#chapter Twenty-Four
Her phone rang and, bleary eyed, Maura plucked it with fumbling fingers from the dock on her nightstand. She dropped it with a clunk loud enough to wake the dead before putting it to her ear. “…’Lo?”
“Hi.”
Maura sighed and scrubbed at her eyes, not daring to look at the clock. “Hi.”
“Everything okay?” Daniel mumbled from beside her.
“Yes. Fine. Go back to sleep,” Maura said and swung her legs out of bed, hating the cold. Hating being woken at asscrack o’clock. She grabbed a sweatshirt from the chair next to her bed and headed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
“Who…” Ian said. “You’re not alone.”
“No. I’m not alone.” In the living room, she bundled herself into the sweatshirt and then under a blanket on the couch, tucking her freezing feet beneath her. Her teeth chattered.
“I’ll let you go, then.”
“You woke me up, Ian,” she said sharply. “Don’t you dare hang up on me now.”
Ian said nothing for a moment. Then, “I shouldn’t have called you, I guess.”
“But you did. So talk to me.” She yawned behind her hand, waking up a little more. Sleep would be next to impossible at this point. “What’s going on?”
“Won’t your…friend…miss you?”
“He’s sleeping. He has to get up early.” Maura paused, but she didn’t owe Ian an explanation about how it had gotten late while they watched movies, how they’d drunk another bottle of wine. How she could’ve made Daniel sleep on the couch but the comfort of a warm body next to hers had been too tempting to pass up.
Let him wonder what had happened.
Let him ask.
But Ian didn’t ask. “I want to see your face.”
“Now? God.” She groaned. “I look terrible.”
“You never look terrible.”
She laughed at that. Bittersweet. “Ian, Ian, Ian. What am I going to do with you?”
“Get on the computer. I want to see you.”
What had happened to her pride? “Fine. I’m logging in now.”
In another minute, her screen brightened with an image of her own face and the sound of ringing. She disconnected the phone call and waited for him to answer the video call. Another few seconds passed. Her face got smaller, and Ian’s filled the screen.
It had been a mistake to agree to it, she realized that at once. Ian was sleep rumpled and sexy, and when had she ever been able to resist that face? Also, he had “the look.”
Oh, she was a goner.
“What do you want, Ian?”
“Missed you.” He ran his tongue over his bottom lip, leaning close to the screen. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Maura bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from responding right away. When she didn’t speak, Ian ran a hand over his chest and down to his belly. He tugged his shirt so the hem lifted slowly, showing just the hint of his belly.
Fire warred with ice inside her. The sight of him was enough to peak her nipples and make her cunt clench, but Maura squeezed her thighs together and crossed an arm over herself. She kept her expression neutral.
“Go back to sleep, Ian. I’m exhausted, and I have to work in the morning.”
For a moment he looked uncertain, and that was when she understood how love can turn to hate in a heartbeat. He’d thought this would be easy, and she couldn’t blame him. It had always been so easy for him to come back to her, before.
He held up the note. Her own words scrawled there. The paper had been folded and creased, crumpled and smoothed. She hadn’t written them large enough to read at the distance he held them, but she remembered what she’d said.
We will meet in the place without darkness.
She’d been tired when she wrote that. Overwrought. Two weeks later without a word from him in between, all she could do now was stare at the screen and say nothing.
“What does this mean?” Ian asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Maura said. “I was stupid to write it. I guess I was stupid to think it you’d figure it out or know what it meant. I was stupid to think anything.”
“You’re one of the least stupid people I’ve ever met.”
“Thanks.” He meant it as a compliment, but she was too tired to feel great about it.
He had the grace to look self conscious, but only for a moment. “I missed you.”
She looked at the clock finally, against her will. “Well, Ian, I have to say, three a.m. is a shitty time to figure that out.”
“Especially when you’re not alone,” he retorted with a twist of his mouth that made it look like he wanted to spit.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you. You made your feelings, or lack of them, very clear to me.” She drew herself up. Shoulders straight. Mouth thin. She probably looked like some kind of hardcore bitch, but that was how she felt. Hard fucking core. “But now what? Now you miss me, so you come to me with your dick in your fist, and I’m supposed to just leap for it, mouth open wide?”
