Say the Word Read online

  The last time this had happened, she’d told me we were going to get lattes at a funky, yet-undiscovered — and thus trendy in the eyes of every hipster in a five mile radius — coffee shop downtown that smelled vaguely like patchouli oil, was littered with beat up furniture that didn’t match, and had purposely left its street windows too grimy for passerby to peer through. This in itself was troubling enough, though not half as concerning as what Fae did next.

  Upon our arrival she’d immediately feigned a headache and excused herself, forcing me into an awkward coffee date with a poet named Lucien, who wore exclusively red flannel and donned thick-framed black glasses with nonprescription lenses. He’d read his angst-filled poetry to me for three painful hours, was offended on a fundamental level because I worked for the — and I quote — “materialistic magazine-industry machine,” and didn’t even pay for my chai tea latte afterwards.

  Obviously, it was a match made in heaven.

  So by the time Desmond asked me out, I figured he was the lesser of two evils and, at the very least, he always paid for coffee. Not to mention he was funny, laid-back, and good-looking – well-built, with dreamy blue eyes, a buzz cut, and a dimpled smile.

  I wanted to like him, I really did. My heart just wasn’t in it, I guess.

  Not that it was ever fully in it, but I knew I could at least try a little harder to like the poor guy. Especially because, for some unknown reason, he seemed to like me.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he said, hurt evident in his voice. “Wondering how your pitch with Jeanine went this morning.”

  Face, meet palm. I was such a bitch sometimes.

  “I’m sorry, Des,” I said, picking up my pace as I spotted the ArtLust building up ahead. “Jeanine was a total pit-bull as usual and now she has me out delivering lunches to the models at some photo shoot. Which, when you think about it, is pretty ridiculous because it’s not like they’re going to violate their air-diets and actually consume solid food anyway.”

  He snorted. “Sorry babe, that sucks. How ‘bout you come over to my place tonight and I make you dinner?”

  I knew very well that by dinner he really meant sex.

  “Um, maybe, I don’t know,” I evaded, unsure whether I wanted to take things to the next level with him yet – or at all. “Hey can we talk about it later? I’m at the studio now.”

  “’Kay babe, let me know. I make a mean macaroni and cheese.”

  “Kraft?” I asked, knowing full well that he couldn’t cook anything that didn’t come either frozen or canned.

  “Of course,” he said, a smile in his voice. “It tastes better when it’s from a box. Everyone knows that.”

  I laughed and hung up, just as I reached the front doors of the looming skyscraper before me. The studio was on the fifteenth floor – I’d only been there once before, more than two years ago when I’d had to have my photo taken for the magazine website. A thumbnail of my washed out portrait from that day accompanied every column I wrote and I still cringed whenever I saw it in print. Hopefully the photographer they’d hired for today’s shoot was more skillful. Then again, how hard could it possibly be to take good pictures of practically naked, anatomically flawless women in lingerie? Unlike some of us, they didn’t have any bad angles.

  I crossed the gleaming black marble lobby floor and boarded the elevator, praying that nothing had changed in the months since I’d last been here. I was seriously late and couldn’t afford to waste time wandering the hallways like a lost intern.

  Thankfully, the elevator made relatively few stops as it climbed to my floor, and within minutes the doors were sliding open with a low chime. Entering the studio, which was essentially a large open plan with floor to ceiling windows, I saw that the right side of the room was set up for a photo shoot, cordoned off with large shades to block out any unwanted natural light. Numerous spotlights, tripods, reflective umbrellas, softboxes, and strobes surrounded the photographer, whose back was to me as he snapped photo after photo of next month’s cover girl, Cara Stein.

  A slender brunette whose plastic surgeries had ensured that she was abnormally well endowed, Cara was posing in a mock kitchen set, nude except for a flimsy red apron. Covered artfully in flour, she gripped a rolling pin suggestively in one hand and a cake-battered spoon in the other. As she slowly licked it clean, her seductive gaze trained on the camera, I averted my eyes so as not to gag and headed for the other side of the room.

