The Gambler

by Molly O'Keefe

  He came with a roar. Head-bent and shaking he practically collapsed against me.

  “Sorry,” he gasped. “I’m…crushing you.”

  He shifted as if to leave but I held him there. “No. It’s good.”

  He didn’t fight me, just gave me his weight until I felt the boundaries of my body again. The edges of my skin where it felt like they’d burned away.

  “Gimme a second,” he said, finally pushing off and away from me. Holding his dick and the condom and walking naked and proud to the bathroom next door.

  I knew if I stayed where I was, naked in his bed, he’d come back. And we’d talk. And he’d fuck me again. And we’d talk some more. And those words… the words that would change everything would come roaring out of me.

  And we’d done this already, jumped into love and both been shattered by the aftermath.

  So, I did the impossible and dragged myself out of bed and got dressed. My body raw under my clothes.

  He stepped into the room and saw me. “Wow,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I get it. You’re taking me up on the dirty little secret thing.”

  “No,” I said and reached for him. Holding his hands even when he tried to pull away.

  There was still so much between us that was unsettled and unsure. And in the moonlight, drunk on orgasms…I just couldn’t do it.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll talk. Really talk.”

  “Sure,” he said. I kissed him hard and when he tried to pull me up against him, I stepped away.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”

  13

  The next day, I got a message from Tyler that he was going to take Miguel out to watch the bulldozers clear out the FEMA trailers.

  A few hours later, unable to keep my mind on work, I took the drive out to the site. Only to find Tyler alone next to his truck.

  “Where’s Miguel?” I asked, yelling over the sounds of bulldozers and jackhammers breaking up the concrete pads.

  Tyler pointed to the bulldozer systematically rolling over a brown trailer that used to be someone’s home. From inside the cab, wearing a hard hat and sitting next to a man I recognized as Bill Hartley, Miguel waved.

  The smile on the kid’s face could light up the night sky.

  Tyler did this, I thought, amazed. He brought on that smile and he’s actually going to build houses out here.

  “Cool, huh?” Tyler yelled, his eyes twinkling in a way that made my knees tremble, my heart pound. Last night echoed in me. Around me.

  “Amazing.”

  “Can we talk?” he yelled. His eyes damning me for running out last night. And yeah, well, fair enough.

  “Is there someplace...quieter?”

  He nodded and spun on his heel, opening the door of his truck. “Inside,” he mouthed, and I climbed in.

  We slammed the truck doors shut and the roar outside was diminished. But now, the air was suddenly too warm. Tyler sat too close. The memory of last night was alive in the pulse between my legs. My sore breasts. The beard burn on my neck.

  “You want a cookie?” Tyler asked, picking up an open box from between us on the floorboards. “I got weaseled into buying twenty-five boxes of Girl Scout cookies from Louisa.”

  “I’ve got ten at home,” I said, trying not to smile.

  “That girl.” Tyler shook his head and dug four cookies out of the box before handing them over to me.

  I took two that I didn’t want, but was happy to have something to do with my hands besides reach out and brush away the white thread hanging on to his tanned forearm.

  “So,” I said.

  “Before we get to the us stuff,” Tyler said, licking at the cream center of one of the cookies as if he was in a porno or something. “I want to offer Miguel an afterschool job out here. You know, around his counseling sessions.”

  I was taken aback, all filthy thoughts fleeing the cab of his truck. “You do?”

  “Yeah.” Tyler laughed. “The kid is talented. He’s practically building that porch at The Manor by himself and his geometry skills—” Tyler whistled. “I think Derek and the other trades could really teach him something. You know? Something useful. Of course he—”

  Nora Sullivan’s words about Tyler O’Neill being the seed of my community service program whispered in my head.

  “When are you leaving?” I practically barked, not nearly as calm as I wanted to be.

  “I guess we’ll move on to the us stuff, then.”

  “It’s a fair question.”

  He blinked, blinked again, and suddenly all his excitement vanished into cold understanding.

  “You going to run me out of town?” he asked. “Like father, like daughter?”

  “That’s not fair. I’m just trying to protect Miguel.” And myself.

  Tyler stared out the window and I could see the pounding of his heart under the skin of his throat.

  “What if I told you I wasn’t leaving?” he murmured. I went totally and utterly still. I’d come here seeking answers, but had hoped not to hear this one.

  Now what are you going to do?

  “I’m sticking around,” he said. “I want to see Katie and Savannah. I want to meet this guy she loves. I…I’m staying in Bonne Terre.”

  “What exactly do you plan on doing here?” I asked, the words painful in a too-tight throat.

  “I’m rich,” he said with a careless shrug. “I don’t need to do anything.”

  “You’re just going to lie around all day? Play piano out at Remy’s all night?”

  Tyler stretched his arm across the top of the seat, his fingers inches from my hair. I tried not to notice the distance between our bodies, but my skin was doing its own calculations. Every millimeter between us was mapped out and noted so that I couldn’t breathe without knowing how it brought us closer.

  I shifted away and he noticed, his sharp eyes not letting me get away with anything.

