Devious Lies: Part 4 – Chapter 50

\fi-ni-‘fU-gal\

Finifugal originates from the Latin word fuga, for flight. It shows us that endings are fleeting. We may hate them. We may fear them. We may avoid them. But we don’t need to.

Like sunsets, endings can be beautiful. The next morning, the sun always rises again, because there is no such thing as an ending, just a new beginning.

“Why is it that two people never realize how much they love each other until one of them says goodbye?”

Silence.

No one answered me. Not even crickets. Made sense, considering I laid on my shitty quilt in the unfamiliar twenty-fourth-floor closet, picturing the ceiling as the starless night. Outside, so many stars twinkled, it nauseated me.

“I had a nightmare last night. In it, I never met Nash. I died in a parasailing accident, and a blue man in a pink suit took me to a white room and showed me Nash Prescott—defending me against Able, feeding me all my life, sending me notes, being the Ben to my Durga, giving me his new first kiss, all the filthy things juxtaposed beside the clean, the baltering, the late nights as ‘roommates’, making love in the rain, the way he loves the same people I love and sees me better than anyone else.”

“I watched it all, thinking it was the most epic love story I’d ever seen. Then, Blue Man shut it off, and I nearly killed him for it. He gave me two options for the afterlife. Door One saves me the heartbreak, but I live a life without ever meeting Nash. Door Two takes me back to day one, where I meet Nash Prescott, eventually fall in love, and experience a pain like I’ve never experienced. Do you want to know which I chose?”

“I chose Door Two. Blue Man patted my shoulder and told me I made the right choice. Apparently, Door One is the bad place and Door Two is the good place. Am I being ridiculous, Ceiling?”

“It’s just… everyone in my life lies to me, and I promised I’d never put myself in this situation again. Not if I can help it. Dad—I mean Gideon—lied to me most of my life.”

I ignored the buzzkill above me. “Virginia lied to me all my life. Same for Balthazar, but who the hell cares about him?”

“Fuck you, Ceiling. Such a damn buzzkill.” I made snow angels in the blanket, imagining the comforters in Nash’s penthouse. The quilt ripped when my fingers caught in a hole. “Hank lied to me about his illness. So did Betty and Nash.”

“It would be painful, yes, but what’s worse is not being given the option to love him like every moment could be his last. There’s so much I would have done differently.”

“Did you say something? I couldn’t hear you. Ran out of Q-Tips this morning.” I patted the hole in the quilt as if my touch would heal it. “Do you know what hiraeth is?”

“Hiraeth is a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was. It is the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past. I’ve always thought of it as the saddest entry in the dictionary.”

“And on the long list of lies, I can’t even wrap my head around the whole thing about the Winthrop Scandal. I mean, if you think about it, the only person in my life who hasn’t blatantly lied to me is Reed.”

I ignored the last half of Ceiling’s insults. “Stupid that I once considered Reed a recipient of my love. He didn’t compare to Nash. With Nash… It’s a vicious love, the kind that beats me down and robs me of all my possessions until I feel bloodied, worn, and bruised, stolen of everything that makes me… me.”

“I wonder if this is how any of my father’s victims felt. Except… If Nash is to be believed, they’re not my father’s victims.”

“You’re right. Tomorrow.” I wrapped myself in the quilt like a burrito. One of those sad and skinny ones from Chipotle, that happens when the customer doesn’t know how to order. “Hey, Ceiling? Avoiding Nash sucks.”

“Don’t be silly. He didn’t break my heart. He cracked it open.”

KNOCK!

Knock!

I swung the closet door open, bedhead for days. My heartbeats tripped over themselves, racing at the sight of Nash. He wore a navy three-piece suit, tailored to hug every delicious inch of him.

My hair stuck up in several places. The clinomania shirt I wore boasted drool stains on the shoulder. I’d stayed up all night, talking to Ceiling, and the night before that—the night of Virginia’s dinner—I hadn’t slept at all.

Delirium had set in twelve or so hours ago.

I didn’t know how to act around Nash, so I went with pretending his lies hadn’t gutted me. “How did you know I’m here?”

After we’d returned from the dinner, I’d begged Delilah to grab my boxes and high-tailed to a random floor.

He went along with my ruse, “Full disclosure?”

No. Lie to me again.

“Obviously.”

Nash eyed my shirt, my hair, the quilt behind me, everything. “I checked every room from the ground up. You had to pick the twenty-fourth floor?”

“Had I known, I would have picked the fifty-third.”

I examined him, head to toe, telling myself I did it to confirm the truth and not because I already missed him less than forty hours into our fight. Beneath the Kiton suit, his chest rose and fell a little faster. A thin sheen of sweat misted his forehead. His cheeks flushed the softest shade of pink from the exertion.

Jesus.

He really had inspected every floor. Even he looked like he couldn’t believe it. Furrowed brows and jaw a bit slack. His fingers combed through his hair. Once.

I clutched onto the door frame, trying and failing to delete the question from my brain. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Run your hands through your hair. Three times if you hate where you are. Two times if you think someone or something is idiotic. One time if…” I tipped a shoulder up, playing it off as if it meant nothing. “… you’re around me.”

