“Is that why you’re not interested in me?” There it was. Right out in the open.
He looked across the table at her. “I’m interested. I’d think that much was obvious.”
“Is there a ‘but’?” she asked.
“There is.” He ran his finger around the edge of his plate. “A man wants to feel like he could take care of his woman. Not the other way around.”
“There’s more to caring for someone than just money,” she said. “I want a partner who loves me and takes care of me in his own unique way.”
“Seriously, though…don’t you think less of me because I’m broke?”
“Not a bit. Would you have still liked me two years ago when I didn’t have money?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“It’s the same for me. I like you, not your bank account,” she said. “Now that I’m doing well, it means I can offer financial security to whomever I’m with.”
“That’s what I want, too,” he said. “I want that to be my part in the relationship, not the woman’s.”
“I thought you were more evolved than that,” she said.
“I wish I was.”
Her heart sank. What was she doing? It would take about a second more and she would be in love with this guy. He’d just told her the truth. There was no future here.
He reached across the table and placed his hand over hers. “Stardust, that doesn’t mean I can’t get there. It is and will be a struggle for me. I can’t promise anything other than I’ll try.”
“That’s fair,” she said.
“I’ll always be honest with you.”
“Same.”
He got up and cleared their dishes, putting them back on the tray and setting it outside the door.
Lisa settled onto the couch to enjoy the rest of her glass of wine.
Rafael returned with another beer and plopped down on the other end of the couch. “You going to tell me what’s happened?”
“My mom called. They fished Marigold’s body out of the lake. She was murdered.”
His face fell. “I’m sorry.”
“Mom said David’s in shock. I should go there, but he doesn’t want me to. Not until I get through my duties.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I want to be with my brother. But I can’t go until I’m done. The memorial will be in a few weeks. I’ll fly straight there from New York.” David was the solid one. He would be fine. Wouldn’t he? Was his strength unproven? He’d always done exactly what was expected of him. Up until now, everything had seemed to go his way. How would he deal with a setback like this?
“Of the two of us, David’s always been the together one,” she said out loud. “I’m the one who’s had problems, not him.” Should she tell him about the depression? The time she spent in the hospital?
“What kind of problems?” he asked.
“Except to members of my immediate family, I didn’t talk until I was four years old.”
“Really?”
“My brother talked for both of us. Mom sent me to speech therapy, thinking it was a physical problem, but it wasn’t. I was just painfully shy.” It was easy to talk to Rafael. Her stories tumbled out when she was with him. “When I went to school, my mother had them separate me from my brother. She thought this would miraculously make me talk.”
“Let me guess. It had the opposite effect?”
“Pretty much. You’d be amazed at what can be communicated with a nod of the head in either direction. I took dance classes. No one asked me to talk there. In fact, they preferred I didn’t. The summer before I went to middle school, they sent me to a child therapist and she did some cognitive therapy, including pushing me into situations that scared me. Acting class was my worst nightmare. Or so I thought. The teacher took me aside one day and told me that she’d been a shy kid too. She encouraged me to try different personas in class improvisations—ones I could use in real life. My whole world changed.”
She’d also discovered that inside the quiet girl was a songbird. What she couldn’t say with words, she could express through singing.
“When I studied at NYU, we spent a lot of time learning how to break down our barriers so we could express truthful emotions. I didn’t need to be broken down. It’s like I came out of the womb this way. Sometimes I think that’s part of my problem. If I weren’t so sensitive, maybe I wouldn’t struggle so much.”
“But if you weren’t so sensitive, you wouldn’t be who you are,” he said.
“My mother’s worried the concert might have triggered some of my old thoughts.” Lisa stared above his head at the painting of a field of poppies that hung on the wall by the door. Red poppies. Happy flowers. “I was hospitalized for depression when I was sixteen. I took a bunch of pills.”
“Did something happen to trigger it?” he asked softly.
She took in a deep breath. “No. Nothing. Depression isn’t about one thing. In my case, it was gradual decline until one day I couldn’t get out of bed. All I wanted to do was sleep. I know it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to understand.”
“Can you try to explain it to me? I want to understand.”
She searched for the right words before answering. “Healthy people experience sadness or grief or disappointment, but they still have hope that tomorrow will be better. They come up with plans to solve their problems. They ask friends for help. Depression is the absence of hope. It’s like a powerful vacuum that sucks all hope from you and leaves you in a darkness so bleak that nothing matters. Even the thought of walking across the room requires more of a plan than you can muster. I couldn’t see any way out. I just wanted the pain to end.”
“How did you get better?”
“Medication and therapy. It took some time to get the dose right, but once we did, I was able to function better.”
“And you’re on them now?”
“I am. I will be for the rest of my life. My health isn’t something I can ever take for granted. I have to manage it like the disease it is.”
