by Dana Marton
Jess scanned his face, but his eyes were clear, his expression honest and open. She could almost swear he was telling her the truth.
“Of course, we won’t let you freeze to death over there,” Zelda said, as if his sleepover was a done deal.
What could Jess say after that? “Sure.”
Did she sound as churlish as she thought? She put a smile on her face. “What are friends for?”
Was it too late for her to go to a hotel?
After dinner, Eliot insisted on doing the dishes. So then, of course, Derek insisted on drying. The two stood side by side at the sink, trying not to be obvious as they fought for space, bumping elbows accidentally.
Zelda and Jess watched from the couch in the living room because, let’s face it, the show was worth watching. The men had lovely . . . jeans. Seriously, they could have been in a commercial.
Zelda sipped her tea with a deep, appreciative sigh. Jess echoed it. The men couldn’t hear them over the running water, so they were safe.
Only after the kitchen sparkled did Derek and Eliot come to sit with the women.
The living room was now airy and navigable, no longer a fire hazard. After Derek had carried out the heaviest pieces that first night, Jess was able to remove the rest. She didn’t remember the place ever being this sparely decorated. Her mother was going to faint when she came home. Knowing about the big clear-out and seeing the results were miles from each other.
“So, Eliot, which one of Derek’s books is your favorite?” Jess asked to start the after-dinner conversation in safe territory.
“Soldier’s Return,” Eliot said without thinking.
When Derek cast a questioning look at Jess, she looked away. She cleared her throat. “I mostly just read screenplays.”
“The action sequences in Soldier’s Return are a thing of beauty,” Eliot said. “I could see the whole movie shoot in my head as I was reading.”
“That happened years ago now. I remember the heat more than the action.” Derek’s tone was relaxed and easy as he reminisced. “Like working in an oven.”
Eliot grew still. His eyes lit up. He spoke in a hushed tone as he asked, “That really happened? The jump between the helicopters?”
“Buddy of mine. I was there to see it.”
Eliot leaned forward, his smile splitting his face in two. “As I was reading, I was thinking that might be too dangerous even with the best safety equipment we have. And your friend survived that jump?”
Derek’s face darkened. “He died in a different chopper crash.”
Jess stared at him, wondering if he was talking about the same crash that had given him that limp. A long time ago, she used to know nearly everything about Derek. Her schoolgirl crush had verged on an obsession. Now she knew precious little about him.
And I don’t want to, she reminded herself as the men talked about the book and how much of the story was based on real events.
On the surface, the conversation was nothing but friendly, yet she kept catching what she thought were undertones, and the image in her head was from a shoot three years ago, a remake of The Three Musketeers, a fencing duel, two men circling each other with sharp rapiers, doing their best to kill each other.
Zelda took out her knitting.
Jess picked up the Taylorville Times from the coffee table. The front-page article was from Mark Maxwell, covering the school board elections, digging up dirt and then exaggerating it with innuendo and suppositions until the piece was slimier than the worst tabloid.
Just seeing the Mark Maxwell byline pumped up her blood pressure, let alone reading the mud he was slinging. She dropped the paper with disgust.
“What is it?” Derek wanted to know.
She hadn’t realized that he’d been watching her. She cast a cautious look at Eliot as she answered Derek. “Maxwell.”
She still hadn’t told Eliot about her past, and didn’t want to do it tonight, not in front of Zelda and Derek. She intended it to be a brief, private conversation between the two of them.
She thought about asking him to walk down to the sugar shack with her, and telling him on the way. But Eliot’s phone rang just as she was going to make the suggestion. He glanced at the screen.
“Excuse me.” He went to take the call in the kitchen.
“What about Maxwell?” Derek asked, then added, “The nosy little bastard called me today. He wanted to know why you were back. I told him to buzz off.”
Jess buried her face in her hands. What were the chances that Maxwell wasn’t going to make himself into a complete nuisance?
“That boy better not come around here,” Zelda said, “or he’s gonna meet the business end of my cast-iron fryin’ pan.”
Derek was still watching Jess. “What is it?”
For a second, she considered brushing him off, but then ended up telling him. “He cornered me in Taylorville yesterday while I was getting coffee, on my way to the hospital.”
Derek didn’t move a muscle, but somehow his entire being was laser-focused in a second, and some invisible cloud seemed to surround him that she could only identify as threat of violence. “What did he do?”
“He was pushing me to give him an interview.”
“I know what he wrote about you two years ago,” Derek said. “Mom told me.”
Jess rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about that.” She glanced at Eliot, still on the phone, one hip leaned against the kitchen counter. “Please.”
“Was that why you didn’t come back for your father’s funeral?”
How would he know that? And why didn’t his tone hold a single note of judgment? She judged herself.
“Fuck the little bastard,” Derek said under his breath, so Zelda wouldn’t hear.
Jess didn’t argue with him.
The cookies had done her in. When she’d first moved to LA, she shared a computer with her aunt. Aunt Linda liked to keep up with what was going on in Vermont, in particular with the area where her family lived. The search engines put cookies on the computer, and Jess and her aunt were shown story after story from the local papers, including the Taylorville Times.
