love parties and outings. I’d love introducing you to people and seeing their eyes widen with curiosity or admiration as they added your face to their blank slate. I’d love holding your hand and passing people on the street who you didn’t know, who’d never touched you.” Her smile faded as another tear chased the first. “Here, it’s different. I hate going out with you. I hate going to parties because I can tell who’s slept with you. I hate seeing their eyes sweep over what belongs to me like it once belonged to them. I… I hate the e-mails and the phone calls warning me that you’ll break my heart. I hate it that my brothers can’t give you a chance because they still see the person you were, not who you are with me.” She shook her head, letting the tears fall, adding herself to the list of everything she hated. “I feel like we need a fresh start, and I don’t see how we can get it here.”

“
But we can get it in London,” he said, his voice hard and angry.

“Have you slept with half of London?” she asked in a whisper.

He flinched, clenched his jaw, his eyes hard. “No. I haven’t.”

“I’m sorry I said that.”
She reached for his hand, but he didn’t clasp hers when she took it. “Alex, I’m—I’m not saying this well.”

“You’re doing fine,” he said
. “But I have responsibilities here. I admire your volunteer work at the Tate, but I’m the CFO of one of the top investment firms on the east coast, Jess. I can’t just walk away from that.”

“I know.”
Her pulse raced and her face flushed as the full weight of their conversation settled on her shoulders. “What are we… Alex, what are we doing here?”

“Talking.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head and sitting up. She pulled the comforter around her, covering her breasts. “What are we doing… right now?”

He stared at her for a long ti
me, his jaw hard, his lips thin. Only the glistening brightness of his blue eyes betrayed the shattering of his heart.

“I think we’re breaking up,” he
said in a tortured whisper before drawing a ragged breath and blinking his eyes.

“No, we’re not,” she insisted, wiping away her tears and crawling toward him. She cradled his face with her hands, looking into his brimming eyes. “We love each other.”

Alex placed his hand over his heart, rubbing with the flat of his palm, like his chest was aching. “Maybe love isn’t enough.”

Jessie had just had the same exact thought
a few minutes before, but hearing him say it was so painful, it ripped through her like no agony she’d ever known before. She’d been holding her breath, but now she exhaled in a sob, her shoulders shuddering as she stared into his face.

“
Forget it. Forget everything I s-said,” she begged him. “I’ll move here. I’ll f-figure out how to—be happy, to be, um, be stronger. I can try harder to ignore it. P-please, Alex. Please.”

He reached for her hands, lowered them to his lap, his face stricken and devastated as he shook his head back and forth. “No
, Jess. No, baby.” He reached up to swipe at a tear that had slipped from his eye. “I can’t let you do that. I can’t let you be so unhappy for me. I can’t let you change into someone else. I love you too much to let that happen.”

Her mind raced frantically.
He was the love of her life, and she wasn’t going to lose him. There had to be a way.

“Then we’ll, um, we’ll f
-fly back and forth. One weekend here, one in London. We c-could do that, couldn’t w-we?”

His thumbs brushed gently against her wrists. “
No, Jess. We couldn’t do that. Not forever.”

Her head fell forward as she cried, letting him draw her into his arms, a weak, limp, spent thing that loved him, but didn’t know how to live with him.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.

After a long time, he answered, “I’m not,” in a broken voice, pullin
g her tighter against his chest. “I’m not sorry I got the chance to love you.”

T
hey held each other and cried all of the tears they had to cry, then fell asleep curled up together, clinging to one another like they couldn’t bear to let go.

***

When Alex returned to his apartment the next night, she was gone.

He could tell because the air was dead and dark,
void of her warmth. As his briefcase slipped from his hand, his other hand fluttered helplessly upward to press against his chest, which ached and throbbed as it never had before. The emptiness he felt was so sharp, it occurred to him to turn around, head to the nearest bar, get drunk, and go home with the first woman who looked at him. He’d tell her to shut up if she spoke. He’d keep her face-down beneath him. He’d bury himself inside some nameless, faceless woman and try to trick himself, for a few moments, into believing it was Jessie, that he hadn’t lost her, that he wasn’t alone.

