what you want,” she said and pushed off of the counter, shaking with the impact of what they’d just done. “I want you out of here,” she said firmly, turning her back to him as she grabbed her sweater and pulled it back over her head.
When she felt his hands on her shoulders, she stiffened and tried to pull away but he tightened his grip on her shoulders, keeping her there, so close to him that she could feel his heat against her back.
“We’re going to make love, Elana. You need to stop fighting this. We can’t do that anymore, but I want all of you,” he stated. “We’re not doing a repeat of seven years ago.”
She spun around, ready to confront him, but he just saluted her before he grabbed his jacket and a moment later, he was gone. She looked around her apartment, feeling as if her world had just been spun around by a tornado. And it had nothing to do with the way she had books and papers stacked up everywhere. It had everything to do with the way Gaston always made her feel when she was in his presence for more than a few minutes. The man was diabolical, she thought with anger rising up.
She looked at her apartment once again and was actually embarrassed by what she saw. This was not her, she thought with anger and resentment at what she’d allowed herself to become. Gaston had been correct earlier in the evening when he’d said that she was organized and careful. And this room was chaos! She had no organization, no control in her life. Maybe that’s why Gaston could simply walk into her apartment and touch her once and she would melt like butter in his hands.
In the back of her mind, she knew that her conscience was transferring her focus to the mess in her apartment so she didn’t have to deal with the scene with Gaston. The mess in her apartment was easy to deal with so she looked for a starting point. Gaston on the other had was impossible to deal with. She didn’t understand him, couldn’t wrap her mind around what he wanted anymore. There had been a time when she thought she knew him better than anyone. But he was a stranger now. A stranger that came into her life and tossed things around so that she was so confused she didn’t know what was happening. And that scared her.
With determination, she started attacking the papers that were littered everywhere. She hated this! Bending down, she picked up a stack of papers that were just shoved into a file folder. As she sifted through all of them, she realized that they didn’t even match the file folder name. Now that her dining room table was cleared off, she took the papers and started sorting them, making piles of the various research she’d done over the past several years. There was even a pile for things that were irrelevant. Good grief, when had she started accumulating junk mail?
For the next six hours, she sorted, sifted, piled and compiled the papers all over her apartment. At one point, she even rushed out to the all-night drug store and found a shredder, more manila folders and storage bins. By the time she finally called a halt in the early hours of the morning, she felt cleansed! Her apartment looked amazing! There were still books everywhere, but the papers had made the whole place look messy. The stacks of books definitely didn’t help, but with the ragged papers all sorted and filed away in the large storage bins or shredded and bagged up in a recycle bin, the place looked almost neat.
She curled up on her sofa, enjoying the newness of her environment. She didn’t realize when she’d fallen asleep, but her ringing cell phone wasn’t something she was going to ignore any longer. As soon as she moved to answer the phone, she knew that she hadn’t made it to her bed. The sofa was comfortable, but it definitely wasn’t a piece of furniture that one wanted to sleep on forever.
With a crick in her neck and some not so subtle pains in her back, she searched for her cell phone. The number on the small screen was the same as last night and she remembered how Gaston had come over simply because he hadn’t been able to find her.
“Hello?” she answered, pushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Where the