When she felt the moisture against her temple, she raised her head quickly. Her face was wet with grief; sympathy broke from her in a low moan. “Oh, no, no,” she said desperately. He shut his eyes and shook his head slightly. She put her arms around him and rested her cheek against his. He gave in, holding her tighter, trying to melt into her and diffuse the pain. His stiff and soundless anguish made her stroke the back of his head gently.
“You don’t know how to cry very well,” she said, her voice barely audible, breaking on each word. “But you don’t have to hide it from me.”
Despite her urging, he suppressed the hollow grief pounding behind his eyelids and said through clenched teeth, “You’re the only person in my life who knows I’m even capable of it.”
“I can’t believe that. They can’t do that to you. It’s too much to expect.”
“It’s what I’ve taught them to expect. To rely on.”
“Even her?” Lily asked without condemnation. It was clear who she meant.
His loyalty to Glenda would only let him answer, “It’s not her fault.”
The note of careful allegiance in his tone was enough to distance Lily from him. She exhaled wearily. She continued to hold him, but her hand stilled on his hair, and she angled her face away, resting her cheek on his shoulder. “You must love her very much.”
“She deserves to be loved.”
The vagueness of his answer was no escape route to Lily. “Then you love her,” she prompted.
Artemas knew the truth wouldn’t help either of them. A lie would be appropriate, even wise, because it would help keep Lily away from him. The dilemma raged in his chest. I don’t want to hurt her. Whatever I say, it will hurt her.
He took her by the shoulders, held her back from him a little, and looked at her without saying anything. She studied him, her blue eyes piercing, provoking, but failing to find what they wanted. Her ravaged face settled into a mask of resignation. “She’s important to you,” she said carefully.
“Yes. Very.”
Artemas felt the deadened acceptance. She had handed him a way out. God, she was able to sacrifice that, because she knew she’d lost. Her courage was everything he’d ever dreamed about, and something he would never stop wanting to celebrate and protect.
Lifting a hand to his face, she smoothed a trembling finger over the fading dampness on one of his cheeks. His breath caught. One more second and he’d be catching her hand to his mouth and kissing the palm. She saved him from that disaster by suddenly dropping her hand to his chest and pushing lightly. He let go of her, and she moved to the middle of the couch.
Artemas faced forward and brusquely rubbed a hand across his face. She did the same. Their charade of dignity was as pathetic as tornado survivors picking through the ruins of a house. As if there were any way to make the effort look noble.
“You never wrote much about your parents,” she said. “You mentioned they died, but you never said what happened to them.”
“I don’t miss them.”
“Not ever?”
He glanced at her. “No.”
Her face paled at his brutal tone. “Why?”
Telling her would tear away more of her idealistic expectations about him and keep her at a distance. He started with Susan de Gude, softening the details but leaving nothing out. As he talked, horror crept into Lily’s expression. The questions she interjected held a note of sick regret, as if she were compelled against her will. And by the time he finished with a few terse words about his mother’s drunken death, she was hugging herself.
Artemas sat back, exhausted and defenseless. He felt dirty, as if the words had stained his mouth and skin. “That’s what I come from,” he said. He jerked a pack of cigarettes from his trouser’s front pocket and fumbled with the cheap lighter he’d tucked into the cellophane sheath. Lily lurched forward and grasped his wrists. His startled scowl only made her look at him sadly. “You think you can go back and change what they were. Isn’t that what pushes you? Believin’ that everything they did wrong will disappear if you make enough money and impress enough people?”
“Yes.”
“You could lose the whole point of your life that way. Lose yourself.”
His skin felt feverish where her fingers clamped it. “Just the opposite,” he told her with growing dismay. “I know who I am and what I have to do.”
“For them.” Her voice rose, became a plea. “But what do you want for yourself?”
