The Love Triangle(24)

She broke the kiss and smiled at me, letting go of me. She took a step back and leaned with her ass against my counters, holding on to the edge with her hands. It pushed her chest out, and I noticed she’d removed her bra. I could trace the outline of her breasts through the sheer fabric.



A primal drive took over, and I stepped closer to her, putting my hand behind her neck and pulling her into me. I kissed her, hard, mashing my lips against hers. She made a small sound at the back of her throat, a sound that made me want more.



My phone vibrated again in my pocket. Alice giggled.



“You’re vibrating,” she said. My phone pressed against her thigh. I shrugged, trying to ignore it. Alicia undid her pants and let them drop to the floor. I picked her up onto the counter and pushed her legs open so I was between them. She looked down at me, lips slightly parted and sex was written all over her face.



I heard the footsteps on the porch, and my name being called before I could react. The door was open, and two steps on the plank floor inside meant she was inside.



“Justin?” she said again, and I turned. Grace stood just inside the door. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and she had dried blood on her arm. My stomach clenched into a tight knot. It wasn’t the blood on her arm that got me, although that was scary enough.



The look on her face was what killed me. I knew what it looked like. I stood here with Alice on the counter, without her pants and her naked breasts showing through the top she was wearing. Her arms around my neck, my arms around her ass. I pulled away and Alice closed her legs, but it was too late.



Grace didn’t say anything else. She just turned around and walked out again.



“Shit,” I said and followed her.



“Justin?” Alice called after me but I ignored her. I cleared the two steps in one jump and set after Grace in a half-jog to catch up. She was already at the road that led to the ranch house.



“Grace!” I called after her. When I finally reached her she was crying.



“What?” she asked, keeping her voice strong. “What can you say to me right now that’s going to make this any better?”



She took a deep breath and it escaped again with a sob.



I opened my mouth, tried to find something to say. But ‘it’s not what it looks like’ wasn’t true, and ‘I’m sorry’ just didn’t cut it.



“Is this what happened the first time? Is this why I chose Elijah?” she asked me, and her face crumpled.



I shook my head, reached for her but she stepped away from me and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. I dropped my hand again, let it hang by my side.



“No,” I said. “This isn’t why.”



“Nice to know that this kind of pain only happened once, then,” she said and her words stung.



“Please don’t do this,” I said. “It’s me.”



“That’s what I thought, too. But I was wrong. This isn’t you.”



Her sentence didn’t make sense but I didn’t ask what she meant. Instead I focused on her arm.



“You’re bleeding. What happened? What did he do to you?”



Her face changed, drained of emotion until her look was stony and her eyes were guarded. “Right, point fingers. All this bullshit about how he wasn’t the right man for me, what was that? And then you go and do this?”



She turned to leave, but I grabbed her good arm.



“Don’t go, Grace. Please.” That last part sounded a lot like begging, but I wasn’t in a place to do anything else. I’d messed up really badly.



“Go to hell, Justin,” she said and pulled free. I watched her march away. Only after she disappeared around the bend that led to the gate did I realize she hadn’t come in a car. I wanted to jump in my own truck and race after her, be her knight in shining armor, save her. But I’d ruined that image.



I was the villain now, wasn’t I?



I turned around to go back to the cottage. Alice stood at corner of the cottage, hands clasped in front of her, looking at me. She was dressed completely now.



“Well,” was all she said. I sighed and walked to her.



“I’m sorry,” I said.



“Who was she?” she asked, following me into the house. I shook my head. How could I answer that? Alice kept quiet. I half expected something, a fight, shouting, something. But it didn’t come. I pushed my hands into my hair and grabbed two fistfuls, tugging at it. I felt like I was going to be crushed under the weight of what had just happened.



“I think I’m going to go,” Alice said and I turned to look at her. That brilliant smile was nowhere to be found, but she didn’t look upset in any way. Her face was very carefully blank.



“You’re not mad?” I asked.



“Well, I’m not happy. But what’s the point in fighting about it? That’s not what we do, really. We just… carry on. Or we don’t. You’re not the kind of boyfriend that does fighting.”



And in a way it was true. I’d never done anything like that with her. Part of it was that I just didn’t care enough. Part of it was that I was numb after losing Grace. And now it had all happened again. Different scenario, same result: she was going back to Elijah.



“Do you want me to call you?” I asked.



Alice looked to her side, out the window, and then back at me.



“Don’t take this the wrong way, Justin, but no. I don’t want you to call me.”



I nodded slowly. She turned and walked out of the cottage without saying anything else. It was the easiest, simplest breakup I’d ever gone through. When I heard the car pull away, I sat down on my bed and buried my head in my hands.



Losing her was my fault. Again. It always was.





Chapter 17 - Grace





I knew it hadn’t been like that the first time. I knew we hadn’t split up because he’d been with another woman. Even though that would have hurt me then, it wouldn’t have been so strange. After all, I had been with Elijah.



I remembered it. Somewhere it had come back to me, and remembered him asking me to choose. I remembered him telling me that he wanted to be exclusive. And I remember that I’d thought that no man was going to control me and tell me what to do. What a fool I’d been, pushing him away just because he loved me enough to ask me to be exclusive with him.



Until ten minutes ago, I’d wanted that more than anything in the world. To have a life just with him. Elijah had scared me. I’d run to Shonda who wasn’t home – she hardly ever was, and the only other person I really trusted, the only other person I thought I could turn to, was Justin.



The thought of him with that woman, pushed up against the counter with her thin legs wrapped around him and his hands on her ass made my head hurt. At one point I’d thought that that was what I’d wanted. For Justin to be less serious about me so that I didn’t have to feel so torn about the two men in my life.



Now every time I thought about the fact that I was losing him, or the fact that maybe I’d never really had him, made me want to throw up.



I’d run to him to run away from Elijah. But what had I really run to? And what had I run away from?



Elijah hadn’t hurt me. He’d scared the shit out of me. But he hadn’t hurt me. The blood, well that was a tiny scrape, and that hadn’t been him. It had been the ornament that had shattered when the shelf had come down.



I’d gotten a taxi to drive me to the ranch. I hadn’t asked him to wait for me, because I’d thought I was going to stay a while. But when I called for another taxi, the same person had just turned around and come back, and he’d driven me home.



“Are you going to be okay in there?” he asked me when we arrived at Elijah’s house. The first time he picked me up, he wanted to drive me to the hospital. I refused, insisted it was just something small. When I got back into the car, sobbing, I think he’d given up on the idea that it was something small.



“I’ll be okay,” I said and sniffed, trying to pull back the tears and stop crying. I wiped my cheeks furiously with my sleeve and looked in the mirror. I hadn’t been wearing makeup a lot lately, and at this point I was glad about it. It saved me having to make myself look decent again.



The taxi driver nodded and I paid him before getting out. He was concerned but it was my life. There was nothing else to it. And there was no one else that could fix it. I took a deep breath and looked up at the house, towering and stretching away from me. I was going to go in there, and I was going to try make it right.



Why? Because I had nothing else left. Between Justin and Elijah, both were assholes. But Elijah at least was an asshole that would look only at me.



I scraped what courage I had left together, and walked up to the door.



Elijah was in his office where I’d last seen him. The door was open and someone had cleared the broken pieces of glass. The housekeeper, was my guess. The books were stacked neatly in piles on the floor and the shelf stood against the cabinet. The only damage seemed to be done to the clips that held it up.



He looked up at me and his eyes didn’t focus right. He had his fingers wrapped around a whiskey tumbler but it was clean and empty. In his other hand he held a bottle of whiskey that was almost empty. He held it around the neck and sucked on it every now and then. The glass really was just an afterthought.