“Love. What kind of an idiot came up with that word? It must have been another delusional woman swooning over the possibility of a soulmate. Just goes to show that all the good ideas in life really stink.”
Suddenly, Alexis was thrown out of her reverie by a tap on her shoulder. She sat bolt upright, all her senses tingling at the touch of a man’s harsh, callused hand. It had been so long since she’d been touched by a guy that she almost didn’t recognize the sensation. Spinning around, she quickly tried to regain her smooth, calculated appearance by running her hands over her flowered tank top and adjusting the fall of her jean skirt around her tanned legs before looking up… and up, and up, and up… into the face of the one man she’d hoped never to see again.
“Ryan? What on Earth are you doing here?”
“Wow. Just the kind of reception I always wanted to receive,” he replied, smugly grinning down at her. Alexis hated him so much that she desperately wished she wasn’t so enamored by the way his lips spread back, revealing the little dimples in the corners of his cheeks and his white teeth at the same time. She practically snarled, wishing that she had a better reply to his well-trained comments, but took the time out to look him up and down, realizing that he’d certainly changed a lot from the way he looked twenty years ago.
Ryan stood before her, grinning with the same cocky attitude that had annoyed her so much when she knew him before. His windblown brown hair lay across his head in a short, yet attractive, style and she had to mentally stop herself from desperately wanting to run her fingers through it. She allowed her gaze to travel down the length of his body, from the gray polo shirt he was wearing down to his faded blue jeans and work boots. Looking back up to his face and watching his blue eyes, she was about to give him a snappy comeback when he startled her yet again.
“Once you’re done ogling me, do I get my turn?”
“For your information, Ryan, I was not ‘ogling’ you. I was merely…” she paused, grasping for words, “noticing that you’d… um… changed.”
“You’ve changed, too, in case you haven’t noticed, but you don’t see me looking at you as though you’re a three-course meal and I’m a starving dog.”
Alexis sighed and closed her eyes briefly, thinking back to the last time she’d seen him. It seemed such a long time ago now. She’d known him for hardly any time at all, yet it was as though they’d been enemies forever. The two of them had grown up together in New York, but neither had even known of the other’s existence until the day she had been walking along the Plaza and tripped over him, nearly knocking him over. She could remember it so clearly now that it seemed like only yesterday.

“Oops. I’m sorry- I really am,” she muttered, shockingly embarrassed, as she bent down to help him gather up his belongings that had been spilled all over the floor at the moment of impact. “No, no, it’s not a problem at all. Don’t worry about a thing,” he responded, like the gentleman he was, bending down and helping her stand back up. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll pick it up. After all, my arms needed a break from carrying all that anyway.”

He’d been so charming then that she found herself swept off her feet by his sheer masculinity… and his looks helped a bit, too. Now that they’d both grown older, he still was just as good-looking as he’d always been, with maybe just a hint more of gray in his hair, but that was about it. Today, however, as he stood before her with what was almost a bashful expression on his face, his rugged good looks did nothing for her but only angered her further. She scowled angrily up at him, shaking her head so that her ponytail bounced lightly and several loose strands of blond hair drifted gracefully over her forehead.
Ryan gazed remorsefully down at Alexis, feeling himself swept away by her subtle, yet charming, beauty. If only their relationship with each other hadn’t ended so harshly the last time they’d known each other. If only she didn’t hate him so much… but there was no use wasting his time making aimless wishes. He’d come to their high school reunion today solely on business only, and that was what he aimed to accomplish. Business. He repeated this term to himself several times, as though he were trying to reassure himself of something that even he wasn’t certain of. Keeping his mind on the work aspect of what he’d come here for would be so much easier if she didn’t look so good. He studied her carefully, looking for signs of change, but could hardly find any. She was still the graceful woman he’d known so long ago. Even though she had the appearance of frailty, he knew that she was much tougher than she looked outwardly. Alexis was most definitely not the type of girl to let herself be pushed around by men- any man. He watched as the wind blew her short blond hair across her face and resisted the urge to reach out and tuck it behind her ear. She stared at him intently with her grass-green eyes- so intently, in fact, that he could almost see her brain working as she tried to think of a harsh remark. However, Ryan was determined not to be captivated by her beauty again. He mentally shook himself and returned to the matter at hand.
“Lexi, I don’t want you to be hurt again, so I’m going to make this as brief and painless for you as I can.” For both of us, he thought.
“Trust me, Ryan; you could never hurt me again, even if you tried. Can you make this quick? I’ve got somewhere to be in…” she paused, lifted her tanned arm and glanced sharply at her wristwatch before speaking, “three minutes.”
He sensed an excessive quickness, harshness in her movements, and doubted that she really had anywhere to be, as she had appeared quite comfortable before he interrupted. Saddened that she was trying to get away from him, he continued, almost biting his lip to hold back the words that he dreaded to speak.
“Lexi, please listen to me. I – uh, I need something from you.”
“Shoot.”
“Your family still owns that old store on Thirty-second Street, correct?”
“That would be correct,” she sighed, sensing what he was leading up to and slumping down on her bench.
“I need you to sell it. As soon as possible.”
Alexis sighed and leaned back, closing her eyes weakly. Suddenly she felt extremely faint, as though she could no longer hold herself up, and, before she knew what was happening, she blacked out, her head crashing to the table. Ryan lifted her gently, sitting down and cradling her head in his lap while fishing madly in his pocket for his cell. He dialed the nearest hospital immediately and hung up, patting her cheeks gently and checking her pulse, which was still beating, though faintly.
Cursing himself avidly for delivering such a shock to Alexis, obviously at a time when she was already more vulnerable than ever before, Ryan tucked her head gently under his chin and rocked her limp figure slowly back and forth. Just as the ambulance was pulling up a few feet away, Alexis opened her eyes and blinked slowly, feeling Ryan’s heartbeat pulsing almost in time with her own. She sighed weakly, enjoying a sense of more safety than she’d felt in longer than she could remember, before realizing where she was and what Ryan had told her just before she passed out. Sitting bolt upright, the top of her head caught Ryan a glancing blow on the chin as he sat, eyes closed, with his cheek softly pressed against her hair. She heard his teeth clack together and felt him gasp in pain, but she wasn’t bothered by this as she jumped off his lap and spun around to face him. Alexis was briefly surprised by the look of pure fear on Ryan’s face, but overcame her shock almost immediately as he jumped up and drew her into a warm embrace, his arms wrapping comfortingly around her back as he stroked her hair numbly and repetitively with hands that she noticed, with annoyance, were shaking.
“A – Are you all right?” he murmured softly into her ear, when he had recovered his voice adequately to speak. She found herself with her head pressed against his chest and was suddenly incredibly aware of its every rise and fall, feeling his relieved heart beating against her cheek.
“I’m fine!” she barked, pulling out of his embrace harshly and backing away from him – straight into one of the hospital attendants who was holding one end of a stretcher obviously intended for her. The helpless man, thrown off balance, stumbled backward, pulling his partner down with him. As the two hospital employees struggled to get back up off the ground from their prone positions, Alexis stepped over them, looking down as she did so to snap, “We won’t be needing that stretcher. I’m fine. Perfectly fine.” She turned around briefly to look back at Ryan, noted the ghostly paleness of his complexion, and continued sarcastically, “Well, I may be fine, but I can’t say so much for him. Perhaps you should stay after all.” And with that last cutting remark, she strode off, leaving the helpless Ryan to deal with the two attendants, who were now trying to get him to lie down on the stretcher – perhaps just for the sake of having an injured person to carry off.

