The Love Triangle(25)

“Elijah?” I asked. He looked up at me.



“You came back,” he said.



I nodded. His eyes slid to my arm where the blood had caked around the small cut, and his face crumpled a little bit before he visibly pulled himself back together again. I shook my head. I didn’t want him to concentrate on that, on what had happened. I wanted him to concentrate on me.



“I didn’t think you were going to come back,” he said again and the words came out lopsided like his tongue was uncomfortable speaking them.



“Where else would I go?” I asked, and it sounded a lot more romantic than I meant it. I really didn’t have anywhere to go anymore. He pushed himself out of his chair, searching for his balance and finding it just before crashing to the floor. He walked to me in a jagged line, pressing on the desk until he was too far to use it as support.



He was very drunk. In a way I felt like this was my fault. He’d been waiting for me for a long time, putting up with my issues and never pushing me.



When he reached me he leaned into me, and his face came up very close. The smell of whiskey was thick on his breath and I couldn’t breathe through it. I took a step back.



His face changed, confusion or hurt bleeding away to something harder and colder. He took another step closer to me but that smell made me feel like I was suffocating. It was a smell I knew very well. Too well. I backed away again.



“Don’t run away from me,” he said and his voice was louder than it should have been.



“You’re drunk, Elijah,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. I just wanted him to stop trying to walk to me. He was almost climbing on top of me.



“Don’t do this to me again,” Elijah said, and his words were slurred, full of emotion that wasn’t there a moment before. Again?



He took another step to me, pushing my back up against the wall. His face was barely an inch from mine and I was losing it. I put my hands on his chest to push him away, and his face changed, anger taking over his features from before until his face was just a twisted mask of rage. That face. That smell. Those eyes.



Something inside me snapped and I screamed. Where I’d been numb I suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline and I pushed out from underneath his wide frame. He tried to stop me but I was scared and he was drunk and I got away. He lost his footing and fell. I ran out of the office, down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom where there were no windows. The only way through was the door and it was harder to get into.



I clawed at my head, the pain was sharp and intense. I pulled my knees up to my chest and jammed my forehead into the line between them, feeling the hard bone of my knee caps on either side.



Since I’d met Elijah I’d believed that his work face was different than his social face. In the office he was a tyrant. Everyone feared him. Those that didn’t know him well enough, like the HR department that never really got to see his face, even knew that he wasn’t the person you wanted to meet in person.



But outside of the office he was all grace and charm. Everyone around town respected him. I would even have gone as far as saying that they loved him to an extent. Elijah Wilson was a name most people had heard, and they always felt honored to be in his presence.



When I was paraded around on his arm as his girlfriend, I got looks of admiration. I was the one that had gotten into the mansion, into his pants, into his pocketbook. In the beginning I used to love that attention. I loved the way the crowds parted for me just because they knew I belonged with Elijah.



After my fallout with Justin, I’d gone to him and showed him what it meant to be his. And he’d accepted me and suggested I move in with him. I agreed, and we’d been living together two months.



At work it wasn’t the same thing. I wasn’t revered because I was with Elijah. I was pitied. I walked past the employees in the cafeteria and they all fell quiet, and once I was past, their conversation would pick up. It wasn’t hard to tell that they were talking about me. But why would that bother me if I’d gotten what I wanted? I lived in an amazing house with a man that doted on me and I didn’t have to want for anything.



I came home late Friday evening. Elijah had left the office earlier to go to a meeting in Dayton. I didn’t know that we knew anyone in Dayton that would benefit Magna Solutions, but he’d insisted that it was important so I’d seen a client without him. I knew what he wanted from the meetings. I’d known how to seal it without him.



“I’m home,” I called into the quiet house. The smell of cooking hung in the passage to the main bedroom. I put my briefcase on the bed and kicked off my shoes, massaging my toes. I’d been in the heels a lot longer than I usually was.



“Elijah?” I called when I’d gotten dressed. There was no answer. “Baby?” I walked back down the passage. When I reached the office, the door was closed. I knocked and there was no answer. I hesitated for just a moment before turning the doorknob.



“Elijah, honey?” I asked again, pushing the door open. I heard scrambling, like he was doing something in a hurry. When I had the door open all the way and I could see him, everything looked wrong. He sat behind his desk, pen in his hand, tip poised over a blank notepad. He looked guilty, his eyes beady and shifting from me to the door behind me to his desk and back again.



“What’s wrong?” I asked.



“What are you doing here?” he asked. I frowned.



“I live here, remember?” I asked. He shook his head like he only realized what he’d said now.



“I didn’t know you were going to be home so early,” he said. I narrowed my eyes at him.



“It’s half past six.”



He nodded at me, and his face was a blank, like his thoughts were somewhere else.



“What’s going on, Elijah?” I asked.



“Nothing,” he said and pushed up from his chair. He made to come around the desk toward me, but stopped and glanced down at his desk one more time. It made me suspicious. He was hiding something, I was sure he was. I smiled when he came to me and kissed me on the cheek.



We sat down at the dinner table. The cook had put out the food in silver dishes, and we dished it out ourselves. When we sat down, Elijah took a bite before he spoke.



“How was the Kennewick meeting?” he asked. I shrugged.



“Nothing we didn’t expect. He signed, so he’s not getting out of this one.”



Elijah smiled. “That’s my girl,” he said with food in his cheek. It irritated me when he called me that. I wasn’t his girl. I pursed my lips and moved my food around my plate before finally taking a bite.



“What did you do in Dayton today?” I asked.



“I told you, I had a meeting.”



“With who?” I asked. He shoveled more food into his mouth so that he couldn’t answer me straight away. I took a bite too, but said nothing else. I wanted to know.



“It’s nothing important. It might not go through anyway,” he finally said when he swallowed. He’d answered me because taking another bite without doing it would have looked like he was intentionally avoiding the question. He didn’t want to talk about it, but that just made me want him to talk about it all the more.



“What was it, though?” I asked.



“Does it matter?” he asked, looking up at me. He took a sip of wine, still looking at me over the rim of the glass.



“Well, no. But I usually know of all the meeting because you’re in the process of growing the business and you usually need my legal advice,” I said.



“This wasn’t a legal matter. I just ask you when it’s about contracts and loopholes. You don’t know everything about the company.”



The last statement sounded terribly defensive.



“Well, don’t you want to tell me, just as your girlfriend? I’m not exactly on a need to know basis, am I?”



He looked at me and I could tell he was angry. His jaw bulged out on either side of his face, he was clenching that hard, and he’d wrapped his hand around his fork in a fist. It just made me angry too. And when I was angry I didn’t let up. Maybe we’d only been dating for two months officially, but I knew him a lot longer than that. And he ought to have known that I wasn’t going to just let up.



“Why won’t you tell me?” I asked when he didn’t answer me. “What do you have to hide?”



“I’m not hiding anything,” he said and his voice was cold and controlled, like he had to concentrate to keep it calm. I could see the anger beating in him like another pulse, a thick cord down his neck that spread into his shoulders. The air around us crackled like a storm was building, and judging by his face, it was.



I’d seen him like this with other people many times. It had never been aimed at me. And I wasn’t scared of him.



“Just tell me, honey. Don’t exclude me from your life.”



“I’m not excluding you,” he said.



“Then what do you call this?” I asked. The look on his face was hard and I knew I had to stop, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was on a roll now, and I wanted to know. I was sure something was up. We were about to have our first couple fight.