Cain was still on the phone as I stomped angrily up the stairs, but when I got to that empty, quiet bedroom, the anger changed to tears. What was I doing here? Was I crazy? My family thought I was, even Cassidy. They thought I’d married Cain to rebel, or to get myself to California, or because I was desperate. I didn’t think any of that was true, but really, the truth seemed far away from me at the moment. Maybe it was at home in Tennessee.
I opened my suitcase to find something to sleep in, because I wanted this day to end. At the top of my belongings was Cassidy’s wedding gift to me. It was a bodysuit, like a bathing suit but see-though and made of black lace, with a pink satin ribbon that tied at the waist. I laid that on the bed, thinking that I wouldn’t need it now. “Thank you!” I’d told my cousin when she’d given it to me. I had wondered if I would have the nerve to put it on, and if I did try, if it would fit. I had doubts.
“He can unwrap you like a present,” she’d told me, playing with the ribbon. “Aria, don’t get Aunt Amber’s judgmental face. Sex is awesome. You’re going to love sleeping with him!”
“Do you really think so?” I thought that my sister Aubree wasn’t such a fan of the process, because she complained sometimes about her relations with her husband Clayton (and sometimes about the lack of those relations). But Amory just smiled when our other sister whined, and I got the feeling that maybe she and her husband didn’t have a problem in that arena. Maybe they were happy with how things worked between them and liked to do it plenty!
“I love sex with Bo,” Cassidy had assured me. “There’s nobody better, not that I’ve found. Are you nervous? Do you know how it’s going to work?”
“Of course!” I’d said, but she’d given me a lot of tips about what to do with my fingers, lips, and tongue that had left me redder than a tomato. “It’s too bad that Kayleigh isn’t here,” she’d finished. “She gets those guys yelling.”
She really had, and she’d made a lot of noise herself, which was why I’d used the earplugs. In Cain’s quiet house, though, I probably wouldn’t ever need them. It was so silent that I could hear myself breathe.
“Aria?”
I stuffed the bodysuit under my pillow and sat on the mattress, sinking down again. “Yes?”
Cain opened the door. “Everything ok in here?” He glanced around the room, his eyes lingering on my unpacked suitcases.
“I’ll put everything away tomorrow. I’m tired.”
He looked more carefully at my face. “Are you crying again?”
“No.” It wasn’t a lie, because I had stopped for a few seconds. I felt just the same as when Bree used to accuse me of it and call me a baby, and I answered him the same way I’d done with her. “I’m not, anyway!”
His eyebrows rose. “I’ll take a car to my office in the morning and leave my keys for you if you want to go out. And my credit card, if you want to get groceries. Or anything else.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“Aria, I…”
I waited for a moment but when he didn’t continue, I prompted, “Yes?”
“I was talking to a friend of mine just now,” he said, but I had the feeling it wasn’t what he’d wanted to tell me. “He’s having a party this week and wants us to come.”
“A party?” I started to feel a glimmer of excitement. I had brought some dresses that I could wear out, and I always had the chase-me-etc. shoes to put on, too. Maybe only eating the broccoli for dinner had knocked off a few ounces, even. “That would be fun!”
“I thought you might like it. I’ll be at work for a long time tomorrow, probably until you’re asleep.”
“Really?” I remembered something Miss Liddy had mentioned, about his sixteen-hour days. “Maybe there’s a lot to catch up on.”
He nodded. “There is. I did my best in Tennessee but it wasn’t the same as being onsite. So don’t worry about cooking dinner for both of us like you said.”
I nodded back and thought of the long day he’d have. I thought of the long day I’d have too in this grey house, in the city which had also looked grey as we’d driven in. The city where I didn’t know anyone besides Cain and I wasn’t sure he even liked me.
But he sat down on my bed, sinking in next to my hip. “I don’t want you to be upset.”
“I think that’s normal,” I told him. “I bet when you first moved away from Miss Liddy, you were plenty upset, too.”
“I was.” His eyes looked very, very sad, all the ice melted. “When I got sent away for good, I was so sorry. I lay there in my bunk bed and cried my eyes out, missing her and wanting to take it all back.” He sighed. “I made you start again.”
I had put one palm on his cheek and the other over my heart to stop it from breaking. “That makes me…” I sniffed. “I wish my father had been there to help you more.”
“Your dad had already warned me about how I was acting. He’d tried, again and again, to talk to me, to show me the right way. He took me with him on a ride-along one day to scare me straight, and I was trying to change. But when he got shot, it didn’t seem like there was any use in anything.”
“It wasn’t fair,” I agreed. “He was too good a person to leave us like that.”
Cain nodded. “Do you think we’d have ended up here, together, if he was still alive?”
No, I didn’t think it, but I wasn’t sure, so I said mostly honestly, “I don’t know.”
“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever seen, Aria McCourt.”
“Aria Miller,” I corrected, and he looked at me, his eyes widening in shock. Then he got off the bed and walked out of the room and the door clicked loudly in the silence.