Alexis spun around in her chair to face the door of her office, disgusted. Why was she constantly disturbed by her employees, when she really only wanted to be left alone? She’d just been falling asleep, drifting into a blissful catnap to escape both the troubles nagging at her mind and the beginnings of a nasty headache, and now here was someone else, probably wanting to know how she liked her coffee or some other trivial nonsense. After her confrontation at her reunion, she’d left immediately, without even having a chance to talk with some old friends, gotten into her car, and driven straight to her office. Alexis was the manager of one of the biggest radio stations in New York City, and, though she certainly wasn’t scrimping and saving every penny, she wasn’t happy, either. Her mind had been racked with painful memories after meeting Ryan- it was as if an age-old scar was opened again to the hurt of the world, and when she’d pulled up to her office building in the winding streets of New York, the first thing she did was collapse in her chair and try to catch some much-needed shuteye. But that was the one thing you never did in the city- sleep. Shaking her head and picking up the Styrofoam cup of coffee abandoned on her desk, she tipped it back, only to realize that it was empty, and called “Come in,” as she turned to gaze out her window over the city. This was her favorite place to be ever since the accident. Something about this birds’-eye view soothed her troubled mind and brought temporary peace to her soul.
“Uhm… Miss?” a questioning, shy voice asked, and, without even needing to turn around, Alexis knew that it was her secretary, Phoebe.
“Yes?” Alexis asked, trying to keep a patient tone in her voice despite the twinges of anxiety she was experiencing.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Phoebe spoke, almost in a whisper, before she was interrupted by loud footsteps in the hallway, the sound of the door swinging wildly in its frame, and a loud call that ricocheted throughout Alexis’s office – one that caused her newly forming headache to double in intensity.
“Lexi! It’s so fantastic to see you again!”
Alexis spun around, nearly knocking her secretary off her feet, to find herself face to face with her good friend, Mia. She noted that Mia was dressed in her usual colorful hodgepodge of clothing. Mia was one of those women that all the smaller, less impressive girls envied in school – a nice height (about 5’6), smoothly tanned skin, a mass of silky golden hair that draped over her shoulders in amber waves, long, shapely legs that attracted the wandering eyes of many men, and beautiful hazel eyes. Today she was sporting a flowing, brightly colored dress in an African print that served to further accentuate her trim hourglass figure, accompanied by a matching earring and necklace set that seemed to be decorated by gold-plated elephants with their trunks raised. To her surprise, Alexis found herself remembering a legend of sorts about elephants that Mia had told her quite some time ago – some symbolism relating their raised trunks to good luck. Mia strode across the room, nearly bowling the secretary over as she did so, and threw her arms around the now-standing Alexis in a bear hug that only worsened Alexis’s migraine.
“Long time no see!” Mia exclaimed, holding Alexis back at arm’s length to look her up and down. Taking in the tell-tale lines under her eyes and her rumpled, windblown hair, Mia sighed. “What’ve you been up to now, Lexi? Didn’t I warn you to start taking better care of yourself? Remember to –“
“Cut down on my stress, eat a better diet, and get more exercise. Of course I remember, Mia. How could I forget?” Alexis laughed ruefully, rubbing her throbbing temples gently as she turned away and eased into her chair, closing her eyes. She winced in pain, hearing the door to her office slam as Mia shut it, yet didn’t bother looking up. Mia came around Alexis’s chair and perched on her desktop, her long legs gracefully dangling over the edge in a pose that served only to make her appear more attractive than she had standing – if that was possible.
“Have you had any more episodes, Alexis? I’m worried about you.”
“Trust me. You don’t need to worry about me. I haven’t had any blackouts in… quite a long time.” Before she finished speaking, Alexis found herself troubled by a nagging memory in the back of her mind – one of her experience earlier that morning – but she chose not to bring it up, dreading the thought of opening that wound again for discussion, even with her closest friend.
“Like I said, Lexi, you need to do something about your faints. They’re getting worse, and you’re stressing yourself out unnecessarily over this new show that WCTV is producing. You need to take a break and –“
“I’m fine, Mia. I don’t need your counseling. I don’t need anyone’s help. This show is gonna get going before you know it, and my blackouts are nearly gone. The accident happened fifteen years ago, not yesterday. Maybe you’re the one stressing me out.” Alexis immediately regretted such an angry outburst halfway into her speech and opened her eyes to find an expression of more hurt on her old friend’s face than she’d ever seen. Shocked at what she’d done, Alexis stood up and tried to take back her remark, realizing that what it had taken her less than two minutes to say had served to hurt Mia more than she had ever seen anything do. “I’m sorry –“ she gasped, “I didn’t mean to say that. It slipped out. I didn’t mean it – any of it. Please forgive me. You’ve done more for me than anyone else ever has. You’re the only friend I’ve got.”
Slowly, Mia blinked and the look of intense pain disappeared from her face almost as quickly as it had appeared. “It’s okay, Lexi,” she whispered, patting her friend’s back gently, “I know you didn’t mean it. Don’t worry. You’re just under a lot of stress right now. Are you still living alone?”
“Yes,” Alexis muttered from her position with her head resting on Mia’s shoulder. She could hardly breathe from the overwhelming scent of Mia’s flowery perfume, but she managed to say “I don’t need to live with anyone. I especially don’t need to live with another man.”
There was silence for a time in Alexis’s office as she cried and Mia held her, both basking in the company of and leaning on the other. The two stayed like that for a while until Alexis’s sobs quieted and she let out a long sigh, relaxing against her friend and enjoying the sensation of having her troubles lifted, if only for a short time. Just then, they were interrupted by a loud, assertive knock on the door. Lexi lifted her head wearily from Mia’s shoulder, wiped her eyes, smoothed her hair with one hand, and, with a weak smile, crossed the room to pull open the door, only to find herself face to face with Ryan. He looked better than he had before, if that was possible, beaming down at her with an honest expression on his clean-shaven face. Somehow, Lexi knew that if she got close enough to him, she could smell his aftershave. He had changed clothes into black slacks, dress shoes, and a blue silk shirt, but she knew that underneath his friendly exterior was the heart of a true businessman- one that had come here for one reason and one reason only, to get her to give up the piece of her past she was most determined to hang onto for as long as possible.
Lexi took a step back, almost reeling as she tried to get control of her emotions. Her temples pounded worse than they had a few moments ago, and she might have fallen onto the floor right there in her office had not Mia stepped forward and taken her arm in a comforting, friendly grip. Mia was always the more confrontational of the two, and she was certainly in top form today.
“What do you think you’re doing, showing up at a time like this, so many years later, to act like nothing ever happened? Can’t you see she’s not feeling well? Lexi doesn’t want to deal with you right now,” she barked at Ryan, snarling angrily at him as she approached in an aggressive stance, threatening to push him out of the doorway.

