Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 24
The last timeI saw him, his hands were all over me. Now he’s brushing up against me, one hand deep in the pocket of his shorts and the other digging a credit card through the gap between the door and the wall. His expression is unreadable, placid. I try not to watch the muscle in his bicep flex as he works.
“Do you miss me at all?” something prompts me to say. Just standing here with him, so close and so familiar, yet feeling like there’s a barrier between us. Every single time, it breaks my heart a little more.
“Uh,” he says, and then something clicks and he gets the door open. He holds it open and gestures me inside. I quickly snatch up my bank card. “I don’t want to answer that.”
Not what I’d thought he’d say. My head shakes on its own, saying ‘no’ when my mouth can’t find words yet. He shuts the door behind me. “What does that mean? Because you do?”
“Because I don’t,” he says on an exhale, checking the door and then sweeping across the room to his father’s big, expensive mahogany desk. A laptop and several thick files sit on the top, and there are shelves and filing cabinets all along two of the four walls. Noticeably, on his desk is a picture of middle-school Gunnar, grinning at the camera in his mother’s arms. She wears a large sunhat and a white dress, and she looks beautiful, holding him tight. There are no other pictures on the desk.
Poor Ransom. The child of an affair that Preston probably wishes the whole town doesn’t know about. His pictures are nowhere to be seen. I’d always thought Ransom was a cute kid, even when Gunnar found him intolerable.
For some reason, Gunnar’s casually cruel comment slides right off me right now. I’m in Preston Rayne’s office. I’m sure ‘Because I don’t’ will creep into my mind some night in the future and squeeze my chest, but right now I feel nothing.
“Why do you keep …” I start, and he folds his arms and squints at me until I find the rest of my words, “touching me like that, then?”
He makes a big show of ignoring me this time. His jaw clenches and he turns around, opening and closing the drawers in one of the filing cabinets. He has no idea what he’s looking for, I bet, because neither do I. And I’m the one who came here to do this.
I start with the laptop. I power it on and while I wait I open and search through the top file. It’s jargon and spreadsheets and it pretty much means absolutely nothing to me. I guess I shouldn’t ever run my own businesses in the future. That sucks for me. I move on to the second file just as the prompt for Preston’s password appears on the computer screen.
“Hey, do—” I begin.
“Because our deal only lasted while we were friends,” he says suddenly, talking over me completely. I almost flinch, because Gunnar’s voice carries and we are absolutely not supposed to be in here.
“I understand,” I say slowly, and point at the screen. Our deal, never crossing that line, only existed because we were such close friends. I get that, really, I do. But my question is why does he want me at all? He hates me, he wants me gone, and by his own admission he doesn’t even miss me. This isn’t my priority right now, though. “Do you know your dad’s password?”
“No,” he says, his voice a growl. He’s having some kind of internal debate, and I bite my lip when I see the angry light dancing in his eyes.
There is no doubt in my mind that I am perilously close to getting under his skin.
“Can you guess it?” I ask, gesturing. “The quicker I find nothing, the quicker I leave.” He was already on his way to the computer, until I added that second part. Then, maybe it’s my imagination, but he slowed down.
“So you already think you’ll find nothing,” he repeats impassively, tapping something into the bar. A big red X appears. No good.
“Honestly, Gunnar, I’m starting to realize that even if I had undeniable evidence that your dad had unscrupulously bankrupted the Waller family, I probably wouldn’t recognize that’s what it was.” I sigh, rubbing at my eyes. “Also, what would it prove? Somehow, somewhere in here, there’s proof that your dad killed a kid? His son’s friend? No way he’s that stupid.” I wrap my arms around myself. He tries another password. No good.
“My dad— What?” It takes him a second to internalize what I said, and then he leans back in his father’s leather chair and stares at me.
I shuffle around on my feet. “Well, yeah.” This is going to sound stupid, but I say it anyway. “I know Cole was digging around, trying to prove your dad had used some shady loopholes. What if he found the evidence he needed?” I gesture around at the office. “What if your dad caught him?”
Gunnar snorts. The laughter tumbles from him like it’s nothing, and he turns back to the computer screen. “This is ridiculous. What about the note, then? In this universe, my dad planted the note?”
The air around my skin cools dramatically, but my face flames. “The what?”
“The note, Andie. The note.” He brings his hands up, but when he sees the shock on my face he drops them into his lap. “I guess you ran away before word got out.”