Chapter 7
“Oh, my word. Oh, my word! Don’t get so close!” I yelled to the driver behind me. We were coming to a stop sign on a hill that must have been almost vertical. I was going to roll backwards, right back down it, and hit that car and end up in the ocean at the bottom—
“Oh, Jesus save me!” I accelerated and shot up to the top, past the stop sign, and onto the downhill side where I gained speed so quickly that I slammed on the brakes.
“Turn left now,” my phone ordered me.
“You’re not my boss!” I sassed it, just like I used to say to my sisters. But I did veer left at the next street, and then, somehow, got myself back to the grey house, Cain’s house. I turned into his steep driveway, wincing as the bottom scraped again, and parked in his garage. Then I shut off the engine, leaned back against the seat, and wiped my forehead. Despite my expectations, California wasn’t a warm place, but I was sweating so much from nerves that I kept all the windows open as I drove to help me cool off. I’d never been in a situation where everything was so difficult, and the crazy roads and traffic were just one part of that.
For example, today I’d gone to the post office to wait in line with thousands of other people in order to mail Christmas presents home. We usually drew names for gifts in my big family, but in the confusion of my wedding I’d missed out on the lottery. I’d decided to pick out presents for a few different relatives. That had turned into buying for a lot different relatives, because I realized I missed many of them.
I’d had so many boxes that it was hard to carry them all inside to mail them, and although many people had watched me struggle, no one had offered to help. The woman going in ahead of me hadn’t even held the door open and it had shut in my face, and then the man at the counter had been angry that I’d used red and green ink to write the addresses, and didn’t seem to buy my excuse that I’d been trying to make things festive.
I’d gone shopping around the city for those presents, battling other cars and pedestrians to find parking, then fighting through crowds on the filthy sidewalks. I’d bought groceries, too, at the store where you had to circle to get a spot outside and then practically knock people out of your way with your cart to enter and to get in line to pay. I hadn’t used the credit card that Cain had given me, though, because it felt so strange. But I’d had a little credit trouble
of my own when I’d first moved in with Cassidy and Kayleigh in Chattanooga and now I was pretty worried about spending on my own card without having a job. So I’d have to find one of those soon, no matter what Cain had said about taking time.
It sure had been a busy three days, busy and difficult and tiring. I’d been so busy and tired, in fact, that I’d hardly had any time at all to be lonely or miss anyone! I’d hardly even noticed that I’d been on my own for more than seventy-two hours and the only people I’d spoken to face-to-face had been the checkout lady at the grocery store, who didn’t want to chat at all, and the mean man at the post office when he’d asked me if I also wanted to buy stamps. I had, but only because I’d wanted to continue our interaction.
I turned on every light as I walked in from Cain’s garage, and I started to sing just about as loud as I could. The house felt so empty and sad. “There’s a dark and a troubled side of life,” I belted out. “But there’s a bright and a sunny side, too—”
But that ended in a shriek as I rounded the corner from the laundry room to the kitchen and ran into a man there.
“Chuck!” Cain yelled back, but not exactly that word. “Jesus, Aria! Why are you screaming?” He rubbed his ears like they hurt. “You’re as loud as your mother!”
“What are you doing here?” I gasped.
“I live here, I think.”
Maybe he did, but I hadn’t seen him since the day we’d flown in from Tennessee. The next night, I’d gone ahead and cooked dinner even though he’d said he’d be home late, and I’d fallen asleep at the table with it warming in the oven. I’d woken up the next morning in my bed, where Cain must have brought me (without spraining any muscles, I’d hoped). The dinner was just a hard, burnt mess in the casserole dish in the sink. I’d tried to wait for him the next night too and I’d tried to wake up early each morning, but I hadn’t seen him. Not until now.
I put my hand over my heart, which was pounding out of my chest. “You startled me,” I explained. “It’s usually so quiet in here. That was why I was singing.”
“I’ve never heard you sing. I didn’t know that you could.” He sat down at the counter, where I noted happily that he had set out one of the drinks I’d bought and also some of the dip I’d made with the vegetables I’d chopped up.
“I can’t sing, not really. Kayleigh is the real talent in the family,” I said. “It was what she always did in pageants.” I helped myself to a glass of water. I’d been looking into gyms, but they were so expensive! Instead, I’d made myself run—or walk—some of the hills and staircases I’d come across. I was also carefully watching my diet, so water was plenty for me.
“I think your voice is pretty. Beautiful,” Cain told me, and he met my smile. “What was your talent if not that?”
“Ugh, ballet. It was terrible. My outfit was all green because Mama thought the color set off my eyes and I had a skirt with a bunch of layers of chiffon. With my size and shape, I looked like a head of lettuce. The other girls used to laugh!” I shook my head, remembering how much I’d hated that outfit. “Not that the other competitions were any better! My swimsuit was the worst. It barely covered me and I was so embarrassed! And my last eveningwear gown was so bad that when I finally got to quit, my sister Mory torched it in the burn barrel in the back yard. I think we had basically run out of money by the time that it was my turn for costumes, so they definitely weren’t up to the standards of what my sisters had. I was glad to see that thing in flames, except the spangles made a really strange purple smoke.”
“It sounds miserable. It’s good that your mother let you quit.” He swigged from his bottle.
