Scandalized

“I didn’t want to sleep in my bed.” It’s all I’m willing to give him. “The last time I was there you were with me.”

Alec reaches up, pinching the bridge of his nose, covertly wiping his eyes. “I get it. I changed hotels for the same reason.”

Don’t break, I tell myself when he confesses this, imagining the insanity of him even trying to leave the Waldorf Astoria, let alone check in somewhere else. He would be absolutely mobbed. What on earth would make it worth it?

Alec shifts on his feet, clearing his throat once and then again. I fix my attention on the ground between us, trying to unchain everything I’m feeling, separating anger from sadness from fear from longing, binning them into different spaces in my body so I can make room to breathe.

When he speaks, his words are hoarse. “I’ll never be able to apologize enough for how I behaved on Friday.”

He’s probably right, and there’s nothing for me to say. I wanted to talk to him, to help him fix this—help us both fix it—but he shut me out. All my words have dried up.

Silence yawns between us. “To be honest, the entire affair was a mistake,” I say with careful control. “Your career is a mess. I’ve been fired.” He barely reacts, and my anger flares. “The moment I saw you at the hotel room in LA, I should have turned around and walked back out.”

I don’t look at his face so I can’t be sure, but I imagine Alec staring at me like he knows it would have been easier to split atoms in my fists than to walk away from him that morning.

Not that it would have mattered anyway—someone still took photos of us in Seattle. I was screwed from the very beginning.

“I know you’re angry,” Alec says, “and I get it. I absolutely get it. But I was in an impossible position. I needed to figure out a plan with Sunny. I couldn’t just…” He falters. “I couldn’t just lay her story out there to save my own ass, like it was that simple.”

I’m still so mad, I’m not even willing to own the fact out loud that it would have been easier to handle all of this if I’d included his account in the write-up. Because with a couple days’ distance—even feeling messy and hurt—I still don’t regret my instinct to try to protect the people I love. I don’t regret only using information I got cleanly.

“So why did you bother staying in LA?” I ask. “Why aren’t you in London, figuring it out with Sunny?”

He stares at me and then blinks away, jaw tight. I wait another few seconds for an answer before I realize one isn’t coming.

Whatever, I think. Say your piece. Be done. I swallow, pushing the next words out. “Your loyalty to the people in your life is one of the things that I love most about you.” He snaps his attention back to my face. “But what about me?” I ask, and the dam breaks. “You decided to protect your sister, and I understand, but you threw me away so quickly. When things first started with us, the story was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. But then, all of a sudden, you were the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. And here I ended up with neither.”

Alec sucks in a shaking breath, nostrils flared. “I know.”

“You told me you were going to do your best to make me love you,” I say, “and then twelve hours later had me get my shit out of your hotel room and told me you were leaving town and to ‘please take care.’ I realize I’ve only had you for fourteen days, and Sunny is your blood, but it still tore me in half to be thrown away like that. You could have at least talked to me.”

He opens his mouth but closes it again. I expect him to argue, but he says only, “You’re right. I could have.”

“I’m so glad I left the Batphone here,” I tell him, and he takes this like a shove to his chest. “I would have been checking it constantly. It would have killed me to see you this morning, knowing you were in town this whole time.”

“Gigi—”

I cut him off, pointing to the bag on my doorstep. “You thought I was inside, didn’t you? You weren’t even going to talk to me. Did you just swing by here on your way to the airport to leave my crap on my porch?”

Alec blinks away, staring at the ground. “I think you’re making a lot of assumptions right now.”

“You know what? I don’t actually care what you think anymore.”

In response to this, Alec bites his lip, nodding like I’ve hit my target. A horn honks at the curb, pulling his attention to the open stairwell as he says, “I wish we could just go back in time to Seattle and decide to stay there for two weeks and fuck everything else. This has been the best two weeks of my life and the worst three days of my life.”

This truth hits with startling accuracy. I hate how the easiest and most passionate relationship of my life has been trashed by circumstance. I hate the way Alec is taking the hit. And I hate that the thing I admire deeply about him—his sense of duty to his family, to the public—means that he’s doing exactly what everyone who knows him knew he would do. Alec never gets to belong to himself. Except with me, I realize. This thing that hurt me so acutely after our first night is now the deepest truth between us: He’s been real with me from that very first minute in Seattle. He knows I can handle myself. He doesn’t have to be my protector.

Suddenly my anger dissipates. I can’t let it be like this if this is the last time I see him. He looks like he hasn’t slept or eaten. I remember hating Spence enough to not even want to see his face but that isn’t the case here. I can hate Alec and myself and this situation forever, but I don’t want angry silence to be my last memory of him.

“Have you slept? Eaten anything?” I study his face, his posture, his rumpled clothes. He doesn’t look like any version of Alec Kim I’ve ever imagined. “You look terrible.”

His eyes search mine, and I remember what he asked me in the hotel that first day in LA—can see the question in his eyes right now: How mad can you be if you’re looking at me like that?

I feel it, too, that I’m not glaring at him with anger, but watching him with carefully protected adoration. I blink and startle in surprise when tears streak down my face. I didn’t even realize I’d started to cry. Alec takes a step closer, but I immediately take a step back. “Don’t.”

“Gigi…”

“I’m not going to invite you inside.” I swipe at my face. “I can’t.”