Now Or Never by Stella Rhys

27

IAIN

She tookme by the hand to lead me to her room, and as soon as she turned on her lamp, she went to light the candles at her desk and flick on the string lights decorating her window and bookshelf.

Wandering in slowly, I smiled.

I looked at the bed I’d bought her. The stacks of notebooks on her white desk and the familiar bulletin board tacked with an array of colorful pictures. Printouts of the Minx logo. The Minx offices. Magazine rip outs of New York, Milan and L.A.

I recognized it all, because back in the day, this bulletin board was what hung on the wall right across her always-open bedroom door, which I always had to pass to get to Adam’s room.

“This actually feels… a lot like your old room,” I said when I finished taking it all in. Her little laugh drew my eyes back to her.

“I know. Is that weird for you?” she asked, her head tilted at me as she undid the buttons of her skirt.

“Honestly, yeah,” I said so quickly and bluntly it made her laugh. “And it doesn’t help that you’re taking your clothes off right now,” I added as she pushed her skirt to the floor, flashing me her thin white panties.

I swallowed, knowing well how smooth she was under there.

Fuck.

Forcing my stare back up, I caught her smirking at my look of visible torture.

“Sorry, it’s just I take my clothes off at the end of the day,” she said smartly, crossing the room in her top and panties. “And actually, you’re going to need to do the same thing if you want to get in my clean bed,” she added, opening up her closet.

I stared at her ass as she bent over to pull something out.

“Here,” she said, turning around to bring me a change of clothes. “This is stuff I stole from Adam forever ago because it’s super soft.”

I looked down at it. Grey sweats. A thoroughly worn Empires T-shirt that made me break into a laugh.

“Wow. I haven’t seen this in so long,” I remarked, running my thumb over the faded old logo. “You realize this was mine, right?”

“What?” Holland was already back at her closet, but she looked over her shoulder with a big, quizzical smile. “Really?”

“Yeah. I know you guys were an Empires family but your brother was always secretly rooting for California teams.”

“I guess he always knew he wanted to escape there eventually. And good thing he did, or he would’ve never met you,” she said as she turned around and backed into her small closet to change behind the door—no doubt for my horny sake.

I smirked, whipping off my tie and getting changed myself as she spoke to me from behind the door.

“When I was growing up, my mom loved to talk so much about how rotten Adam was, and she would always say that the worst thing that could ever happen to us was if he found someone just like him. But high school would’ve been actual hell on Earth if it weren’t for you, so I should’ve known from the jump that she was full of shit.”

When she reappeared from behind the closet door, she was wearing thin blue shorts and the same T-shirt she used to wear to sleep in high school.

It was white with a square picture in the center of palm trees over a pink L.A sunset.

Christ. I raked my fingers through my hair till I was rubbing the back of my neck as I stared, because the color was faded and the fit was definitely tighter now, the palm trees stretching wide and the cotton stretching thin around her perfect tits, but it was the same shirt she’d always worn around the house when she was in high school.

And the fact that it was making my dick hard was probably evident to her, since she was standing in front of me, quietly smiling as she observed the way I looked in this outfit. I knew it was because this was how she remembered me for the longest time. Relaxed and at ease. Walking around her house in a T-shirt and sweats.

There was an actual twinkle in her eye as she looked at me, and she was so fucking cute that it took awhile for me to remember what she’d just been talking about.

It took even longer as I watched her crawl onto her bed, dangling off the side for a second to pull her notebook and pen out of her bag, but then setting it in her lap and settling in.

“I think you’re the only person in the world who misses the old version of me,” I said when I finally remembered.

She uncapped her pen and peered up at me as I sat against the edge of her desk.

“Yeah, I really doubt that’s true,” she said easily as she opened her notebook, flipping to the latest page before writing something in.

My eyebrows moved. I knew what I’d said was right, but she’d been so confident in her assertion just now that I couldn’t help but ask, “Why?”

“Because you were the best,” she said without looking up, making me smirk. She finished what she was writing, dotting her sentence with a period before looking at me. “I mean you might’ve been a little wild—” I didn’t realize I’d already started shaking my head till she cut off. “Okay, a lot wild,” she corrected. “But—”

“Stop,” I cut her off gently, my voice easy but my heart already beating a little faster in my chest. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

I paused.