Ryan staggered inwardly as though he’d just been punched in the stomach. He hadn’t come here expecting anything like what he’d just experienced- certainly not the look on Alexis’s face that he had just seen. In all the time he’d known her- which, he regrettably admitted to himself, wasn’t very long- she had never looked so weak or so vulnerable. In the back of his mind, he had a nagging feeling that something terrible, something heartbreaking, perhaps, had come into her life after they’d parted, and just the thought of her being hurt so badly was enough to enrage him. He could feel the heat of anger rising within him- not anger directed at Lexi herself, she was so fragile, so helpless- but anger at whatever, whoever could have hurt her so badly. However, Ryan knew that this wasn’t the time to demand answers or an explanation of any sort from Lexi herself. She was far too devastated, both by whatever had happened, and, he admitted regretfully, by his presence in her doorway. Knowing that he was a part of her troubles drove a stake through his heart.
“Hey, Lexi, call off your dogs,” he joked with a fake smile plastered on his face. “I – uh, I just came by to see how you were doing. After all, you certainly worried me at the reunion.”
“Don’t you dare bring that up,” Lexi growled, stepping forward and jerking her arm out of Mia’s grip. “That was my business, not yours, and I know why you’ve come here. I’m not selling the store. Not now, not ever. So you can just take your business elsewhere.”
“Calm down, O angry one. This is a peace mission.” Ryan took her hand gently in his, applying the slightest amount of pressure as he enjoyed the sensation of touching her, if only for a short time. With the other hand behind his back, he produced a bright bouquet of flowers with an exaggerated flourish. “For you, milady.” Ryan noticed that Lexi’s face was pale, although her eyes and her nose were reddened, and wondered, with a burst of sorrow and guilt, if she’d been crying. Before she could take the flowers, Mia stepped between them and snatched the bouquet herself, shaking her head angrily so that her earrings bounced.
“I told you, she doesn’t want to see you –“
“Mia. Mia, it’s fine. I can handle this,” Lexi spoke softly, putting her hands on Mia’s shoulders and gently guiding her toward the door. “Would you mind terribly leaving us alone for a bit? Don’t worry about me, okay? I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t like it,” Mia protested even as she was being pushed out the door. “If you need any help- any help at all, just call me. You know my number.”
“By heart. I’ll call you later tonight. Thanks for all your help.”
Once she’d guided Mia out the door, Lexi crossed the floor of her office and sank into her leather chair with an exhausted sigh. Closing her eyes, she groaned. “What do you want, Ryan? Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”
Ryan came over and sat down, facing Lexi. He reached out and gently took both her hands in his. “Lexi, I’m worried about you. I get the feeling something’s happened to you since the accident, and you’re scaring me.”
“How am I suddenly ‘scaring you’, Ryan? We haven’t talked to each other in twenty years. You were the one who left without a word. You disappeared and left me with a broken heart. Face it. We’re not in each other’s lives any more, and I want to keep it that way.” Sitting up slightly, Lexi moaned softly and opened her eyes, pulling her hands out of Ryan’s comforting grip. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Trust me, I’m perfect.”
“You’re acting differently, Lexi. It’s like more than just your lungs was damaged by that accident.”
Lexi slumped back in her chair, closing her eyes and giving herself over to memories of the terrible event more than fifteen years before. It was the accident that had brought the end of her relationship with Ryan. Perhaps something about her injuries had scared him away- an underlying fear of commitment, who knew, but whatever it was, he’d left and never come back, taking a piece of her heart with him. That is, until this afternoon, at their high school reunion.
She had been driving along the freeway to her apartment in the middle of New York late one afternoon, about five o’clock, to prepare for her date that night with Ryan. Her young heart had been winged all day. Their relationship was improving lately and she was just beginning to hope that, eventually, the two of them might have something more than just a casual friendship. To her delight, the night before, while they were talking on the phone, he had proposed exactly that- a date, an actual date, at one of the best restaurants in Manhattan. They’d set the time for six-thirty, so she had left work early to make sure that she got home and was able to put in sufficient primping and pampering time before the big event.

