Forked

by Melanie Harlow

  “You watch who you’re ordering around, little girl. I’ve got gangster blood, and it runs hot.”

  Gangster blood.

  Damn.

  I ran hard, the soles of my Nikes stirring up dust on the dirt road. My body was bursting with trapped energy, fueled by frustration and adrenaline, which only seemed to replenish itself the harder I pushed.

  “Jesus, Coco, pace yourself.” Nick easily kept up with me, although I was glad to hear he was breathing heavy. “You’re going to wear yourself out on the first mile.”

  “Can’t keep up?” I teased, stretching my legs to lengthen each stride.

  Instead of answering he took off at a speed I’d never attain in this lifetime, moving about a hundred

  feet ahead of me and then jogging backward as I caught up. “Hey, cupcake. What took you so long?”

  I punched his shoulder and he turned around, running alongside me again. “No fair,” I panted. “You have much longer legs than I do.”

  He glanced down at my blue running shorts. “I don’t know, your legs look pretty long to me. Long and luscious and begging to wrap themselves around my neck. What do you say we stop up here for a breather?”

  “No. Do you know how many calories I’ve consumed in the last twenty-four hours? I’m getting a run in if it kills me.” Ignoring a stitch behind my left rib cage, I pumped my arms harder and sped up again.

  “It might, the way you’re going at it. Why don’t you save some of that aggression for later? It’s turning me on.”

  “Everything turns you on.”

  “True. At least where you’re concerned.”

  We ran in silence for a few minutes, following the dirt road as it curved around a bend. On our left was a field of greens; on our right, land thick with trees.

  “How far do you want to go?” he asked.

  “Three miles,” I panted. “Same as always.”

  “Perfect. We’ll go to that silo up there, turn around, and then head east through the trees when we get back here.” He gestured to our right. “The reservoir is that way.”

  “Great.” I slowed down a little, breathing deeply in an effort to relieve the ache in my side. Eventually it dissipated, and my mind strayed from my body to my heart, which ached in a different way. I needed to ask myself some hard questions.

  What was I really doing here with Nick? Yes, I needed him to do me a favor by catering for Angelina, but he and I both knew he owed me a favor without this weekend together business. I could have argued harder that being friends and getting to know each other again did not have to involve sleeping under one roof. And I should have. But the truth was, I’d wanted to say yes. I wanted to spend time with him under one roof. Alone. With others. Clothed. Naked. Cooking.

  Talking. Drinking. Laughing.

  Kissing.

  Showering.

  Fucking.

  Christ. My shorts felt wet with something other than sweat, and my breasts tingled in my sports bra. It didn’t help that he was right here next to me, sweaty and shirtless and breathing hard, muscles flexing. Before thinking about sex could derail my introspection, I put it aside and tried to examine how I really felt about Nick.

  When I looked at him, I had all the stomach- flipping, panty-melting, heart-fluttery feelings I had all those years ago. When I thought about his success and saw how hard he’d worked to get where he was, I felt proud and happy. When I thought about being here at the farm, talking to Noni about family history, I felt like I belonged somehow. And when I thought about never being back here again, about saying goodbye to Nick tomorrow when the weekend was over, about going back to my regularly scheduled days of work, living with my parents, and no sex, I felt empty. No, worse than empty. Sad. Lonely. Depressed. Doomed to spend countless nights alone with my vibrator, getting myself off by thinking about Nick—and that’s only when I knew the house would be empty.

  But. When I thought about what he’d done, I got so mad. I felt bitter and humiliated and betrayed. Served him right if he still loved me—here was my chance to make him feel a little of what I felt back then.

  Only trouble was, I still loved him too.

  Looking skyward as we turned around at the silo, I waited for lightning bolts to streak the sky or thunderclouds to burst. But there were just birds and trees and puffy white clouds. Did that mean the universe was in favor of a second chance? The lake came into view, and I made up my mind. I’d listen to what he had to say, and I’d tell him how I felt. If he could somehow convince me to give him another chance, I’d try again—barring any signs from the cosmos telling me to run for the hills.