Jess had tried to avoid them, but as soon as she turned on the computer, there they were on the home page. Avoiding the headlines was impossible.
About two years after Jess moved, a high school girl disappeared. Madison Hale. Jess had been on tenterhooks for weeks, scanning the headlines on purpose at that point and Googling the missing person case, but Madison was never found.
Two years after that, just over the county line, another girl went missing: Crystal Gneiss, a nineteen-year-old waitress at a small diner. She left work one night, never to be seen again.
Then nothing for twenty-seven months.
Then a seventeen-year-old went missing from a high school football game. Bailey Rook. Bailey had been in trouble at school a lot. She was just about to be suspended again. She didn’t get along with her parents, who were overly conservative and controlling. Everyone assumed that Bailey had run off.
Eighteen months after that, Mariana Allen went missing. High school dropout, working on her GED.
Four girls. Different school districts. Different police jurisdictions. Nobody noticed the link but Jess, for whom each disappearance brought back all the trauma of her past.
First, she called the Taylorville police. The deputy sheriff, Gordon Muller, talked to her on the phone, gave her a bunch of platitudes, then brushed her off. After the third contact, he wouldn’t take her calls.
Desperate, Jess had contacted Maxwell at the Taylorville Times. And, oh how he listened. He promised a full feature article. Except, then Bailey Rook reappeared. She’d run away with a boy she’d met on the Internet, but the romance fizzled.
When Maxwell’s article was finally published, it had a drastically different slant from what he’d promised. He’d painted Jess as suffering from PTSD, paranoid, delusional, desperate for attention, wanting to reinsert herself into the limelight again.
The article had devastated her. She’d been on a movie shoot in Hong Kong at the time. Her mother had called. She was mad at Jess for talking to Maxwell, for stirring up the past. They’d had a fight.
Her father had died that weekend. Maxwell contacted Jess, wanting a video interview for the paper’s website. They should sit down when she came back for the funeral, he’d said.
Jess hadn’t come back.
“You OK?” Derek asked as Zelda checked her pattern and then counted her stitches, lost in the task at hand.
“I’m fine.” Jess meant to leave it at that. She had no idea why she added, “I know who I am in LA. I don’t know who I am here.”
Derek held her gaze. “You’re the strongest woman I know. Wherever you go, that goes with you, Jess.”
God, she wanted to believe him. But the trip home had knocked her sideways in more ways than one. The past still lived here. She hadn’t fully understood that when she’d decided to come back.
She didn’t want to think about any of this tonight. As Eliot ended his call and returned to the living room, Jess pushed to her feet.
“Since we’re going to have a line in front of the bathroom before bedtime, I’m going to grab a shower now.”
She looked back from the top of the stairs. Zelda was no longer focused on her knitting. She was watching the men who went back to discussing book plots. Jess didn’t blame her.
The scene in the living room really was captivating: both men powerfully built, in their prime, incredibly handsome in different ways. Derek was a rugged kind of man. He had a roughness to him, something about him spelled soldier. Eliot too was obviously a physical guy, but more in a Gen X way. He climbed cliffs as a sport. Jess had a feeling that Derek would only climb a cliff if he needed to reach an enemy. But, really, she was pretty sure Derek would just blow up the damn cliff.
She thought about that while she showered. She thought about him. Only because he was a massive pain-in-the-ass inconvenience.
Damn his stupid furnace. How many days is he going to stay here?
She wanted to spend time with Eliot, but not with Derek. And definitely not with the two of them together.
Derek would have to write during the day, wouldn’t he? Weren’t authors always on tight deadlines and tearing their hair out over whether they could finish the book on time, working around the clock, drinking too much coffee and too much wine, all blurry-eyed? Why couldn’t he be one of those writers, in a wrinkled shirt and with a potbelly from sitting all day? Did he have to be so attractive, and with time on his hands?
After her shower, Jess dressed in black yoga pants and a white T-shirt before heading downstairs. Again, she paused at the top of the steps. She couldn’t see Derek. Maybe he was in the kitchen.
Zelda and Eliot were watching a cooking show, Zelda explaining how the hosts had been friends but were now married, how good the romance had been for ratings. Chuck sat in the easy chair. He must have popped in to say good night to Zelda. He’d fallen asleep.
Zelda shot him a quick look, and the expression on her face made Jess smile. It was an expression that said Chuck was here and all was right in Zelda’s world.
With Zelda’s feet resting on the ottoman, Jess could see her swollen ankles. Guilt bubbled up inside her when she thought about her mother and Zelda managing in the long term. Neither of them were getting any younger. But Jess couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t. Her stomach clenched at the thought.
She was over her Mother-has-a-boyfriend freak-out. She’d given up on never returning. She’d talked herself into regular visits. She was meeting everyone halfway. They couldn’t expect more from her than that.
As she looked down at the living room, exhaustion hit her—physical and emotional—as if someone had pulled a plug and drained all her energy.