Lexi sped along the freeway, noting with surprise and happiness that the road was almost empty, with one arm dangling gracefully out the window as she listened to her favorite song on the radio. Her friends had told her that she was actually singing happily for the first time in a long while. Perhaps there really was something promising in her relationship this time. All the other boyfriends she’d had in the past were unsatisfactory in one way or another. Either they smoked, (which she hated), or they drank, (which she hated), or they had to be touching her all the time. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was a guy following her around and pawing her every chance he got. But there was something different about Ryan- there really was. Lexi knew that this was what every love-struck girl said about the object of her affections – before she was dumped and resigned herself to eating gallons of ice cream and crying, that is; but she’d discovered, for the first time, that there might actually be something to those stories of true love. Tonight she was planning on opening her heart to a man for the first time, and, whatever he wanted to do to her, she would let him. She had never felt this strongly for anyone before, and she intended to hold onto that feeling for as long as possible.
Just then, Lexi heard a barrage of horns honking around her car. Blinking and refocusing her eyes from her daydream onto the harshness of real life, she realized that the road had suddenly become extremely crowded, the dark of night illuminated by what seemed like thousands of lights. She looked up and saw headlights blaring down on her tiny car, filling her range of vision like the eyes of some cruel monster from the night. Lexi was filled with a sickly sense of fear and the realization that she was facing her own imminent doom. Panicking, she spun the wheel frantically, making any attempt to get out of those deadly beams, but to no avail. The last thing Lexi heard was the screams and frantic calls of the people in the cars around her before she lost consciousness completely, her head slamming with astonishing force into the dashboard and blood pouring from a gash on her face.
Lexi awoke to find herself lying in a strange bed. She tried to sit up and open her eyes, but found that it was impossible. There was a throbbing ache from her head and, when she tried to breathe, she realized that she was wheezing. Opening her eyes, Lexi found that she had tubes leading through her nose and mouth and that she was hooked up to a respirator with bandages wrapped around her head. Sitting across the room, watching her, with a look on his face different from any one she’d ever seen before, was Ryan.

When Lexi recovered enough to take the news relatively calmly, the doctors told her that she’d suffered from a collapsed lung and had received mild brain trauma from the car crash. She was lucky to be alive. But being lucky in life didn’t mean she was lucky in other respects- particularly love. The day she opened her eyes in the hospital bed for the first time was the last she ever saw of Ryan, until her high school reunion. He disappeared without ever speaking to her again, and, when he did, that was not only the end of Lexi’s newfound belief in true love, but also the beginning of her new cynical views on the subject. He’d never come back- but someone else had.
That someone else was Lexi’s first, and so far only, husband and lover, Damon. Their relationship only caused Lexi to despair even further of ever finding her “soulmate” again. She knew that she’d found him once, but then he had walked out of her life without a word when she needed him most, and she was not ready or willing to welcome him, or anyone else, for that matter, back. Lexi’s mother, Chelsea, had been alive at the time, however, and she desperately wanted grandkids before she died, so, much to Lexi’s annoyance, she spent all her spare time trying to set her only daughter up with the “perfect husband”. Finally, she was satisfied with a man she found on an online dating service. Immediately, Chelsea set Lexi and Damon up on a date together, and, much to Lexi’s regret, he seemed like a nice guy. Though, in her mind, he and Ryan could never measure up, her new fiancé appeared to be a suitable alternative to the real thing, and there was an additional bonus of getting her mother off her back, so Lexi and her newfound “boyfriend” married a year later.
There was only one problem.
Damon was an alcoholic.
Two months into their marriage, he started going out every Friday night and coming home stoned. In the beginning, he’d use the excuse of going out for a men’s bowling night, but once they were together for about a year, he began getting drunk more and more often and hiding his drunkenness from Lexi less and less. Perhaps his being stoned so much wouldn’t have been such a problem if it didn’t make him heavily abusive. Though Lexi was disgusted by her husband’s behavior, somewhere deep in her heart she hoped that he would change and that he really did love her. And it wasn’t just her hope for love that kept the two of them together. At the time, she was pregnant, and she desperately wanted the best for their unborn child, so Lexi stayed with her husband until the very end, determined to make their relationship work to give her baby a father. At first, Damon wasn’t so bad when he got drunk, and Lexi thought that she could handle it. Rather than being physically abusive, he took his rage out on her verbally. Each night, he’d come home about midnight, wake her up by slamming all the doors, come in, and pace around their room. He would then throw and break their things while screaming angrily, his breath stinking of bourbon, calling her words that not even a sailor would use. But Damon never laid a hand on Lexi herself until one terrible night in about the sixth month of her pregnancy.
It had been about midnight, the usual time for Damon to come home from the bar. Though he drove home every night now completely stoned, Lexi no longer worried about him. She’d passed the stage of caring whether or not he got killed- even if he did die, that would just be one less thing for her to worry about. Her belly was becoming more and more swollen by the day, it seemed, and the child within couldn’t seem to stop kicking. Lexi was uncomfortable all day at her office and, when she came home, Damon was never there- until midnight, that is, when he never failed to barge in screaming and rage for several hours. At the end of his raging, he would collapse on the floor wherever he fell. If he was lucky, that would be on their bed. She no longer had any kind of a $ex life and couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love- the sad thing was that even if he’d wanted to, she knew that she couldn’t bring herself to be with him. The only reason they hadn’t broken up yet was for the sake of her unborn child.

Suddenly, Lexi sat up and looked around their bedroom. She had turned all the lights off, except for one softly glowing desk lamp, and she was lying on their queen-sized bed drifting off to sleep, but a moment ago, she’d heard a loud noise coming from the family room. Lexi leaned over to look at the clock and was surprised to see it was one in the morning, unusually late for her drunken husband to be coming home. Just then, Damon appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. His hair was rumpled, his shirt was stained, and he obviously hadn’t shaven. He was a large man, about 6’3, with short black hair and dark brown eyes, so, when he stood in the shadowy entryway to their master bedroom, he appeared quite menacing and struck a chord of fear deep into Lexi’s heart. It was the first time she’d ever been afraid of a man.
Damon strode forward across their room with an evil glint in his eyes, strangely silent despite Lexi’s calls, and she could smell the heavy stench of alcohol on his breath. It was clear that he’d had more drinks than usual tonight, as it was only when he was heavily drunk that he didn’t scream and reverted to an eerie silence.
“Hi, honey. How was bowling?” she asked shakily, scooting back in bed nervously as she tried frantically to divert his rage by reverting to his old excuse. “Did your team win the tournament?”
Damon continued pressing toward her. She wound up sitting on her pillow, back pressed against the headboard, eyes spread wide in fear as he approached steadily. When he reached her, he slapped her quickly and violently across the face, and thus began the worst night of her life. She recoiled immediately and cried “Why did you do that?”, but his only reply was another slap. Within a few seconds, he had reverted to hitting her. Pulling her up from the bed, Damon beat her up with a vicious anger that she’d never seen before in him. After the first injury, Lexi tried to fight back and protect herself from his blows, but her efforts were futile. Damon’s painful attack seemed to last for an eternity, but when he finally let her go and collapsed on their bed into his usual alcohol-induced stupor, really only about half an hour had passed.

