Chapter 179 CHAPTER 179
Lonely, very lonely
Ares found himself drinking more often in those afternoons when the world felt particularly small. The drinks weren’t a straight collapse into misery; they had instead become a ritual of extracting thought, of softening the hard places so decisions might slide from one place to another.
He drank to forget the edges of the past and to steady himself for the present. Sometimes he drank to test his resolve, to see if the man who had once been unshakable still stood.
Lila arrived at the house like a storm in high heels. She had always been capable of theatrics; now her presence felt like a scenic change meant to provoke. She moved through the rooms as if she owned the air itself, her laughter a practiced and bright thing she aimed at an audience of one.
Ares saw her from where he stood at the bar, the glass he had poured in his hand nearly warm from his palm. He’d seen Lila in the past light and in the present shadow; he had learned to read the subtext behind the dresses, the way she bent her neck to show the line of her throat, the way she laughed at a joke before it had been told. Tonight, he felt weary in that most private way, tired of the demands of desire at a time when his heart hung in limbo between what had been and what might be.
“I told you to leave. Game over. I am not interested in the contract marriage. My parents are dead now. Everything is gone… I don’t want Tessa, I can’t forgive her. She killed my parents.”
“You look tired,” Lila said as she sauntered close, placing a hand on his arm as if to anchor herself. Her perfume clung to the air, floral and designed to unsettle. “Relax…”
He gave a short, distracted smile. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, then realized the sentence sounded more jaded than he meant. The drink made his edges slur into blunt honesty.
Lila’s smile widened. Her eyes flicked up, calculating. “I thought you might appreciate some company,” she said, moving even closer. She leaned in, the action not subtle: she wanted to be noticed, to be claimed in a way his public life often left him exposed to. “We were good friends before the contract.”
Ares had no interest in being claimed by her; the thought of intimacy in his current state felt like a betrayal of the past and a cruelty to the possible future. But there was a more practical reason he wanted to avoid entanglement tonight: he had a head full of plans, and any distraction now would cost him clarity.
He found his phone as if by instinct. “I have a call I must take,” he said. He thumbed the screen and then, on a small, thoughtless impulse that was both cruel and clever, put the call on speaker and let it ring.
Lila’s lilt of amusement died as soon as he hit the button. She opened her mouth then closed it, because what Ares wanted her to see was not merely a conversation, it was an assertion. He put the call through and smiled in a way that was not for her.
“Lila, darling,” came the voice, warm and on the edge of domestic. On the far line, without theatrics, Ares began speaking with Lila’s name in the kind of tone he’d used when he wanted the world to know they were intimate. He spoke softly about a charity event, about a seating arrangement, about a necklace he’d admired earlier. The words were innocuous, but the cadence was unmistakably intimate.
Lila’s face hardened. The smile she had practiced fell from it like a costume. Her eyes flashed, and for the first time that night she looked unmoored.
She backed away with the kind of abruptness that showed both hurt and the fury of being told she could be so casually displaced. “Fine,” she snapped, a brittle note to her voice. She left the room like a wind leaving a closed window, abrupt, angry, with a last look that promised a storm.
Ares watched her go, feeling again the strange and terrible freedom of living truthfully, even if uncomfortable. The act had been small, a staged call but it had done what it was meant to do: demonstrate he was not untoasted, not entirely at Lila’s disposal.
Lila’s silence outside the door soon turned into shouts he could hear fading into the night. Her anger was theatrical but sharp-edged. He turned back to the drink in his hand and let the liquor set his thoughts like a stone in still water, waiting for the ripples of the evening to settle.
The city adjusted, as it always did, to people leaving and people staying. Julian’s departure brought Dorcas the promise of a softer life; Dorcas’s goodbye wrapped Tessa and Ayisha in a quiet tenderness; Ares’s small, deliberate cruelties to protect his own liminal space marked the boundaries of a man not ready to offer his heart to anyone yet. Lila’s wounded pride flared and folded itself into the night, another bright thing waiting to burn or to be banked.
They were all moving forward in the only way humans knew how: haltingly, with compromises and small victories. Two months was too soon to declare peace. It was only just enough time, perhaps, to let pain take a different shape.
And as Julian’s car disappeared down the lane with Dorcas’s suitcase riding beside him, the future, maybe messy, complicated, and fragile leaned toward them, waiting for e
very one of them to make the next choice.