  “Actually, I thought Miguel and I could start a car theft ring. He could steal them, I’d chop them up for parts.”

  “You’re hilarious,” I said. “Be serious.”

  “Christ, Juliette, it’s no big deal. I thought I’d play piano at night,” he said. “Get to know my niece and my sister. Help Margot around the house. I’ve given this community a lot of money over the years, and Remy and Priscilla are getting old. It’s hard enough running Remy’s at their age. I think if I want to keep helping people here, I’m going to need to do some of this stuff myself.”

  Sunlight sparkled around us, catching dust motes and turning the air into glitter. Such was the power of Tyler O’Neill, and I suddenly realized much to my sick astonishment he was showing me the real him. No bluff. No sleight of hand.

  He wasn’t a mirror reflecting what I wanted.

  It was him.

  Just him. The real Tyler O’Neill.

  And he destroyed me.

  “You lied to me,” I said.

  Tyler squinted up into the sunshine and nodded. “Several times, but what are you referring to, specifically?”

  “You’re not an asshole at heart.”

  He was quiet while the crunch and smash of machinery rolling over metal echoed all around us.

  “I think,” he said, looking at my, his face utterly composed, his eyes rock solid, “I’m trying to change my ways.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. Because, despite the proof he’d offered me to sway me toward belief on one side of the scale, all I had was the cynical proof he couldn’t change—proof that took the shape of heartbreak.

  “You don’t believe me?” he asked.

  “Do you blame me?” I asked, my throat and mouth a desert. “I’ll never forgive my Dad for doing what he did, but… a phone call? An email? A god damn Facebook message? Something?”

  “I was…” he blew out a breath. “Trying to make it simple. I think. Easier.”

  “Was it easy for you?” I asked.

 
“Fuck no.”

  That at least gave me comfort, bitter as it might be.

  I am not asking what if. I’m not doing that.

  “You have every reason to hate me,” he said. “But hating me doesn’t explain why you’re here. Why you care. Sure as hell doesn’t explain last night.”

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” I finally managed to ask. “The French model in all the magazines?”

  “Theresa Guerriere,” he said. “She dumped me.”

  I didn’t even bother to try and keep my mouth closed. He smiled at my expression. “I’m not kidding,” he insisted, and then suddenly the sparkle drained away and Tyler suddenly looked older. Tired. I was able to see Margot in him, and even Savannah. And not just the eyes and the hair, but the careful side of the O’Neills. The wary side that curled up around their hurts so other people couldn’t see.

  It was human. Real. Devastating.

  “I thought she was pregnant,” he said, and the air emptied out of me, and I was just a sack of skin and incredulity. “And I…I was so damn happy. So…” He blew out a big breath. “Ready to be a person. A real person. A human with family and a home. I proposed.”

  “Marriage?” I squeaked. The concept of marriage and Tyler sharing space in the same sentence made jealousy gnaw at my bones.

  “I proposed—” he glanced at me sideways, his grin a stab at my heart “—marriage. And she said no because she got her period. And she had no intention of being a person with a family and a home. Not with me.”

  So much pain. It just radiated off of him, soaking into my skin by osmosis. “Did you love her?” I whispered.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I loved the idea of a baby. But Theresa and I were really more of an arrangement than a couple. In the end, we were lucky she wasn’t pregnant. It would have been a disaster between us.”

  I didn’t know what to say, how to process this new man beside me. I twisted a cookie in my hands, tearing it apart and then putting it back together.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Any proposals?” he teased. The glitter was back, but not completely. I’d seen behind the curtain and the mighty and powerful Oz was just a man with hurts and pains, like the rest of the world.

  It was a sickness on my part that it made him even more attractive to me.

  “No,” I said. “No proposals.”

  “You happy being chief?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What happened to law school?”

  “I got impatient,” I said. I pressed my finger down on a black cookie crumb on my pants and touched it to the tip of my tongue. “I wanted to get on with my life, get to work, and law school was going to take forever. I got my masters at night while working.”

  He chuckled and looked at his hands. “Patience was never your strong suit.”

  “No.” I smiled. “It still isn’t. But it’s something I’m working on.”

  “Have you always worked in Bonne Terre?”

  “No, I’ve only been here six months,” I said. “I was a lieutenant in Baton Rouge for a long time. I had gotten my masters in Municipal Administration and was thinking about a change when Dad retired and the interim chief they’d hired didn’t work out.”

  “So you decided to come home and fill your father’s shoes?” There was a world of sarcasm behind his words, but instead of getting angry, I understood where it came from.

  I looked at him, the softness and magic of him. And it suddenly occurred to me that Tyler had taken beatings before. He was a fighter at school and my father never really scared him. The past ten years I’d convinced myself that what we felt hadn’t been real, but last night and now in this truck, I couldn’t believe it. It had been real.

  We were real.

  “What else did my Dad do to you?”

  Tyler quickly shook his head, and that he understood exactly what I was talking about damned my father with guilt. “Nothing, Juliette. I was a kid and I was scared.” His eyes were dead serious. “Leaving you was my mistake.”

