I’m in love with Elise.
Blindingly in love with her.
The way she reduced me to a pile of adjectives…she might as well have carved between my ribs with the tip of a blade. She sees me no differently than anyone else, as much as I tried to convince myself otherwise. I allowed her behind my walls this afternoon more than ever and she ranks me as nothing more than a selfish prima donna. Maybe that’s all that I am. If I can expose everything to someone and they still find me nothing more than an ego on legs, perhaps it’s true.
“Wow,” Gabe says, handing the laptop back to Banks.
Banks closes the lid, sets aside the computer and sits in silence.
“Well.” I circle the bed to stand in front of them. “Isn’t it nice to know that we’ve been torn up for this woman and she’s been laughing behind our backs?”
Gabe’s brows draw together. He looks down at his hands. “No, I wouldn’t call it nice…”
“You heard what she said, right?” Banks doesn’t sound as sure of himself as usual. “She would write it differently now.”
“Yes, I heard.” I rub at the empty feeling in my sternum. Five-year-old memories are racing back, leapfrogging what’s happening currently. Smoke and mirrors. Betrayal. The ache I’m experiencing is telling me it’s happening all over again. Once again, I’ve wrongly believed someone gave a shit about me. “Can you trust that so easily?”
Banks stares hard at the ground beneath his feet for several moments. Then, slowly, he begins to nod. “Yeah. I can.”
Gabe’s expression goes from desolate to hopeful. “How?”
“What the fuck do you mean how?” Banks asks, pushing to his feet. “You know Elise. You think everything she’s given us has been for an article? Are we done here, Tobias? Or do you need to overreact some more?”
That dread I’ve been ignoring gets louder in the wake of that question.
“Kindly bring us up to speed on your thought process, mate,” I sputter.
“Gabe.” Banks backhands the big man in his shoulder. “Don’t you dare join this pity party.”
“Too late.”
“Jesus Christ.” Banks splits a disgusted look between the two of us. “Do you know who called me this morning on my way to the meeting? My mother. She hasn’t called me in years. She told me…fuck.” His emotions seem to get the better of him momentarily. “She told me she’s proud of me and she wants us to be more involved in each other’s lives. If it wasn’t for Elise, I never would have left that last ticket at the front of the stadium. And my mother admits she never would have gone in without running into a stranger. A stranger who, she says, spoke about me with so much affection, it took her breath away. It reminded my mother how much she loves me.”
My legs are beginning to lose strength.
I can’t stop thinking of Elise’s stricken face when she walked out of here.
The venomous way I spoke to her.
“Gabe.” Banks isn’t finished. In fact, he seems to be getting angrier by the second. “Tell the truth. Would you have finally stood up to your brother this morning if it wasn’t for her?”
“No,” Gabe responds automatically. “I’d have kept hiding. It started when she came to the gala with me. I…I don’t know. It’s like my confidence has been snowballing since then. She makes me feel like I count. I’m around for a reason.”
“Exactly.”
Banks turns his disgust on me and I sit down on the windowsill. Or maybe I stumble backward and fall, because my knees have finally given way. My heart is beating in an unnatural rhythm now. It feels so heavy and uncomfortable that I want very badly to rip it out of my chest.
“And you, Tobias.” Banks paces toward me in full coach mode. “You aren’t the same person now that we met on the tram. You were a caricature. A sad walking innuendo. You were everything she said in that article and more, weren’t you? Until she forced you to take off your mask before she would give you the time of day. Why would she bother if all she wanted from you was an entertaining story? If that was the case, she would have been better off leaving you unchanged.”
My throat drops into my socks.
I’m going to be ill.
Banks drops the final hammer. “She was lying to herself. She was pretending this was all one big joke, that we were one big joke, because she was afraid.”
She was lying to herself.
She was afraid.