Untangle (2)

Caleb's POV

His words prompted my in-built defence mechanism and snapped me into an automated response.

"I'm not running. I am protecting mys—"

"Oh, cut it out, Caleb," Leo shook his head in frustration then looked deep into my eyes, as if wanting me to understand every word of what he was saying.

"You're not worried about her running away. I mean, she resigned from a job, not enlisted herself to be shuttled to Mars, for God's sake.

Infact, you're not scared of her at all. You're scared of yourself, and the depth of your feelings for her."

Leo paused, as if expecting me to butt in, but for once, I didn't even try to respond so he continued.

"You have seen what loving someone can do to you. Especially if they have the power to blindside you. You're scared to give her that much power over you. It isn't even about her, Caleb. Its about your trust issues and your fear of getting abandoned. Again."

The image of a 7 year old Ana flashed into my mind again, and I forced myself to shut it down. This was different, I told myself. This wasn't a familial or brotherly love I felt.

Oblivious to my inner monologue, Leo went on, "Afterall, even you understand that you can't be vulnerable to someone if they are no longer in your life because you pushed them away, or ran away from them. Right?"

And just like that, Shy's parting words suddenly made total sense to me. And I felt extremely stupid. How could I not realise this simplest thing? I won't be - can't be - vulnerable to Ruth if I ran away from her. Because if I did, then I would lose her. Forever.

What the hell was I even thinking? Was I planning to waltz back into her life once the dust has settled and I thought I loved her lesser than I did now? Was that even possible? Was I an idiot?

The answer was a resounding yes.

Afterall, she had never seemed like the kind of woman who gave people a second chance to redeem themselves. Her survival instinct was too strong for that.

The fact that I had gotten so many of them spoke in itself that she felt something deeper than lust and sympathy for me, just as I did for her.

With that, I acknowledged two more facts. First, I loved her, the kind that wasn't going away, no matter how much I ran from it. And second, I was being a coward to run away from it. Doing so was no different than relying on alcohol to confess something to her.

And I didn't want that. I wanted her. If that meant staying and facing my fear of getting hurt and rejected again, then so be it.

"Besides," Leo dragged me out of my thoughts for hundredth time in the last hour and dropped another bomb on me.

"She didn't run away from Boston that day."

"What? What the hell do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. She didn't run away from Boston that day. That's what we were discussing yesterday in the cabin before you went ballistic on us. I asked her why she left when you obviously needed her, and she said she left because you wanted her gone."

"I wanted her gone? What made her think that?" The thought was incomprehensible to me.

"When things started getting heated, she thought to excuse herself from the room. I distinctly remember her signalling me that she was going out, and when you told me she has flown out of Boston, I assumed that's what she meant. But yesterday she said she had only intended to leave the room."

"But... It makes no sense. Why did she leave the whole frigging state then?"

"Well, only she can answer that. But yesterday, after you and Ruth left, I couldn't stop thinking about what she had said. And it made sense. She could not have gotten a ticket so fast. Not unless she bought a ridiculously expensive one, and its not like she was running from the FBI to pay twice the price for a ticket to get the hell out of there. So on a whim, I checked the flight tickets booked under corporate bookings in the last month."

"And?"

"Turns out that someone from CrossRoad softwares, Seattle - which was InfoWeb softwares at the time - had booked her ticket 12 hours earlier."

"You mean-"

"Yes, I mean, someone had planned to have Ruth fly out of Boston 12 hours before she even had a reason to run."

My mind raced. If they planned to have Ruth leave 12 hours earlier, then they knew something was about to happen. So it wasn't a coincidence that my father had visited Cross mansion that same day that I had.

He certainly hadn't been visiting Leo for his birthday. It was an ambush. Ofcourse it was, and I had been too self-absorbed to see that until now.

My fists clenched, and I fought the urge to break something. So all this misery over nothing. Ruth hadn't ran away. And I could think of only one person who might be behind all of this.

"Tristan."

And it seemed Leo and I were on the same wavelength, because he didn't look surprised at my conclusion.

"Probably."

Probably? Definitely. There was no one else who could've done this. I had the sudden urge to jump out of the car and run all the way to the rented apartment he was currently staying in, just to shred him into pieces.

This was probably why Leo was great at being the Managing Director of Cross Empire. When I felt like I was barely holding onto the edge of my sanity, Leo was calm and rational.

But that didn't mean he was he was any less dangerous. He was a Cross after all. The only indication of his anger was his knuckles that were turning white from squeezing the steering wheel so hard.

"What do we do now?" I asked with barely controlled anger, to which Leo calmly replied, "and now we need to decide whether we buy Dutch chocolate cake or truffle. Or maybe cupcakes would be better."

"I'm serious, Leo. Tristan needs to—"

"Tristan will get exactly what he deserves when the time is right. And what he needs is to lose the very thing for which did all this for. But right now, its time to think about someone far more important than Tristan and give her what she deserves."

Like a talisman, her thought dissipated all the poison from my mind. Leo let go of the wheel and opened the door, letting cool air in. It cleared my mind as if blowing the cobwebs off it. He stepped out, and waited until I joined him outside before starting to cross the road.

"And speaking of Tristan, I got a message from him yesterday. Apparantly, Ruth is still an employee at CrossRoads."

My head whipped back to him, and I saw a small smile playing on his lips. It was a good thing that almost no vehicles on the road right then, because I couldn't have focused on the road even of my life depended on it. And it did.

"But I thought you said she handed her resignation letter in yesterday."

"She did. But it seems she made a major mistake on that letter. Not sure what that is, but its important enough to consider her application null and void. Now, she needs to decide if she wants to stay or leave. And if she decides to leave then she needs to submit another, error-free letter on Monday. Now, how about we get both the cake and the flowers?"

"I don't know, Leo. I'm not exactly the cake and flowers kind of guy." I sighed at the idea of going all hearts and flowers. So much had happened in the last hour that I felt mentally exhausted.

But Leo was in no mood to take no for an answer. He hopped two steps ahead of me and opened the glass door that led into the most fragrant flower shop I had ever visited and gestured for me to walk in before him.

"Everyone is cake and flowers kind of guy for his lady love's on her birthday, Caleb. And don't even try to deny—"

"Birthday? Ruth's birthday?" I stopped on the threshold, then stumbled in when Leo ran into me.

"Damn your timing, man. Ofcourse, Caleb. Its Ruth's birthday. You don't happen to have another lady love, do you?" He shook his head and rubbed a hand over his stomach where my elbow had accidentally hit him.

I ignored his comment and instead asked, "how do you know that? And why did you know that when I didn't?"

"Because I don't over-magnify something so much that I miss the bigger picture or important details, unlike you," he bent over a huge bouquet of wild flowers, inhaled deeply.

I narrowed my eyes at him and couldn't help the slight accusation that slipped into my tone. "You already wished her, didn't you?"

"Caleb," Leo sighed and straightened, turning to face me, apparently at the end of his patience.

"You can either waste your time standing here and splitting hairs, or you can get some flowers and chocolates for the woman you love, go back and hope to God that she takes you back after your humongous fuck-up, and then spend the rest of the day celebrating her birthday in the most creative of ways possible."

"Huh."

"So?" He spread his arms wide when he realised that was all the answer he was going to get from me and asked, "what do you say?"

I thought for a moment, then replied, "I say, that I need some coffee and a wingman."