Alicia’s head buzzed as she walked up the stairs and into the bedroom. She unbuttoned Colin’s shirt and dropped it in the hamper. Moving back to the chair where her clothes lay, she grabbed her bra and put it on, one of the hooks catching under her thumbnail. The small pain made her wince, but she continued to dress, shrugging her shirt on and buttoning it up.
Colin appeared in the doorway. “What did I do now?” he asked, resignation in his tired face.
“Nothing. It’s…we’re too different. I was right before.” Alicia avoided his eyes, looking resolutely at one of the paintings on his bedroom wall and pressing her lips together.
“I must have done something. We went from ‘we’re provisionally fine’ to you being gone in the space of half a minute.” His voice was soft, and Alicia gritted her teeth. She would rather he get angry and hard, give her something to push against.
Alicia pulled on her trousers and finally looked at him. His expression was gentle, concerned. Something inside her chest wrenched, and she found it hard to breathe.
“What do you think I did to put food on the table and a roof over my head when I left my family?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “I was eighteen years old, not even a high school diploma, and I didn’t exactly have a trust fund to live off of.”
Eyebrows drawing together in puzzlement, he just looked at her for a few moments.
Go ahead, put two and two together. Make four. Make twelve, make a million, for all I care. Just figure it out so I don’t have to say it.
His expression smoothed, and his head tilted back. “You were an…exotic dancer.”
Alicia nodded. “If you want to call it that.”
“At…eighteen?”
“What choice did I have? I didn’t have a lot of skills. Any, really. Just my body. And it paid better than serving fast food. It enabled me to get the hell out of Minnesota.”
His jaw worked, and Alicia braced herself for another argument. “Okay. I get that you did what you had to. But why are you leaving?”
Alicia closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples. “No, you don’t get it. It never occurred to you that you would ever actually know someone who had done that for a living. And yet. Here I am.”
“I still don’t understand why you want to leave.” The naked pain growing in his eyes became too much to look at. Alicia sat on the chair and pulled on her shoes.
“I don’t want to leave. I need to leave,” she said, her gaze tracing the grain of the wood floor. “We’re not just worlds apart. We’re universes apart.” A sob threatened, and she took a deep breath, forcing it down as she stood. “And you…I don’t have any defenses around you.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“When you finally realize I’m right and we’re too different? Yeah. It’s going to be catastrophic.”
Colin focused on keeping still, even though every impulse in his body screamed to go to her, to hold her, to make her stay.
“Is there anything I can say to make you change your mind?” His mouth was dry, and his voice was a ragged croak.
Alicia worried her lower lip with her teeth, increasing his desire to touch her, to wipe the sadness from her eyes or let her bury her face in his chest and cry. But he remained motionless. He feared he would spook her entirely if he so much as lifted a finger.
Finally, she shook her head. “I…I can’t. Can’t see my way through it, or around it. I…don’t do this. Relationships. I need to be strong, take care of myself. But you got in so fast, so completely. I can’t cope.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re going to wake up one morning and see that the girl who took her clothes off for money, who wears tacky red shoes and likes pop art, just doesn’t fit here.” She waved her hand at the room, but Colin kept his eyes on her face.
“That’s not true. We have our differences, but I don’t see that they matter.” Was that really how she saw herself? What about the tenacious, self-taught mind she had? What about her incisive creativity and her incredible dedication to her work?
“They might not now. But they will. Your fancy friends with their equally fancy backgrounds and degrees will eventually start judging me. They’ll start questioning why you’re with me. And then you’ll start to wonder yourself. Then I’m going to end up out on my ass.”
Colin’s chest was constricted, and breathing seemed nearly impossible. “Which of my friends struck you as ‘fancy’? I thought you seemed to get on well with Russell, with Brandon and Mari.”
Alicia’s face flushed. “No. They were all really nice. But what about that bitchy old lady at the gala?”
Of all the people…why did Alicia have to bring her up now? “Mrs. Lloyd-Hudson? What does that miserable old hag have to do with anything?” Colin said.
“Isn’t she someone important? Someone who belongs in your world?”
Colin shifted, unease roiling in his gut. “All this talk of different worlds makes me think you’re becoming an astronaut or something. No, she’s not particularly important, at least not to me. She’s unpleasant. I generally steer clear of her. You don’t have people like that in your life?”
“Of course I do.” She gave him a frustrated look.
“Well, why are the ones in my life a problem?”
“The ones who are in my life wouldn’t ever object to you. Even if their opinion mattered at all.”
“Well, if…if someone objected to you, that would automatically mean their opinion didn’t matter.”
Why doesn’t he see this? It’s so obvious.