  There were three long rolling racks of garments for the models – apparently they occasionally wore more than baking ingredients – along with a hair and makeup station, where several beauty technicians hovered among their vast array of brushes and powders. Two models wearing silk bathrobes sat at the vanities, pecking feverishly at the screens of their cellphones. No doubt keeping their Twitter and Instagram followers interested with minute-by-minute updates about their like, totally, like, glamorous lives, while waiting for a turn in front of the camera. In the back corner, I finally spotted what I’d been searching for: a long, empty buffet table upon which I promptly dumped the heavy Gemelli’s bags.

  Flexing my hands, I winced as pins and needles shot through my fingertips. I was tempted to slip off my heels and rub feeling back into my arches – feet were not designed to walk ten blocks in stilettos, it’s a scientific fact – but I refrained. I was about to touch people’s food, after all.

  When feeling had fully returned to my hands, I reached into the bags and unloaded the boxed salads and sandwiches. I heard Cara’s whiney voice distantly responding to some of the photographer’s directions, and tried to tune her out – she might be gorgeous, but she sounded like a feral cat caught in a rainstorm whenever she opened that million-dollar set of collagen treated lips. The studio was surprisingly quiet, the atmosphere saturated only by the hushed whispers of the makeup artists and the faint yet familiar refrains of classical music drifting through the overhead speakers.

  Vitali’s Chaconne, if I wasn’t mistaken – one of my favorite classical pieces. I’d heard it for the first time on a rainy afternoon eight years ago, and in the many years since I hadn’t been able to listen to it — or any other classical music, for that matter — because it was irrevocably tied to too many painful memories. And yet, as I began to arrange the containers on the tabletop, I found that no matter how much time had passed, I still knew each mournful note by heart. The violin was mesmerizing, heart-wrenching as it climbed effortlessly through the scales. As I listened to its defiantly beautiful strains, I had to fight the urge to weep.

  Jesus, Lux, it’s just a song. Let it go, already.

  I quelled the gathering mist in my eyes and let the music wash over me. I couldn’t help but think that it was a strange soundtrack choice for such a sexy photo shoot, but I was just a lowly columnist – the artistic process wasn’t something I had any right to question.

  I’d just lifted the last salad from the bag when I heard something far more upsetting than the tinny speaker music. Something that caused the container to slip from my fingertips and thud against the floor in an explosion of lettuce and croutons.

  Or, to be more specific, someone.

  Someone whose voice I hadn’t heard for seven years – whose voice I’d never expected to hear again. That same someone who’d first played Vitali for me all those years ago.

  Sebastian Covington.

  Chapter Four

  Then

  It was a bitter January afternoon – the kind where the wind whips icy rain into your face and the crisp air bites against your exposed skin like it has actual teeth. My jacket was from two seasons ago, so worn out it barely shielded me from the elements or retained any warmth. The ripped-out knees of my skinny jeans sent chills racing up my legs.

  I always laughed lightly to myself whenever I saw the wealthy girls at my school wearing pairs of $150 designer jeans that had been purposefully ripped to shreds with the help of a manufacturer. They were paying good money to look like war-refugees, while I would’ve just lik
ed to own set of pants I didn’t have to patch or turn into cut-off shorts when I grew too tall for them – ironic, wasn’t it?

  I kept my head down against the spitting rain as I walked along the side of the road. I’d missed my bus again, which meant I was in for either a long wait in the rain until the next one rolled around at five, or a lengthy, drizzly trek through muddy puddles. I opted to walk, hoping it would get me there faster.

  Ms. Ingraham, my spring session advanced Latin teacher, had kept my entire class after school today because she was convinced no one had done the mandatory reading – or maybe it was just because she was a lonely old cat lady with no one to spend time with other than the students she coerced via detention sessions. Regardless of her reasons, I knew she was going to be a pain in the ass, and it was only the second day of classes.

