Libby and Jenna had said their goodbyes earlier. In private. Jenna truly couldn’t be happier for her friend. She’d never seen Libby more optimistic about the future and at peace with the past. Was it wrong to feel so wistful? Jenna wondered.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever be free from the haunting memory of that night. Until the dream returned she’d begun to believe that she’d turned the page on that chapter of her life. Then, this morning, Shane’s brother appeared. A stranger, and even though she’d been in broad daylight in a public place, she’d felt a panic attack.
She’d suffered them frequently when she first moved home. The humiliating, unpreventable response when fear flooded her body had embarrassed her beyond words and was the main reason she hadn’t been able to return to school.
Writing poetry had helped. And time. But obviously she was still not cured.
Beep. Beep.
She looked up as the pretty white car started to inch past the few remaining guests. She sat forward and waved but made no effort to join the others. Libby would understand.
“It went well, wouldn’t you say?”
Her heart rate spiked but only for a second or two as her brain recognized Shane as a friend, not a foe. “Y-yes,” she answered, her voice a bit tentative. She cleared her throat and added, “It was beautiful. Very Libby.”
Shane laughed as he stepped near. “So not Cooper. At least, not the Cooper I used to know. I think it’s safe to say Libby has changed him. For the better. He’s less frenetic and more focused. Sort of grown up.”
Neither said anything for a moment, then Shane asked, “May I join you?”
So polite. He had nice manners. “Sure,” she said, scooting over a little.
His weight made the chair creak slightly. The unit was the type that had a built-in canopy with braided fringe around the top. They rocked together finding a complementary rhythm.
Would sex with him be like that, too? Like they’d known each other forever?
She inhaled sharply, shocked by the question that had left her tingling all over. What’s wrong with me?
“What?” he asked.
She grabbed the first thought that came to mind. “Did I tell you Mom’s delirious about her trip to L.A.? You are serious about this screen test, aren’t you? She really does have a chance at the Aggie part? You’re not just stringing her along to get on my good side?”
His left eyebrow shot upward with a look of incredulity. “Why would I do that? I like Bess. I think she may be very talented. Aggie the dog lady will make a strong secondary character. But I can’t hire her without seeing her on screen. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh.” She knew that. He’d explained it to her before, but she still couldn’t quite believe that her mother might actually appear on a network television show someday. “I feel like a mother sending her kid off to kindergarten. What if nobody likes her? She’ll be heartbroken. And I’ll have to handle whatever new diseases she contracts after she gets home.”
He let his head drop back to rest against the seat. “I wish I could guarantee her a job, but ultimately it’s up to her. And the studio. And the test audiences. The entire series has a lot of hurdles to clear before we get a slot in the new lineup.”
“I know. I was joking about the new diseases. Did I tell you she’s gone off every over-the-counter medicine she was taking before you came and says she feels great? Thank you for that, Shane. No matter what happens.”
“No matter what happens,” he repeated. His tone was dark and faintly ominous. She knew the subject had changed and they were no longer talking about her mother and the future of the show.
She turned to look at him. “Have you heard from your brother, yet?”
“No. He won’t call. I’m sure he’s counting on you to give me the message.”
“What message? I didn’t stick around long enough for him to tell me anything.”
When his gaze met hers, she felt a sudden chill.
“You don’t look anything alike, by the way,” she said, suddenly feeling nervous. “He looks ten years older than you. Dissipated, but very prosperous. I realized that I’d seen him get out of a limo when I was in town wedding-dress shopping.”
“Did he see you?”
She shook her head, again unnerved by the intense quality she heard in his voice. There was no love lost between these two, she realized. “Why do you think he’s here?”
“Whatever it is, it’s not because he missed me. Adam doesn’t do warm and fuzzy. Never has.”
Jenna didn’t think of Shane as a cuddly teddy bear, either, but she was beginning to see him as a Bernese mountain dog. His brother had rottweiler written all over him. And not the sweet kind.
“How can twins be so different?” she asked, without meaning to say the words out loud.
“I’ve asked myself that a thousand times over the years.”
He sounded so hurt and morose, she had no choice but to lean closer and brush aside a lock of his hair. “I like your hair a lot better. And his beard reminds me of the old G.I. Joe dolls—only with gray in it.” Her fingers trailed lightly down the side of his jaw. She was glad he was clean shaven.
He covered her hand with his. “We should talk.”
“Can we just make out, instead?” she asked, wondering if it was the wedding or the champagne that made her take risks she wasn’t in the habit of taking.
“You don’t make this easy,” he said softly, pulling her into his arms.
His kiss was unlike any they’d shared before. Rough, intense, needy. As if they were the last people on the planet and the world was about to implode. She gave him what she thought he wanted in return, and the heat between them turned molten.
A part of her brain was conscious of where they were, and although it was getting late and the guests had scattered, she wasn’t in the habit of making out in public. She pulled back enough to say, “We should go somewhere else. Your place, I’m thinking.”
“My place?”
“Coop’s gone. My mother is at my house.” She looked at him, wondering what was going through his mind.