Ian said nothing.
“You call me at three in the morning because you can’t sleep,” she cried. “Because you’re horny and you’re alone, and you have nobody else! That’s all!”
She dared him to say differently, but he didn’t. He stared at her, not moving. Barely blinking. He didn’t look away from her, at least there was that, but it was cold comfort when she couldn’t read his expression.
“What did you mean by that note?” he asked.
Maura rubbed at her burning eyes and squeezed her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose to fend off the impending headache. She had to be up for work in a couple hours, and she would be miserable all day if she didn’t get enough sleep. Fuck that, she thought and looked at him. She already hadn’t had enough sleep. She would already be miserable, waiting for Ian to call or message or email her during the day, knowing he wouldn’t but waiting anyway.
Like a fool.
“I’m not a yo-yo, Ian. And I’m not a robot. I’m a real person, with real feelings I have never hidden from you. All I’ve ever done is try to be good to you. Even when I shouldn’t have been, I was anyway. And don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m not blaming you. Anything I ever did was because I wanted to.”
“And now you don’t want to, any more?”
It was starting to feel that way. Or maybe it already felt that way and had for some time, but she’d refused to see it. “I want you to stop fucking with me. That’s all. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it? That you be consistent? If you don’t care about me —”
“Stop that,” Ian said sharply. “You know that’s not true.”
Maura leveled a look at him. “Actually, I don’t know that it’s true. You tell me one thing, but words mean nothing without actions to back them up. When you do this, when you push me away only to pull me close again, over and over, it leaves me incapable of trusting you. I don’t trust you anymore, Ian, and that makes me so immeasurably sad.”
He frowned. “Me too.”
“And what’s worse, what’s so fucking worse, is that now I no longer believe any nice thing you ever said to me.”
He looked startled at that. “Maura…”
“Why should I?” She shook her head. “You say one thing, do another. You tell me you love me, and you fuck me, but then you push me away. Really hard. It hurts me when you do that.”
She waited for him to say he was sorry, not because she demanded an apology, but because she’d have said it if he’d told her she hurt him. Ian looked away, hand over his mouth in his familiar way that meant he had words to say but was holding them back. Maura swallowed around her emotions.
“Sometimes,” she said, “people fit each other like pieces of a puzzle. No explanation that makes sense. You can call it chemistry or kismet or coincidence. You can call it whatever you want, but the universe put us together for a reason.”
“You believe that,” Ian said with a small laugh. “You believe in horoscopes.”
“I read horoscopes,” Maura corrected. “I don’t necessarily believe them.”
“So, what’s the reason?”
She shrugged, so far beyond tired now it was starting to hurt. She got up, turning the computer so he could watch her making coffee in her single cup maker. She put the coffee pod into the receptacle and turned leaned against the counter, arms crossed.
“I don’t know. You’re a blessing or a lesson, one or the other. Maybe both. All I know is,” she said as the coffee hissed and spit into her cup, “I can’t do this any more.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t.” Her laughter sounded like the grind of rusty gears. She warmed her hands on the mug.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ian began, but more of that grinding laughter stopped him.
“But you do, Ian. Over and over again, you do. And I just keep letting you.”
He sighed. “Maybe you should stop.”
“There is no more maybe about it.” The coffee burned her tongue, but she drank anyway. “You want to know what that note meant?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll meet in the place without darkness. It’s what O’Brien says to Winston in a dream,” she said, relaying part of the plot to 1984. “The place where there is no darkness is the Ministry of Love. Where the Thought Police take you when you’ve committed thoughtcrime.”
“To Room 101,” Ian said.
“Yes. To Room 101. The place where there is no darkness is Room 101, and what’s inside that room is the worst thing ever you can imagine.” Maura put her mug on the counter. The floor seemed very far away; like Alice in her Wonderland, she was either growing or shrinking. Things had shifted sideways, yet she stayed steady on her feet. “What’s in your Room 101?”
“Losing you,” he whispered.
“We’ll meet in the place without darkness,” Maura repeated. No tears. No gasp for breath. Nothing but ice where once he’d given her fire. “Goodbye, Ian.”
Then she disconnected the chat.