“Seriously?” I demand as Miles doubles over from the hit. “You seriously think I’m going to let you fuck me again? After everything I just said to you?”
“Tori, wait!” He makes a move to grab me, but I bat his hand away.
“Don’t touch me!” It takes all my self-control not to hit him again, the smug asshole. “All that stuff out there might pay for one roll in the hay, but it sure as hell isn’t enough to buy you a second. So you need to back the hell off.”
“I want to talk to you!”
“Frankly, Miles, I don’t give a shit what you want right now.” I deliberately mimic the words he shot at me a couple of minutes ago. “All I want is to be left alone.”
I start to walk away, but this time he manages to grab on to my arm. “Stop,” he orders, holding me in place with nothing more than a hand around my wrist. “If you’d just be reasonable for two seconds—”
“I’m being very reasonable,” I say as I twist my wrist back and forth in an effort to get out of his hold. “If I wasn’t, I would have clawed your damn eyes out by now. Let me go.”
“Not until you listen. I don’t know what I did to make you think this badly of me, but—”
“Let me go right now,” I say a second time, my voice low and darkly sincere as I glare up at him. “Or I swear to you, this will be the last time you ever touch me.”
“Goddamnit, Tori. You don’t actually expect me to just let you walk away in the middle of an argument, do you? We need to work this out.”
“What we need is a little time to cool off. Or at least, that’s what I need. And I’m going to take it.” I finally succeed in jerking my hand from his grasp—because he lets me, but beggars can’t be choosers right now, so I go with it. “I’m going down to the beach for a little while. Don’t follow me.”
“The beach? You can’t leave the house. The reporters—”
“I know you persist in thinking I’m an idiot who can’t take care of herself—and I’ll admit that I’ve done more than a few things these last few days to reinforce that belief—but I’m not a total moron, you know.”
And with that, I turn and walk away. From him. From his charity. And from the look on his face that says he really doesn’t think I can handle the mess I’m caught up in.
He’s right about the fact that I can’t go outside the gates right now, not with all the paparazzi lying in wait. But I can’t sit in this house with him for one more second, either. Not when Miles’s larger-than-life presence sucks up all the air.
So I do the only thing I can do. I walk out the French doors to the patio, then make a beeline past the pool to the rock staircase that leads straight down the cliff to Ethan’s small, private alcove of a beach. In my opinion, it’s the best thing about the house. A small swathe of La Jolla beach with none of the crowds or sunburned tourists.
I’ve lain out here a bunch of times, but I’m not exactly in the mood to sunbathe right now. The last thing I want to do is make a spectacle of myself for some asshole pap with a long-range camera lens and a little ingenuity. But I can’t go back upstairs, either, can’t face Miles right now.
So instead I walk to the very back of the alcove and sit down there, with the sand under my butt and the cliff against my back.
I try to make myself as small as possible, pulling my knees up to my chest and laying my head down on them. Only then do I think about what happened upstairs, about the fight I had with Miles and everything we said to each other. Only then do I start to wonder if maybe I overreacted.
Now that I’ve had a moment to think about it—to catch my breath away from that mountain of bags in the middle of the foyer—I can acknowledge that maybe he really was only trying to help. Only trying to do what anyone would do for someone they cared about.
If Chloe and Ethan had bought me that stuff, would I really be this upset? If they’d bought me a phone and shoes, a computer and a couple of weeks’ worth of clothes, would I have been anywhere near as offended?
I don’t even need to think about it to know that I wouldn’t. I don’t like the idea of taking help from them, but I would do it without thinking twice about it. That’s how I ended up here, after all, at their house. Because I knew they wouldn’t think twice about letting me stay here until I could figure out a plan.
So what is it about Miles helping me that sets me off so badly? What is it about him trying to do something nice for me that makes me feel like a prostitute instead of someone he actually cares about?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m not going upstairs—I’m not facing him again—until I do.
With a sigh, I look out at the ocean. It’s a cloudy day, overcast and a little bit chilly despite it being the end of summer. And the Pacific is definitely feeling the chill. The waves are a choppy blue-gray, rough and foamy and without much setup. They’re kind of ugly, actually. Kind of messy and all over the place.
A little like my life right now.
A little like me, right now.
I don’t like the comparison, like even less that my life is suddenly so completely out of my control. Arguments could be made, I suppose, that it’s never been more in my control. That right now I have the chance to really start over, to take my life in whatever direction I choose without having to answer to anyone.
And while that might be true, I still hate that it has to be like this. Not the loss of my condo, necessarily, although—not going to lie—that totally sucks. I love that place. And not even the loss of the trust fund for the next couple of years, though that sure as hell stings, too.
No, it’s that Miles is seeing me this way. That he knows how lost I am, how broke and broken and afraid I am. That he knows what an absolute mess I’ve made of my life.