by Megan Hart
Don’t Deny Me: Part One
Megan Hart
St. Martin’s Griffin
New York
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Also by Megan Hart
About the Author
Copyright
This is how it works, at the end of things. You stop finding reasons to talk. You make excuses to avoid each other, or worse, to fight. All the funny quirks and flaws you used to find endearing and charming¸ the bits and pieces that made you fall in love so hard and fast, they all start to curl your lip. In the beginning, you never want to leave, and in the end, all you do is struggle to stay.
And eventually, you stop struggling.
—Alice to Mick
* * *
Alice Clark hadn’t been to Bernie’s place in about ten years, but nothing outrageous had changed. The slim saplings planted in perfect formation in the backyard to be used as bases for the softball and kickball games had turned into thick-branched shade trees. The garden had been expanded. The furniture in the living room had been rearranged but contained the same comfy, overstuffed chairs and sofas with plenty of tables for the placing of drinks. The floor-to-ceiling shelves still overflowed with books. The kitchen had been updated with new appliances, but the center island around which they’d always all gathered was the same, as were the wine and spice racks and the scent of something delicious simmering on the huge six-burner stove.
“Hello, beautiful girl.” Bernie greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and a lingering hug. He handed her a glass of red wine and pointed to the platter of meats and cheeses on the island. “Help yourself.”
“What can I do?” As the first to arrive, Alice felt it was the question to ask even though it was well known that she didn’t know a paring knife from a potato peeler and could burn water if given the chance.
“You can sit and drink wine and stay out of my way,” Bernie told her. “Cookie’s getting changed. She’ll be out in a minute. Sit, Alice.”
Alice sat and sipped the wine with a grateful sigh. She closed her eyes for a moment, relishing the thick, rich flavor. Bernie had exemplary taste in wines. Well, in everything, really. Including his taste in women, she thought as Cookie floated into the kitchen with a warm grin and open arms.
“Alice! So good to see you! It’s been forever. I mean, literally, it feels like forever.” Cookie hugged Alice hard and ran a hand down the length of her hair. She stepped back to look her in the face. “Your hair is so long!”
“That’s what happens when you don’t cut it.” Alice laughed.
Cookie patted her own cropped cut. Her hair had gone completely silver in the past ten years, but it suited her. “I couldn’t stand the upkeep for mine anymore. I went pixie a few years ago. What do you think?”
“It looks great.” Alice looked to Bernie, who was busy chopping shallots at the counter. Though she’d been in regular contact with both of them, she hadn’t seen either of them in a few years, and she hadn’t been to their house in much longer than that. “You both look great. The house, everything. I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve been here.”
Bernie glanced over his shoulder. “You’re here now. That’s what counts. The others are coming along later. And on Sunday, the picnic is going to be epic. Cookie told me we didn’t have to invite every single person we ever knew, but I told her that of course we did.”
“But only the ones we love the best are invited to stay over! We’re so glad you decided to come share our celebration with us,” Cookie said. “It wouldn’t be the same without you here.”
“It’s like old times,” Bernie added.
Old times, Alice thought with another sip of wine. Some of them good. Most of them, actually. It was just that the bad times tended to overshadow all the other memories.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly.
Cookie, who’d been delicately loading a thin slice of crusty bread with a layer of shaved ham and brie, looked at her. “For what?”
“Alice means because it’s been so long since she came for the weekend.” Bernie flourished the knife and pushed the chopped shallots into a sizzling pan. The smell was immediate and glorious, and he added a splash of white wine.
The best part of having good friends was how easy it was to slip back into that friendship, no matter how long it had been since you’d seen each other. And how you forgave each other for that distance. Impulsively, Alice hugged Cookie again.
“Thank you for inviting me,” she said. “Over and over again, until finally I stopped being stupid and agreed to come.”
Cookie looked solemn. “We wanted our twenty-year anniversary to include everyone who’s been an important part of our lives. That’s you, Alice. And others, of course. But I’d have understood if you felt like you couldn’t come. … You’ll be all right. Won’t you? I mean, it’s been years. And we wouldn’t have invited both of you if we thought it was going to be … painful.”
Oh, it would be painful, Alice was sure of that. There was no way around the past, no forgetting how it had felt to love and lose and hate and grieve. But it would be the pain of memory, bittersweet and easily borne.
“It’s been a long time,” she said simply in way of response, and sipped wine.
Cookie hugged her again, holding her close and pressing her cheek to Alice’s. When she pulled away, her deep green eyes glimmered with a sheen of surprising tears. Her voice thick, she laughed. “It’s just so good to see you, Alice. Truly. We’re so, so happy you’re here.”
“Me, too. Are you sure I can’t help with anything?” Alice lifted her wineglass toward Bernie, who glowered and waved her off.
“Go pick some flowers from the garden for the table,” he told her. “You’re the one who always had the eye for arranging them.”
Alice laughed and finished the last of her wine. “You’re trying to chase me out of the kitchen, huh?”