She was tearing him apart, making it impossible to think clearly. “This. I’m saving this.” He felt reckless, bursting with the half-realized desires that suddenly crowded his mind with vivid recognition. He jerked his head toward their surroundings, then looked at her. “And you. And the estate at Blue Willow. All of it’s mine.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before he realized how possessive and intimate they sounded. In one thoughtless, vulnerable moment, he’d revealed too much, not only to her but to himself.
“Sentimental memories,” he explained quickly. “Friendship. A sanctuary.”
She whispered his name in awe, leaned over, and kissed him on the mouth. The sweet, hot pressure made a clean thrust into an unguarded part of his shield, a wound that felt mortal. She could take his life, if he let her. It would be so easy to let her.
Artemas pulled his hands away from her powerful grip and grasped her chin. He was kissing her back blindly, his only thought to make her lips damp and luscious and open to him, and she was urging him on. Nothing had ever felt so right, so complete. If they continued, he would forget every duty but the one to her. He could not.
Artemas broke the contact and held her apart from him. She lunged forward, trying to kiss him again. Her eyes were shut. She seemed dazed, wild. He groaned bitterly and grabbed her arms. When she finally realized his harsh resistance, her eyes flew open. Shame and regret seeped into them.
She stared at him from the dangerous space of a harsh breath, then slid away. Her hands quivered as she covered her flushed face. “I better go.” She strode to a pile of blankets and pillows on a chair near the front door. Artemas followed, cursing silently. Gathering her bedding, she turned and flashed a shattering, anguished look at him. “Relax. I’m not goin’ to do that again. Don’t lecture me about your live-in ladyfriend. If you cheated on her, I wouldn’t have much respect for you. And I’m not some fool who thinks going to bed with you would change anything.”
His hands were clenched by his sides. He was dying. “Good,” he forced himself to say. “You summed the situation up nicely.”
She blanched at his uncompromising answer. He trailed her to the porch and watched her hurry out into the pasture. A full moon made a silver mist on the knoll where the barn sat, a low, dark form with a peaked roof against the night sky. She tied the winch rope around her things and climbed the ladder to the open loft door, disappearing into its blackness. The bedding rose slowly, pulled upward by her expert hands, with the eerie effect of floating, until it was absorbed in the dark loft with her.
Artemas turned and went into her bedroom, pulled the neat patchwork quilt from her bed, then strode through the house turning off lights. When the darkness matched the barn’s, he went to the front porch and sat on the edge, the blanket thrown loosely around his shoulders, his eyes on the barn’s loft entrance.
A boy’s childish vow had become a grown man’s passion. Unfettered desire and possessiveness overwhelmed him. He had never wanted anything or anyone with such vivid, painful certainty.
Insects sang in the small grove of peach and apple trees beyond the yard, as if the morning were peaceful. Artemas stood in the open door of the screened back porch, brooding over a charmed world washed in the last pink shadows of dawn. The budding vines of old-fashioned roses draped a remnant of wooden fence that had been left as a border for an herb bed. Huge ferns were beginning to unfurl along the creek banks, shaded by the willows. Crepe myrtles and hydrangeas dotted the yard’s edge, and trellises held muscadine vines.
He remembered popping their fat, sweet grapes into his mouth when he was a child, and the smell they made simmering in huge pots on Mrs. MacKenzie’s big gas stove.
His restless attention moved to the pasture beyond the shrubbery, then to the barn. Lily obsessed him. Wanting her was like walking into a dark, unfamiliar room and immediately, without rational explanation, knowing how to find the light.
Artemas stepped into the yard, dropped to his heels by a spigot, and filled his hands with frigid well water. He scrubbed his face roughly, wishing the icy sting would jolt his good sense.
To throw away the alliance he’d made with Glenda’s father meant ruin for all his hopes of building the Colebrook businesses. It meant ruin for his family’s future. Yes, his commitment to Glenda DeWitt had been conceived in necessity rather than choice, but he’d promised himself he’d never hurt her, and that vow was all that had saved his self-respect.
You could have Lily too, a rebellious inner voice whispered. Who would blame you for rewarding yourself?