I sucked at this fight thing.

“Full disclosure?” Nash asked.

“Yes.” I wanted to laugh, because he genuinely meant it each time he said it. “Jeez.”

“I don’t know.” He drove me insane.

“That’s it?”

“I never realized I did it.”

“If you had to guess?”

He stared at both sides of his palms as if noticing them for the first time. “If I had to guess, it’s because I need something to do with my hands. Whenever you’re around, they always want to touch you.”

I toyed with a strand of lint on my jeans. “I’m not ready to have this conversation.” Yet. “There are so many unanswered questions… and I haven’t seen my dad.”

I’d missed the bus to Dad’s yesterday, and ‘Hey, Dad, I figured out I’m not a product of your sperm’ didn’t seem like an appropriate text or email exchange. Especially since I had to frame it in my mind as a joke just to think about it.

“I know.”

My brows pulled together. “How do you know?”

“Full disclosure?” Again, he looked so serious, like he wanted to make sure I understood he meant everything that passed his lips.

“Oh, my God.” I rolled my eyes. “Yes.”

“You don’t have a car, and I paid some kid a thousand bucks to keep an eye out at the nearest bus stop.”

My jaw slackened a bit before I recovered. “You realize that’s borderline psychotic, right?”

His neck corded, muscles so tight, they seemed fake. “You realize Billings and Dickens are on the bus route to Blithe Beach. Murder capital of North Carolina ring any bells?”

“I can take care of myself.”

The slow shake of his head bothered me. “I didn’t stop here to fight with you. I know you’re mad at me. I’m not asking for forgiveness, but you’re sleeping in a closet when you can sleep on a bed. I can kick Delilah out of the presidential suite.”

I blinked a few times, wondering if I’d heard that right. “You’re not kicking Delilah onto the streets.”

“She and her husband are worth more than the GDP of some industrialized countries. She’ll hardly be on the streets.”

“Nash, no.”

“My room.”

My hands dropped to my sides. “I’m not sharing the penthouse with you.”

“Stay in the guest room inside.” He adjusted his cuff. “I’m pulling the boss card. This is my hotel. I cannot, in good conscience, have someone sleeping on the floor in a closet without a bathroom or bed or running water.”

“You have a conscience?” I bit back the smile, missing the banter I thrived on.

He lied to you, I reminded myself. Everyone lies to you. Even now, by not telling you, he is lying to you.

“You’re a pain in the ass.” He let loose his smile, and I forced myself to breathe.

I hacked out a cough. When it settled, I relented. Kind of. “I’ll stay in a finished room inside the hotel, not attached to yours. To be clear, it’s because I want to. Because I’ve never made myself my priority, and that’s changing now.”

NASH TRAILED the bus to Blithe Beach.

It should have pissed me off, but when I left the bus for a water fountain break in Dickens and returned to an abandoned parking spot, I might have been thankful. Even in the daylight, I’d panicked.

Murder capital and all.

“I just need a ride to Blithe,” I told him, tossing my Jana Sport under the seat. “I’ll take another bus back. You don’t have to stay.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

I faced the road, ignoring my hair whipping around in the wind. Pain kept me company, an unwelcome companion. I didn’t like how easy his response had come, but I also saw the hypocrisy in wanting him gone yet needing him to care.

“Shit.” He clenched the steering wheel and turned to me. “Lie of omission. Reed is with Basil near Blithe. At Synd Beach. I planned on heading there, then rounding back to Blithe to pick you up.”

“You can stop this all by telling me everything.”

“It’s not my secret to tell. I shouldn’t have said anything. Virginia sure as hell shouldn’t have said anything.” He ran a hand through his hair. Three times. “I promised Gideon I wouldn’t.”

“What about me? Am I selfish for wondering where I fit into this? Why does everyone get a say in when I learn things that affect me—except me?” When I looked at him and saw an answer I didn’t like, I added, “Don’t answer that. Tell me this. Do you regret anything? Not with your dad and stuff, but anything to do with us?”

“I don’t regret a second, because they led me to you.”

“When you lied to me, Nash, you became like every other person in my life. Virginia, Balthazar, and Gideon, who apparently isn’t even my dad. I hope I’m looking into things. I hope it’s bad timing—”

“Timing? There is no such thing as time. Time is something people made up to give value to each breath we take, to remind us that they’re limited, that we should leap first and ask questions never.”

How can you believe that when you lost your dad? All Betty wants is more time with Hank.

When he said things like that, things that made me stare up at the sky and consider my place in the universe, I wanted to close the distance and remind myself it was with him.

He pulled up at Gideon’s tiny cottage, not unlike the Prescotts’, and turned to me. “Will you stop fighting it? Us. Come back to me?”

“No.” I retrieved my Jana Sport and snatched it against my chest. “I am literally here because you know some big secrets about me and refuse to share them.”

“Can I ask again tomorrow?” Nash Prescott—of the underground fights, the constellation of scars, and the billion-dollar hotelier business—looked like a damn puppy in this moment. And he’d asked for permission instead of telling me.

I caved. “Yeah.”

I was so fucked.