“Um, yeah, no thanks. I’ll pass.”
He opened up the back passenger door of a black sedan with dark tinted windows. “Come on. Get in the car. I don’t have time to dick around right now.”
“Then don’t. I’ll find my way home.”
I skirted around the open car door and trotted the down the sidewalk, my black lace-up boots clipping a panicky metronome over the concrete. Nearly two and a half months had elapsed since he kissed me on my birthday, and every day my anger grew and grew both at him and myself. The five or six times I saw him he looked right through me like I didn’t exist. An invisible nobody. Someone completely beneath his notice.
The first encounter felt like he plunged a dagger into my chest. I’d spent the ten days between my birthday and that moment dreaming up all these scenarios where we’d start dating, he’d profess his undying love for me, and we’d live happily ever after.
When I recognized his voice in my father’s study, I lingered outside the wood and glass double doors, drinking in the chiseled angles of his face and the way his shoulders filled out his suit. By the time he emerged from the room, my face was heated from waxing poetic about his masculine beauty. To my horror, he sauntered right by me, offering nothing more than a frown and slight pursing of his lips.
I still didn’t give up hope. Nope, I rationalized his behavior a million different ways all of which fed my unhealthy infatuation. After five more weeks and a handful of meetings where he couldn’t be bothered to mumble a greeting, I got his message loud and clear. He didn’t want anything to do with me, and I had experienced enough rejection in my life without willingly inviting more.
The chance run-in outside the office of my father’s bar completed my trifecta of humiliation. He had his arm around some blonde woman who was my complete antithesis. Curvy to my petite frame, colorful dress to my drab black t-shirt and boyfriend jeans, light to my dark, sexy to my cute, carefree to my moodiness.
And like magic, the final remnants of my obsession with him died a hard, cold death. Summoning my best poker face, I looked right through him like I didn’t know who he was. Like he never meant anything to me. I’d worked hard to keep him from intruding in my thoughts since then, which underscored why I needed to get the hell away from him before I relapsed like the Sal junkie I was. While I could delude myself with the best of them, the way my heart leaped and my nerve endings tingled when I heard his voice told me all I needed to know. Despite all my efforts, my fascination with him was alive and well.
“Godammit,” he grumbled from behind me, the car door slamming with a loud thud. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
“Good, then we’re on the same page. Do what you need to do and leave me alone.”
His hand clamped like a vise on my shoulder, and he spun me around. “The fuck, Emilia?”
“Don’t touch me!”
He raised his hands in the air next to his head. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Why are you here?”
“I told you already. Gian needed—”
“No. The real reason. Gian could’ve called Carmela, my Aunt Helena, anybody really. You’d be the absolute last person he’d send to pick me up, which means you offered. I know that doesn’t make any sense considering how cold you’ve been since my birthday. That’s the only reason I can think of.”
He ripped his sunglasses from his face and hung them from the collar of his shirt. He tipped his head to the brilliant blue sky, his hands buried deep in his pockets. I drank in the clean lines of his face and exaggerated pout of his lower lip like I was dying.
Evidently, his physical and mental distance made it easy to forget how attractive he was, which made it even more imperative to get the hell away from him. Nothing and no one could convince me to risk a thirty-minute drive home in close quarters with him where I’d further commit his smell and the unique color of his eyes to memory.
“Look, Em, I—”
“Emilia,” I growled, hating how much I liked the nickname on his lips.
“Fine. Emilia. Is that better?” I nodded, and he blew out a breath. “Kissing you was a mistake. You’re eighteen, and I’m twenty-one. If your dad found out I took advantage of you, he would fit me with a pair of cement boots.”
I ground my teeth together until I could suppress my hurt and anger enough to reply. “I agree. It was a mistake.”
“You agree?” He sounded confused, as if he couldn’t believe I would have given up on him so easily.
Well, he underestimated me, because I would rather stomp on a bed of hot coals than beg for scraps of attention or affection from him or anyone else. It was one of the few lessons my father taught me that I took to heart. Love not given freely wasn’t worth my time. I wholeheartedly agreed.