Someone I Used to Know - By Blakney Francis Page 0,96

I could get.

I yanked her tight against me and found her silky lips with my own, lifting her with the leverage of my arms around her petite waist. She was the smallest force of nature I’d ever encountered.

“Wait.” I pulled back with a savage breath, trying to shake off my sudden intoxication. I was drunk off her. There was something I was missing though, something important. As soon as the memory fluttered through my mind, I blurted it out, scared to lose it again, “Your brother, Thomas, he’s here.”

Really smooth. I cringed as my whole ‘careful’ and ‘delicate’ plan bombed epically.

She stiffened and broke all physical contact between us.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a guy here to see you claiming to be Thomas Adair…Tallish, thin guy with hair a shade or two lighter than yours,” I explained gently, trying not to spook her. She’d recaptured the untamed horse look.

“What does he want?”

“I can’t imagine what he’d want, other than to see you.”

She seemed lost, utterly confused, and then her stance shifted and, like rising steam, her posture soon followed. In her mouth first, and then slowly leaking up to her eyes.

I knew what it meant. I read it as clearly off her as if she’d she said it aloud. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear though.

“I’ll go with you,” I offered in denial of the resolution I saw so clearly.

“No,” was all she said.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend to know or understand your relationship with your family, but if he’s trying to see you, then that’s a good thing, right? It can’t hurt to see what he wants…He’s your family.”

Her eyes were already long gone from me. “No.”

All I could do was watch her walk away.

It felt like so much more than that one moment though. Every joint and muscle screamed at me to do something – anything – to keep her with me. I didn’t move though, frozen and torn between what she wanted and what I thought she needed.

I was sure I could find a way to make her stop. Up until that point, I had always found a way. But something occurred to me, as I stood there for the first time.

Just because I’d found a way to make her come back time after time, didn’t mean I’d ever be enough to make her quit walking away in the first place.

As her back disappeared out of sight, it felt so much more like a premonition of what was to come than reality.

Chapter Seventeen

Adley

I had no idea how I was going to survive the next two weeks. My plane ticket didn’t offer an escape for nearly sixteen days after the final day of production. It served me right for letting Cam make my travel arrangements at the beginning of the summer. Every second of every day was a struggle against my deeply embedded urge to flee – to run as fast and as far as I possibly could – to forget the dent another plane ticket would put in my soon-to-be-acquired funds.

Cam’s house had turned quiet upon his return; even quieter than it had been when it had only been me haunting the halls. We lived in the most boring silent film ever made, going through our daily lives in perfectly polite contempt, never daring to reenter the crescendo of our last confrontation. I could do nothing as my past, present, and future closed in on me from all sides.

Thomas had appeared as if he’d been called forth by the universe to make sure no amount of pain was spared, no throb of heartache left unaccounted. Why had he come? He was supposed to stay locked behind the door. Didn’t he know I’d long since forfeit the rights to that part of my life? I’d given up – thrown in the towel – when it came to my family, and I knew better than anybody, there were no such things as second chances, not real ones at least.

My past was easier to avoid than the present. I’d never gone to identify the man Declan told me about. I already knew it was really him. I could feel it inside of me, and it happened to be just the sort of thing my brother would do. If he’d come to see me once, I doubted it was the last time, but that just meant I had to be more alert than ever.

My present was more complicated. I’d worked out a system on set that seemed to suit