  The old bat was not only responsible for the hand cramp I had after conjugating approximately 17 million Latin verbs, but was also to blame for me missing my bus and being late to see Jamie at the hospital. He’d been there for almost three weeks this time, recovering from a particularly rigorous surgery on his left femur where more cancer had begun to grow.

  He was supposed to start physical therapy any day now. The doctors were hopeful that he’d walk again within a few months of recovery, so long as the cancer didn’t return. Unfortunately, their optimism was likely unrealistic. The sad fact that everyone knew but didn’t say out loud was that with a cancer this aggressive, regrowth was an inevitability rather than a possibility. It was only a matter of time before Jamie was back at the hospital for another bone graft or, if things got really bad, a full amputation of his left leg.

  They’d wanted to amputate this time, but Jamie had begged them to try to save his leg. It was riskier, but worth it, according to Jamie.

  “No risk, no reward, Lux,” he’d tell me, smiling through his pain.

  I felt my numb lips twitch up into a reluctant grin, and pressed on through the downpour.

  He wasn’t responding to his chemotherapy drugs anymore, so the surgeons were taking a more aggressive approach. Limb-salvage surgeries weren’t always effective, but since Jamie was young and relatively strong, they said it was his best option. They didn’t say out loud that it was his only option, but I was smart enough to read between the lines of their sugar-coated prognoses, worried expressions, and hushed whispers.

  So was Jamie.

  He hated being at the hospital alone, cooped up in bed and unable to move, so I tried to visit as often as possible. I didn’t like the thought of him lying there contemplating death or the possibility that his surgery wouldn’t be a success.

  My parents had picked up double shifts to pay the rapidly accumulating medical bills, so they weren’t around much to visit him. Even if they hadn’t been working, though, I wasn’t sure their presence would’ve done Jamie any good. We’d never been as close to our parents as we had to one another — perhaps because they’d never seemed too interested in getting to know us. But I couldn’t complain – not when they’d both been working nonstop to keep our house out of foreclosure and to cover Jamie’s basic medical care.

  Truthfully, it was silly for me worry about him getting lonely. With Jamie’s handsome features – he pulled off the bald look really well – and sense of humor, he’d charmed the nurses within days of his first hospitalization. They all checked in on him and fussed over him like a son, bringing him extra pudding cups and sharing all the hospital gossip whenever they stopped by. It was hysterical and mildly inappropriate, but I was grateful he wasn’t alone.

  Caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the car approaching until it was far too late to move off the road. It whizzed by on my left, careening through a puddle at nearly forty miles per hour and dousing me completely with a torrent of dirty rainwater. I gasped, startled by the sudden icy downpour, and immediately began shivering as the chilly winds plastered my now-sodden coat and jeans to my body.

  “Asshole!” I screamed after the car, shaking a fist in the air as it drove away.

  My eyes widened when the car abruptly slammed to a halt about fifty yards up the road, its red brake lights brightly illuminated in the overcast sky. It was a nice car – a two-seater Mercedes hard top convertible, from what I could tell at this distance. I watched in horror as the white reverse lights flipped on and the car began backing down the vacant roadway, toward me.

  Shit. I was so going to get beat up.

  Here I was, walking alone on an empty roadway with no cellphone and no means of escape. Come to think of it, I was pretty sure this was the exact plot-line from the beginning of a horror movie I’d watched last Halloween…

  Defenseless, isolated, idiot girl? Check.

  Overcast, dark, stormy day? Check.

  Psycho-killer in an expensive automobile? Check.

  Dammit. Jamie was going to be so pissed at me when they found my body in an alligator-infested swamp somewhere in bum-fuck Florida.

  When the Mercedes came to a stop next to me, I held my ground and stared menacingly at the darkly tinted passenger window. Whatever this jerk thought, I wasn’t going down without a fight. I was Lux Kincaid – badass bitch extraordinaire, albeit in a five-foot-four, blonde pixie-like package.