  Because this felt real. Familiar. Right. As if we were picking up our story where we left off, but now we had a chance to give it a better ending.

  In order to do that, we had to go back to where we went wrong…we had to talk about it.

  The thought was scary as hell. But it was the right thing to do, and the decision to face it freed me somehow. I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. With a fresh burst of energy, I surged ahead. “Race you to the lake!”

  He laughed and shot past me through the trees within five seconds. I caught up just as he was ripping off his socks.

  “First one in wins!” I yelled, barely slowing down to yank my Nikes from my feet and run right off the end of the rickety old wooden dock into the water, fully clothed, Nick at my heels.

  Heart pounding, I went all the way under, the water blessedly cool against my hot skin. I rested for just a couple second under the water, my toes digging into the mucky sand bottom. The world around me rumbled when Nick jumped in beside me, and we surfaced at the same time.

  “Cheater!” He shook his head to clear the dripping hair from his eyes and reached for me. I

  “Look who’s calling who a cheater.” I tried to swim away from him, but his hand closed around my right ankle.

  He pulled me back toward him, reaching for my waist when I was close enough. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that one of us has a history of cheating, and it isn’t me.” But I let him turn me into his arms, running my hands up his shoulders and wrapping my legs around his torso. The water came up to his chest, just below the tattoo of my name. Every time I looked at it, I felt a surge of desire for him.

  “Aren’t you ever going to let the cheating thing go? It was so long ago, Coco.” His hands slid beneath my ass.

  I shrugged. Would I ever be able to let it go? Not a bad place to start. “Maybe we should talk about it.”

  He groaned. “Now? I do want to talk to you, like I said before, but now I can’t concentrate. It was bad enough when you put on your little running outfit but now that you’re all wet too…” He kissed me, and his cock stirred between us. “Now I have other ideas.”

  “Mmmmm.” I squeezed him with my thighs, pulled him closer with my heels. “Tempting. Except remember what happened that last time we did it in this lake?”

  His face fell. “Oh yeah. It gave you an infection.”

  “Right.” I’d never had a UTI before, so I was terrified by the symptoms. Nick had gone with me to the campus clinic and held my hand in the waiting room. It cleared up after a round of antibiotics, but I didn’t feel like repeating the experience. Shuddering, I shook my head. “Sorry, no sex in the lake.”

  “No. I agree.” He spun around, making my stomach go weightless. “I’ll just look at you, then. I could do that all day.”

  I smiled. “Liar.”

  “You’re right. That’s a lie.” He spun around the other way. “I wouldn’t last all day.”

  I hugged him close, chest to chest, and rested my chin on his shoulder. Cool water swirled between us, the sun warming my arms and glinting off the surface of the lake. “It’s OK. I wouldn’t last all day either.”

  We stayed like that for a couple minutes, so peaceful that I was loath to disturb the mood with a painful conversation, but I wasn’t one to wait around when I had something to say. And the sooner we dealt with t

he past, the sooner we could try to bury it and move forward.

  At that moment, I honestly believed it was possible.

  I opened my mouth, but Nick spoke first.

  “Coco.”

  “Yes?”

  He swallowed. “I lied to you. That night we broke up.”

  Gooseflesh broke out on my skin. The night we broke up? What the hell was he talking about? “About what?”

  “About cheating on you. The last time.”

  I pulled back from him. Looked him in the eye. “What do you mean, you lied?”

  “I didn’t do it. I never slept with anyone else that spring.”

  The water, which had been pleasantly chilly before, suddenly felt icy. “What? Why did you tell me you did?”

  “So that you’d break up with me. But I’m tired of being called a cheater. Being thought of that way. I didn’t do it.”