The floor creaked behind her, and footsteps came closer. Didn’t take a genius to figure out who. So he was up here, then. Jess appreciated that he let her hear him coming instead of sneaking up behind her, but she didn’t turn. She didn’t want to be face-to-face with Derek in the narrow hallway.
He stopped behind her back.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked under her breath.
“Zelda told me I could grab a blanket from the linen closet.” He smelled like the winter woods.
He stood very close, his warm breath fanning her neck. And then he reached out and slowly put an arm around her, giving her time to push him away. When she didn’t, he pulled her against him, her back against his chest, and he bent his head to rest his chin on her shoulder. They were nearly cheek to cheek.
She’d always thought that if she ever met Derek again, things between them would be too awkward to bear. Except, none of this was awkward. They stood together as if they belonged with each other.
Suddenly and without warning, Jess slipped into an alternate universe. A universe where those torturous three days in the woods had never happened. Where Jess and Derek had gotten together and stayed together. Now, ten years later, they were living in this house. And Eliot downstairs, laughing with Zelda, was just a visiting friend.
Derek’s strength and warmth behind her was a comfort. Jess felt surrounded not by just his strong arm, but by his protection. For a moment, she completely relaxed, and an ever-elusive peace filled her. For a moment, she wanted this alternate life—the sweet, seductive simplicity and rightness of it, the innocence of never having known darkness.
Then the moment was over.
Jess tore away from Derek and ran down the stairs—too abruptly and way too fast.
Eliot looked up at her, then smiled. Zelda hadn’t heard her, so she kept watching the TV.
Jess, heart still racing, perched on the arm of Eliot’s armchair. She wanted to be close to him, but maybe he thought she was looking for a spot to sit, because he stood. “You take the chair. I’ll take a shower. If it’s my turn.”
“Clean towels are in the bathroom cabinet.” What else could she say? She slid into the spot he freed for her.
Derek came downstairs.
Eliot went up.
Was there a moment of odd tension when the two passed each other?
Zelda didn’t seem to notice anything. She yawned. “I think I’ll tuck myself in for the night.”
“Good night.” Derek dropped into the chair next to Jess’s.
“Don’t let the sugar fairies bite.” Zelda winked at Jess.
The TV was still on, but once Zelda went upstairs, nobody watched the show.
Jess shifted in her seat. She couldn’t deal with that strange moment at the top of the stairs. She certainly didn’t want to talk about it. God, don’t let him bring it up. “I should go to bed too.”
Derek stretched his legs in front of him until the toes of his socked foot touched Jess’s. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
She pulled her foot away. “Hanging out with Eliot, I guess. I want to empty out Dad’s office, then bring Mom’s things down there. I don’t want her trying to navigate the stairs with a walker.”
Yesterday, when she’d been in her snit-fit, she figured her mother’s new boyfriend could take care of all that. But now that she’d calmed down over the relationship, she wanted to help again. Principal Crane was her mother’s age. He shouldn’t be dragging furniture down stairs. If he fell and broke a hip, they’d be a matching pair.
“Zelda should move down here too. There’s room.” Derek apparently didn’t miss how long it had taken Zelda to climb upstairs, and how tightly she’d been hanging on to the railing.
“I’m thinking about converting the dining room for her.”
“I can help.”
“Don’t you have books to write?”
Derek went for the mysterious author smile. Damn if it didn’t look good on him. “I’m at the percolating-new-ideas stage.”
Why couldn’t he percolate at home? He took up too much emotional space. And where was Eliot? How long could a man take a shower?
Derek kept watchin
g her. “I missed you.”
Her heart gave a hard, confused thud. “No.”
He looked like he was biting back a grin. “I thought a lot about you. Did you ever think about me?”
“Not really.”
“Out of sight, out of mind?”
“There’s a reason people say that.”
“I’m glad you stayed.”
“I thought you wanted me to leave.”
“It’d be the smartest thing to do. I shouldn’t be glad that you’re here.”
“I’m not glad to be here.”
“I think I read that loud and clear.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “I thought adversity had made me strong. I think I was mistaken.”
His gaze never moved from her face. “Adversity breaks the weak. Adversity doesn’t make you stronger. You were strong to start with. You were always going to make it. You were always smart and stubborn. You always had faith. You never gave up on anything.”
“I ran. Running is weakness.”
“You were strong enough to take yourself to an environment that was healthier for you. Strong enough to move cross-country, into the unknown. That takes strength, Jess.”
She had trouble processing his words. She’d spent the last decade hating her weak old self, the one who’d allowed herself to be a victim. Everything she’d done since, she’d done to prove that she was a victim no longer.
Yet Derek seemed to see a part of her that even she hadn’t been able to see. He was looking at her with an admiration she was reluctant to think she deserved. That open admiration confused her. She didn’t want to reevaluate herself, the past, or Taylorville. She just wanted her simple life in LA.
“I’m leaving with Eliot in a couple of days.”
Derek’s smile disappeared. “How serious is this Eliot thing?”
“How is that your business?”
“Why are you so bristly?”