Alicia’s hands clenched. Colin appeared so bewildered and hurt that her chest felt like it was being crushed. The pressure of tears behind her eyes had become nearly unbearable. He hadn’t moved from his position in the doorway since he had come upstairs, but his dark eyes bored into her with heavy intensity. He seemed to be coming to a decision of some kind. She braced herself. It would almost be a relief if he said, “Fine. Go.”
And it would also be the worst kind of pain.
His expression shifted, became resigned. “Can I tell you a story?” he asked.
Alicia blinked at him, bewildered. “Um. Yeah.”
“I was with someone who you would have said was ‘from my world.’ I didn’t enter into a relationship with her because she fit any sort of résumé criteria, but yes, she came from a wealthy family, had a good education, all the things you cite as reasons we can’t be together.” He paused, fingers rubbing his lips. “She is also the daughter of the Lloyd-Hudsons.”
“What?” She couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard. “The woman…at the gala. The woman you said isn’t ‘particularly important.’ You dated her daughter?”
Colin nodded, not saying anything.
Barking out a bleak laugh, Alicia said, “You have a hell of a definition of ‘not important.’ How long did you date her?”
“Two years.”
“Two years? Jesus, it sounds like this woman practically became your mother-in-law.”
He blinked, his gaze shifting away.
“You nearly did marry her, didn’t you?” He didn’t answer, and Alicia’s breath caught as rage flooded through her, bright and hot. “You have a lot of damn nerve not telling me that before now and getting on your high horse about me not telling you about something I have to do for my job.”
“Because I knew you’d…”
“I’d what?”
“I knew you’d feel intimidated, okay? I wanted to spare you that. Her bloody mother has oiled up to me at every social function since we split, trying to see if I might possibly take her back. That’s undoubtedly what she was about to do when you met her. But what was I supposed to say? ‘Oh, by the way, the Lloyd-Hudsons are my ex-girlfriend’s parents’? Mrs. L-H had already been so awful to you I was afraid knowing that about me would scare you off.”
The accuracy of the statement stung. Alicia’s jaw clenched, her stomach souring. “So, if you two were such a perfect match, what happened?”
“She slept with someone else.” His hand flipped up in a dismissive gesture, but his eyes never left hers. “Would you do that to me?”
Swallowing, Alicia shook her head. “No. Never.” Anger and sympathy swirled inside her, a confused wash of emotion.
Colin nodded and finally lifted the gaze that had been pinning her in place, his eyes focused somewhere over her head. “That’s what I thought. So why is this other distinction so important to you?”
Alicia’s throat felt thick. “I don’t know. I just know I’m going to get hurt.”
“So, you run. And that hurts me.” Colin’s eyes lowered back to her, making her want to weep.
“Does it?” Her voice flaked with rust.
His gaze bored into her. “Yes. Does it hurt you?”
“Of course. But better now than later. When it will hurt worse.”
“You’re treating that as an inevitability,” he said with a maddening calm.
“Well, isn’t it inevitable?”
“No. I’m the product of a man and woman whose families both disapproved of their marriage. Real life Romeo and Juliet, except they lived to have three kids. The only thing that separated them was a car accident. You can’t tell me that some stupid American class differences are stronger than that.”
He was impossible. That sort of romance, what his parents sounded like they had had, was one in a million. Alicia had no illusions that she would ever be that lucky.
“I don’t believe in soul mates,” she said.
“Nor do I. But I do believe in the kind of compatibility that can make two people want to work through their differences.”
“And you think we have the potential for that?”
“I do. The question is, do you?”
She thought for a long moment. She wanted to say yes. Wanted to so badly it hurt inside her. Colin made things so easy.
She didn’t trust easy.
“I don’t know. I’ve never believed in happily ever after. I’ve never seen it.”
“Do you need to see it before you believe in it?”
“You’re asking me to take a leap of faith?”
“I guess I am.”
The fatigue that Alicia had felt since the end of the workshop threatened to swamp her. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “I don’t know. I can’t think straight right now.”
She heard him move toward her, one large, warm hand settling gently on her shoulder. She didn’t dare reopen her eyes for fear she would break down, and his next words seemed to come from all around her.
“I won’t pressure you. But will you at least consider it? Consider us?”
Her eyes were dry and hot. She wanted to run to the other side of the world, and she wanted to wrap herself around him at the same time. “I will try.”
“Can I call you in a few days?”
She shook her head. “No. I can’t…just don’t.” Something hollow and dark opened in the pit of her belly. “Don’t call. I can’t promise anything. I know myself too well. Try to forget about me.”
“Don’t ask for the impossible.”
Alicia’s eyes snapped open, and Colin reared back at whatever he saw in her eyes. “Then don’t ask the impossible of me.”