And the media was having a heyday.
There were rumors about why he’d changed from a golden-boy college athlete to a bad-boy, out-of-control drunk who’d been suspended for the rest of the hockey season after three fights on the ice.
Some attributed the change to his on-again, off-again relationship with Vanessa Osborn, who had been swept off her dainty feet by the British independent filmmaker Phillip Longfellow, known in peerage circles as the fifth Viscount Longfellow, during a summer sojourn in London while Erik remained at his family’s summer home in the Outer Banks.
Others wondered why Erik had kept such a low profile all summer. Instead of partying with his fraternity brothers in Durham or making the society pages at posh events in Raleigh, he’d been spied only once: with Vanessa, at a party at the Governor’s Mansion in July. Maybe he was depressed? Or on drugs?
There were others who waved his bad behavior aside as healthy college hormones, and still others who called him a spoiled brat who needed a firmer hand.
Only Erik, and his sister, Hillary, knew the true reason for the great change in his disposition:
Erik Rexford’s heart had been permanently and irrevocably broken.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
“Fuckin’ shut up!” yelled Erik, throwing an extra pillow from his bed in the direction of his cell phone, which was probably still in the hip pocket of the jeans he’d worn last night.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
“Fuck!”
Squinting from the stream of bright light filtering through his bedroom window, he groaned as he flipped onto his back.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
“Fuckin’ fuck, Hills!”
Scrambling out of bed naked, he grabbed his jeans off the floor and took out the offending phone. Hitting the Talk button, he pressed the phone to his ear.
“What?”
“Oh, there it is: the sweet voice of my darlin’ brother. Good mornin’ to you too.”
“It’s fuckin’ early,” he grated out, sitting on the edge of his bed.
“It’s noon.”
“So fuckin’ what.”
Hillary sighed, and he imagined her rubbing her forehead with consternation. “So it’s also Thanksgivin’ on Thursday. My classes end tomorrow. Are you goin’ out to Buxton, or what?”
Thanksgiving.
Fuck.
He hated the word. He didn’t want to hear it. He definitely didn’t want to celebrate it.
“No.”
“So you’re leavin’ me to the wolves.”
“Fancy’s furious at me. Daddy can’t look at me without explodin’. I’m sure they’d both prefer it if I wasn’t there.”
“I’m sure they’d both prefer it if you got your shit together.”
“Hills—”
“I know what happened,” she said in a rush, “and I know it hurt you. Bad. But you have to move on at some point. You can’t self-destruct!”
“Why not?” he asked softly, clenching his jaw and swallowing over the giant lump in his throat.
Laire had been so stony, so cold, that day in the hospital, he’d tried going back the following day, hoping she’d softened a little, but she’d told the nurses not to allow him to visit. They’d taken one look at his driver’s license and politely asked him to leave. With no other choice, he returned to school that following Thursday, but he called King Triton more times than he could count during the first two or three weeks back at Duke.
The first time she answered, his heart soared at the sound of her voice, and he begged her not to hang up. He could hear her breathing into the phone, ragged and shallow, as he told her he loved her. But no more than two or three seconds passed before he heard the click of the call disconnecting and the drone of the dial tone.
About a week later, she answered again, but this time she spoke first.
“Stop callin’ here.”
“Laire? Laire, darlin’, I need to talk to you. Please, just—”
“It’s over, Erik.”
“No. I can’t accept that.”
“You’re deluding yourself.”
“Tell me what I can do. Please. Please, Laire.”
“It’s over. You need to let me go.”
And the line went dead.
He couldn’t get his head around it. He didn’t understand. Yes, her father had had a heart attack, and he understood that she loved her father, and he even understood that the cold way she’d behaved in the hospital, while incredibly painful for him, made sense. Her sister was coming and going. Her father could wake up at any moment. He was still a secret. The timing was bad.