“You can’t break through something that isn’t locked.” In the back of his mind he knew he needed to address her lax approach to security, but right now he had other things on his mind.
“What do you want, Zach?”
“I want you to say whatever it is that’s on your mind instead of behaving as if you’re auditioning for cheerleader of the year.”
The faint flicker in her eyes told him he’d scored a direct hit. “I don’t have anything on my mind. What could I possibly have to say to you after all this time?”
“Plenty, I would have thought, given the note I left on your pillow.” He still remembered lying awake in a blind panic and then scrabbling in her bag to find a pen, something to write with. He couldn’t remember exactly which words he’d used, but he knew they weren’t Shakespeare.
“The message in the note was clear enough.”
“And you don’t have anything you want to say about it?”
“I had plenty I could have said to you at the time, but that was ten years ago. I don’t have feelings about something that happened so long ago.”
“I don’t believe you. I’d say you have plenty of feelings. In fact I’d say you have so many feelings you don’t know what to do with them.” He saw the brief flash of her eyes, shards of anger that dazzled before she masked it.
“You should go now, Zach.”
Zach decided that he hated polite conversation almost as much as he hated cocktails and social media.
“I’m not leaving until we’ve dealt with this.” He moved closer to her and Brittany backed away until her shoulders made contact with the wall.
“It’s ironic that when I wanted you to stay, you couldn’t wait to leave, and now when I can’t wait for you to leave, it’s impossible to get rid of you.”
For some bizarre reason it made him feel better to hear her finally speaking the truth. “I know I deserve that.”
“Oh, you deserve a hell of a lot more than that, Zach. You want me to tell you how I really feel? Right now I hate you.” Her eyes blazed and her chest rose and fell. “I hate you and I want you to get the hell out of my house.”
He was standing so close he could almost feel the heat coming from her.
Their relationship had always been intensely physical. Long stretches of simmering promise interspersed with wild moments of sexual oblivion.
“You don’t hate me. I think you want to hate me, but you don’t and that’s driving you crazy.” He cupped her jaw, lifting her face to his. “You hate the fact you still feel something.” He could feel the softness of her skin and the rapid pounding of her pulse beneath his fingers.
“What I feel is regret that I ever got involved with you in the first place. Goodbye, Zach.”
If he’d been paying attention to the words he would have left, but there were other forces at work. Deeper, darker forces that sparked something on an elemental level.
“You don’t feel anything?” He caged her, planting an arm on either side of her to prevent her escape.
“That’s right. Sorry if that bruises your ego, and now you need to—”
He flattened her to the wall and brought his mouth down on hers. The feel of her lips brought a groan to the back of his throat. She tasted soft and sweet, like strawberries dipped in sugar. And then the sweetness turned darker, more wicked and the explosion of heat consumed him. He’d expected to prove a point, but ended up slaking a hunger, filling a need.
Sex was a skill of his. He’d learned all the moves, knew how to touch, how to give maximum pleasure to his partner. He treated sex like an athletic workout, a sequence of calculated physical moves culminating in mutual satisfaction. For Zach, there was never an emotional element. He was well aware that there were women who had wanted him to fall in love with them. Women who had hoped to be the one to cure him of whatever defect stopped him from truly engaging with another human being. They’d never succeeded.
As a young child he’d learned to switch off feelings and then as an adult had discovered he had no idea how to switch them on again.
He’d married Brittany because it had felt like the right thing to do, and he had swiftly discovered that it wasn’t.
Like everyone else, she’d wanted something he wasn’t capable of giving. Disappointing people, letting them down, had been a feature of his life. Up until the point where he had married Brittany, it had never bothered him. He figured that people’s expectations were their own and if they chose to pin them on him, then it wasn’t his fault if their worst predictions came true. With Brittany, it had been different. Her naive and unquestioning belief in him had almost suffocated him.
He’d known from the start that he was going to let her down.
That part had been inevitable.
This, he thought, as he focused all his expertise on her mouth, this was all he’d ever been capable of giving.