The Avoidance of Love (The Daniels' Sisters Book 2) (26 page)

“Okay.”

“Okay? You’re not mad with me?”

“Okay, Jace.” I turned and headed for the stairs.

When I reached the bedroom, I dropped to my knees, grabbed my bag from under the bed, and began to pack my stuff.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Thank God, I didn’t have much to pack. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Jace was hovering around me the whole time telling me to stop acting stupid, which of course wound me up even more.

I carried my bag downstairs, and he stepped in front of me.

“Get out of my way, Jace.”

“You’re being irrational. I forgot dinner; I’m sorry.”

“Jace, we’re in a three way relationship. Call me when she’s gone, but I won’t wait around forever.” With that, I stepped past him and went to my car.

I want to say I was steady in my resolve while I drove back to my flat, but I wasn’t. The tears streamed continuously down my face the whole way home. I felt like I was back to where I was a year ago, where it was just me and no one else. The only difference was that I now knew what it was like to have more in my life. I knew everything I was missing and it hurt.

As I walked into my apartment building, I could hear music coming from upstairs. Who has mid-week parties in this place? I had picked this flat because of the location and the type of people who lived here already. They were all professional or retired singletons that had carved out their careers and had very little time for much else.

The more stairs I climbed, the louder the music grew. I was praying that it wasn’t one of my direct neighbors but it was worse. It was coming from my flat. Who the hell was in there? If I had acquired squatters while staying at Jace’s, I was going to be pissed. It had only been a few days since I stopped by and checked on the place.

A part of me thought I was stupid for going in by myself, but I wanted to see what I was up against. Opening the door, the music was blaring, I was surprised no one had called the police to report the behavior.

Never could I have guessed what I was about to see . . . my sister and my assistant doing the Charleston in face masks, dressed in a bikini and matching mankini.

“What the fuck is going on?” Both heads whipped around to look at me.

“Busted.” Coops announced and then they both started giggling. It was going to be pointless getting mad at them. They were both stinking drunk. Fuck it. When in Rome. I dropped my bag on the floor and went to the kitchen to find a bottle of wine and a large glass.

I sat down on my sofa and, even though I felt miserable and rotten inside, it still felt good to be home. Coops and Lana eventually came and sat down at my feet like puppies that had been scolded.

“So why have you been partying in my flat? You both have your own places. Lana, yours is bigger than mine.”

“Yes, but we were the singles crew.” Her words were slurred, and she was struggling to keep upright. Coops slung his arm around her shoulders. “The three of us together. Forever destined to be single because no one appreciates our awesomeness.” Coops was nodding his head in agreement. I was more concerned about him spilling wine on my floor. “And then I shot myself in the foot, Mara. I found you love and now we’re all alone with our singleness.” I groaned and emptied my glass before filling it again.

“Why are you here anyway? You’ve been staying at Jace’s most of the time.” Coops seemed the more sober out of the two.

“Brielle.” I didn’t feel like the situation needed any more explanation than that, but the two drunkards wouldn’t let it go. I gave them both a recap of what had happened today and they added that they thought that Brielle had kept Jace from meeting me on purpose, even though he was still at fault for forgetting in the first place.

Lana finally managed to sit up unaided. “Wow. I still can’t believe Eric did that. He’s quite easy going.” I raised an eyebrow at her. “No, we never did the vertical samba.”

“I thought it was called the horizontal tango.”

“That was last decade. It’s all about wall sex these days. Anyway, I remember we were out once and he saw this guy shouting at his girlfriend and he nearly knocked him out right there and then. He was ranting for ages that real men didn’t abuse women. Guess he’s got double standards.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“So why have you thrown in the towel and left Brielle to feast on your man.”

“I haven’t thrown in the towel. I just couldn’t do that kind of living arrangement anymore. He needed to make a decision. Either tell her to find somewhere else to live, or I go. So I went. I mean how could he not realize having his ex-fling there was going to grate on me?”

“And you told him all this. Word for word?”

“Not exactly.” Maybe she had a point. I hadn’t exactly coherently explained what my problem was to Jace. I had just expected him to know, to understand, and take the correct action accordingly. “Fuck. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”

I decided to discover what my sister and probably best friend had been doing in my flat while I’d been away. Apparently, the routine was to get drunk on as many different concoctions of alcohol as they could create, dance until the buzz wore off just enough to sit down, and watch Dirty Dancing. No part of me wanted this to be my life.

We all crashed on my bed, sprawled out on top of the sheets with both Lana and Coops dressed in their swimwear. I never did get an explanation behind that part of the night.

THE SIMPLE BIT of light that shone through the smallest crack between my curtains, managed to find my forehead and made me squint, which caused me endless pain. I was groggy and in pain. Groaning, I rolled to get past Coops barely covered body and find my bathroom.

Lana was already up as usual. No matter how much she drank, she never had a hangover. It just wasn’t fair.

I looked in my bathroom mirror and the face that looked back at me echoed how I felt. I was absolutely dragging. I quickly decided the best thing I could do was take a shower and get myself some coffee to try to kick-start my system into functioning mode.

