But when she’d kissed him, kissed him with all her heart, emotion pouring from her, forcing him to feel, he’d known he had lost. And so he’d deferred to his backup plan.
Draw a line beneath the relationship. Make it a transaction, like every sexual encounter that had come before. Make it so she wasn’t different. So she wasn’t essential.
And she had cried. Every tear a drop of acid inside him, burning away the scars, the protection.
He felt like hell. He had betrayed her, like so many other people in her life. He had let her down. He had hurt her.
He had never hated himself more. Not even as he’d stripped down for women he didn’t even want and followed their every command. Not even then.
He got into his car and threw it in Drive, going too fast down the winding driveway that led out to the main highway. He needed to forget. Needed to figure out how to pull emotion from his chest as he’d once done.
To once again separate his desires from his needs. His mind from his body.
But the scent of Julia was on his clothes. His skin. He had a feeling it went down deeper than that. That she had a mark on him, in him, that would not be so easily removed.
The need to do that wasn’t about preserving his business. Wasn’t about preventing outbursts in meetings and undoubtedly costing himself major accounts.
It was just about survival.
He had to find a way to survive.
Suddenly the pain in his chest was so blinding he had to pull his car off the road. He sat and waited, trying to breathe, waiting for the feeling of loss, the feeling of emptiness to pass.
But it didn’t. It just kept crashing over him, wave after relentless wave, and with it, images of Julia. Julia, excited about a project. Julia, rambling about a game. Julia, as she looked when they made love. Julia, crying.
It took him a moment to realize his cheeks were wet, too, like the Julia in his mind’s eye.
He couldn’t remember the last time emotion had had so much control over him, the last time the pieces of himself had felt so united, all of them crying out in pain over the loss of her.
And it was his own fault. He had pushed her away. Because he had been afraid of this. This pain, this loss of his protection. When everything was fragmented, it was easy enough to deal with it all. Emotion went to its own place to be dealt with later, as did the needs of his body.
But since Julia it was all out of his hands, a jumbled up mess inside him.
Just like it was for normal, everyday people.
So this was what it was like to be normal. This was what it was to feel. He hit the steering wheel, hoping the pain on his hand would deaden the pain in his chest.
It didn’t work.
She was right about him. He was a coward. Clinging to the past to protect himself against anything that might happen in the future.
But she’d taken the choice from him. He was stripped bare. Too late for protection, too late to keep himself from feeling.
He would find it again. He had to. He would find a way to rebuild the walls that had been around his heart. He just needed time away from Julia.
And then things could go back to the way they’d been before she walked into his life. All he had to do was forget.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EVERYTHING IN HIS house was hideous. Ugly and gaudy, a testament to money. Money that meant absolutely nothing when the house was empty of everything but horrible artwork. He’d been trying to forget for five days. It was two in the morning and he was well on his way to being drunk, but he still hadn’t forgotten.
She haunted him. His bed was cold. His heart was cold. It was a cold that ran deep. No night on the street had ever felt so bad. No stripping of his pride in the bed of a woman he despised had ever left him feeling quite so sick.
Losing Julia showed everything he’d built up in his life for the false facade it was.
He had not changed. He was still a scared boy with nothing and no one at the end of the day. Money hadn’t changed that. And it wouldn’t.
The only thing that could change was him. Even thinking about it scared him. Because if he opened himself up, he might remember. Might have to deal with the full force of his feelings, feelings from the past twelve years that he’d blunted. He’d blocked it all out to avoid the pain.
But without it, he would never have her. Without emotion, he could never have joy.