Everly After (19 page)

I throw the bra and panties on the counter, glaring over my shoulder at that baby. Don’t they have pacifiers in England?

I’m fine.

The lady behind the register tries for my attention now so I can pay. I think about just throwing my purse at her so she can figure it out. I’m trembling as I count the money, and when a tear splashes on top of the stack of banknotes in my hand, I realize I’m crying, too.

I hand everything over, averting my eyes, forcing myself to think of something else, me being someone else. I’m that happy girl in the sun, and Beckett’s there, too…

She hands me the bag and the receipt, and I blow out a breath. She’s looking at me strangely, but I can’t cause a scene. I fumble with the bag and my purse, thankful that I’m not wearing heels. I’d probably be on my ass right now.

The toddler breaks a bottle of perfume behind me. The mother curses, and the baby is still fussing as I try to skirt around the mess.

“Oh, please. Shite, Tammy…stay away from the broken glass. Be a good girl now for Mummy.”

I can’t really step around them. There’s a toddler, a stroller, and broken glass in my way. The hazard of all shitty hazards for me to stumble into. The mother hands the baby off to me, desperation on her face. I think I might be sick with the infant’s weight in my hands. It stares back at me with large green eyes, and my heart breaks. I think the rest of me does, too, because I should be comforting it or something. Instead, I stop breathing. I run over to the counter and hand the baby off to the woman behind the register and rush out of Harrods, slipping over the spilled perfume and broken glass.

I’m having a nervous breakdown on the sidewalk of Harrods like a fucking champ.

I’m fine.

My hands are shaking so badly it’s hard to unzip my purse. I turn my back to everyone on the sidewalk. I don’t need or want the attention. If I can talk to Beckett, hear his voice, I might be okay.

I mean I
am
okay.

I’m about to call him when an unknown number comes up. I connect without thinking.

“Everly?”

It’s Julia.

Fuck, I’m not fine.

The events of last year rush over me, and suddenly I’m back there. Back when the hours faded into one, long blackness. Stuck on my bathroom floor, half-naked and choking from sobbing so hard.

There was no one. I mattered to no one. We didn’t matter to him.

You’re like every other worthless trust fund baby, used to getting your way
, he’d texted. Michael was too much of a coward to face me—he locked me out of his office. I begged at his door, even as the interns looked on.

“
I don’t want you,”
he’d yelled when he finally called that night.
“And if you come after me again, I’ll ruin you.”

He had anyway.

Michael fed me lies, and I lived off them, bingeing as if I was starving. It didn’t matter that he was friends with my father, didn’t matter that he was twice my age or that he was my professor. His words mattered to me—the time he spent making me feel like I was important, like I was talented and smart, meant everything.

We snuck into the coat closet at a charity event, and I gave him head because he told me he wanted me, that he was tired of pretending he didn’t love me. I rode him later in his limo that night, too, while the driver circled the block so no one would find out. Michael had ripped my gown, rough, marking me as his. We could be together, he’d said, still inside me, if I was quiet. If we stayed a secret.

Three months later and I was nothing more than that dumb slut who got knocked up by her college professor.

He’d said he loved me, worshipped me. And then I saw them outed as a couple online. I never thought… I was too stupid to believe otherwise. I meant nothing. While he fucked me in his office, in his car, in a bathroom, he paraded around Manhattan with Julia Wilkes, the philanthropist socialite.

I had no one now—no one to turn to, no one to help. Julia, the sister I never had, meant nothing. Just a bitch who went behind my back.

I was easy for him. Easy. And it would be better if I wasn’t around.

The blade pressed into my skin, tears falling around me.

Worthless.

It didn’t hurt. I was crying too much, anyway. My lungs burned, my eyes raw. And then the black was crimson until I was nothing at all.

Beckett

I want to hit everything and everyone on the way back to the hostel. No one is walking fast enough and the sidewalks are too crowded, and I’m still upset that I thought I could have lunch with Hugh without it turning into a therapy session. I’m sick of people handling me like a fucking grenade.

The idea of losing myself to writing seems more appealing the closer I get, but then I remember Everly and that madness silences as soon I push through our door. Maybe it’s too early and she’s not back yet. I hold my breath, waiting to see her on the bed.

Her purse is on the floor, along with a Harrods bag, and it smells like someone took a bath in perfume. I hear a soft noise as I step farther into the room. The soles of her feet are sticking out from under the bed.

I sink to the floor and press my face flat. Everly cowers against the wall. “Bad day?” I ask.

Her blue eyes are shiny, but there aren’t any tears on her cheeks. This is the Everly who scares me. The one who’s so broken she falls apart and becomes still, letting the world carry on without her.

“Me too.” I hold back my sigh. I know she won’t want to hear it, and there’s no point in trying to fix her. I can’t. I reach out, take her hand in mine, and squeeze. “We’ll hide here together until it gets better.”

We sit in silence, caught in a painful staring match. I’m about to close my eyes when her hand tugs on mine and she slides over the dusty wood floor closer to me. I reach for her other hand and drag her out a second before she launches herself at me. She wraps her body around mine and cuddles close, pressing her ear against my chest, her fingertips digging into my shoulders, as though I might pick up and leave London right now.

I should ask her what’s wrong. It’s not like I don’t care—I do—but I’m afraid of what could happen, what she’ll do to my life if we carry on together. She’s equal parts amazing and terrifying. I wish I could strike some balance, get some footing before we both tip and fall over.

I end up sitting cross-legged on the floor, wrapped up in Everly for the afternoon as the two of us try to decide why life is the way it is and why it has to suck so much. And why we’ve found each other.

The endless whys of two people when they start falling into that terrible, horrible, wonderful collision of love.

