When we got home, she made dinner with the last of the groceries that were left over from when I’d been cooking for Cain, and I called her mother to get more of the story.
“It was a party all the time, nonstop, Aria, and she was hiding it from us,” Aunt Jill said. “We talked to her and threatened her, and nothing made a difference.” She started to sniff. “And then the day of Terrance’s funeral, I walked into her room and she was off her head with I don’t know what, not even able to talk and barely breathing. Cy had to carry her out to the car and we brought her to the hospital…” She couldn’t even talk with the crying.
“Aunt Jill, I’m going to do my best to get her back on track. I’ll try to get her to finish the rehab and I’ll watch her to make sure she doesn’t get sick again.”
“I know you love her, too, honey,” she told me, “but this is a bigger problem than you can handle. I’m going to let her be for a few days but if I need to drive out and get her, I will.” And we both started to cry together.
I straightened myself out to have dinner with Kayleigh, which felt so familiar that I almost forgot how she’d ended up at Cain’s house. In fact, the whole day had been so comfortable and easy with her here—I could even overlook that weird episode in the art studio! Not the drawing, though. That was hidden and I never, ever wanted to see or think about it again.
I hugged her hard as I went up to bed. “I’m sorry you left that place but I’m so selfish that I’m happy to have you here,” I told her. “Are you coming up?” She needed rest after the long bus ride, and like Cain had said to me once, things would look better in the morning. Maybe Kayleigh would understand that she had to go back to complete her program in San Diego and this would all work out.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” she said. “Thanks for letting me stay, Ari. I’m happy to see you, too. We’ve all been missing you a lot, but Cass has Bo now, and I…”
“You could have someone if you wanted him. What about the guy from Atlanta, the one who gave you the teddy bear?”
She waved that off. “He only wanted a good time. That’s all I want, too.” She walked briskly back toward the kitchen. “I’m going to hunt up something sweet.”
I wished her good luck with that in my mind. I’d pretty much returned the kitchen to what it was before I first moved in: empty and with no temptations. I went upstairs and thought a lot about that word, saying it out loud the way I’d done as a kid, like I was playing with it in my mouth. “Temptation,” I murmured, and dug in my pink suitcase through some things I hadn’t bothered to unpack, like bathing suits for the summer and mittens I’d brought just in case, but didn’t think I’d ever really need here. I found what I was looking for and put it on in the dim light of the closet, tying on Cain’s robe over it and avoiding my reflection in the mirror on the back of the door.
Then I went into his bathroom and worked for a while on my makeup, not so neutral this time. I sketched on thick, black, cat eye liner and dug in my bag until I found the red lipstick that Kayleigh had used earlier. I filled in my lips with that and puckered at the mirror. Not bad. I teased up my hair, making it a little messy and mussed, and then carefully lay on the bed and undid the robe. I moved a few different ways until I found a pose that looked right on the camera. And I waited to see if he would call.
“Hi,” Cain told me around midnight when I answered the phone. “Did I wake you up?”
I tried to pull in my nerves. I could do this. It was time to make the next move. “No, I was waiting for you,” I said, and the tension made my voice sound husky. “I’m awake. How was your day?”
“It started when I called you,” he told me. “I just got up and I have an early breakfast meeting scheduled.” He yawned. “Are you ready for bed?”
“Yes, I’m in bed right now.” My heart almost jumped out of my chest and I clenched my fist over it. Then I said a quick prayer and tapped the button on my phone. “I just sent you something.”
“Let’s see.” There was a moment of silence as he must have opened it. “Aria? What are you wearing in this picture?”
“I got it as a wedding gift. Do you like it?” I swallowed, my heart now pounding so hard that I was having difficulty breathing.
“It’s…it’s…it’s lace. I could almost see…do you still have that on?”
“I’m wearing it right now,” I told him. “I’m lying in bed and wearing only that.” Come on, Aria! “I’m thinking about you a lot, and what might happen if you were here, too.”
“Hang up.”
“Hello?” The call was over and I stared at the screen. “Cain?” Oh, my word. That hadn’t worked at all! He—
Oh. He was calling back with video. “Hi,” I answered, a smile spreading across my face as he appeared. I’d missed seeing him so much.
“Are you seriously wearing that right now?” he asked me. “The lace and the pink bow?”
I nodded at him, so far away from me. He did look tired, but he also looked very interested. “Cassidy bought it. She thought it would be like unwrapping a present.”
“That’s what you wear to sleep in?”
“I am tonight,” I told him. “You liked my pajamas with the pigs. Do you like this, too?”
“I never imagined,” he started to say. “Right next to my room, you’ve been sleeping in that?” I watched him take a large breath and swallow. “Could you hold up the phone?”
With my one arm draped across my breasts and with the sheet adjusted carefully over other feminine areas, I did hold the phone so that he had a better view.
“Well, Jesus,” he said. “Jesus. This gives me a lot to think about.”
“Do you think about me sometimes?” I asked him. I rolled onto my side and balanced the phone on the other pillow.
“I’ve been thinking about you a lot, but not wearing anything like that. This morning, I was thinking about the first time I saw you when I went home. I mean, when I went back to Tennessee. You were in the bushes and you had a stick in your hair and a smudge of dirt on your cheek.”
