Immediately, her face went blank. And white. Her body froze at the same time.
“Jacob?” She swallowed, her eyes connecting with mine for one beat before she looked away.
My heart had managed to lodge itself in my throat when I heard her say his name. There I was, naked and hovering above his girl, while he was on the other end of the phone with her.
This was seriously messed up.
“Yeah, Matt found me. He told me you’re flying in later.” Her lips moved, but that was all. Everything else looked paralyzed in fear. Or something like it.
I wanted her to shake her head when I crawled off of her. I wanted her hand to reach for mine when I pulled away. I wanted her to drape her arms around me again and hold me close, so I knew. So I knew she wanted me to stay. She wanted me close.
But she didn’t want me close. She didn’t want me to stay. She didn’t make any move to stop me when I lifted away from her and crawled off of the bed.
“No, I’m in another room. Not the penthouse, no—” Cora sat up in bed, throwing the downy comforter over her body like we were a couple of kids again and I’d accidently walked in on her changing or something. “Listen, Jacob, a lot has happened, and I’m not going to sit here and explain it all to you over the phone—”
He must have cut her off again. Jacob had been cutting her off and interrupting her forever. For some reason, this time, I wanted to figure out a way to reach through that phone and wrap my hands around his neck.
Things had changed between Cora and me. We’d slept together. We’d shared things. I might not have had any claim to her, but I wanted one. I wanted to be able to say she was my girl and use whatever means necessary to protect her, even if it meant driving my fist into my brother’s jaw if he kept interrupting her and using that raised voice I could hear from across the room.
“I’m not having this conversation with you right now. I’m not doing it.” Cora seemed to have forgotten about me completely.
I was plenty used to that. When Jacob was involved, I was there one minute, invisible the next.
I was such a fool. Such a goddamn idiot.
She didn’t want me. She wanted him. She always had and nothing was going to change that—least of all me confessing the way I felt about her.
Anger seeped into my blood, making me feel like I could tear apart this entire hotel, one crumbled fistful at a time. I tuned out whatever Cora was saying as I snagged one of the towels off the floor and cinched it back around my waist.
She never looked up. Her attention never diverted from the phone and who was on the other end of it.
As I started for the door, something stopped me. Exhaling, I turned so I was facing her, waiting for a chance to get her attention. It didn’t take as long as I expected.
When her eyes connected with mine, I saw a dozen emotions playing in them. She was scared, nervous, unsure. At the same time, she looked relieved, happy, and almost peaceful.
“Are you okay?” I mouthed, waiting. I couldn’t leave her if she needed me, but there had been few times in life when Cora had needed me over Jacob. I hoped this might be one of those times, but I knew it wasn’t.
She took a moment, her throat moving when she swallowed. Then she pulled the covers tighter around her and nodded. After that, her gaze left me and her whole focus shifted back to the phone. Even from here, I could still hear Jacob’s raised voice as he fired questions and accusations at her, pausing half a second before popping off the next.
What did she see in my brother? What did she see in him that she didn’t when she looked at me?
I guessed the answer to that was everything, because Jacob was everything I wasn’t, just like I was everything he wasn’t. We were twins, two halves of what had started as a whole, but life and experience had turned us into totally different people.
As I pulled the door open, I heard Cora get in a few words. “Okay, yeah. I’ll see you soon.” A pause, just long enough for my heart to feel as though it were turning to stone. “I love you too.”
What had driven me to this? Sitting here, perched on the sidewalk curb, staring through the hotel windows at some girl waiting for another man?
I’d been camped here for the past hour, as long as she’d been stationed in that chair in the lobby. Both of us were waiting for a cab to roll up carrying Jacob. It was almost seven, which meant his flight had been delayed . . . or he’d been delayed in one of the airport bars. Which tended to happen frequently.
He’d had a drinking problem for years, and Cora had seemed content to overlook it. That was the only answer, because I knew she was aware of it. She wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t na?ve; she knew Jacob’s problem, but she accepted it. If that was what you wanted to call it.
She had on another pretty dress, this one cobalt blue and providing more coverage than the one she’d worn on the flight yesterday.
Cora couldn’t see me—it was dark outside and I was a couple hundred feet back—but I could see her. She’d been waiting for him as long as I had, pulling her phone out of her purse every few minutes to check it. She’d been nursing the same glass of wine for the past hour and had barely finished half of it. Even from back here, I could tell she was nervous—she kept shifting in her seat, crossing her legs, uncrossing them, crossing her ankles, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. She looked like she’d never been so uncomfortable, and even though I shouldn’t have cared how she felt after what had happened this afternoon, I did. Staying where I was, watching her through a plate of glass, when she was so distressed went against my every instinct.
Every time I felt the muscles in my legs twitch, ready to get up and go to her, I put myself back in her hotel room and remembered the way she’d gone from whispering my name and sharing her body with me, to completely ignoring me when Jacob’s call came in. How could a person who’d just looked at me like I was special act like I wasn’t even in the room sixty seconds later?
I’d never thought Cora could do that until today. But now I knew, because what other explanation was there? She’d had a temporary use for me—forgetting herself and what had happened—but once Jacob came back into the picture, her need for me was gone.
We hadn’t gotten to have that talk I’d planned on—the one about what she wanted to tell Jacob when he showed up. We didn’t need to though, because I already knew what story she would weave for him. The one he wanted to hear. The one that would be easiest to admit. The one that was a lie.