I’m trying and failing to speak.
“The note said that, well, you were the love of his life. It was really pretty beautiful, actually. Quoted his favorite book.” I see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. Then he gives a bitter laugh. “Said you had his heart but you’d been cheating on him, treating him like shit, for a while. Then walking in on you confirmed everything: that he had nothing. He didn’t want to live anymore. Because of you. Not because of my father, Andie. You.”
It takes me so long to react that I’m honestly surprised Gunnar is still sitting in here with me when I finally recover from that shock.
And I start to laugh.
“What?” he demands, and gets up from his seat. He raps his knuckles on the mahogany as if trying to snap me out of it, but I can’t. I’m lightheaded. There are no words to explain how I feel. I have invented a wholly new feeling. “What?”
“Gunnar,” I say, bringing my hands up to my head. “That proves it.”
“Yes, it d—”
“It proves he was killed. Oh my God. He was killed.” I feel a twisting, shattering feeling. I have never been so sure about this before. My lungs constrict. The world lurches. Gunnar catches me before I realize I’m falling. “He was killed, someone killed him,” I keep saying. I grab at him, righting myself, and he lowers me into a chair.
“I, uh, I didn’t realize you didn’t know about the note,” he says. It’s not an apology — in his mind he has nothing to apologize for — but he sounds very slightly guilty, still.
I turn to him and I take his hand. Surprise flickers across his handsome face, but he doesn’t snatch his hand away. He lets me grip him while my mind stops reeling. “Gunnar, I wasn’t the love of his life. He was in a relationship with somebody else when he died. If the note named me — by name? Did it?”
He nods. “Yes. It called you out by name. Andie. Several times. I think there was an ‘Andrea’, even. No two ways about it. What do you mean—”
“Listen to me,” I interrupt, my voice catching. I’m exhilarated and I’m terrified and I’m sick to my stomach. I can’t calm down. “He was in love with someone else. Please believe me. He never would have written that about me. And he knew I was … in love with you. And he thought it was great. He would talk to me about— He was helping me figure out how to—” Tears prick at the backs of my eyes and I feel so frustrated I can’t prove any of this, or even word it very well.
His eyes are wide with confusion and concern when I look up at him. “How can I help you believe me? This proves it wasn’t suicide. Gunnar.” He just shakes his head. “Please. Someone murdered Cole.” Now I’m crying again, and my breaths are coming in shuddering gasps. “Someone killed him and left him there and got away with it.”
There’s a long silence. “I have literally no idea what to say,” he finally cuts through the silence. “I don’t know if you’re crazy, or lying, or if you believe you’re not lying, which might still just mean you’re crazy. I don’t—”
“You know me.” I stand up and grab his forearms, pressing our chests together. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t look at me either.
“You know, I don’t. If what you’re saying is true, I don’t.” He scrapes his teeth over his bottom lip. “You pretended to date someone. That’s insane. You lied about it to me for, what, years? And now you expect me to believe you wanted me, but it was a secret? Why?”
I’m shaking. “I can’t tell you everything, and maybe one day you’ll understand that. But I can tell you something.”
“What?”
I can tell him something. I have to. I have to make myself. “This is hard.”
“Uh, OK.” He looks around the room as if searching it for his own feelings. This is really going to suck.
“You know what happened with Dom, sort of.” His muscles tense under my grip. “He didn’t like that I didn’t like having sex with him. I guess he wanted everyone to think badly of me before I got the chance to say anything bad about him.” Gunnar shrugs. “Anyway, rumors went around like crazy that I liked it rough. Really rough. Bad rough.” I step away and let myself sink down into the leather chair again.
“I remember all this,” he says, and now that I’ve released his arms he folds them tight across his chest.
“A few of his friends attacked me at a party at the Palace.” Tears spring back to my eyes and I sweep them away, furious at myself for them. “I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me,” I add. He nods once. “It was so soon after Dom. I was still … sore. I cried. I struggled. Finally, someone opened the door. I bolted before they could really, you know, hurt me.” I can see his jaw clench harder and harder the more I speak, but he doesn’t make eye contact. “But it was bad. And I didn’t want to be with anyone. Not for years.”
“Why did you lie to me about that?”
“Because you were so uncomfortable talking about that stuff with me,” I mumble. “And I hated that you might think I was weak, or stupid. Just a dumb girl. I also didn’t want to deal with you trying to get revenge. I didn’t want to deal with any of it.” I look up and catch his eyes. “Apparently you beating the shit out of people who hurt me was something I had to be worried about. So you fucking lied to me too.”