“You know how he gets.” Cookie gave her husband a fond look. She poured more wine into Alice’s glass and handed her a piece of bread piled with meat and cheese. “But you’d better do as he says, or else he’ll get grumpy and dinner will be late.”
Alice took the wine and the food, biting into it with a groan of delight. “Can’t have that,” she said around the mouthful. “I’m starving.”
“Everyone else should be here soon. Go, take a walk. Relax.” Cookie smiled.
“I can take a hint.” Swallowing the last of the bread, Alice took a long sip of wine and got off the bar stool. The drink had gone to her head a little, the long drive and no lunch making it easier for the wine to work.
She slipped out the French doors onto the back deck, for a moment overlooking the sloping yard and the trees beyond before carefully navigating the stairs in the way of someone who’s just tipsy enough to fear falling. At the bottom she drained her glass and set it on the railing so she wouldn’t forget to bring it back inside with her, and then she took the winding stone path toward the flower garden.
Bernie reigned in the kitchen, but the yard was Cookie’s domain. They had a gardener who came to deal with the vast expanse of soft green grass, but the flower garden had always been Cookie’s love project. Laid out to imitate a formal English garden but with what she liked to call her own “modern sensibilities,” it featured several raised vegetable beds a
mong the meandering paths, but most of it was thickly planted plots of flowers. Brilliantly hued wildflowers tangled in overgrown beds, while exquisitely pruned and tended roses in their first spring bloom bordered them. Tinkling fountains and birdbaths along with bird feeders, statuary, shaded benches for sitting and enjoying it all … the garden was amazing, and Alice admired the time and talent Cookie had invested in it.
Pulling a pair of gloves and shears from a small cupboard shed near the front of the garden, along with a pretty wicker basket looped with ribbon, Alice felt like the heroine of a Jane Austen novel—minus the floppy hat and empire-waist gown, of course. Her teal maxi dress was romantic enough, she guessed, if you could forget the fact it was made of clinging T-shirt fabric. Then again, she’d read once that Victorian women had sometimes wet the fabric of their gowns to get it to mold to their bodies and become transparent, so maybe her sundress wasn’t so out of place for a romance heroine, after all.
Except she wasn’t.
Not a heroine, not a romance. She was here for the weekend to see old friends, she reminded herself as she headed for a patch of bright purple and red flowers with feathery green stems. And if one of those old friends had once been more to her, so what? Time had passed, Alice reminded herself. They were both adults. There was no reason for either of them to be anything but pleasant. Maybe even cordial. She’d gotten over Mick McManus a long time ago, Alice thought.
And then, of course, she saw him.
* * *
The night we met, I didn’t want to talk to you. I’d have had to make an effort. Find some small talk, some chatter, and you were so vibrant and bright I knew instinctively that there was no way I could possibly live up to that. Not just then, not with my own shit going on, stuff that now I can’t even recall as being important but sure seemed heavy at the time. I needed air, so I went out to the deck with a beer I didn’t even want to drink, and I settled myself into the shadows like some kind of brooding hero from a gothic novel. Thinking if nobody saw me, nobody would make me talk.
And then out you came, through the French doors, the hem of your dress swirling just above your knees. That green dress, the one without sleeves. You wore it every week that summer, because I told you it was my favorite. I liked it best because it’s what you were wearing the first time I saw you.
—Mick to Alice
* * *
It hadn’t been a secret or anything. Alice being here this weekend. Bernie had made sure Mick knew all about it ahead of time, and he’d assured Mick that Alice knew, too. So there wouldn’t be anything awkward or weird about it. It had been something like ten years, after all. More than time enough for old, bad feelings to fade.
So why, then, had Mick taken so much extra time deciding what to wear? To shave or not? Should he use product in his hair, shorter now than how he’d worn it then, and noticeably (at least to him) thinner?
Because it still mattered, of course. A decade had passed, but a century could’ve gone by and he’d still be trying to make sure he looked his best when there was a chance of running into an ex-girlfriend. And not just some random girl he’d dated once or twice, either. Alice was going to be at this party.
He’d seen her once in the past ten years. Three summers ago, Mick had gone down to Baltimore with some friends to celebrate a bachelor party. They’d hit a few of Fell’s Point’s multiple pubs, then made their drunken way over to the Power Plant Live, a club complex a few miles away. Some of the guys had suggested they keep walking until they hit the Hustler club a couple of blocks away, but Remy, the guy getting married, had a fiancée who liked to keep his balls in the palm of her hand. She’d made it very clear she didn’t want him getting a face full of tits and pussy. Mick could’ve told her a strip joint was a safer bet—at least there the girls definitely weren’t angling to go home with anyone. Remy, however, was balls-deep in love with his girl, so instead of the titty club they’d gone to a country rock bar with a mechanical bull and a surprisingly great ’80s cover band that blew the audience away. Alice, in a green dress much like she’d been wearing the first time Mick met her, had been in the center of a group of muscular guys in black T-shirts. All of them dancing and laughing, two of them making her a sandwich for a few minutes before giving her up to dancing again with her girlfriends.
