I balk, my mouth going dry at the thought. My cup of Joe almost tries to climb back up my throat, and I push it down, my head swimming from all the conflicting notions fighting in my overworked brain.
My dad said that? My mind tells me No way…despite what Jesse says.
It doesn’t make any sense. Considering my father’s past. Considering my past with him.
Truth was…my father didn’t trust my judgment. Never said a kind word about my intellect.
He pressured me into attending Harvard Law—harassed me into it, in fact. Every step of the “Ivy-covered” way, he’d tried to beat me into submission, bend me to the will of the Sparrow way.
Shock wasn’t the word for what his lawyer had told me about his living will. I’d never imagined my father would leave his shareholdings and the future of the firm in my Harvard-dropout hands.
Hearing Jesse’s confessions about my father pushes a button in me—a button I didn’t know could be pressed. A stinging sears its way behind my eyes, but the burning subsides when the delivery guy—Steve What’s-His-Face—steps into the glossy gray-painted break room, his smile wide as our gazes collide.
I punch Jesse’s shoulder lightly, feeling a tingle form underneath my tightening fingers. In the clear light of day, I feel every bit of the asshole David King is, and because I can’t have what I really crave, I opt for the next strongest item. I storm out.
Jesse calls over my shoulder. “Is it lunch time already?”
Halfway down the hallway, I stalk into my own office space. “Not quite.” I reach for my wallet and keys. I glance at Somerset throwing him the jingling set.
“Not unless Jameson has enough calories to count as a full brunch.”
I stalk quietly to the elevators without looking back.
Chapter Twenty-Three
VIOLET
Friday afternoon
My heart feels heavy in my chest, no matter how hard I run.
This morning’s jog is one of the worst I’d ever had.
Completing my jog through Central Park isn’t the toughest; keeping my mind off of Heath is. And as I cross the trail through the park’s Bridle Path loop, my headphones in, and my Nikes on, I can’t quite get the sexy asshole out of my head, last night’s late rendezvous and later trip to police headquarters sticking like a thumbtack in my mind.
The air is crisp, ripe to the taste. I inhale it steadily, not letting the frigid temperatures stop the one habit I love to have—the only habit I’ve kept to myself after my divorce left me decimated.
Jogging was my release. My sin and my sanctuary.
When my mind is full of chaos, running is what I escape to first, and this morning, through the December frost and winterized forest, even the lap around the Reservoir, through the Meadows and up across 102nd Street can’t save me from my scandalous memories, my body still on the path, but my head still stuck in Heath’s apartment. Thinking. Dreaming. Wondering what if…
What if he didn’t get that call? What if we had finished what we started?
Would I still be the same? Would anything be?
What was the protocol for fucking your boss when part of you wasn’t so sure about him? When a piece of you still believed he might revert to the prick he’d been just several months prior?
Heath was a playboy. That was a given.
It went without saying that the New York investor-slash-Hollywood producer was a male-slut on every coast, and a part of me had been ashamed at how fast he’d almost talked me into his bed, how quickly I was willing to throw caution to the wind just to let his lips feed on mine on top of his quartz counters.
Only hours after, he’d made me regret my decision, pushing me away in as harsh a manner as anyone could. I recount the sordid scene as I cut across West Drive, my heartbeat drumming in my ears.
“Heath?” I called again to him in that secluded back seat. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes,” he answered, his stare as cold as the dry earth and just as brown. “You can stay away from me.”
I blinked, my brain barely able to keep up with the scathing words coming from his mouth. “What…?”
“I’m serious, Keats,” he said, his clipped tone cutting the very wings on which I’d flown just hours before. The high I’d had from being with Heath was falling at my feet, and I crashed to earth, shattering into a million pieces at his pricey soles.
“This?” He motioned between us. “This can’t work. It never does. I don’t…” He grit his teeth. “I don’t know how to be close to people.”
I said his name again, my touch drifting to his shoulder. “Maybe you should just give it a try…”
“Why?” He turned on me, the ice in his eyes turning to anger. “You want to end up in a coma too?”
My breath hitched. “Jesus, Heath. That’s not fair.”
“Fair to who exactly? To my father who may never wake up? To my sister whose phone calls I hadn’t picked up in a week prior to the accident that almost took her life? And what about you, Keats?” He leveled at me, making my skin shudder.
“What about me?”
“I left your bed in the middle of the night, put a goddamned country between us. Didn’t that give you a hint as to the type of asshole I am?”
I said nothing. I couldn’t. In so many ways, he was right, and the hurt in Heath’s eyes when I didn’t respond was tangible—a palpable sensation that put a heaviness in the air. He turned from me, his face twisting towards the opposite window. The chill outside is nothing compared to the frost I feel when he looks away, and his voice is quiet when it returns, the tenor soft enough to cut an emotional hole into my psyche.
I sighed when he said “See? Even you know it… I think it’s best you cut your losses now.”
“Heath…” I uttered, an attempt to recover.
“Just go!” He yelled suddenly, scaring me half-to-death. The sound was a shock to my system, and I fleed, my eyes filling with tears as I reached for the car door, wrenching it open. My body was just as bewildered as my brain, my senses overwhelmed. Both raged against me, in a battle with absolutely no winners, and I fought the urge to listen to either, sprinting up the steps to my Brooklyn brownstone, chest hurting, my head swimming and small pieces of my soul breaking along the way.
Even now, jogging in my favorite place on Earth, I can feel those pieces missing.
Different types of pieces than those that had broken, fractured and flailed from what was once the worst thing to ever happen to me.
My divorce.
It’s an event that feels like forever ago, despite the passing of just two years—a time warp I will never understand.
Somehow this is deeper. More visceral.
When a marriage ends, it feels like the world does. And I remember a time it felt like the sky was falling around me, that the very ground beneath my feet was going to swallow me whole and spit me out.
But I recovered. Bounced back more than I ever thought possible.
Maybe it was because the pieces I thought were missing when my ex, Jeffrey, left were just hiding. Sitting around, tapping their feet. Waiting for me to get my shit together.