He brings a hand up to sweep over his face at that, then releases a heavy breath. “Yes, I lied to you about that. I didn’t want you to think it was your fault. It was his fault that I did that. And, well, mine. A little.”
To my surprise, I laugh softly. He exhales; a sound that could almost be a laugh, too.
“So, yes, I would say that I was in love with you,” I say. Every time I say it, it gets a little easier. My voice wobbles a little less. “But I didn’t want to have sex. And then, when I thought I was ready for a real relationship, and I was ready to tell you the truth, that night happened.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “There. I told you the truth.”
“So the whole thing with Cole … you’re saying it …”
“Yeah. We were just friends. We kissed once. We didn’t really like it.” He doesn’t react at all. “Everyone thought we were dating. It wasn’t a big deal. It kept guys far away from me, which I really wanted.” It kept girls far away from Cole, too, for the most part.
“And he was aware of this,” he checks. I nod up at him. “He was definitely not in love with you.”
“But everyone thought he was,” I say. “So someone writing a suicide note, especially if they wrote it after somebody made up that rumor about me and Barkley at the party, would obviously have written about that. Do you understand what I’m saying now?”
“I understand what you’re saying,” he repeats, stiffly. “It just doesn’t make sense. A lot of things that don’t make sense would all have to be true for you to be telling the truth.”
He’s not wrong. “I get that.” I chew hard on my lip. “I don’t think I’m crazy, and I know I’m not lying. I don’t know what else to say.” Short of telling him Chris Barkley’s biggest secret, though there’s no telling he’d believe me if I told him. I can’t out him just to try to get Gunnar back on my side. Apparently there are barriers I won’t cross, even for him.
“You still have those same hangups?” he asks, and it takes me a second to realize what he’s asking.
“About sex?” He nods his head. “No. I’ve been doing self defense classes and therapy. The self defense is really mostly for my peace of mind, but they really helped a lot. And there was that time I saw you …” I trail off, eyes flying open wide. I almost told him about what I saw at Dallas’s party last year. The way he fucked that girl’s mouth. The way it reignited the fire inside me that had been taken away.
“The time you what?” he asks, leaning against the desk.
“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” I ask, standing up from the chair.
He stops me from walking to the door with a light touch to my hips. Electricity jolts through me, meeting between my thighs. “The time you what?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I say, irritated that he gets to have this effect on me. I struggle out of his grip, which only tightens it. “If you don’t treat me like—” He yanks me towards him, lets go of my hips as I stumble into his chest, and catches my face in his hands. Before I can say anything, or move, he presses his lips against mine. It’s hot, quick, and there is aggression in it, but it’s not violent. Not like last time. His tongue is between my lips, pushing them apart, and then penetrating. He groans, sliding his hand down and grabbing a handful of my ass. I make a noise I can’t really identify against his lips.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, lips still on mine. His tone isn’t kind; it’s accusatory. He catches my lower lip between his teeth. It doesn’t hurt, but it stings. When he lets go, I shake my head, and pull him back in again. For the first time with him, I have the use of my hands. I run my palm up from the waistband of his shorts to his chest, catching on the fabric of his shirt and dragging it up. The tight muscle of his stomach, the dusting of dark hair leading down, is exposed. He dips his head and drags the tip of his tongue from my collarbone up the side of my throat, feeling my heartbeat.
“Why are you doing this?”
Both hands are on my ass, and he’s grinding me into him. It’s not enough. He lifts my leg and pulls it, setting my knee down on the desk behind him. I am wearing leggings, but I can feel his steel-hard erection now against me. “I want to figure out what the lies are,” he says gruffly.
“Tell me you miss me,” I say, laying my hands on his chest. I can feel his cock throb. His eyelids flutter.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.” He takes my wrists and pulls me close again, nipping at my lips, my jawline, groaning deep in his throat with frustration. “I don’t know.” His hips buck, and at the angle we’re in, I would have been impaled on his cock if we were naked. I feel the wide head, even through our clothes.
His fingers brush over my nipples, feeling how hard they are. For him. “Maybe you do like me,” he says against my hair. It makes me weak. I’m almost leaning my full weight against him, like I can’t support myself when he touches me.
