“I’m fine. Just busy.” She patted my shoulder, then glanced to make sure we were alone and closed the door.
“Did you and Mr. Blaine have a falling out? I sensed some tension between you two.” Yeah, I bet. I was surprised more people hadn’t felt it.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I’d gone into it with Sloane, but I couldn’t break Lucah’s confidence further.
“Oh, Rory. Work it out. Don’t let that boy get away from you. He’s one of the good ones and they don’t come around very often. You’ve got to grab onto them when they do and make sure you keep ‘em. My husband was one of the good ones and once I knew that, I wasn’t letting him go and I never did.” Her husband had died a few years ago from a heart attack, and she hadn’t remarried. I’d never asked her, but I figured it was because he was “it” for her.
She patted my face and gave me a sympathetic look.
“Ah, sometimes youth is wasted on the young.” She laughed and then opened the door and went back to her desk. I grabbed my coffee and went back to mine, avoiding looking at Lucah, even though I could feel his gaze burning my skin. It was different than when he looked at me when we were naked. That made me feel beautiful. Now it just made me . . .
Sad? Angry? Frustrated? Negative. It was all negative.
But yet . . . I was still head over fucking heels in love with him. He might be a liar, but he was my liar. He was my Lucah. Despite not knowing his real name, I knew other things.
I knew what he looked like when he woke up first thing in the morning. I knew what he wanted to hear when we were having sex. I knew where all his freckles were. I knew the curve of his shoulder and that he liked Bugs Bunny cartoons and truffle pizza and s’mores. Were those more important than what I didn’t know?
I left the office at lunch and took the letter with me as I sat outside at a café with an iced tea and a ham and cheese croissant. I was finally hungry again.
I opened the letter and saw Lucah’s neat handwriting had covered pages, front and back. I started to read and I realized it was more of a list than a letter. A list of all the things I didn’t know about him.
When I was twelve, I had my first kiss with a girl named Cassidy. It was during Spin the Bottle at my first boy-girl party. She tasted like bubble gum and our noses bumped.
My first girlfriend was Annie. We started dating when I was fifteen and we stayed together for six months. She started dating my best friend a week after breaking up with me, and they dated all through high school and then got married. They have three children and still live in my hometown.
I lost my virginity to a girl at my first party. I was sixteen and I have tried to remember her name, but I can’t. She was from another school and we were both drunk and I don’t actually remember much except that we definitely had sex and it definitely lasted about thirty seconds.
I’ve never really loved a girl the way I love you. I thought I had, but I had no idea what it was before you. I’ve told exactly five women in my life that I loved them. You, my mother, my nieces and Annie.
I can’t stop thinking about you, even if I wanted to. I never believed in fate, and I didn’t believe in love at first sight either, but I have no other way to describe the feeling that went through me when you walked down that hallway and I saw you for the first time. Oh, yes, there was lust. I knew I wanted you, and I wanted to be inside you. I also knew that I shouldn’t pursue you. It is very, very against the rules. I’d been with other women when I went undercover before, but that was different. Those were strictly physical no-strings.
He went on to tell me so many other things, some I wanted to know and some that were hard to read. Like his parents, and how it felt to lose them. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that had been like for him, but I kept reading, even as tears started to fall down my face and the page became blurry.
Lucah had poured his pain and his past into this letter, and the only way it wouldn’t have affected me was if I didn’t have a heart. Well. I’d had a heart but I’d given most of it to him. That was what love did to you. Made you give parts of yourself to someone and they could do whatever they wanted with them and there was nothing you could do about it.
I finished the letter and went back and read it again. And then a third time. And then I put it down and went to a secluded corner outside the café and cried. It would be much better if I could go home and cry, but I had to actually go to work. Dad was out of town for a few days, so the company was kind of in my hands. Yes, there were other people that shared the burden, but he was my father and I had more of a burden of responsibility. It also meant that I couldn’t confront him about Lucah until he got back. That wasn’t something you did over the phone. I was going to put that off as long as possible.
I got myself together and popped back into the café to fix my face. My eyes were puffy, but my crazy expensive mascara and eye makeup were still in place. They should put that in the advertisement; will withstand heartbreak and ugly crying.
There was nothing I could do about my puffy eyes, so I wet a paper towel with cold water and put it under my eyes for a few minutes. A few other women came and went, and some stared at me and some made sympathetic faces and others just glared at me for taking up space in front of the mirror.
Why couldn’t I cry like girls in the movies? Even if those bitches were sobbing, they always looked cute doing it and their eyes were never red afterwards. So many people said they wanted a man from a movie, or a house, but I wanted to cry like girls in the movies. That would be great.
The cab ride back to the office didn’t feel long enough and when I walked into the office, I wanted to turn right back around and go home.
My head hurt from the crying and my heart was torn to shreds and I just didn’t give a fuck about work right now. But I straightened my jacket and walked to the elevator.
Thirty-Two
Lucah wasn’t at his desk when I walked by it. There was a note on the edge of it.
Had a meeting. Be back later.
-Lucas Blaine
He couldn’t put more detail in it in case someone walked by the desk and saw it, and he signed it with his alias.
His alias. I really hadn’t sat down and thought about that. How many times had he done that? How many names had he had? How long had he been doing this corporate investigator gig? How did he get into it?