Lexi managed to drag herself to their bedside phone and call the nearest hospital for an ambulance. She wouldn’t have had to do so if her water hadn’t broken a month early due to the beating. Her face and body were severely bruised and she had several open wounds on her body where Damon had managed to get hold of his pocketknife. When several members of the hospital staff made it to her house, they burst in to find her curled up, bleeding, on the floor and her husband lying on the bed. Once they’d heard her report, Damon was taken to the police station for questioning and Lexi went straight into the delivery room. Seven hours of labor later, Lexi delivered a stillbirth. The doctors told her that the likely reason the baby had died in her womb was because of the stress of the beating that Damon had inflicted. Two weeks later, the case went to trial and Damon was jailed. Unable to pay his bail, he’d remained in jail, and, as far as Lexi knew, he was still there. She desperately hoped he was rotting to dirt in a moldy cell somewhere and would stay there until he died, but she knew that it was too good to be true and dreaded the imagined day when he would break out and come looking for her to beat her again.
“Lexi. Lexi!”
She sighed and opened her eyes, letting her wearied mind drift back to the reality of the scene before her. Suddenly, Lexi felt exhausted, as though she had run laps rather than just remembering her past. Her entire body felt weak and limp, and she found it an exertion just to hold her head up. It was like an electric shock had jolted through her body, weakening her to sheer debility. For twenty years Lexi had kept those painful memories locked away deep in her heart. It had taken her a long time to put the lid on that box, but she’d done it. For a year after losing her baby, Lexi mentally reviewed all the painful things that had happened to her over and over in excruciating detail until she was finally able to seal them away so that she never had to think of them again. That was exactly why the sight of Ryan sickened her to such a degree. Just looking at his honest- she hated to admit it- loving face opened her oldest wounds again to the world and caused her more pain than she had ever known possible.
“Lexi! Shall I call the hospital again?”
She tried to sit up, but her muscles were so weak she could hardly move. Opening her eyes slowly, Lexi looked up and realized she was in Ryan’s lap, her head resting on his leg, and that he was looking down into her face. He was wearing an expression that she’d never seen on any man before.

After Ryan took her hands, Lexi closed her eyes and remained in that position for what seemed like an eternity, before her body went lax and she began to slide off her chair onto the floor. Ryan immediately sat down beneath her and gently pulled her into his arms, where he took her pulse. To his immense relief, her heart was still beating normally. He quickly reassured his fast-beating heart that she was so exhausted she’d just fallen asleep in her office and began to regret coming to find her again. It seemed like every time he tried to talk to her, she either fainted or collapsed. The thought was just sprouting in his mind that perhaps she really did hate him after he’d walked out on her all those years ago, and, truthfully, he’d never intended to come back into her life at all. When he left her hospital room that day, leaving her lying in bed looking so pale and weak, he’d had to force himself to walk out, but deep inside, he believed that it had been the right choice. Their lives were so different that he managed to convince himself she was better off without him- although that certainly wasn’t an easy mindset for him to assume. After walking out on Lexi, he had spent many sleepless nights with very intense dreams about making love to her. During his dreams, he felt happier than he’d ever felt before and he experienced a sense of oneness, of belonging, that he knew he neither would nor could ever feel with anyone else. She was radiant, her skin gleaming and her face bright and loving in a way that he’d never seen it in daily life – especially never turned in his direction. In his dream, his heart was so full of joy it threatened to explode and neither of them wanted the moment to end – but end it did, every night just as dawn began to creep over the horizon. Slowly, she would float away from him into the light of day, and, no matter how tightly or lovingly he held on to her, no matter how many desperate tears he shed, each morning she would disappear. Soon, Ryan found himself living for his dreams alone, knowing that, at least while he was asleep, he and his true love could be together for precious short hours of happiness and bliss. Each morning, he would awake in a mass of rumpled bedclothes, drenched in sweat with salty tears on his cheeks, unable to escape the terrible feeling that he was spending his life searching for something he could never find – and all of it his own fault. Every moment of every day, Ryan lived in regret of what he’d done so many years ago, yet he knew he couldn’t just run back into her life and take her in his arms as he longed to do. After more than ten years, he knew that she must have done a lot of things with her life, none of which involved him. She could have married, had kids, moved perhaps, who knew, leaving him to live in the torment of knowing that he had, in one swift move, destroyed all his chances of ever seeing her again.
Eventually, Ryan had tried to move on with his life, tried to change the pattern of his dreary, routine days by doing something different. The first thing he’d done was buy a new house. Ryan’s father was an attorney who had started his own law office, and Son, and a year or so after leaving Lexi, his business hit a boom and the clients came pouring in. Ryan suddenly found himself with more money than he’d ever wanted or needed. For the first few years, he’d had tried to fill the empty space in his heart with possessions and money. He bought all sorts of fanciful, worthless things for himself, things that wound up days later buried in his attic or basement, like his automatic jar opener that he used once, or his tie rack that fell off an hour after he hung it up, but nothing helped. There was a period of his life where he tried to convince himself that he just needed some female companionship, so he entered the dating game for a brief period of time, but failed miserably. Everyone that he went out with just couldn’t ever seem to measure up to Lexi. Even though he had never actually kissed her, he somehow knew that there was no one else who fit him so well or tasted so right, and, consequently, no matter how attractive his date was, she would inevitably go home dissatisfied.
About five years after leaving, Ryan finally gave up on the meaningless things he’d tried to fill his heart with – the women, the worthless possessions that wound up lost and covered in dust, even his new house, and reluctantly admitted that there was no one in the world who could ever hope of taking Lexi’s place. The worst part was that, thanks to him, the one woman who could make him truly whole was forever beyond his reach. He was devastated and resigned himself to a life without joy or love, choosing instead to look for his heart in the bottom of a bottle. For several years, Ryan went through each day in monotony; not thinking about what he was doing, going straight to the bar after work to drown his sorrows in ever-larger amounts of alcohol. He stopped shaving and taking care of himself physically and mentally, making thousands of mistakes at his job and losing several prominent clients, and he might well have kept it up for the rest of his life had it not been for one devastating day that changed his outlook on life forever.