“You want to know for sure?” I ask, cupping his cheeks so I can brush my lips against his. His breathing is heavy, hot, and his full lips keep finding mine in the dark. He nods as if in slow motion. I take his hand and run it down my chest, my stomach. With a soft, almost agonized sound, Gunnar pushes his hand under the waistband of my pants, and my pink cotton underwear, and his fingertips brush my clit. I am frozen still, in disbelief that this is happening. With him. Like this. He gently, slowly, moves his hand down further.
“I didn’t think you’d be shaved,” he says, and another wave of arousal ripples through me so much that my hips buck slightly against his hand. When his first two fingers find my pussy, he slides them slow, almost imperceptibly softly, between my lips. My hand runs up his leg and finds his cock, thick and diamond-cutter hard, straining against his shorts. I palm the head through the material and he tilts his head back and lets his mouth fall open for a second before crashing his lips against mine like they belong there. There is a growing wet spot where his cock head meets the fabric. His fingers circle me, sliding back up to stroke at my clit.
“Fuck,” he says, deep and low and like he’s close to completely losing control. “Fuck. Touch me.” I barely realized I was stroking his cock through his shorts, squeezing the base and then trailing my fingertips up to feel that wetness at the head again.
“Admit that you don’t hate me,” I get out. “Admit that you can’t hate me.” I’m not fooling around with someone who thinks all those things about me. “I just need you to say something. Something nice. Something—”
His fingers thrust inside me, taking me by surprise and I nearly lose my balance. They are long, beautiful fingers. Fingers I’ve held, squeezed, stared at while he played the piano. Now they’re fucking me in short, staccato motions like he can barely focus on what he’s doing. I hiss a breath in through my teeth as it builds and builds, so fast; faster than ever before.
“Are you OK?”
I pull away from him. He holds my gaze in his, fingers still crooked and chest rising and falling. I don’t know what I want. My heart is beating, my head is swimming, and I’m completely soaked. More than I ever have been. “I’m fine. I don’t … I don’t have a problem with that stuff anymore. I told you.” He goes to grab me again and I step away, trying not to look at the hard-on in the thin material of his shorts. His teeth are dragging across his lower lip, his eyelids heavy.
“So what’s the problem, Andie?” he asks, his voice low. An edge of danger. Something flicks through his eyes, and he licks his fingers without looking away from me. The need in me surges. Nobody has ever made me feel like that. Just for a few seconds, he touched me like he knows me. He touched me like he owns me. And he doesn’t. “We can do whatever we want. The deal’s off.”
I take another step back. “You’re the problem,” I say. “You said awful things to me, did awful things to me. And you don’t even know if you believe me about this. Not to mention: Aren’t you in a thing with Aurelia?” I can’t control the vicious shudder in my body when I say that last part.
Ugh.
His mouth quirks upwards. “Does that bother you?”
“It is bothering me every time I learn how much of an asshole you’ve always been. How stupid I was.” I straighten up my clothes some more to keep my hands occupied.
“We’re not together, if you’re really that desperate to know.” When I make a face, he laughs. “We have an arrangement. Had … an arrangement.”
“Gross,” I mutter. “Why?”
His answer is quick, and he looks straight at me. “She’s the hottest girl I know. And she really means a lot to me,” he says, as if he knows exactly what to say to rip inside me. It’s so tailor-made to hurt me that it’s almost funny instead. I bite my lip and try not to laugh. “You don’t know her like I do. Aura has really gone through a lot this—”
“Aura?” I repeat. Ew.
“She just needs … a friend.”
I rock on my heels as if that last part literally knocked me back. “You’re going to look back on this one day,” I say steadily, “and realize how you were with me when I really needed a friend.” I start to walk away.
“If you leave …” he says, his voice steady. He takes an annoyed breath and rearranges himself so he isn’t tenting his pants. “We should stop doing this. It isn’t helping anything.”
“We?” I repeat.
He twists his face into that fascinatingly normal smile. I hate that he can make such a convincing, winning expression no matter what the hell his mood is. I’ve always hated that. At least I can recognize that it isn’t real. I know his real smile, his real laugh. I know when he’s being real, because he’s less perfect.
“That’s fair. I should stop this. And I will.” He gestures to the door. “But Andie,” he adds.
I stalk towards the doorway, but I pause when he says my name so softly like that.
“You need to understand that you either prove what you said to me today, or you leave town forever.” His eyes darken and he stands up straight in the dark room. “Before it’s too late.”