Twisted Fate (Dark Heart 2)

He shakes his head. “I was scared of someone hurting you. I didn’t want you to feel how I felt. Not ever.”

My heart feels as if it’s twisting; something might pop off or crumple. “How did you feel?” I stroke my hand down his arm, and chills fan out from the ground zero of my fingertips.

“Like dying.” He closes his eyes, swaying slightly as he goes on. “I knew you were moving on to better things. And if you saw me”—his hand cups his forehead—“I knew you could tell.”

“What would I be able to tell?” I take his free hand and hold it between both of mine, prompting him to lift his head a little.

“You’d know I was…”

“You were what?” I whisper.

“Fucked up,” he says thickly. “I thought if you knew, you’d want to save me.”

Tears spill from my eyes. “I would have. You were right. I would have done everything I could to save you. Every single thing.”

“And it would drown you, because that’s the way it works.”

“Saving someone drowns you?”

His eyes close as his face shuts down.

“Is that how it seems to you?”

“Don’t bullshit.” His eyes open as his face twists. “That’s how it is. Like saving someone from the water.”

I almost laugh. “Lifeguards do it every day.”

“You know what I mean.” He shifts slightly, putting space between us. Now his body is taut, his eyes emphatic and a little wild. “You didn’t need to be swimming for me.”

I press my lips together, picking at a string on the couch as I decide what I can say without losing my temper and lashing out. But this is Luca. I’m not censoring myself now. “I don’t think it should have been your choice. How do you know that I couldn’t have done it? I was smart, resourceful, and I had a lot of money.” I say that bitterly—because it’s bitter to me that I had so many things he didn’t.

“You were going everywhere. I couldn’t even swim, you know I made that shit up? Didn’t learn till I was twenty-seven. Fucking hard, too.”

“Luca…”

He wipes his eyes with the back of his arm. Then he shifts me onto the other couch cushion and gets up. “There’s your story,” he says, with his bare back to me. “Fucked up, right? And I’m that person.”

He looks at me over his shoulder. I can see his chest is pumping, and his face is drained of color and emotion. I don’t even think he’s looking at me. His gaze is fixed on something behind me.

“Hey…come sit back down.”

He shakes his head and steps into the kitchen. He’s still nude, his body statuesque in the shadow of the wall between two small, square windows. I watch him reach into a cabinet, trying to commit every flicker of his movement to memory—even as I wonder what to do and say now. This is going to be the last time that I ever see him. I can feel it.

I watch his back as he breathes. Deep breaths…and then slower ones. I watch him fit those jagged edges back together. Then I watch him start on coffee. Beans into a grinder, paper filter into an old coffee maker. He turns on the water at the kitchen sink and puts his hands under the steaming faucet. God, he is so very gorgeous. I would never stop touching him if he were mine. I don’t think we’d leave the bed.

“Are you gonna go?” His voice startles me. He turns the water off and looks over his shoulder again.

I grab a blanket, wrapping it around myself with shaky hands before I walk slowly over to him. “Do you want me to go?”

His eyes move to mine. “Yes. Because you’re the D.A., Elise. You don’t need to be within a mile of me.”

“It worked just like you thought it should,” I hear myself say. “You thought I shouldn’t be around you. Now it’s fixed so I can’t.”

Tears sting my eyes. Now it’s my turn to lock my jaw and look down at the floor and try to hold myself together.

“It’s okay.” The words are soft and slow. But when I look back up at him, I find he’s got his cheek between his molars. “Nothing is wrong with me.” He inhales deeply, his face tensing almost painfully as he says, “Ever since that time with Tony…I remember everything I do. Even things I wish I didn’t.”

He looks down. I think he’s embarrassed, but I can’t be sure—because I don’t know him the way I used to. He is different. He seems more closed off, as if the acts involved in being close with someone else are unfamiliar to him. He seems…heavy. Maybe that’s just regret about what happened between us. I tell myself it is, because I can’t stand thinking he’s unhappy as a way of life.