  “Mistake?” I asked on a weak breath of air.

  He stared at his hands for a long time and I held my breath, waiting. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes were as blue and bright as if they were made out of the hottest part of flame.

  “I told you the truth the other night at Remy’s,” he said. “I have thought about you almost every day for the past ten years.”

  I licked my dry lips with a drier tongue, trying desperately to process all of this in a way that wouldn’t implode my life. But it didn’t seem possible. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, not after this conversation.

  “But why did you leave that way?” I finally asked. “Without a word?” I could forgive so much, but that seemed too heartless. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Tyler flexed his fingers and made fists. I ached to touch those hands, to feel them against my skin again, the bite of them in my flesh.

  “Because I knew you would have left with me,” he said, and that was the truth. But also not enough. Or not the right truth. “You would have thrown away law school and your future to be with me. And—” He shook his head. “That would have been your mistake.”

  “So you made the decision for me?” I asked, anger overtaking sadness and disbelief. “It’s my life—you don’t get to make those kinds of decisions for me.”

  “We were kids, and you had a future. I had a beat-up Chevy and some luck at cards.”

  “That sounds like what my dad whispered in your ear while he let Owens beat you up.”

  “Well,” he smiled, sadly, “you’re not wrong.”

  “Your piano,” I whispered. “The music. You were going—”

  “To support us by playing the piano?” he scoffed, and it felt like sandpaper over my heart.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Lying.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “But it’s not the truth.”

  “Look, nothing changes the fact that it was better that I left. You may not see it, but that’s the only option we had then.”

  “I don’t see it that way, Tyler. I would have stood up to my dad.”

  “You said we weren’t doing what if’s.”

  He was silent for a long time before responding. “You know it’s easy to say that, even to think it. But actually doing it?” He looked at me. “Putting aside your blood…it’s hard. It changes you, Juliette.”

  “You did it,” I said. “Margot, Savannah. You walked away from them.”

  “Which is why I can’t do it again,” he muttered. “My dad…” He shook his head and I understood why he kept the man around, despite the pain he’d caused. He was the only family Tyler had left—without Richard, he had no one.

  “That’s why you’re staying,” I said. “Your dad?”

  “Someone has to look after him.” He looked up at me. “But he’s only part of the reason.”

  The question I didn’t want to ask ripped its way from my heart, leaving behind a thousand cuts that would never heal.

  “Are you staying for me?” I asked.

  Tyler looked up at the sun, over to Miguel in the distance, and all the while I held my breath, knowing the answer and not wanting to hear it.

  Don’t say it, Tyler. Don’t make this happen. Don’t put us here.

  “Would you have me?” he whispered.

  I fumbled with the door, needing to be out of there before my heart spoke for me. “I need to go,” I said. “I need to get Miguel and pick up Louisa.”

  His hand on the bare skin of my arm froze me. My entire body felt the press of those fingers, the heat of that palm. I closed my eyes, swamped, utterly overrun by sensation.

  “You’re running,” he said. His thumb grazed the sensitive skin of my elbow. My body loosened its boundaries, relinquished its control. It’s what he always did to me. It’s what I’d always wanted him to do to me and I w
anted it again. Now.

  “Answer me, Jules.”

  I couldn’t, afraid of what would spill out if I opened my lips.

  “I know you feel something,” he murmured. His fingertips brushed my cheek, the corner of my lip, and I wanted to hoard the sensation, the electric pulses and shocks. “I know I’m not alone.”

  You’re not, I thought. You never were.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking up at him with old eyes. I was no longer Chief Tremblant. I was Jules, a girl in love. “It still feels like you’re not telling me something.”

  I charged past the white columns out front of my parents’ home. I knocked once on the big black door with the lion’s head knocker and then just went on in, powered by an engine of anger.

  “Dad!” I yelled.

  There was a thump upstairs and I walked across the checkered foyer to the bottom of the curving mahogany staircase. This house had been in Momma’s family for generations, and without her in it, the place seemed like a museum. Dad just didn’t have the power to fill it like Momma used to.

  “What’s happening, Juliette?” Dad asked, coming to stand on the landing, his elegant face creased with worry.

  The anger in me doubled at the sight of him.

  “What did you do to Tyler ten years ago to make him leave?”

  Dad frowned, as if the question didn’t make sense. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Cut the crap!” I cried, gripping the balustrade so hard my fingers ached. “I know you did something that night, or Owens did something worse than beating the shit out of him. What was it?”

  Dad stepped down the rest of the stairs, back straight, eyes focused as though he was taking me out on my first cotillion again.

  “Ten years ago is a long time,” he said. “It’s possible no one really remembers the truth.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t forget anything, Dad,” I said. “What did you do?”

  “I gave him a nudge,” he said, with one of his long-suffering sighs. “That’s all. A point in the right—”

  “Stop the riddles,” I sighed. “Look, I know since Mom died you and I—” Dad tensed, but I pressed on. “You and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. And maybe me coming back to be chief wasn’t the best idea, but I’m an adult, Dad. And you need to tell me the truth.”