It was the end of another bleak day, rain pouring down from the sky a mirror of the tears from Ryan’s broken heart. He’d just pulled up his broken-down Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of his new house. Sitting in the car for a moment, he surveyed his latest purchase, yet nothing about it held any appeal for him. Ryan caught himself wishing that he could see Lexi in one of the lovely Victorian-style windows, beaming down at him and holding some flowers that were weeds in comparison to the beauty of her face, but he knew that this would never be possible. Overwhelmed by desperation and longing, tears began running down his face. Trying to hide his intense feelings with anger, Ryan yelled and brought his fists down on the dashboard. To his annoyance, the plastic gave beneath his force and he suddenly found himself up to his elbows in the front of his car. Jerking his arms out of their plastic prison, he slammed the car door and walked up the path to his house.
Ryan turned his key in the lock and opened his front door. Staring down the empty hallway facing him, he was again thunderstruck by feelings of loneliness and sorrow. He stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and headed straight for his living room. It was extremely plain and simply furnished with the bare essentials- a chair, a couch, a television set, and one small bookshelf. Throwing himself on the couch, he picked up an abandoned bottle of whiskey, tipped it back, and drank deeply.

It turned out later on that Ryan drank himself into an alcoholic stupor where he then collapsed on the couch- unknowingly leaving his lit cigarette on the shag carpet. The carpet caught on fire and the flames spread through his entire house within half an hour. Had the fire alarm not gone off, Ryan’s life would have ended that night. As it was, he didn’t get off scot-free. He wound up spending a month in the hospital being treated for second-degree burns on his hands and arms. He still wore the scars, and they served as a reminder of what he vowed never to do again. When he got out of the hospital, Ryan’s father talked him into joining AA, and a year later, Ryan had successfully broken his habit. He hoped it was for good. That was why, even though the doctors had informed him of the benefits of plastic surgery, he had refused. He wanted the scars to stop him from ever doing anything as dangerous again.
When Ryan’s father accepted him back as a partner, they’d worked together quite well for several years, and the heavy workload helped to take Ryan’s mind off his lost love. For a while, he thought that he would be able to forget her forever – that is, until his Dad asked him to go find Lexi again and ask her to do the one thing she’d never be able to do- give up her beloved store.
It wasn’t really anything much to Ryan or, as far as he knew, to anyone else, but it certainly had meant the world to Lexi when he’d known her. A small coffee shop on one of New York’s bustling streets, it had stayed in an out-of-the-way corner location for as long as he could remember. The shop looked quaint and rather friendly, he had to admit, but it, like everything else, had to bow down to the onrush of new apartments being built in the area. For years, new buildings had been erected around the store, but it had never even been threatened with destruction, as it wasn’t city property. How Lexi’s great-grandparents had gotten it in the first place, it seemed no one in town knew, but it certainly was common knowledge that her family had owned the store for at least three generations, possibly more. When Lexi’s Dad died, he’d given Lexi the deed to the property, not her mother. She had always been extremely close to her father, probably because her mom was one of those annoying people who liked to meddle in her daughter’s business and had a loud, scratchy voice. Perhaps it was because, when she was younger, her mother went out at least once a week and came home drunk that alienated the two of them- Ryan didn’t know- but the store was the last piece of her father and of her past that Lexi could hold on to, and he certainly had expected her to put up a fight. The one thing he hadn’t expected was for her to faint practically at his feet. When she’d collapsed and recovered so suddenly, he had been overwhelmed with anger at himself for surprising her so awfully at a time when she was already obviously weakened by other circumstances, so he’d looked her up in the phone book and driven to her office in the hopes of apologizing for his ridiculous behavior.
Suddenly, Ryan felt Lexi’s muscles tense and her slow movements as she tried, weakly, to sit up. He leaned down and gently turned her head, taking the loose pieces of her hair and tucking them behind her ears. Her face was so delicate, so beautiful, that he couldn’t resist touching her the way he’d dreamed of doing for so many years, if only for a brief period of time before she came to her senses and slapped him. At least the memory itself might carry him through a few more nights. Ryan looked into her sparkling eyes and ran the pads of his fingers softly around her jaw, her nose, her mouth; his body heating up from just the simple contact until he expected to see sparks flying between them. He found himself pulling her gently up in his lap and cradling her gently in his arms, stroking the wonderfully soft place at the base of her neck until she sighed luxuriously and cuddled up against him, resting her head on his shoulder. Bending his head, Ryan caressed her face with his lips, gently reveling in her taste. He took his time, carefully kissing the corners of her mouth, tantalizing the two of them with his probing tongue, until he finally bent his dark head and took her with a rush. She moaned and parted her lips in reception, her body relaxing and molding to his as she lazily put her arms around his neck, twining her fingers in his soft brown hair and holding him closer. He was surprised by the way she accepted him so readily, but he wasn’t about to question her behavior when he was so overwhelmed. Raising his head, he gazed at her lovingly with eyes now dark with passion and found only her anger staring back.
Lexi glared at Ryan with a fury in surprising contrast to her actions of a few moments ago, recognizing the shock on his face and reveling cruelly in the knowledge that she’d caught him off guard. She jerked away from him, feeling her heart wrench in two against her will, and stood up.
“Have you had your fun?”
“I wasn’t the only one enjoying that, Lexi, and you know it. What I want to know is why you won’t admit it.”
“How conceited are you, Ryan, that you think you can leave me for twenty years only to march right back into my life and try to make out with me on the floor of my office? I haven’t spoken to you in so long. Then you walk up to me at our reunion and ask me to sell the one piece of my past that I’m closest to.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just marched up and sprung it on you like that.”
“Ryan, I don’t have time for this. I have to go home. I’ve got an appointment tonight and a show to prepare for. You have to leave. I don’t want to see you here ever again.” Lexi walked across the room and held the door of her office open, gesturing with one hand as she invited him to leave. Ryan still sat on the floor, his eyes wide in shock, but once Lexi crossed the room, he stood up and walked over to her. He was at least a head taller than she was, so his height was quite formidable in comparison. Putting one arm around her and pulling her in closer to him, he bent his head down and kissed her again, dipping his tongue in and out of her mouth tantalizingly. Then, just as quickly, he pulled away and, without a backward glance, strode out of her office. She heard his footsteps echoing off down the hallway as she snatched her purse and followed him out the door on the way to her own car.