He splayed his hands over both his knees. “Let me get this straight. You battled through shyness to become a gifted actress. At sixteen you fought through depression and became healthy. You lived in New York City for over a decade. You aligned yourself with two people who had your back, which is smart. You can’t tell me you weren’t brave as hell out there. Waitressing with guys ogling you or worse. Taking the subway to auditions where people judged you on your abilities and your appearance. Taking grueling dance classes and sticking to a rigid diet. Through all that, you stayed real and sweet. You kept believing in love, even after a dozen guys screwed you over. Come on. If that isn’t the definition of brave, then I don’t know what is.”
“How did you know all that?”
One shoulder rose in a shrug. “Maggie told me about what it was like for you girls back there.”
“She did? When did that come up?”
He grinned. “I may or may not have asked about you.”
“When?”
“After I met you last summer.”
“Oh.” She stared into her glass.
“After I learned a little about you, I decided my initial assessment was correct. You’re way out of my league.”
“But now you know the truth. I’m a medicated, unstable mess.”
“That’s not what I see.” He studied her for a moment, then shook his head. “Everyone struggles, no matter how tough they seem on the outside. You’re real. You don’t have pretensions or put on airs. That sets you apart from most people I know. Anyway, just because you feel things deeply doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. You’re brave enough to deal with them head-on instead of burying your head in the sand.”
“If you knew then what you know now, would you still think I was out of your league?”
“Stardust, the more I get to know you, the surer I am.” He crossed to her and grabbed her hand, pulling her to her feet and into his arms. “You make me
dizzy. I can’t think straight. Just the scent of your perfume is enough to drive me crazy. The thought of what’s under those leggings is like torture.”
She held her breath.
“It’s not just your outer beauty. Knowing how hard you’ve fought for your health and how brave you are shows me how beautiful you are inside, too. A woman like you needs one of these rich dudes in a fancy car. A producer or director or some rich guy like Mullen and his friends. Someone you wouldn’t be embarrassed to take to a party.”
“I would never be embarrassed to take you to a party.”
“I want to believe that,” he said.
“Believe it.”
He moved his thumb along her bottom lip. “Your mouth—it isn’t fair. How could I think about anything but kissing you?”
Her instinct was to take his thumb all the way into her mouth. Instead, she held her breath. Her lip burned where he’d touched it. Her mouth had gone dry. “From the moment I met you all I wanted was a chance to get to know you a little. And now that I do, all I want is to know what it feels like to be kissed by you.”
“All night I’ve been watching you, wondering what the inside of your mouth tastes like.” His voice was husky and quieter than usual. “What it would feel like to let myself do to you what I want.”
She drew in a sharp intake of breath. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to kiss you, long and hard, until you’re begging me to take you in that room and rip off your clothes and get lost in you.”
She nodded and lifted her chin slightly. “Maybe you’ll be the one begging.”
Rafael chuckled as he pulled her closer. “You’re pretty cocky.”
She wound her fingers into his thick hair and pressed her breasts against his chest.
He lowered his mouth to hers. His strong arms pulled her body even closer. She lifted her chin and let him take her bottom lip in his. The kiss began gently, but soon their mouths were at war, pressing, tugging, licking. When his tongue darted inside her mouth, she moaned and held on for dear life.
Finally, it had to end, or their lips would be bloody and bruised. They were both panting. He stepped backward. She brought her hand to her mouth.
“I told you,” he said. “Electric fence.”
“I told you it wouldn’t maim us.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “Stardust, you better go to bed and lock that door of yours, because I can’t be trusted to be a gentleman.”
“Good night, Rafael.”
“Good night.”
Lisa was dreaming. The bullets came one after the other, endlessly popping. She tried to run. The ground beneath her feet crumbled, encasing her feet. People ran by her. She fell. Boots trampled her.
She woke, her pajamas drenched in sweat. The clock on the bedside table told her it was close to two a.m. The sound of a helicopter circling above penetrated the walls of the hotel.
She sat up and turned on a lamp. What did the people in the helicopter look for? A gunman? An escaped convict? A man with an automatic rifle?
She hugged her knees to her chest, shaking in her wet pajamas. The whir of the helicopter was a reminder that they were not safe. Not ever, really. If someone wanted to wreak havoc, he or she could. At any moment, another monster could roar to life, their need to spread hatred greater even than their human instinct to survive.
She crawled out of bed and eased out of the damp clothes. Her eyes stung from fatigue, but she couldn’t go back to bed like this. A shower? Yes, a shower. She would wash away the remnants of her nightmare.
Chilled and clammy, she turned on the water and waited for it to heat. When it did, she slipped under the spray and felt immediate relief. She scrubbed from head to foot using a washcloth and soap. When her skin was pink, she got out and dried with a towel. She used her body lotion that smelled of spring flowers to soothe her warm skin.