  I unwrapped my legs from around his waist, and my feet floated down to the bottom. “I don’t understand. Why did you want me to break up with you?”

  “After Mia told me you’d been accepted to that program in Paris, I thought about it a lot. I didn’t want you to leave, but I realized how important it was for you to go.”

  I took my arms from around his neck and stared at him, waiting for him to go on.

  He ran a hand over his hair. “I went to your apartment to tell you to go, but you refused. So I made up the lie about sleeping with someone else so you’d do it.”

  My heart was thundering so hard it sounded like canons in my head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true,” he said, his expression sincere. “And it worked. You threw me out. You threw everything out.”

  “Because I was fucking mad!” I yelled, smacking the water. “You deserved it! And I’m not even sorry, because that was a shitty thing to do to me, even if it was a lie. You destroyed me that night. You watched me fall apart.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head, tiny little movements that mimicked the drill of my pulse. “No. No. I don’t believe you. You fucked some random girl just like you told me you did. You did it because you were mad that I lied to you. You’d done it before, and you did it again.”

  “I was mad that you lied, but I hadn’t cheated on you in over a year, Coco, I swear.” He held up his palms. “And I’m only telling you now because I want to move forward with a clean slate. And I thought it would help you to know that I wasn’t unfaithful to you that year.”

  “Help me?” I stared at him, my stomach churning. “My God, do you know what I went through that night? The agony of thinking you betrayed me after we’d been so close that year? Of thinking you fucked someone else?” I put my hands to my head. The world was spinning.

  “I went through it too. I hated hurting you. It killed me, knowing it was all a lie.”

  I ducked under the water, exhaling so I’d sink to the bottom. I couldn’t hear another word. Was he telling the truth? He hadn’t slept with someone else? That lie had changed everything. It set things in motion that brought us to the end. The morning after we broke up I’d called my mother to say I’d changed my mind and had decided to go to Paris after all. She’d been so thrilled, she’d booked a flight and paid my deposit within hours, probably because she was scared I’d try to back out. But I’d assured her things between Nick and me had ended, and I couldn’t wait to get away from everything that would remind me of him. Now he was telling me my decision had been based on a lie? Goddamn him!

  With my lungs about to burst, I surfaced again.

  “Jesus Christ, Nick,” I said, gulping air. “I can’t wrap my brain around this. I don’t know whether to be glad you didn’t cheat or furious you told me you did. That lie was the start of everything.”

  “I know, but I thought I was doing the right thing, especially when Mia told me you’d decided to go. You had a ticket by the next day.”

  “Well, you weren’t doing the right thing, manipulating me that way. That wasn’t your decision to make. And damn Mia for telling you that.”

  He reached for my arm, but I wrenched it away. “Don’t blame her. I called her and begged her to tell me if you were going. I didn’t want to think I’d wrecked everything for no reason. And she didn’t know I’d lied about cheating.”

  I gave him a cold stare. “She couldn’t have. She would have told me the truth long before now, because she knew what it did to me, thinking you’d been unfaithful. Christ, Nick. What a shit thing to do.”

  Nick pressed his lips together for a second. “I was twenty-two, Coco. I didn’t reason through it the right way. I just knew your family wanted you to go and knew they’d blame me if you didn’t. No matter what you say,” he went on, holding up his hand when I opened my mouth to argue, “they never thought I was right for you, good enough for you.”

  “They didn’t think anybody was good enough for me! I’m the youngest and the only girl, Nick. For fuck’s sake, I wasn’t even allowed to date until I was sixteen. And they never liked anyone I brought home—they still don’t!” I couldn’t believe we were back to this again. Was he really trying to pin our problems on my family? He was the asshole here

  “They wanted someone with money,” he said, his jaw set. “Just admit it. Someone who drove a nice car like yours and majored in poli sci and took his junior year abroad and played tennis at the club and owned his own golf shoes.”

  “Are you crazy?” I stared at him. “Where are you getting all this?”

