She would have her two months, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be watching over her.
She was mine, and I protected what was mine.
Chapter 18
Mary
Two months later
I turned onto my side on my bed and lifted my knees up high, curling up in a ball. I grasped the collar of the hockey jersey I was wearing and brought it to my nose, inhaling deeply. I bit my lip as tears formed. It no longer smelled like him. That was to be expected. It had been two months.
Two full months.
Two months of obsessively checking my phone for a text message or phone call that never came. Two months of my heart skipping a beat every time I heard someone at my apartment door. Two months of looking over my shoulder, wondering if he was somewhere nearby, watching.
I pulled up the thick silver chain I kept around my neck, exposing Vaska’s heavy silver signet ring that dangled from it. During a sentimental moment, I had strung it on a chain around my neck and had not taken it off once since that terrible day I’d told him goodbye. I wore it close to my heart and often touched it just to feel its warmth.
Two full months—and nothing from him.
No contact whatsoever. Damn him.
The first week had been brutal. Emma returned home, and we clung to each other and cried for a week straight. I was a fraud. She thought I was crying for her and her broken heart over Dimitri, who had broken up with her shortly after they returned to Chicago, but that wasn’t entirely true. Of course I had been scared to death for my friend, and beyond happy when she returned safely, but I cried as much for Vaska as I did for her.
I’d never told her about my brief… I’m not even sure what you would call it? A fling seemed too lighthearted. An affair seemed too seedy and yet it was too short of a time to truly call it a relationship. Whatever you called my intense time with Vaska, I had kept it to myself. Emma was hurting and the last thing I’d wanted to do was pile on my pain as well.
After a week of crying together, I remember sitting on her bed and trying to coax her out of her funk, hoping it would coax me out of mine. “Look, I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you’ll get over him.” Maybe I could take my own advice.
Her eyes had teared up. “No, I won’t.”
I’d stroked her back. “Everyone feels that way about the first guy they’ve loved, but eventually you move on.” Again, fingers crossed.
She objected, “I don’t want to move on. I know you think it’s crazy and will probably say I just met the guy and barely know him but…”
A few weeks ago, yes, I’d have thought she was crazy. I would have lectured her about confusing a silly crush with long-lasting love. I would have been relentless in trying to convince her that what she was feeling was nothing more than an infatuation. But now I knew it was possible to fall in love at first sight. To know, deep down inside, that you’d met the person you wanted to be with for the rest of your life. I knew what it felt like to be confused and excited and scared all at the same time. I knew precisely how she was thinking and feeling. How she was now questioning her own reasoning, doubting her own heart. Wondering if it had all been real or just a product of her overactive imagination.
“Actually, I think I’d focus more on the whole he’s-a-dangerous-Russian-mobster angle more than the you-two-crazy-kids-just-met trope,” I quipped as I opened a bag of Doritos, trying to hide the truth of my own emotions behind humor, hoping she wouldn’t see through it.
She snatched a chip out of the bag. “So he has his faults. No guy is perfect.”
“Emma. The man is a fucking mobster! A criminal. I’d say that is a pretty big fault.” Who was I trying to convince, her or me?
“It’s not like he’s out there robbing banks or shooting up restaurants! Besides, from what I’ve seen, he’s mostly a businessman. If you think about it, half of corporate America are criminals in one way or another.” She grabbed a handful of Doritos.
“Emma, if you are going to accept the man for what he is, then you can’t justify it or paint it a color it isn’t. You have to look at this in black and white terms.”
“Does it make me a bad person if I say I don’t care if he’s a criminal?”
I adjusted the red kerchief in my hair to give myself time to think. “A few days ago, I would have said yes. That you couldn’t possibly consider being with a man like that… Now, I don’t know.”
She looked at me slyly. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Dimitri’s friend, Vaska?”
Fuck. I should have known I wouldn’t be able to completely hide my feelings from Emma.
I let out a frustrated sigh. “That man is the most insufferable, brutish, stubborn, obstinate, mule-headed person I’ve ever met.”
“You do realize all those words are technically synonyms?”
Not wanting to reveal any more than I already had, I sprang off the bed. “Fuck this iced tea. I’m getting the tequila.”
I returned with a bottle of Cuervo and my favorite Rhett Butler shot glasses that said I Don’t Give a Damn in black scroll.
After I poured us both a shot, Emma raised her glass and toasted, “To bad choices!”
We drank.
I looked down at my glass and voiced my own fears. “What if he gets you killed?”
She snatched the bottle and poured us another shot. “That’s not a fair question. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life is random.”
“It most certainly is a fair question! You were kidnapped by a lunatic who held a gun to your head because of him.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“He may not be directly responsible, but you have to face facts. If you’d been there with a boring accountant, the likelihood of something like that happening dramatically decreases.”
We both drank, not bothering to toast.
“Why did Buffy love Angel… or fuck Spike?”
I poured us a third shot. “I get it. He’s your Angel and Spike all rolled into one.” That is precisely how I feel about Vaska. I raised my arm high. “To bad boys!”
“To bad boys!” Emma shouted. We both drank.
“Well, okay. You love him and damn the consequences… so what are you going to do about it?”
Emma huffed, “Hello! He broke up with me!”
“So what? You think Elizabeth or Beatrice or Catherine or Jane or Bathsheba would take that lying down? You think they’d be curled up in bed in their pajamas feeling sorry for themselves? Ask yourself, WWBD?”
What Would Buffy Do? Maybe I should be asking myself the same thing.
Emma sat up straighter. “No! No, they wouldn’t!”
“You’re damn straight they wouldn’t!”
“Mary, I have an idea, but I’m going to need your help.”
“Hell, yeah! Let’s go get that criminal demon vampire bad boy of yours!”
That day Emma had gotten her beloved Dimitri back… and now, weeks later, I was still curled up in my bed like a sap, pining after Vaska, while wearing his old hockey jersey.
This was so fucked up. At the time, I’d had no idea if I was giving Emma terrible or good advice. On the one hand, I believed what I said to her, but on the other I wasn’t following my own damn advice. I was telling her to trust in her heart and go get Dimitri back while at the same time I was desperately trying to forget and move on from Vaska.