Everly

If it bothers Beckett to find me hiding under the bed when he gets back from his meeting, he never says anything. Eventually, we decide to pry ourselves off the floor and find something to eat.

We’re both in a weird mood, making stupid small talk as we walk to a Lebanese restaurant. Beckett insists I try something new and pretend like I’m traveling there. I go along with it because I know he’s trying to make me smile. But I know he’s hurting, too. I’m not blind to his hurt, even if I’m caught up in mine.

By the time we finish dinner, we’re back to the new normal—the tension, the flirting. I feel like I have a blindfold on, stumbling into something with Beckett. If this keeps up, it’ll be the two of us in bed. Soon.

I’m right.

Back in our room, some indie band I’ve never heard of plays from Beckett’s phone as I strip down to only my panties. He takes his shirt off and levers his body over mine. Our breathing is ragged, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I mean I know
what
we’re doing, but I’m not sure about me. What the hell am I doing with Beckett Reid when I’m supposed to be traveling the world?

“What are…Am I hurting you? Why are you crying?”

I shake my head, trying to quiet the screaming in my head. I feel as though I’m being torn in a million different directions. Like he has me strapped to some medieval torture device and is quartering me with each soft kiss, each gentle touch. I wipe my tears away—or try to—but he holds my hand still. I’m being a buzzkill right now. I know I am. But why…

“I don’t want to like you.” My voice is a rough whisper. I struggle to swallow, to take another breath, to not fall to pieces in his arms.

Beckett appears just as upset as I am, his brows furrowed, his breathing uneven. He opens his mouth to say something, but it never comes. I blink up at him, sniffing back my tears, finally realizing what I’ve said. I can’t take it back. My stomach knots, and my clammy hands shake at the back of his neck. I let them fall to the pillow in a defeated whack.

“It makes everything harder, yeah?”

I nod, the fear in my chest slowly loosening so I can drag in another steadying breath.

Beckett bends down and sips at my tears, kissing them away. “You make me…” He kisses my lips, his tongue stroking lazily against mine until I feel overwhelmed again, this time in a good way. “Sometimes there’s good in what scares us.”

“You don’t scare me,” I say. He shoves up onto his elbows, his warm body flush with mine, our eyes locked. “You don’t.”

“Okay.” He says this without a smirk or disbelief, even though I know he thinks otherwise. It’s in the way his fingers tenderly trace my collarbone like he might break me.

He could. It would be so easy now that I’ve let him in. Now that I’ve told him something I’ve only ever told one other person.

I clamp my eyes shut and press my hips against his, feeling his need hard against my middle. I try to push us forward again, to give in to what we both want so I know what to feel. But he’s frustrating and pins my hands over my head, his lips traveling over me slow and careful, like I’m a porcelain doll. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be truly wanted, to be appreciated.

“Well, you don’t scare me.” He ducks his head down and kisses the hollow of my throat, then trails his mouth lower until his lips circle my nipple. My toes curl in the sheets.

“Why not?” It comes out as a sort of sigh, a throaty question that reveals my earlier lie.

He does scare me. He scares me until I’m frozen and can’t move. I think I’ve been a little stuck ever since I met him.

My fingers knead into his back, and I roll against him again, beyond frustrated.

Beckett stops his sweet torture and slides back up my body to gaze down at me. He brushes back my hair, a smile building on his lips. “I don’t scare easily, remember?” He doesn’t wait for my response. “I’m not going anywhere yet, but…” He closes his eyes and swallows. I place my hand over his chest, his heart beating wildly against my palm. “I don’t want to like you, either.” Our eyes meet, and the room goes quiet. “But I do,” he whispers. “And it’s okay for you to like me, too.”

I shake my head, stupid tears pricking at my eyes. I’m still stuck on his confession when I push up onto on my elbows and kiss him. It’s desperate and needy, but for once he doesn’t slow us down and I feel myself fall open to him for that. For knowing what I need and when.

But I do.

I hear it over and over in my head as things heat up between us. My tears have dried, and my heart is racing, my stomach somersaulting as if this is going to be the first time sleeping with someone instead of when it actually was—thirteen years old at my parent’s boathouse in the Hamptons.

He’s sitting on his knees between my legs. I’m about to make a joke, but his hand runs over my lace panties, petting me. I forget how to breathe and buck up under his warm fingers.

“I think you like that, too.” He bows his head so his forehead rests against my stomach. It feels like he’s praying, his hands tracing the curves of my sides until they hook in my panties and he draws them down, his warm breath caressing my skin from my hipbones to my toes. I shiver, waiting.

He tugs them off, my hips swaying from side to side as he does. His eyes are soft, filled with hunger when he looks down at me. It’s as though there’s a hummingbird trapped in my ribcage, tapping and pecking, fluttering to get out. I get so nervous I close my eyes because I’m afraid for what comes next. Not just here in this room, but outside in real life. I’m terrified about what will happen when we’re back in Paris because what we have in London is too good to last. Eventually, I’ll wreck it.

“You’re so beautiful, Everly.” His words are a lulling command. I open my eyes to stare back at him. A smile finds its way to my lips, and I reach my hand out for him. I want him back with me, not so far away. Not now.

“I do like you,” he says again, crawling up the bed and settling between my legs.

I try to say it back, but the words fall away when his fingers part me. His lips are warm as he kisses and licks me, his fingers slipping inside until I grow hot and frustrated from the sensations. My palms flatten onto the mattress, and I press my hips against his mouth, my head tossed back. For once, I don’t worry about anything, my needy sighs filling the moment between us.

Everything speeds up until it breaks and I shatter. I’m not sure how long I lie there, staring up at bunk above us, trying to push away the black dots dancing in front of my eyes.