After slipping into a fresh pair of cotton pajamas, she got back into bed. For at least another hour she lay there, trying to fall back to sleep, tossing and turning from one side of the big bed to the other. Her desperation to sleep brought the opposite. Back in New York when she had a nightmare, she would go out to the couch in their living room to sleep. That was before she knew the sound an automatic rifle made when pointed into a crowd of people. An image of the gunman’s finger holding down the trigger as the bullets fired in quick succession played before her closed eyes. She’d seen someone use one once. She and David and their father had spent an afternoon at the firing range years ago. They’d gone just that once and never again. None of them could tolerate the noise, especially Lisa with her sensitive ears.
Had the gunman targeted certain people, or did he just point in the general direction of innocent people enjoying a day off from their troubles?
Her thoughts turned to her brother. Was he awake, wondering how his life had gone so wrong? She remembered their wedding like it was yesterday. Marigold had wanted it at the country club, and her father had spared no expense. Lisa was a bridesmaid. Marigold had picked hideous lavender dresses with big bows attached to the bodices. Lisa had known they were chosen with precision. No one could look better than the bride, especially Lisa. Marigold made sure of that.
From the beginning, Marigold had treated Lisa as competition, jealous of the close relationship between the twins. Lisa had done what she could to assuage those feelings by being careful not to exclude David’s wife from conversations. It was too easy for them to sink into “twin speak” the moment they were together—shorthand and half sentences, inside jokes and exchanged glances. The last time they’d all been together, Lisa had been in their kitchen cleaning up the dinner dishes when Marigold came in from an evening out with her girlfriends. Lisa had asked how the evening went, did she have fun, was it good to have a night off from the babies? Marigold hadn’t answered. She’d swayed slightly and crossed her arms over her chest. Leaning against the refrigerator, she’d stared at Lisa for a moment.
“No matter what I do, your brother will never love me as much as he loves you.”
She’d assured her that wasn’t true, that he was crazy about her and did everything he could to take care of her and the kids.
“A sense of duty is not the same thing as love.”
“He’s loved you since high school. How can you say that?”
“And now, on top of being so goddamn pretty, you’re rich, too. Just one more win for perfect Lisa. I actually hate you. Did you know that? I’ve hated you from the first. I didn’t think I could hate you more, but I do. Just like love, there are layers and layers of hate.” With that, her sister-in-law had stumbled out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
She gave up trying to sleep and wandered out to the living room. The lights of the city twinkled in the darkness. She turned to look at Rafael’s door, closed and probably locked. Was he asleep? Did he snore? Did he dream of the war? Did he ever wake drenched in sweat? Her gaze moved to the bar area. He’d put her empty glass in the sink. The two beer bottles were neatly lined up on the counter. Neat and tidy, like him.
The sound of the helicopter grew louder. She went to the window. A spotlight illuminated a section of the hotel’s entryway. She looked up to see that the light came from the helicopter. Resting her forehead on the glass, she peered downward. A man stood in the center of the light. Something was in his hand. A weapon?
“Lisa?”
She jumped and turned to see Rafael standing in his doorway. Wearing nothing but pajama bottoms, he squinted into the light.
“Yeah, it’s me. I couldn’t sleep.” She moved away from the window.
He drew closer and rubbed his eyes, reminding her of a little boy. “Did something wake you?”
“A nightmare.” Her gaze swept over his muscular shoulders, six-pack, and narrow hips. What did she expect? The guy was a former SEAL. “There’s something going on outside.”
He crossed over to her with an expression of concern and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Your hair’s wet.”
“I was all sweaty, so I took a shower.”
“Are you cold? You’re shaking. I can adjust the air for you.”
Even in the dim light she could see the scar where a bullet had gone through his left shoulder. She resisted the urge to touch him. Instead, she pointed at the window. “There’s a guy down there. A police helicopter had lights on him.”
He grabbed a blanket from the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders, then went to the window. “I don’t see anyone.”
She joined him and looked back to the spot where the man had been. “He was just there. Can you hear the helicopter?”
“No.”
She pushed her fingers into her eyes. The only sound was the soft whoosh of the air conditioner. Her gaze darted to the sky. Nothing but darkness. “Did I imagine it?” Her voice went up an octave.
He pulled her into his arms and tucked her head against his chest. “It’s okay. He might’ve been there and run away.”
“What if I’m seeing things?”
“So what if you are? No harm can come from it,” he said.
“Except that means I’m delusional.”
“Come on, let’s get you back to bed. You need your beauty sleep.”
The moment he released her, a chill rushed over her. By the time they were in her room, her teeth were chattering. He held back the covers. “Get in there.”
She did so, scooting to the middle of the bed, hoping he would sit.
He stared down at her. “You going to be okay now?”
“Will you stay with me for a few minutes? Just until I fall asleep?” She turned to the side and tucked her hands under her cheek.
He perched on the side of the bed and brushed her hair away from her face. “Don’t you know you’re never supposed to go to bed with a wet head?”
“How come?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just something my mama always says.”
“You look uncomfortable. Lie down here with me?”
He took in a ragged breath. “That’s not a good idea. It’s nearly impossible for a man to resist you, especially while lying next to you in bed.”
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