Bile rose in his throat. That was an option his father would have chosen without a qualm. An arrangement that would degrade Lily, even if she agreed to it, which Artemas doubted she ever would. He thought about their seven-year age difference. He hadn’t been naive at eighteen, and neither was she. She’d see his dilemma for what it was—a coldblooded choice. He’d chosen to build something for his family, and he would never sacrifice that.
Artemas slammed a fist onto his knee. He had spent the night weighing his options against reality, and reality had won.
He left the yard at a fast walk. When he reached the barn, he climbed the weathered ladder to the loft without any attempt at being quiet. Wake up, we have a lot to do, he’d tell her, as if she were just an accessory to his day’s schedule.
But he hoisted himself over the top rung and halted, looking at her still asleep on the loft’s golden mat of hay. She was curled up on her side, colorful quilts jumbled over her, her bright red hair splayed across a pillow. One arm was curled around some kind of gray coat; the other was flung out on the hay, the hand unfurled and vulnerable, as if reaching toward him. Her face was poignantly relaxed. For the first time he could imagine how she must look with a carefree smile, or laughing.
The sight of her unleashed an ache of loss and longing in his chest. He glanced around the loft, trying to distract the feeling. To his left, beside a mountain of neatly stacked bales of hay, sat a large open box. He pulled it to him, hoping the rustling sounds would make her wake up. She stirred, hugged the odd coat closer to her chest, but continued sleeping.
Artemas exhaled in defeat. Without caring, he glanced down into the box. The stuffed toy bears brought a vague sense of recognition. He pulled them out one by one, piling them on the floor by his knees, and when his hand touched the box’s bottom, he felt a small bag filled with sharp edges. He lifted it out and stared in astonishment.
Through the clear plastic he saw his insignia from the military academy. The nameplate, the cadet-commander emblem, even the gold braid from the collar and cuffs. Suddenly he realized that the stuffed bears were the ones he’d given her over the years. Staring at her again, he studied the faded gray coat and knew what it was—his academy jacket.
A mouse scurried along a rafter overhead, dislodging the brittle clay remnant of an insect’s home. The crumbled bits fell on her face, and she jerked upright, disheveled and looking around wildly. Hay clung to her hair and the T-shirt she still wore from yesterday.
When she saw him, she flinched in surprise. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes unguarded as they swept over him. It was a provocative examination, taking in a new image of him in jogging shoes and old jeans with a faded football jersey tucked into them. They were all he’d brought with him in the rush to catch a flight out of New York.
Finally she noticed the items in front of him on the floor, darted a horrified gaze at him, then bounded over. Sitting on her bare feet with her wrinkled shorts hiked high around her thighs—a view that did his simmering frustration no good—she scooped the bears into her lap and began shoving them back into the box. “Old things,” she muttered, her voice high. “I meant to get rid of ’em.”
She grimaced at the packet of insignia he still held in one hand. Artemas dropped it into the box. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry.” He hesitated. His life was a maze of hidden needs, small human wishes and dreams he couldn’t indulge. He wanted this time with her to be his, just his, with as little deception as possible. “I’m not sorry,” he corrected. Her astonished gaze flashed up to his somber one. “I like knowing that you kept all of it.”
“Oh, Artemas.” Her voice was soft, but more distressed than pleased. Rubbing her hands over her face, she sighed and shook her head. “I put it all away after the night you came to visit.”
“Why?”
Her chin jutted forward. He recognized that lockjawed, stubborn look. It was as familiar to him as his own. She wasn’t about to tell him, unless he pressed. When she moved as if starting to rise, he reached out and tugged gently on her hand. She stared at his hold on her for a moment, flexed her fingers around his careful grip, then settled down again, looking defeated. Artemas casually let go of her, as if it were easy, and draped his arm over one updrawn knee.
She told him what had happened to her that night, how a boy she’d trusted had mauled her, how ashamed she’d been, how she’d hidden outside the house, listening miserably as her parents and Artemas had talked, then watching him leave. Artemas studied her reddening cheeks and deceptively shuttered eyes. She might not realize it, but she radiated guilt, even now. Guilt because she thought her story would disgust him, that she’d been foolish and gullible, deserving some blame.
