I would quell the little flutter of anticipation I felt when he called on the phone. I would not think about the way my heart started to beat wildly in my chest, or the way I was beginning to draw comfort from the sound of his voice.
I would let go, before anything went any farther with him. This I could do.
I had to do it.
I pulled the top off the beer and dialed the number, all the time wondering what the hell I was thinking. I'd talked with Meia three times on the phone this week. I followed her a few times, told myself it was okay, that I was just making sure she was not being hurt. Of course, who the hell knew what was happening once she went into Aston's penthouse?
I couldn't know, and it was starting to eat at me, the knowledge that she wasn't safe.
I kept telling myself to let it go.
The conversations were mostly one-sided, me talking and her listening, and I wondered what she must think of me. Pathetic, that's what she must think. She had to see me as a pathetic excuse for a man, some broken man whose life ended with his wife’s death. Part of me felt I should be over this by now. Other people got past death. Other men lost their wives. I wasn't the first person in the history of the universe to have lost someone.
Yet here I was, on the phone pouring my guts to someone I didn't know in the slightest.
And then I asked the question. "Can I meet you in person?"
My usual self-assured attitude was suddenly gone. Suddenly I was nervous.
Then the nervous feeling was replaced by something else. And before I could take back my question, she said, "Yes."
When I opened the door of the hotel room, she smiled at me, the expression brightening her face. I hadn't seen her smile before. It made her look suddenly younger, lighter. Less burdened somehow. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
"Meia," I said.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," she said. But she stepped closer to me, and I stood there in the doorway for a moment, with her inches away from me, looking down at her. I had the sudden impulse to kiss her, as she looked up at me, uncertainty and apprehension etched on her face.
"I don't know what I'm doing here either," I admitted.
But I stepped back and she walked inside anyway, her eyes surveying the room before she peeled off her coat and laid it over a chair. She looked exquisite, despite being in a simple dress, one that skimmed her body, barely giving a hint of what was underneath.
I didn't know what the protocol was for this. I didn't know why the fuck I was so nervous. I'd never been nervous about anything in my life, and I felt my heart race as I stood there. "Why did you agree to meet me?"
"Why did you ask?" She sat on an overstuffed chair, crossed one leg over the other, looking around the room and then back at me. She picked at something on the arm of the chair, her eyes focused away from me.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I'm lost lately."
She looked at me, her gaze direct. "We're all lost."
"I didn't used to think I was," I said. "I used to think I knew where I was going."
"Death changes things," she said. "It alters our course." She looked up, tucked her hair behind her ear. The gesture was tentative, nervous, at odds with the in control version of her that I kept seeing glimpses of.
"Is that what happened to you?" I asked. "Is that what altered your course?" I wanted to scream, why are you with Aston?
It was cagey, the way she avoided saying anything about herself. She had this way of making me feel comfortable talking about myself and before I knew it, I was the one who had done all the talking. Each time I hung up the phone, I wondered where the time had gone. But I wondered if it was deliberate, if she deflected everything with me. It gnawed at me, that I couldn't find anything about her.
She shrugged. "You can't control your destiny," she said. "For better or worse, sometimes it chooses you."
"I felt that way once," I said. I sat across from her, my elbows on my knees, leaning forward, looking at the ground. Why the fuck did I feel compelled to talk to her like this, like she was a goddamned priest and I was a parishioner at confession? "After April was killed. The things I did, I thought they were my destiny. I thought killing the men who murdered her would give me peace."
"And now?" she asked.
How did I feel now? Like something was still missing. Like I no longer had a rudder. "Empty," I said. "It feels empty."
"A man without a home," she said.
Yes. That is what I had been missing since April died. It was the thing that Mackenzie must have sensed was missing as well, the reason that she felt so displaced. I just didn't know how to change it, how to feel that way again. Not with April gone.
I felt naked under Meia’s gaze, suddenly vulnerable. She seemed to have the ability to see right through me. It was how I'd felt before when she looked at me, only a hundred times more so right now.