With that, he was gone, leaving me to wonder what it meant that we were suddenly in 'goodbye kiss' territory.
But I threw on my suit and thought about that while getting silly tan lines on the beach.
That weekend was like a dream, all sepia-toned beautiful, blurred around the edges. Perfect. We ate together. We fell asleep and woke up together. We sat on a beach together. He might have copped a feel or two, making me squeal and look around frantically, making sure no one was watching, and we might have had wild, kinky, belt-wielding sex, but that didn't detract from the overall sweetness of it. He put his hand at my lower back. He held my hand.
The trip back to the airport wasn't wrought with the expected anxiety of the flight home, but an overwhelming sadness that it was over and the, maybe a bit presumptuous, but inescapable feeling that what we found was going to disappear as soon as we landed back in Jersey.
I leaned into his shoulder and his arm went around me as we lifted off.
He likely thought it was to ease the anxiety.
But, in reality, it was me trying to hold on just a little while longer.SEVENTEENByronSomething happened on the flight home. I couldn't tell you what it was, but something came over Prue that hadn't been there over the weekend, or perhaps at all since I had known her. Maybe just briefly, the night I forced her to confront her father. Sadness. It emanated from every pore, it seeped into the air around her until she had an aura of melancholy so thick you could choke on it.
Rack my brain as hard as I might, I couldn't figure out what the fuck I had done to warrant that reaction.
I had thought the trip had been a success. It had done what I had intended- gotten Prue out of the mindset of being indebted to me, working for me, of trying to find the balance between those things and whatever-the-fuck was happening between us. It didn't take a genius to see that Prue, like her very name suggested, thought every single little thing through. She weighed pros and cons. She considered all possible outcomes. It was a side effect of growing up in an uncertain household with no one truly solid to lean on. I understood that, having had shitty parents myself. And while I did the opposite of Prue, clinging to her father like it was all there was for her in the world, and left mine behind without a thought, I could see how it happened for her. She was softer, sweeter, while I was a little shit growing up, constantly getting into trouble, always pissing off my old man. I used rebellion to cope while she turned to enabling.
And from the minute I got her on that plane, shaking like a leaf and clinging to me like a life vest, to right before we walked out of the suite at the hotel, things had gone to plan. She had relaxed. The tension that was ever-present in her shoulders fell away. She didn't watch me like she expected something unexpected or bad to happen at any given moment. She laughed and smiled and she even teased me. I caught her when I came in from my meeting on the second day to find her dancing around the bedroom to a fucking Disney song blaring from her cell phone. It was the most at-ease I had ever seen her outside of post-sex exhausted snuggling. And even when she spun around and saw me, she didn't shrink back into herself like I had expected. She had frozen almost comically for a second, then burst out laughing and demanded I not judge her because, "Megara was the most under-appreciated Disney female of all time."
See, I was honest when I told Aaron she wasn't an obsession. I was also right when I told Prue that I had absolutely noticed her and considered her. But it hadn't gone beyond that.
It all changed when she walked into my office with her head raised, sounding as authoritative as her little frame would allow. I'd been prepared for a showdown with Mack. It had been a long time coming. I'd had Aaron talk to him once. I'd had one of my less scrupulous men corner him outside his car one night. He'd proved himself stubborn and utterly unafraid of consequences. My guess was because he was very rarely the one who had to deal with them. Then seeing him walk into my office with his daughter, she being the one to do all the talking, try to set up a payment plan, yeah, it just confirmed my suspicions.
See, when you worked in the business I did, it was an important skill to learn to size up people as quickly as possible. Mack, despite letting his daughter foot his bills, loved her. It was obvious in the way he spoke to me, in the way he looked at her. So I figured the best way to put a fire under his ass was to threaten what he held dearest. While the death threat wasn't wholly empty, it was truly a last resort. My uncle taught me the necessity of brute force once in a while. But it was a final option. It was something you did when someone threatened to bring your empire down. I didn't want to kill Mack. Hell, I actually almost liked the guy until he started stealing from me. He was a hard man to be angry with. I guessed that was why his daughter found it so easy to forgive him.