“Talk about me like…” Like I was actually a good person. I swallowed before I found a way to finish my sentence. “Like I was so great.”

She gave me a look. “I’m not saying any of this to boost your ego, Iain. I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Your truth,” I said.

“Still valid,” she countered.

I quieted. She sounded suddenly a bit terse and I didn’t want to upset her. No matter what I believed.

So for the next few moments, I just watched her write in silence. But I could feel it in the air that I wasn’t off the hook. That she was thinking hard right now. Remembering.

She didn’t look up as she asked, “Why did you leave?”

I swallowed.

She was talking about five years ago. When I up and disappeared.

From her life. From mine.

It took me awhile to find my answer, but she didn’t rush me, only peering up once between writing.

“I needed to get away from the person I was,” I finally said.

“Why is that?”

I paused again. Drew in a deep breath. I didn’t realize I’d zoned out on Holland’s notebook in her lap till I looked up to find her eyes on me.

“Because I couldn’t defend that person anymore,” I answered.

She frowned. “We’ve all done bad things before, Iain,” she said, and just as the thought crossed my mind, she said, “I know you don’t think I have, but I have.”

“Like what?” I asked.

She just looked at me for a second. “You never did anything that terrible,” she said, decidedly skipping my question. “I mean you and Adam were the same. You did all the same things, and look at him. He didn’t feel like he had to change.”

I shook my head. “Adam has changed,” I asserted. “You can’t keep getting into bar fights, getting arrested for reckless driving and keep your high profile job at Engelman. Trust me on this, Holland. The things we did, the way we were—it wasn’t a sustainable way to live. At all.”

Her eyebrows lifted a little and stayed that way as she sat cross-legged on her bed, taking in the words I’d spoken with hotter insistence than I’d intended.

“Well, Adam still does all the things he used to do,” she finally said. “Party. Let loose. Get into trouble here and there. He didn’t go cold turkey like you.”

“Well, that’s just how I do things,” I said, because it was true.

All my life, I’d only ever lived at extremes.

All or nothing. Now or never. I didn’t know any other way.

The slight tension was palpable in the room as Holland eyed me closely, her gaze dropping from my mouth to my neck to my chest as she played with the ends of her hair. It was the look she got when she had a question brewing.

“Why didn’t you get arrested too that day?” she finally asked.

I paused, only just realizing that she knew about that night.

Then again maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, since it happened in Jersey.

Adam and I were at the Maxwell house for Thanksgiving. We’d found a closed road in the midst of a night out and chalked it up to the speed demon in us when we decided to race. I was in his car, he was in our friend’s, and we had each other on speaker as we trash talked each other to over a hundred miles an hour.

“When we heard the siren, your brother laughed,” I said as I remembered the day. “He said ‘fuck’ and then he pulled over.”

Holland nodded. “And what did you do?” she asked, a little frown pinched between her eyebrows. I kept my stare pinned tight on her as I answered.

“I went faster.”

Her eyebrows moved and I watched as she processed the fact that I wasn’t in fact the same as her brother.

I was worse.

And thinking back on it now, I could admit that I had lied to myself. Our law school friends didn’t even know the extent of shit that Adam and I got into, but when they debated whose Speed Demon was worse, they were accurate, and their lack of a verdict didn’t mean there wasn’t an answer. Because there was.

Maxwell’s strikes more often, but Thorn’s does more damage, our friend Caleb would say. A fuckton more.

The room was silent and still as I remembered those words. A thousand memories flashed behind our eyes as Holland and I gazed at each other, but the only actual movement came in the warm flickering of the candles in the corners of our vision, one on her nightstand, the other on the desk.

“Do you miss doing these things?” she asked to break the silence. “Getting that adrenaline rush?”

“Probably.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I don’t let myself think about it.”

“Huh.” She nodded slowly, eyeing me. Reading me.

Which was fine, because now I wanted her to.

I kept this part of myself hidden away, a secret from everyone in my life. Clients. Friends. Even Adam and I didn’t talk about it anymore. But I wanted Holland to know now. I needed her to understand because as much as I wanted it—as much as a part of me felt like I needed it—it hurt to have her looking at me the way that she did.

With adoration. All her heart.