  Ha! I was so dead.

  The window slid down silently, sending beads of water streaming off the shiny black passenger door and ultimately revealing the asshole’s face. I had to clamp my lips together to keep them from falling open when the driver came into view.

  Better than a road-ragey psycho killer, but not by much.

  Sebastian Covington sat behind the wheel – honestly, the last person I’d expected to see. He was the most popular guy in the junior class, in part due to his looks – which even I had to admit were gorgeous, in an Abercrombie model sort of way – but mostly because his father was a U.S. Senator. I may have been the Typhoid Mary of my class, but even social rejects would recognize him on sight. Plus, I’d noticed today that he was in my Latin class. It had been hard to miss him, as there were only about twenty students enrolled, but since we sat on opposite sides of the room and had never previously interacted in the three years we’d both been attending Jackson County High, I very much doubted I’d crossed his radar.

  “Hey,” he called out the window, his eyes apologetic. “I’m so sorry about that – I took that turn a bit fast and didn’t see you in time. I’m still getting the hang of driving this baby.” His voice was nearly bashful as he gently stroked the leather steering wheel.

  Translation: Daddy bought me a new, expensive toy and I almost ran you down you with it… Sorry!

  Great apology, rich boy.

  I rolled my eyes, turned away, and began walking again. To my utter annoyance, the car crept forward, keeping pace with my strides.

  “Ouch, okay, the silent treatment. I guess I deserve that.” I heard the sound of light laugher. “But why don’t you ignore me from inside the car? It’s warm and dry in here and I can tell you’re freezing.”

  I cast a glance over my shoulder at him, trying to see if he was serious.

  “I mean it, get in. I’ll give you a ride home,” he volunteered. “It’s the least I can do.”

  I drew to a stop, considering his offer with raised brows. It was another half hour walk until I’d reach the hospital, and I was turning into a human popsicle with each passing minute. A glance up at the heavy clouds overhead assured that the rain wouldn’t be letting up any time soon. I didn’t want to accept a ride from him, but I also didn’t want be out in the cold anymore. And, if I wanted to make it to see Jamie at all today, it was my best option.

  With a martyred sigh, I reached out and grasped the door handle. Yanking it open, I smirked as I settled my sopping wet jeans onto his pristine tan leather seats. Prince Sebastian over there would probably have a conniption if I ruined his flawless interior. I set my backpack on the floor by my feet, crossed my arms over my chest, and looked up at him defiantly.

  To my surprise, he didn’t look even mild
ly fazed by moisture that was currently causing irreparable damage to his seats. His expression was open, friendly even. I quirked one eyebrow at him, wanting to ask what the heck he was staring at.

  “Sebastian Covington,” he prompted, holding out his hand for me to shake. Or maybe kiss. You never knew when it came to rich people and their weird rules of etiquette.

  “I know who you are,” I muttered, clicking my seatbelt into place and turning to face the windshield so I wouldn’t stare at him. He was beautiful – easily prettier than most of the girls in our grade. His cheekbones were prominent, offsetting a pair of stunning green-gold eyes that seemed altogether too honest and warm to be genuine. They set me on edge, those fathomless eyes – the sincerity they conveyed seemed to me like a mask, put in place so no one would look too close or see the secrets they guarded. His jawline was so chiseled it was almost ridiculous. He was even better looking up close than from across a classroom – that realization made my stomach churn with nausea and brought an unstoppable flush to my cheeks.

  “Not gonna return the favor?” he asked me, nodding down at his hand, which was still hanging outstretched in the air between us.

  “Do you always feel the need to torture your victims with chit-chat after nearly running them down in the street?” I asked quietly, watching the rain droplets trickle in slow paths down the windshield.

  “Fine, common courtesy be damned.” Sebastian laughed, shifting the car into drive. “But it’s all right, you don’t have to tell me. I already know your name, Lux.”