Disgusted with himself for even thinking such a
sick and twisted thing, he stumbled forward in the darkness to the kitchen. Taking a crystal glass out of the nearest cabinet, he poured himself a generous splash of scotch and gulped it down, re-pouring another glass right away.

He leaned against the counter, his heart pounding, his eyes burning. After weeks of coming home to Jessie’s warmth—the TV on, dinner cooking or waiting in cheerful cartons, her body wet and pliant, grabbing for his with the same urgency he reached for hers
, tonight was unbearable. All of those blissful hours spent talking and eating and drinking and showering and fucking and making love—had he taken them for granted? Had he loved every moment as much as he should?

Throwing back the rest of his drink, he poured
a third as his phone buzzed in his back pocket.

Barrett English:
What happened with Jessica?

Alex, raised the phone to throw it across the room, but stayed his hand, taking a deep, ragged breath. His hand shook as he typed two words and hit send.

Alexander English:
It’s over.

He stared at the words glowing in the darkness of his kitchen, their simplicity as devastating as any tiny, efficient tool of destruction:
a knife, an ice pick, the thin deadly blade of a razor. The bright letters cut into his heart until it bled.

For the first time in Alex’s empty life, during which he’d almost never been alone but always been lonely, Jessie had filled that place of bitter, desperate longing. Now that he knew how it felt to be loved, how it felt to feel full and complete, the desolation of
this
moment, standing alone in his dark, barren apartment was more excruciating than he ever would have guessed.

He poured another
splash of scotch into the glass.

How dare she walk into his world and destroy it?

He was happy before, wasn’t he? Sure, the random hook-ups had started getting stale, and Alex conceded that watching Barrett and Fitz find their happily-ever-afters had altered something inside of him. A longing had cropped up in his heart, for something like they had. And he’d found it with Jessie. And in his soul he knew—it was unlikely that he’d ever find it again.

He thought of Hope and Alyssa, and the multitude of other women with whom he’d been intimate over the last decade.
A piece of ass here. A gratuitous fuck there. He hadn’t started out wanting to hurt anyone—quite the opposite. His decision not to commit to any one woman had been intentional… to spare another woman from the pain that Johanna had known. How could he know that his choice to play the field meant that he would eventually end up hurting the one person he loved above any other? He raked his hands through his hair, lifting the glass to his lips again.

The doorbell to his apartment rang, and his whol
e body froze, wondering irrationally if it was Jessie returning to him. Racing down the hall and swinging the door open, his disappointment was complete to see Barrett, who flinched as he watched Alex’s face morph from hope to despair in the space of a moment.

“I was worried. I know how much you love her.”

“Barrett,” said Alex, his voice breaking.

And Alex English—
the Professor, the player, the Casanova, the womanizer, the heartbreaker—whose heart had been sideswiped by a kid, who had fallen deeply in love for the first time in his life, faltered. Maybe it was the scotch, or the terrible sorrow of losing her, or the weariness he felt with his life, or the sheer emptiness that was gutting him where he stood, but his forehead dropped forward in surrender onto the solid, comforting shoulder of his big brother, who stood, grounded and certain, in silent empathy.

***

It was impossible that Jessie’s eyes should have more tears, and yet every time she was finished crying, she would think of his smile, his soft laugh, the way his blond hair felt like silk on the back of his neck, the way it felt when she fell asleep with his chest pressed against her back…and she would lose it all over again.

Presently, she was wrapped in a bathrobe sitting on the window seat in her bedroom that overlooked
the winter white of Westerly Park, bathed in lavender twilight. Looking past the border hedges of Westerly, she saw smoke coming from the chimneys of Haverford Park in the distance. Precious memories from her childhood and from the past four weeks meshed together with Alex’s face holding dominion.

And more tears welled up again.

A knock on her door made her quickly wipe them away, and call, “Come in.”

The door opened and Christopher peeked into the room, just his face looking around the corner of her door, and damn it if her eyes didn’t burn some more.