“Is that why you keep yourself so busy?” she asked. “To bury the old feelings?”

“Yes,” I said, watching her nod slowly, the understanding washing over her. Because now she knew why I’d been gone from her life for the past five years.

While she was working hard to fix herself the right way, I was working just as hard to do it wrong.

To bury everything deep.

I didn’t think twice about it at the time. I just needed to erase the old me however I could, and considering the urgency, I’d never once regretted the way I went about it. Until Holland. Until I saw the good she’d done for herself. All the hard work she’d put in. It made me wish for the first time that I’d done things the right way. The way that she did.

But it was too late to change things now, because I was in too deep with my own faulty system. I had lives and careers, hundreds of millions of dollars depending on the man I’d become based on a foundation of lies. On the burial ground of skeletons I wasn’t willing to unearth.

It was pure fantasy to think that it could change at this point.

Okay,I pumped the brakes just as I felt my chest twisting harder than I could handle anymore.

“I never got to ask you what that was,” I changed the subject abruptly.

It took a moment for me to even catch up with myself. To realize I’d dropped my eyes again to the notebook in Holland’s lap.

I’d first seen her with it that day I came back early from Boston. She’d been writing so furiously in it before I found her in the bathroom. Before I fucked her like I’d never fucked anyone in my life.

When I looked up, she had a hint of a smile on her lips, as if she too was remembering when I’d first seen the thing.

“It’s my gratitude journal,” she answered, giving me a much-needed laugh, because it already sounded exactly like something she’d be into. She smirked at me and just like that, the air shifted back to something breathable. “Glad you find it so funny.”

“I’m not laughing at you, I just think you’re really fucking cute,” I said honestly. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“Just what it sounds like,” she said lightly, running her hand over the page. “You just write down all the things you’re grateful for every day. Doesn’t matter how big or small. It could be that I’m grateful for finding a miracle roommate in Mia or just that I caught the L right as the doors were closing. It just keeps things in perspective,” she shrugged. “Forces you to look at all the good in your life.”

“And I take it this is the secret ritual you do during your me time.”

“I write what I’m grateful for every day. All the firsts. First time on the subway. First time giving directions. First time trying champagne. And then on my me days, I write myself a little summary. Just to reflect on the week. Remind myself what strides I’ve made,” she explained. When she looked up at me, she laughed. “Yeah, I know. It sounds like some mystical bullshit, but you asked me before how I got to a place where I wasn’t always mad at everything, and this was it.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really.”

“Mm-hm. You should try it. You wouldn’t think it, but it’s always the simplest things that make the biggest difference,” she said, flipping back through the pages. “You’re in a lot of it,” she said with a laugh. Then she paused. “In a lot of the old ones too.”

I cracked a smile, my chest actually warming at the thought of teenage Holland writing about me in her room.

There was another beat or two of quiet before she looked up at me again.

“Are you going to come to bed at all?” she asked, making me immediately wish that I could.

“I was actually about to go in the living room for a bit to make some calls.”

She hit me with a look of disbelief. “It’s almost 2AM.”

“Yeah. Which means it’s almost 11PM on the West Coast and my clients just got home from their games,” I said, eyeing the distorted palm trees on her shirt as she crossed her arms. “Plus, I told myself I wasn’t going to touch you tonight and you’re making it very hard on me right now.”

She smirked and said “fine,” though she swung her legs right off the bed and insisted on coming out to the living room to make sure I had all the pillows and comfort I needed to work. I asked her what time she had to wake up in the morning, silenced my own alarm and then settled in on her couch as she headed back to her room.

But just before she disappeared into the small hallway, she turned and said, “Hey.”

I looked up at her. “Yeah?”

Hanging in the frame of the hall, she looked at me for a couple seconds.

“I just wanted to say that growing up, you were the best person I knew,” she said unabashedly. “That’s all.”

And then she went back to her room, leaving me alone on the couch, staring for another five, ten seconds at where she’d just been.

Wondering how she always managed to do this to me.

Anytime I said something, she made me question it. Every time I said I wouldn’t do something, she proved me wrong.

At my core, I knew the person I was. A person who lived to repent. That had been my truth since I’d started over here five years ago.

But with every day, every hour spent with Holland, that truth kept getting pushed farther and farther away.