I nodded, although I’d always wondered if my misery hadn’t actually been the reason she’d allowed me to drop out of the competitions. She’d saved a lot of money without having to pay my entrance fees and costume costs, money which had probably gone to my sisters and their activities.
“Why did she want y’all to get involved in pageants in the first place?” Cain asked me.
I hid a smile. He’d forgotten to California-ify his speech. “My mama was a beauty queen herself. Look.” I searched around in my phone until I came across the photos of her wearing the sash that announced her biggest win. “This is her when she was nineteen, right before she met my daddy. She was Miss Southeast.”
He didn’t seem impressed. “That’s a big-ass crown,” was the only comment he made.
“That’s a huge title! Wasn’t she gorgeous?” I smiled at my beautiful mother. “Amory looks exactly like her and she could have gone far, just as far as Miss Southeast or beyond, even. But she never cared enough to develop a talent, you know, like ballet dancing or maybe really dramatic piano playing,” I explained. “And she scares stray cats with her singing, but she doesn’t care. She just liked winning because it annoyed Mama and Bree so much that she picked up titles with no preparation or anything. She looked like a princess up on stage.” I studied his face. “Why are you frowning?”
“I’m thinking of you describing your sister as a princess and yourself as a head of cabbage.”
“Lettuce. Oh, it was awful! My Uncle Kofi used to carry around a picture of that in his wallet, me dancing and making the worst duck face you’ve ever seen. He’d pass it around to get a laugh.”
Now Cain looked upset. No, angry. “Why would he do that?”
“Well, it was funny looking,” I admitted. “Years later, he would take it out and show it to people because he meant it to be inspirational. You know, how I’d lost all that weight and wasn’t quite the same ugly little girl anymore. If we were together, he’d go up to total strangers and say, ‘I bet you can’t guess who this is!’ and show them the photo. They only knew it was me because of my hair. That never changed.” I spotted the time on my phone. “Oops! I have to get ready for the party! Will you come in my bedroom so you can tell me about your day? You can relax on the bed while I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be able to hear you except when I use the dyer.”
“You want to hear about my day? Seriously?”
“Of course! I’ve been talking nonstop and now it’s your turn. Come on,” I said, and smiled at him again because I was so happy to see someone familiar. But I was also so happy that it was him.
Cain held out his palm. “Let’s go, then.” He settled on the squishy mattress of my bed, which was actually extremely comfortable. I asked questions through the door after I got out of the shower and he answered about what he’d been doing at work, who he’d been meeting, what he’d been eating besides the lunches I’d been packing and the dinners I’d put in the fridge, having learned my lesson the other night with the food “warming” in the oven until it was practically in flames.
“Those were very good meals,” he called, and I smiled as I tried to wring the water from my hair. “Thanks for leaving them for me.”
“You’re welcome! I love to do it. Tell me about the party tonight. Where are we going and who will be there?”
We were going to a place called the Marina, it turned out, near where I’d gone grocery shopping and not, unfortunately, anything really to do with boats in regard to this party. Cain had known some of the people who would be there for a few years, including the guy who was throwing it, Blayden. “He helped me when I was just starting out here,” he told me. “I’ll always be grateful.”
I already liked this Blayden person. What a nice friend!
“His family owns a winery in Napa and a bunch of restaurants. They also bought into California real estate back in the nineteen-twenties, so they’re all set for life.”
“What does Blayden do?” I asked, and carefully drew my eyeliner. I wished Cass were here to help—her hand was much steadier.
“Blayden lives off his trust fund, mostly. He gets involved in promoting new artists. His sister hosts a huge benefit for the ballet each year and he works on that. Well, ‘works’ may not be the word for what he does, but he gets his name on the invitation. He roped me into some of his charity stuff, too.”
I remembered the pictures of Cain and his girlfriend at the benefit thing for the opera thing and nodded. I removed a bit of blush on the left side and added more mascara. “That’s nice for you to do,” I called through the door. It was a huge change for him to be on the giving end of charity instead of receiving it. He and Miss Liddy hadn’t had a lot.
After a while, Cain’s answers to my questions got quieter, and he stopped volunteering information, too. I tried to finish my hair and makeup as quickly as I could, but by the time I opened the door onto the bedroom, he was asleep.
“It makes sense with how much you’ve been working,” I told him softly, and tiptoed over. Awake, his face didn’t usually show very much. “Guarded,” that was the word I’d been using when I thought about his normal expression. But asleep, he was relaxed and younger, somehow. I sat down carefully next to him and reluctantly put my hand on his cheek. If we wanted to go to this party, he had to wake up, even though I wanted to let him stay so peaceful.
“Cain. Cain?”
He mumbled something and looped his arm around my waist, pulling me closer as he put his head into my lap.
“Oh,” I breathed. “This is great.” I stroked his cheek and then his hair. “Hi, honey,” I told him. “You’re sweeter when you’re sleeping. You like me more, I think. Remember how you were cuddling me when we were in my bed at home in Chattanooga?” I did. I’d been in shock with my mother’s screaming, but thinking back, I remembered lying with my head under his chin, his arms around me, his breath ruffling my hair.
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