Oh. That was how he remembered me, when I’d been a mess?”
“I’d been so worried the whole day. The whole week, I’d been frustrated and upset about everything and then you came and suddenly things were better. You make everything better for people.”
I stared at the phone. “Really?”
“Really. That was how it felt for me and my aunt was the same. We were so glad to have you there.”
I used the corner of the sheet to dab at my eyes, careful not to get any eyeliner on it. “I’m so happy to hear that I helped you like that.”
“I can’t believe you in that outfit, Aria.” Cain shook his head.
“Do you like it?” I asked nervously. He seemed to, but I wasn’t sure.
“I never thought you’d wear anything so, uh, revealing. I didn’t know you’d let anyone see you like that.”
“Not anyone, only you,” I explained. “You’re my husband. You’re the only one who can see me. All of me.”
“All of you,” he repeated, and I saw him swallow again.
“Even if we aren’t, you know, totally married in every way,” I went on. “If you get what I mean.” Just to make my point, I did one of the moves that Cassidy had suggested when we’d discussed my future private life with my husband. I trailed a finger from my lips, over my neck, and below. I’d readjusted the sheet so he couldn’t see where it landed, which was only on my bellybutton.
His blue eyes widened. “I do know what you mean. Where’s your hand right now?”
“Down,” I said vaguely, and he gulped.
“Jesus, Aria!”
This was working. This was amazing! I smiled, so excited I could hardly hold it in. “Do you—”
The burglar alarm sounded for the second time that day, cutting off his words and making me slap my hands over my ears. I could see Cain’s worried face and his mouth moving on the screen but I jumped out of bed and raced halfway down the stairs before I realized
that for one thing, I was nearly naked, and for another, I didn’t want to be coming across a burglar no matter what I was wearing. I screeched to a halt and then stood there, torn and not knowing what to do.
“It’s me, Ari!” my cousin’s voice called, and I ran the rest of the way down before screeching for real and running back to the bedroom. It hadn’t been just Kayleigh—there was a crowd of people in Cain’s foyer!
By the time I returned to the first floor, now with the robe on to protect me from all the eyes that had gotten a glimpse before, Kayleigh was hitting numbers on the alarm pad and most of her other guests had wandered throughout the house. Sebastián was lying on the dining room table, laughing. His bare feet had left dirty marks on Cain’s marble floor.
Chapter 12
“No, I’m not ready to forgive you yet. I may not ever. Never.”
“Aria, come on,” Kayleigh said. “This isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
“No, the worst thing you ever did was drive your dad’s pickup truck into the middle of the football field at the Homecoming game when we were freshmen and you didn’t even have a license. But this is really, really bad!” I would forgive her, I already knew, but I certainly couldn’t today. Not after everything that had happened the night before.
She put down her sponge. “The house looks great. It’s probably never been cleaner! I know you don’t think that Cain’s housekeeper does a good job.”
I wasn’t going to complain about someone cleaning instead of me, that was for sure! But I did have to go back after the housekeeper left each week to do some touch-ups. I shrugged an answer to my cousin.
“We got back all the art they stole,” Kayleigh continued.
Not too long after I finally got the house cleared of Sebastián and his friends, I’d noticed the spaces on the walls where a few pictures had hung, a slightly lighter spot on the rug in the library where a sculpture had stood, and an empty hook in the living room where a hanging thing had spun around from the ceiling. Even Kayleigh, even with the drunken state she’d been in, had recognized how bad it was, especially after I’d screamed and almost fainted.
We’d gotten everything back but it hadn’t been easy and it had taken groveling to Sebastián for his help. And then, after he’d ratted on the friends who’d stolen from Cain and we’d reclaimed the artworks before they sold them or something, it turned out that he’d been in on it, too! He’d walked off with some pictures that had been hanging in Cain’s powder room.
“Oh yeah, I have these,” he’d said when we went to his studio for the second time, after going to all the addresses he’d given us but still missing things. I’d been crying by that point and asked if there was anyone else who might have had more of the art. Sebastián pulled three frames from underneath a pile of grandfather clock faces and practically threw them my way.
“Adiós, Miró,” he’d said to the pictures, and I’d hugged them, now practically sobbing with relief, because these were the last of what had been stolen so it was going to be ok. “Did Frederika hand over the Calder mobile to you?” he’d asked, and yes, that was hanging in the back of the car.
“Why did you take these?” I wiped my eyes. “Why did anyone take Cain’s stuff from his house? Y’all just walked away like it was nothing. It was stealing!”
“Your husband doesn’t need it,” he’d told me. For the first time since I’d known him, he had sounded actually angry. “He doesn’t appreciate art. He hung Joan Miró etchings in his pucking bathroom!”
“It still didn’t give you the right to be a criminal!” I’d put the pictures under my coat and stormed out as Sebastián had called after me that the night before, I’d looked all right in that lace outfit and he had been excited to see that I was a natural redhead. I’d been so upset that it was hard to drive over the hills and back to this house, where we’d put the art where it had been before and started cleaning.