“Look, Ryan. I need that piece of property, and I need you to get it for me. If you can’t manage to do that, I’m afraid I’ll have to let you go.”
“You’d fire your own son?”
“If it comes to that, yes. Now can you get it for me or not?”
“I’ll try, Dad. I’ll try.”
Ryan slammed the phone down on its base in anger. He slumped against the wall separating the men’s restroom from the ladies’ and groaned. Here he was at the finest restaurant in New York City, Chez Paris, with Mark and some of his other friends, trying to enjoy a night on the town, and there was his father calling again. Didn’t he deserve a break by now, after ten years of hard work, without the threat of losing his job? This was his father threatening to fire him, after all. His father. How many guys out there had their dad for their boss?
Just then, there was a crash somewhere behind Ryan. He spun around angrily and surveyed the busy restaurant. It was full of stiff men in black suits and equally stiff women in dresses or skirts. Though the place was extremely expensive and served high quality gourmet food, Ryan found himself wishing that he were at a steakhouse instead. He hated the pressure of having to dress nicely and behave himself in front of all these rich entrepreneurs, but his friends had wanted to give him a change of pace. They were worried about him, and he supposed that they had a right to be. After all, he’d certainly been acting differently lately. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the kiss he and Lexi had shared and the way she responded to his touch. It was as if they were meant to be together from the beginning, the way their bodies seemed so perfectly aligned.
Ryan turned around and left the bathroom area, trying to clear his head. He had to get back to their table before his friends left him without a ride. Winding his way through the crowded room, filled with scented candles that assaulted one’s nose with their artificial odors and so many different colognes and perfumes that he would never be able to sort them out, he suppressed the urge to plug his nose in disgust. He had always hated perfume, fake scents, and the way they accosted the senses. Lexi, he realized, never wore any. On some days she used to wear some kind of lotion that smelled of lilies – lilies or jasmine, he wasn’t quite sure, one of those delicate flowers – and it suited her perfectly, so he didn’t mind that at all, but these people drenched their skin in the cheapest of scents and it didn’t do anything for them whatsoever. Distracted, Ryan pushed past a short blond woman in an enormous purple feather boa that dwarfed her head, rounded the corner, and plopped into his empty chair. As he looked around at the small group of people clustered at his table, he sighed in exasperation. They’d already started to get stoned, and it wasn’t even seven yet. Since he’d stopped drinking several years ago, he continued to wonder why he even went out with these people anymore. Maybe it was habit. After all, Mark had first begun their group a year or so ago. They met every Friday night at various bars or nightclubs around town, stayed out for a few hours, and got as drunk as possible before they got thrown out. Tonight, he figured, they might’ve made a mistake in choosing such a fancy restaurant. The black-tied waiters were already hovering in corners, glaring distastefully at them and waiting for an opportunity to get rid of them.
As Ryan’s gaze traveled from one unshaven, sleepless face to another, he found himself becoming even more disgusted and wondered how in God’s name this was supposed to cheer him up. Mark sat at the other end of their table, most of his face buried in an immense foamy mug of beer, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, his hair wrinkled and sticking up in the wrong places. Next to him sat Robert. Bob was the crier of the group. When he got drunk (and Ryan couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t) his eyes watered, his face drooped, and he became overly emotional. There were your two classic types of drunks- your angry drunks, and your depressed ones. Bob was the latter sort. He wasn’t bawling yet, but Ryan knew he would be soon.
On the right of Robert sat Steve. Steve was the type of person that you couldn’t help feeling sorry for. He was tall, about 6’5, with short, curly black hair and sparkling hazel eyes, and it was clear that he would be really handsome if he weren’t an alcoholic. Over the years, however, he’d stopped taking care of himself altogether, gaining a lot of weight and growing a shaggy, crooked beard that changed the look of his face altogether. There wasn’t a day that Steve’s breath and body didn’t reek of alcohol, which was why he hardly ever had a girlfriend. On the occasions when he did, she was usually a one-night stand and, when he was particularly desperate, a prostitute. Most normal women got sick of him by the next day, as, by the time they made it to bed; he was in a drunken stupor and became an apathetic lover.
Ryan sighed and shook his head in frustration. Maybe this was the last Friday night he’d spend with these guys. Not only did they stink, both of unwashed skin and of too much alcohol, but he could never have an intelligent conversation with any of them. To say their table didn’t attract any women was an understatement. All the girls in their right minds stayed at least fifty feet away from them at all times- they were probably repelled by the stench, which seemed to increase tenfold each week. Ryan was sorely tempted to bring a clothespin for his nose, as the scent of alcohol certainly did nothing for him now but made him sick to his stomach. His drink was Perrier – sparkling water. Alcohol had lost all its taste for him.
Mark leaned over the small table and slapped Ryan’s hand in a gesture that was probably meant to be friendly but felt more vicious than anything else, slurring as he did so, “Whaddya think, Ry? Is your fat ass happy yet?”
“Couldn’t be better, Mark. What was this supposed to do for me again? Because I don’t think it’s working.”
“You gotta ferget about that chick, Ry. You just gotta. She’s messin’ with your head. Chicks’re bad fer you, and I should know. I seen enough of ‘em.”
Rolling his eyes- how could Mark know what ‘chicks’ were like- Ryan shrugged. “Don’t worry, Mark. I’ve already forgotten about her. Wiped the slate. I need to get going home now- there’s a lot of paperwork I need to catch up on. So I’m gonna grab the bus, OK? You guys don’t need to give me a ride.”
“Aw, Ry, but we wanna give you a ride.” Mark pounded drunkenly on the table with a fist. “Don’t we, guys? Don’t we wanna give Ry here a ride home?”