Humiliating memories of his own flooded back. A haze of fury misted his vision and made him light-headed. He moved next to her without a second thought, and put both arms around her. “I’m just going to hold you,” he said. Self-restraint coiled inside him, choking off all possibility that he’d do more.
She gave a fervent little nod, as if she couldn’t bear to hope otherwise. Slowly she leaned against him, curled her legs to one side, and shut her eyes. He kept his head up, staring fixedly at the beautiful morning outside the loft door. Then he told her what had happened to him when he was fourteen.
As he described how Mrs. Schulhorn had confused and shamed him with her drunken groping, he felt Lily stiffening with shock. He glanced at her anxiously. She wrenched back from him a little, her face tilting up to his gaze, livid. Her teeth were bared. “That bitch.” Her voice was low and deadly serious. “I wish she were here. I wish I could beat the ever-lovin’ shit out of her.”
Her fury on his behalf had a strange effect. It voided the ugly memory, the feeling of having been used, victimized. Because Lily really would have beat the shit out of Mrs. Schulhorn.
Before he knew why he needed to, he was laughing. Throwing back his head and laughing—with relief, with delight, with lurid disdain for people who thought they had the power to humiliate him, or Lily
“You think I’m kidding?” Lily asked in a low, strained voice. Glowing with pleasure, he looked down at her and shook his head. She scrutinized him. “That’s not a smile on your face,” she said. “It’s exposed fangs.”
He exhaled. It was a soft hiss of threat. His lips barely moved. “I want that boy’s throat between my hands. I want to break his neck.”
Her face lit up. “Really?”
“The last thing I’d let him do is gurgle an apology to you. So there’d be no doubt in your mind that you weren’t to blame for what happened.”
He saw his own brand of giddy relief rising in her eyes. Tentatively at first, then with a snap of certainty. “You’d crack his neck like a wishbone?” she inquired, arching one brow expectantly.
“He’d look like an accordion.” Her absurdity captivated him. He asked slyly, “And you’d punch her until she squealed?”
“I’d give her more dents than an old Chevy.”
“I’d break all his fingers.”
“I’d stomp on her head.”
On some unspoken cue they scrambled to their knees, grasped each other by the shoulders, and swayed, pushing and pulling vigorously. “Kick his ass black and blue.” “Twist her nipples off!” They were shoving at each other, as joyous as wild children. “Rip his stomach open and spit in his guts!” “Slap her till her eyes popped!” “Jerk his arms into pretzels!” “Pull out her eyelashes one by one!” “I can’t think of any more!” “Neither can I! And I’m gettin’ seasick!”
Shouting with elation like battle-fatigued soldiers, they leaned against each other and sat down limply. The laughter trickled away, punctuated by a spontaneous new outburst here and there, as they leaned. against each other. Artemas wiped his eyes. Lily patted her stomach and took deep breaths.
The fragile mood settled and darkened, until they were both silent. A soft, heated breeze curled inside the barn. Artemas turned his face into it gratefully, glancing at Lily as he did. She looked both pensive and peaceful, which was how he felt too. “Thank you,” she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead.
“Thank you.”
One sleeve of her shirt was jammed up to her shoulder. His closeness to her let him notice the thin white scar there. It made a horizontal stripe along the smooth, tanned skin dusted with freckles. A jolt of recognition made him grimace. Artemas twisted toward her a little and touched his fingertips to it. “Is this where you were shot?” he asked gruffly.
She followed his intense gaze. “War wound,” she said, and jerked the sleeve over it.
“It is where you were shot. When you pretended to be a bear to chase someone out of the woods around the estate.”
“You remember.” She smiled sadly.
“Lily, I loved your letters.”
He had done the wrong thing, bringing that subject up. Her face became grim. “Until you stopped readin’ them.”
Blue Willow Page 19