“Ari?” my cousin said now from where she was squatting on the floor, removing a stain from the living room rug. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for those people to take stuff and I really didn’t mean for the police to come.”
“They weren’t police, just private security,” I told her, because it didn’t help to make the story worse. The alarm company had sent them over after I’d taken a long time to turn it off. First, I’d had to cover up the lace bodysuit in front of Sebastián and the ten or so other people who’d strolled in with my cousin, and then I’d had a really hard time remembering the numbers to make it stop. I’d gotten it, eventually, but it had been too late.
The security guys who’d shown up were very nice. They’d promised to call someone they knew with Animal Control to come get the stray dog, and then they’d helped me come up with an easy way to remember the alarm code. I hummed it in my head now, the numbers to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
“Are you still mad at me?”
Rather than answering Kayleigh, I opened the doors to the back patio to go beat the sofa cushions again. Really gross stuff had been happening on them before I’d been able to step in, and it had been hard to stop them because I’d been covering my eyes while I did it.
“Ari, I said I was sorry, and I meant it!”
I turned around to face her. “You’re sorry that you let those people come into this house and steal, or you’re sorry that you snuck out after telling me that you were going to bed?” While I’d been changing into the lace outfit, she’d found the pornographic drawing of me in order to get the address of the club that Sebastián had written on it. She’d also snapped a picture of it to help her remember, and that meant that the drawing wasn’t just on paper anymore! Me, doing you know what, was floating around in those cables I’d read about that took my text messages to Cain in Korea. It was enough to make me cry, which I’d done a lot of through the early morning hours as we got back his artworks.
“I’m sorry for all of those things. Really sorry,” my cousin told me.
“Are you also sorry that you were drinking and using I don’t even know what, after you promised me that you wouldn’t? You swore it on the Bible!” I reminded her.
“Yes.” She actually hung her head. “I’m so sorry about that, too. I was planning to go to bed and then I couldn’t sleep and I thought your friend Sebastián was so good-looking—”
“He’s definitely not my friend,” I interrupted her. I’d thought he might be, but no.
“No, I wouldn’t be friends with him if I were you. He’s a mean guy. And he sucks, really sucks, in bed. It was over so fast, I hardly even noticed it happening.”
I stared at her. “You didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Well, why not? I agreed in my mind. At least someone in this house was doing it!
“Sebastián really is interested in you,” she told me. “He wanted to find you, that’s how we all ended up leaving the bar to come back here. I told him you would never cheat on your husband.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” Although, if he knew what had gone on here with the art thefts, maybe he wouldn’t be my husband for much longer. Just before I’d noticed the missing pictures and sculptures and everything, I’d called Cain back to let him know that I was all right. He’d been nearly frantic when we’d finally spoken.
“I thought someone had broken in!” he exploded. “I had no idea what was happening to you, and you were there alone, wearing a piece of lace. I’ve been calling the police, the fire department, the alarm company! I even called Blayden to drive over and check on you.”
“Everything is back under control here,” I’d told him, but he’d had to hang up to get to the business meeting that he was very, very late for, and we hadn’t spoken since except him sending me two- or three-word messages asking again if I was ok. He didn’t know yet that he’d been robbed and I dreaded telling him, but of course I had to.
“Did you tell my parents about what happened?” Kayleigh asked me.
“No, not yet.” I shook my head at her. “KayKay, do yo
u hear yourself? You’re asking if I told on you, like a little girl! You almost wrecked Cain’s house! I bet those artworks are worth, like, a thousand dollars, and how would we have paid him back? You can’t act like this!”
She turned back to the spot on the rug, which I couldn’t even see anymore. We really had done a good job of cleaning up. “I know,” she mumbled. “I know.”
We were both exhausted and she wandered toward her hard mattress to sleep off whatever was left in her system from the night before. I was so tired and upset that I couldn’t get done what I had planned for the day: finding a new job. There had to be a place in this city with nicer coworkers, people I could make friends with. I also had to deal with calling my Aunt Jill and explaining to her that I’d already failed her and her daughter had gotten into trouble in a whole new city, in a whole new state.
“Aria, this isn’t your fault,” she told me, but it was hard to know that I’d let her down.
That night, I set the alarm and watched my cousin go to bed. “I’m not sneaking out,” she promised me. “I’m not doing anything but sleeping.” And that was what I wanted to do, too, to go to sleep in that hard, uncomfortable bed of Cain’s and to dream about him and then wake up with everything much better in the morning. I got into my cozy pig pajamas and tried to find a comfortable spot in the mattress to do that.
“Aria.”
Mmm. Cain. I smiled at the thought of him.
“Aria, I’m back.”
“Good,” I answered, and yawned. “I’m so glad. I miss you.”
“You don’t have to miss me anymore, because I’m here.”
My eyes flew open. “You’re here? Oh!”
And there he was, standing next to the bed. I lurched up off the concrete I’d been sleeping on and threw my arms around his neck. “I’m so glad it’s really you and not a dream. I’m so glad!”
I felt his arms go around me, too, and he rested his cheek on my hair. “Hi,” he said softly, and l laughed in happiness.
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