Ryan groaned. “It’s fine. In fact, why don’t I give you guys a ride home instead? Come on; let’s get you out of here.” He walked over to Mark and pulled the car keys out of his pocket with two fingers – they were covered in grime and grease, and his friend’s breath smelled as though it should be bottled and disposed of in a radioactive waste facility. The others were slumped in their chairs already, but Ryan knew from past experience that they weren’t too drunk to walk yet and, with effort, he could get them out to the car. It took a few minutes and involved a great deal of groaning and bad breath, but he managed the feat, ignoring the withering glares of the waiters as he walked by. The bill had already been paid, so that wasn’t a problem, although it wasn’t as though any of his friends had paused in their drinking to eat anyway. Ryan hadn’t wanted to order any food at first, but eventually his hunger got the better of him and he’d eaten half of a steak with some mashed potatoes about halfway through the evening. He was exhausted, disgusted with his friends’ behavior, and still felt the stirrings of desire from his last encounter with Lexi. The only thing Ryan wanted to do was go home and collapse for the next three days. Maybe, he thought, if he could just work on something and get his mind off the kiss he and Lexi had shared earlier, he’d start to feel better. After all, there was nothing he could do for it. She didn’t want to see him, and she definitely didn’t want to get involved with him; on top of that, chances were that if he tried to convince her he wasn’t so bad after all, she’d just faint again. Whatever happened, he couldn’t stand watching her beautiful gray eyes start that slow roll back up into her head one more time. He was still a little nauseous from the last time it’d happened. And Lexi, of course, could care less. It was that devil-may-care attitude of hers that really annoyed him. As it was, though, he had worse problems to deal with. Three of them, to be exact, and one of which that was currently leaning drunkenly on his shoulder and swamping his senses with whiskey.

Lexi hadn’t been to downtown New York in what seemed like decades, though it was really only a few years. She knew the store was down there and probably not doing so well, but she just hadn’t managed to go see it. When her father died, he left her the store – the problem was that, for awhile, she’d been too upset by his death to go visit it. Lexington Antiques, her namesake, had been his pride and joy when he was alive; everyone in the area knew that, no matter the circumstances, they would always be welcomed there. During her high school and college years, Lexi had loved to go visit with her father after school. She became well-known amongst the older women in the neighborhood that were loyal customers and learned how to tell the difference between a worthless piece of glass and an emerald before she graduated the twelfth grade, acquiring some knowledge that the operators of shows like Antiques Roadshow would’ve paid a great deal of money for but that her father taught her for free. It was after she met Damon, however, that the two of them began to grow apart. At the time, both her parents had still been very much alive, and though her mother Chelsea was a big fan of Damon, her father hadn’t liked him from the very start. He didn’t attend their wedding, and Lexi never had a chance to speak to him again because he died of a massive heart attack about two weeks later. Adding to her grief, Lexi’s mother followed him perhaps five days afterward. Though the doctors said it’d been from a particularly harsh seizure, because Chelsea had always been an epileptic, Lexi believed that her mother, knowing she couldn’t live without her husband, had just given up the ghost altogether. They gave the pair a double funeral three weeks after her mother died and buried them in the same plot. It only seemed right that two so close in life should be equally close in death.

Even her sadness over the death of her father, though, wasn’t enough to make Lexi want to see the store. While she was married to Damon, she’d been both too depressed to travel and unable to travel any great distance altogether; the doctors forbade her to drive more than three to five miles from her home unaccompanied for a year after her accident and, even after her time was up, Lexi remained afraid of making any long journeys alone. It was perfectly logical, she reassured herself constantly, to have a fear of traveling alone after what had happened, and she even attempted to start again by making increasingly longer trips, but she just couldn’t get over the feeling of foreboding that accompanied her each time she slid behind the wheel. So today, she was taking a cab.

It seemed as though cab fares in the city got increasingly more expensive each time she took one, Lexi thought, but it was no matter, because she had to see the store before she sold it. Because she’d decided she was going to sell it. There really wasn’t any point, after all, in keeping it around if she was never going to do anything with it or even open it again, and why not just let Ryan take it off her hands?

Ryan.

Now there was a topic she never wanted to think about again.

Even though she’d known she was in love with him before he left, the two of them had never kissed. They’d never really shared much more physical contact, actually, than the occasional hug or handshake. That’s why she thought he was behaving really oddly, now that he’d come back. Suddenly, here he was, taking her hands during a conversation, cradling her in his lap when she had a spell, rubbing her back – with hands that were shaking, nonetheless – and even, of all things, kissing her. But it was the last that was the real problem. When she’d been kissed by Damon, she’d never shared anything with him. She’d tried to. Oh, had she tried. There was nothing she wanted more in the world than to experience that sensation all the great poets wrote about, nothing she wanted more in the world than to be touched by a man who cherished her for what she was, whose mere brush of fingertips over her skin ignited a million bonfires… yet she’d never managed to experience anything remotely close with her husband. For awhile, Lexi believed it was her fault for not feeling any passion at Damon’s touch. Then she’d changed her mind and believed nobody ever felt any passion when they made love, that maybe it was just something the poets invented to make the act itself seem more appealing. But there was always one niggling question in the back of her mind to make things worse. She’d always wondered if maybe, just maybe, the man that would open the door to the feelings she’d wanted to experience for so long was the one man that had never even so much as glanced at her with desire in his eyes. And now he was back. And he’d kissed her, and, when he’d kissed her, her world had exploded. There was no better way to describe it. Her heartbeat jumped and sped up to at least twice its normal speed. She’d felt as though her skin were so hot it was a surprise she wasn’t burning the floor beneath her feet. And she’d hated it.

She refused to allow Ryan to hop in and out of her life whenever it pleased him, to come in and stir up emotions she’d never even dreamed of feeling before before leaving again as though it were nothing. If she had her way, she would see no more of Ryan – for the rest of her life, preferably.

If only there were a way to ignore that kiss, she could.

That was the real reason why she’d decided to sell her property in the first place, Lexi knew; it was largely in the hopes that, once Ryan had what he’d come for, he’d just vanish from her life again and leave her alone. She didn’t need the store, she didn’t intend to use the store, and she really, really didn’t need him, so things would be better for everyone.

Lexi sat limply in the back seat of the cab as the driver, a short, stout Italian man, sped through the streets of downtown New York towards Lexington Avenue. Her father hadn’t been a very inventive man with names, giving both his store and his daughter the same name as a street, but he’d meant well. She ignored the urge to throw up and the waves of nausea that spread up her body as the ride continued, partly from habit and partly from necessity. Even sitting in the back, nowhere near the wheel or the driver’s seat, she still had a reaction from her accident. It was something she just had to ignore, and she did. She focused her eyes, instead, on the street flashing by outside her window. The neighborhood was oddly familiar, regardless of the fact that it’d been years since she’d been there last.