Vanilla Read online

  “Where were you?”

  “Out.” I tossed my bag onto the chair and went into the powder room to rinse my mouth and smooth my hair. I turned my face from side to side, trying to see if he would know I’d been with Esteban. Not sure I cared.

  Niall was waiting for me in the kitchen. He’d helped himself to a glass of water and set one out for me. I sat, but didn’t pick up the water. He was wrong this time, I thought meanly. I wasn’t thirsty.

  It didn’t make me feel any better.

  “I just don’t understand why you got so upset,” Niall began, and I stopped him with a look.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t understand.”

  He looked mad then sad. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m really sorry. I’m trying to apologize.”

  “You made me feel like shit. About us. About me,” I said. “You don’t understand why?”

  “No. Not really. But I’m sorry I did.”

  I shook my head. “How can you be sorry if you don’t really think you did something wrong?”

  “I can be sorry I hurt you,” Niall said.

  I started to cry again. No sobs. Just tears leaking hotly down my cheeks, myself incapable of holding them back. I sat in front of him and let him see me weep, not caring if I looked ugly, if he saw me breaking, if he saw by watching how much he’d made me come undone.

  Because that was love, at least the only kind it seemed I’d ever have.

  Niall reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “Let me make it up to you. Please?”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Dinner? Flowers? You name it,” he told me. “Whatever you want, whatever you like.”

  “Would you let me tie you up? Blindfold you? Would you get on your knees for me, Niall, or let me dress you in lingerie or fuck you in the ass?” I took my hand from his and got up. My chair screeched on the linoleum. “Would you come for me, if I ask you to?”

  “I don’t... Elise.” He shook his head, looking pained, lip a little curled.

  “Because I like those things. A lot. I like to have a man on his knees for me, worshipping me, doing whatever I tell him to do. I like lingerie on men. Hard cocks in lace panties damp with precome, because he’s so fucking hard for me that not only would he come for me if I told him to, I wouldn’t have to fucking touch him.” The words tumbled out of me, cold and hard and somehow emotionless. I heard myself saying them, still felt the scald of tears on my face, but inside I felt...nothing. I’d gone numb.

  Niall recoiled. “You want to know why I wouldn’t do it? Why I wouldn’t just come for you on command, like I was your lapdog?”

  “Yes. I want to know why my asking you to give me something you seemed really eager to give me was such a huge, enormous deal. Tell me.”

  “Because all I could think about was how many other guys you’d probably done the same thing with. Your lovers, whatever the hell you called them. All I could think about were those pictures of you, and how beautiful you looked in them, and how content, and how I was never going to be able to do any of that stuff for you. I was never going to be that guy, and I was never going to like that sort of thing, and how you were going to keep asking me to push my boundaries, and I didn’t want to do it. Okay? I didn’t want to try and measure up to something I just don’t have in me. I’m never going to make you happy, Elise. Not like that. If that’s what you need, I just can’t.”

  “So then why bother?” I asked him. “Why fucking bother with the dinner and the flowers and all that other bullshit? If you really think you’ll never make me happy?”

  He didn’t say anything, but that was exactly what I expected him to say.

  “You want to know why you’ll never make me happy?” I didn’t want to look at his face, but I made myself stare him right in the eye. “Because you don’t know me.”

  “I know you,” he said, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.

  “You can’t possibly. If you’d ever listened to me, all along, you’d know. But I don’t think you’ve listened, Niall, because it’s obvious you believe there’s only one way for me to be, and it’s something you don’t want. Did it ever occur to you that there’s more to me than any one thing?”

  Again, nothing.

  “You’re so caught up in what you think I want that you have no idea who I am,” I told him. “But what you don’t seem to understand is that I love you, Niall.”

  In Baltimore I’d told him I loved him, and he had not said it back. I’d taken a chance and said it again, and if that made me desperate and pathetic, well...if you can’t make yourself a fool for love, you don’t deserve to have it. I waited for him to answer me.

  He stood. “I’ll just go.”

  I’d jumped, but Niall did not catch me.

  37

  I told myself it was for the best. I’d already gone down the road with someone who would not give me what I wanted, and it had left me shattered. Better to end things now, I thought, before I got in too deep.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Evan, who’d only given me a look and hadn’t said anything at all about it. “Things end. It’s just what happens sometimes.”

  “Shit, you got that right,” he said bitterly and dumped sugar in his coffee with such vehemence a bunch of it scattered across the table.

  I added cream to mine, waiting patiently for the sugar he was abusing. “What’s going on?”

  “I told her to get the fuck out,” my brother said quietly and far more calmly in tone than his words suggested he felt.

  “Oh.” I stirred my coffee.

  “She said you knew.”

  My heart sank. “I’m sorry. I thought it was her place to tell you.”

  “Yeah. I’m not...well, I am sort of pissed at you. I feel like an asshole. How long?” He sat back in the diner booth, his hair standing on end from where he’d run a hand through it over and over.

  “I don’t know. And I didn’t know for a long time, Evan. I promise. I mean, I thought she was acting weird—”

  “Yeah, right? Shit.” He shook his head. “I thought it was just stress about the Bar Mitzvah.”

  “That might’ve been part of it. Did she say that?”

  My brother hunched forward, both hands wrapped around his mug. “She said a lot of things. It doesn’t really matter. She’s in love with the other guy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We got married too young. Had a kid. I’d never have married her if not for William, you know. We weren’t really all that good together. I just thought it was the right thing to do. And then after a while it’s so much easier to be with someone than it is to even think about trying to start all over. At least, that’s what I thought. I guess she didn’t.”

  “How’s William?”

  “He’s okay, actually. He joined the cross-country team and got a part in the school play. Keeps him busy after school pretty much every day. And maybe it’ll be good for him, get his mind off it. Gives Susan time to look for a place. We’ll have to refinance, get a home equity loan so I can buy her out. It’s going to fuck us financially.”

  I winced. “Ouch. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey. Better now than in ten years. Or twenty. I’m trying to look at it practically.” My brother cut a square of his chicken parmesan and chewed.

  I poked at my cheese omelet, but didn’t feel like eating it. “What did Mom say about it? Jill?”

  “Jill was a dick about it, of course. Mom was more understanding. She said Susan was a good mother and she’d be sure to do the best thing for William, and that’s all that mattered. I didn’t tell either one of them about the other guy, though.”

  “Probably better not to. How are you about that?”

  Evan scowled. “Well. I don’t like it, that’s for sure. But let’s face it. Another guy wasn’t the real problem. Happy people don’t cheat. She wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Maybe we both have a chance to you know, get happy.”

  “You’re a lot more understandin