Stepping out of the shower and going in to my bedroom to get dressed, Coops was still laying half-dead on my bed. I got ready all the same. If he woke up, he wouldn’t be interested in anything he saw.

Lana was sitting at my table drinking a glass of fresh orange juice when I came out.

“Hey. How’s your head?” She looked amused, but I was surprised she didn’t make more of a joke about it.

“Not great, but I’ll live.”

Once I had my coffee, I sat down to join her.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Talk to him.”

“There’s that sensible sister of mine. Make sure you do it sooner rather than later.”

I needed to get in to the office. There was no way Coops was going to be in functioning order anytime soon. I don’t know why he did this to himself on a regular basis. I asked Lana to let him know that I still had his keys to the office and to come in when he felt able to, although part of me didn’t think I would be seeing him again today, unless I came home and still found him in my bed.

The drive over left me to my thoughts and none of them were pretty. I was wondering what Brielle and Jace were doing right now. With me not in the house and the way I left things with Jace, was Brielle now comforting him? Did he even need comfort? Maybe he realized that it wasn’t a relationship.

I kept going over the situation in my brain as I got out of my car and made my way into my office building. The first thing I noticed was that the door was unlocked. I know with conviction . . . okay, maybe ninety percent conviction after last night’s revelation. . . . that Coops would have locked the door before he left work.

“Hello?” I don’t even know why I bothered to call out. It’s not as if a thief was going to call out “Hey! I’m in here. Come and see what I’m stealing and let me know if you’re cool with it.”

I couldn’t hear any noise, and to be honest, whoever had broken in was probably long gone. I still crept inside cautiously; mentally cataloguing all the things that could have been taken that might be of value.

Even Coops desk had been ransacked. There were papers everywhere. My heart was pounding as I walked through, knowing that his desk would look like minimal disorder in comparison to what I was about to find in my own space.

Nothing could prepare me for what I saw. My computer was smashed, and it looked like a small fire had been set with all my files on top. How had this happened without the alarm going off? Everything was ruined. It would take me weeks, if not months, to get this all sorted and get my records up together. I don’t even know if my hard drive was salvageable. I should have listened to Tara and taken her up on her offer to transfer all my files to cloud computing. I was fucked.

I walked around to my desk and sat down in my chair. The pictures of my sisters and my parents were smashed. Not thinking, I picked up the image of my parents and immediately cut myself on the splintered glass. It was all a mess. All of it.

If my parent could see me now would they be proud? I don’t think so. What was there to be proud of? My sister’s lives and mine were a shambles. Each of us muddling through in some sort of fashion. I knew that each one of us was unhappy for some reason, so much for me being the big sister that kept them in check.

Now the practice that I had worked so hard to build was on the brink of crashing. If I couldn’t get all the files together then I would have to let my clients know that we would have to start all over again. A few clients would be understanding, but the majority would see me incompetent. Some would see it as an excuse to pull out.

The tears were falling now just as fast as the desperation came crashing down. I had worked so hard to build this company and it was beginning to crumble around me. I needed help and for the first time I asked for it.

I WAS STILL sitting in a daze when I heard a knock at my broken office door. I looked up and saw so many faces. All my sisters were there along with my grandparents. I couldn’t hold back the sobs. When I needed them, they were there for me.

“What you crying for. Mara?” My grandmother moved fast for her age and was by my side in seconds, holding my head to her chest even though I was still sitting down.

“Where do I start, Grandma? It’s all ruined.” I was hiccupping through my speech.

“Oh hush. I don’t know much about the computer stuff but the rest of it is cosmetic, so it’ll all be fine.”

The rest of my family milled into the room with black bags, sponges, and other cleaning supplies. For a while, I sat in a daze and watched them get to work without even asking me what needed to be done. Tara came over and nudged me out of the way to look at my computer. I got up to give her my chair; she gave me a wink and focused on her task. Tara was friends with a lot of the IT geeks where she worked and had picked up a few of their tricks so I knew that even if she didn’t know what to do she would know someone to call on if it came to it.

We spent the day cleaning and working out just how bad the damage was. Most of the office damage was superficial, and by the time my family was ready to leave, my office looked bare but nothing like the carnage that I had found first thing that morning.

Tara had been unable to fix my computer, but she didn’t think it was beyond salvation; it just needed someone with more expertise than she had to get to the hard drive and retrieve the information safely before the rest of the computer was discarded.

Just before they were all ready to go and get rid of the bags of rubbish, my grandfather came over and gave me a squeeze around my shoulders. That was as good as he got to actually hugging, but the sentiment was just the same.

“Mara, how much did you look at the damage before you called us?” His tone was serious and his face was stern.

“Just enough to know it was more than I could deal with alone.” He rubbed my shoulder a little firmer.

“Just seems to me that they didn’t take anything, that’s all. Smashed up a hell of a lot and created a good mess, but didn’t take anything of worth. That computer you got there would have been worth a pretty penny, would it not?” My brain was starting to engage now. He was right. I’d been so caught up in the damage; I hadn’t given it any thought before. My computer was worth several thousand with all the accessories.