  He closed his eyes and took a breath. “Maybe it’s crazy now, but it’s how I felt at the time. My truck wasn’t good enough for you, my clothes weren’t expensive, I couldn’t take you out to nice places—and if I did, you always insisted on paying the bill.”

  “Because I knew how much you worked and struggled! I knew you had loans to pay off. And I was the one who wanted to go to the nice places, so I felt guilty when you’d try to pay.”

  “I’m not saying you made me feel bad on purpose. And looking back, I can see that it was probably in my head. But I never felt like I fit in with what your family wanted for you. I had nothing to offer you—until then. When I heard you were accepted, then there was something I could do for you in their eyes. Let you go.”

  In their eyes? Suspicion snaked up my spine. “Did my parents contact you or something?”

  He looked away.

  “Did they?” I yelled, my nostrils flaring.

  He didn’t answer for a full ten seconds, during which I clutched at the hem of my tank instead of throttling him. He was the one who wanted to talk, so he’d better fucking come clean about everything! “Your mom wrote me a letter on behalf of both of them. She was perfectly nice, so you don’t have to get incensed about it. She just wanted me to know what a wonderful opportunity this was for you, and how all the women in her family had done it for three generations, and how she hoped I would do everything I could to encourage you to go. She said she could see we cared very much for each other but we were very young. She didn’t want you to throw it away for me, although she never said that outright.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said softly, putting the heels of my hands to my eyes. “Why did she have to do that?”

  Nick took me by the shoulders. “Because she loves you. And she was right. It was a wonderful opportunity and part of your history and your legacy…she was right, Coco. You had to go, I could see that.”

  “But it wasn’t their decision to make,” I went on angrily, pushing his hands off me. “And it wasn’t yours, either. It was mine, and you all took it away from me.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. So many things could have gone differently if I’d just been honest from the start. I hated myself that night I lied to you.”

  We looked at each other a moment, each of us remembering what came next. “You came back the next night. Why didn’t you tell me the truth then?”

  “I was going to, I swear to God, because I couldn’t let you go to Paris thinking that I’d betrayed you that way. Not when I’d worked so hard to earn your trust after those other times. All I’d planned to do was tell you the truth and say I was glad you were going.”

  I sniffed. “You didn’t stick to that plan too long.”

  He shook his head. “One look at you and I fell apart. Begged you to take me back.”

  That detail brought a mite of satisfaction. “You did beg, didn’t you?”

  “On my knees.”

  I sighed, closing my eyes. “We drank a lot of whiskey that night.”

  “Still, I meant every word I said.”

  My eyelids opened a sliver. “You proposed that night.”

  “Guess I liked being on my knees.”

  I splashed water at him. “Don’t joke. This is serious.”

  He swiped at his eyes. “Sorry. Yes, I proposed. It was spur-of-the-moment, but I meant it—I wanted to marry you. I wanted forever with you. In my mind, this was the perfect solution. I’d marry you, you could go to France but you’d go as my wife, even if no one knew it, and we’d stay together. We’d have this amazing secret. I’d know you would come back to me and not run off with some jackass with a title and a trust fund.”

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” I said sullenly. “I never wanted anyone else.”

  “Maybe, but I was young and stupid and scared and crazy about you. So I proposed.”

  “Oh God,” I said, touching my fingertips to my forehead. “What a fucking mess…we flew to Vegas, got married, and then of course I refused to go. Because I was your wife.”

  Nick nodded slowly. “We fought so hard about it that night. Remember?”

  I looked at him helplessly. “How could I forget my wedding night?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “You deserved a better wedding night.”

  I turned away from him, chilled to the bone now, but not ready to end the conversation. “Parts of it were good.” Closing my eyes, I saw him above me in the darkened hotel room, his body centered between my thighs, his skin warm and soft, just like his voice. My wife, he’d said, burying himself deep inside me. My wife.

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