He’d known it was her in an instant, and not only because of that dress. Her hair had fallen to her shoulders, longer than the ear-length cut she’d worn when they’d been together, but it was the same glowing dark auburn it had always been. Her eyes, the same pale gray. The pattern of freckles on her shoulders was the same, a small cluster on the right one that he’d always pretended to connect-the-dots with. And that smile, the way she let her head tip back as she spun, the way she danced, unfettered and free … that was all the Alice he remembered. His Alice.
He hadn’t said a word or tried to approach her. Not even after all that time, six or seven years’ worth of it between them by that point. It wasn’t the time or place for that, not even with the four shots of whiskey topped off with a few beers rolling around in his gut. He’d never been drunk enough to call her after she’d told him she never wanted to see or hear from him again, and that night had been no exception.
He’d regretted it, though. Worse than the hangover the next day. Mick had wished he’d been bold enough to at least say hello. After everything they’d been to each other, surely it had been a mistake to let a chance to talk to her escape him.
He’d make up for it tonight, he decided as he pushed open the French doors and headed for the garden. Cookie had told him Alice was down there—“Not,” she said, “that I’m telling you to go down there to see her, or anything. But in case you maybe wanted to say hello before everyone else gets here.”
It was exactly what he wanted. That first greeting between them, after so much time and all that had happened, shouldn’t be in front of a crowd, where both of them would have to pretend they were happy to see each other. Unless they actually were. He thought he was going to be very happy to see Alice again, but there was always the chance she didn’t feel that way, even if she had agreed to come despite knowing he’d be here.
What would she see when she looked at him? The idiot boy he’d been, or the man he’d worked hard to become? Maybe a little of both, Mick hoped as he paused at the bottom of the stairs to look at the wineglass on the railing, imprinted with the faint smudge of lipstick. For a moment he stupidly almost lifted it to his mouth. To put his lips where hers had been, a pale substitute for a kiss.
He was so fucked.
It was very likely Alice was going to eat him alive. Chew him up, spit out the bones. And he’d deserve it, wouldn’t he? For a moment, he thought of turning back. Being a coward, the way he’d been so many years ago. But no. He was here. So was she. The time had come to stop running away from the past.
* * *
In the beginning, there was always that awkward moment when we first saw each other after being apart. We might’ve spent hours talking on the phone, hours, even, in bed together. But those beginning months, every time in those first few moments, I couldn’t bring myself to look at you. My eyes would skate away, and heat would flood me—even though at the same time, I was usually trying hard not to shake. You’d lean to kiss me, and I would fight and sometimes fail to keep myself from turning my head so your lips would land on my cheek and not my mouth. Because I wanted you too much, you see. When you kissed me hello or good-bye or any time in between, the lightest brush of lip on lip, a casual embrace, I wanted to open for you. Let you sink deep inside. It was all I could do not to leap into your arms, suffocate you with my desire. I was afraid to show you how much I wanted you, because somehow I thought that would make it more real.
And in the end, all I did was waste all those first times when I could’ve been looking at you.
—Alice to Mick
* * *
Flowers whispered in the breeze, and Alice paused for a moment to contemplate which she wanted to kill.
The pink roses were gorgeous, soft and velvety petals with bright green leaves. The red blooms, on the other hand, would blend better with the wildflowers she’d already gathered in her basket. What Cookie needed in her garden was purple roses, Alice thought, stroking one flower while she shifted the basket over her arm. Did such a thing even exist?
“Alice.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t turn. Didn’t blink or gasp or sigh, though every muscle in her body tensed at the sound of her name. She knew that voice at once, though it had been so, so long since she’d heard it any place but in dreams.
“Cookie told me you were here.”
Of course he’d found her on purpose. Of course, she thought with a small and throbbing thump-thump of her heart that she could not pretend she didn’t feel. Lifting her chin, putting on a smile, Alice turned.
“Mick.” Alice smiled, one hand reaching for his automatically. Out of politeness, she told herself. Not because she wanted to touch him.
He surprised her when instead of taking it to shake, he drew her close for a hug. Nothing too unusual in that—their group had always been affectionate embracers, hugging on greetings and good-byes and randomly in between. She’d already been squeezed and cuddled a dozen times today by Bernie and Cookie alone, and would expect more to come from the other guests as they arrived. Still, when Mick’s body pressed to hers, Alice found herself melting into his touch as though the years had never passed and nothing bad had ever happened to them.
It lasted a few seconds, just long enough for her to feel the softness of his breath against her ear and the light press of his fingertips at the small of her back before they were both breaking apart from each other. She with a small, hitching breath. Mick with an embarrassed cough.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “You look … good.”
Her brows went up. “That’s the best you can do after all this time?”
It had been a gamble, guessing he’d respond the way he would’ve back then, but he must not have changed all that much because Mick laughed and took a step back to very clearly look her up and down before letting his gaze settle on hers.