His eyes seemed shuttered, and he let out a sigh, but instead of making some kind of excuse, which is what she expected, he took her hand and stood, pulling her with him. “I have somewhere better in mind, but we can’t get there barefoot. Tell me you have shoes in your car.”
She knew intuitively where he wanted to take her—Pactola. Her writing place.
She gave him a quick squeeze. “Tennis shoes and…a flashlight. I could be a Boy Scout, I’m so well prepared.”
He laughed and kissed her again. “You have no idea how glad I am that you’re not a Boy Scout.”
It took them about twenty minutes to actually leave the premises. Caterer questions. A lost dog. Two friends who seemed curious and concerned about Jenna’s obvious attachment to Coop’s best man.
But finally they were in his car and driving along the highway. Their designated parking spot was empty, which he took as a good sign. And by the time they started along the trail, the moon was high enough in the sky that they barely needed the flashlight Jenna was carrying.
“When my brother and I were kids, we used to sneak out of our parents’ cabin at Green Lake and play commando,” he said, surprised by a memory that didn’t hold some unpleasant overtones.
She was holding his hand. The blanket he’d handed her was clutched to her chest with her free hand. “Normally, I’m more of a daytime girl.”
He didn’t have to ask to know why. Guilt made him walk a little faster.
She squeezed his hand. “Are we on a schedule?”
He stopped and kissed her. His last, he figured. He made it a good one.
“Wow,” she said on a shaky breath, “I just—wow.”
He wasn’t sure exactly when he realized that he loved her. Maybe he’d always loved her and all that fantasizing and pedestal-propping he’d done with her memory had been a clever way to keep his heart from breaking.
/> And now he was going to lose her. Figures. Adam had cost him so much over the years—pride, self-esteem, their father’s affection and respect. How fitting that he would ruin this for Shane, too.
With renewed resignation he started walking again.
“So,” she said, “I gather your problems with your brother started later on. When you were kids, the two of you had fun together, huh?”
Fun? Maybe. Some of the time. But every so often their great adventure would turn dark and dangerous. “Adam’s always been moody and volatile. If he was in a good mood, life was calm and fairly pleasant. If something didn’t go his way or he felt ignored, he’d act out, for want of a better term. Usually I’d get dragged along because he made it impossible to say no. He’d hound, belittle, bribe and cajole—anything to get his way.”
When she didn’t say anything, he added, “One time he wanted to go window peeking on this high school girl whose family was renting a cabin a few houses down from ours. He looked down on renters, and he called her a slut even though she never gave us the time of day. When I refused to go, he climbed up on my bed—I had the top bunk—and kneeled at the foot of the mattress and started to pee beside where I lying. He said he’d tell Father that I wet the bed.”
She made a sound of disgust. “How old were you?”
“Nine or ten. Old enough to talk dirty even though we didn’t know the first thing about anything.”
They’d reached her writing place. When the idea to come here first popped into his head, he’d seen it as the perfect place to tell her about Adam, but now that they’d arrived here, it struck him what a bad idea that really was. Would the peace and safety she felt here be compromised by the memories he was about to dredge up?
Regretfully, he decided it was too late to turn back. He let go of her hand to spread the blanket while she held the flashlight. The air temperature had to be in the eighties. Not muggy hot, but there were still mosquitoes around. They’d doused each other in bug spray before leaving the parking area.
He killed the light and invited her to sit.
“Thanks for being such a good sport about this,” he said.
She sat back on her elbows and looked skyward. “It’s okay. In fact, it’s perfect. Mrs. Smith’s isn’t exactly romantic. And you sure couldn’t see as many stars. There’s Cassiopeia. The Queen’s Chair. She was the mother of Andromeda, but because of her vanity she has to spend part of the year upside down.”
“I didn’t know that. But, if we were back home and it was winter, I’d show you my telescope. When the sky’s clear enough, you can see the Orion nebula.”
She cocked her head. “Is the sky ever clear? I heard you have terrible air pollution from all the cars on your highways.”
“Good point.”
“How do you handle it?”
“Same way you handle winter. You complain a little and live through it.”
Her laugh made him happy. “Good point.”
They sat in companionable silence a few minutes longer, then Jenna turned to him and said, “We’re not here to make mad passionate love, are we?”
The moment of truth. The black moment in the story when all hope for a love match comes crashing down, burying the hero under a thick pile of rubble of his own making.
“I don’t think you’re even going to want to get in the same car with me after I tell you what I need to tell you.”
She sat up. “The show’s been canceled before it even got made.”
He shook his head. “That could still happen, but as of this moment we’re still on track. What I have to tell you has nothing to do with the show. It has to do with you. With what happened to you in college.”
Even in the silvery shadows cast by the moonlight through the trees, he could read her reaction. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I’m not surprised, but there’s something—”
She put her hand on his arm. “No, Shane. I mean it. If you finished reading my book of poems you’d see that I went through all the stages of grief. I was angry and in denial. I pleaded with every higher power on record to make it all a bad dream. I blamed everyone, but mostly myself. Finally, I forgave everyone, including myself.”
His heart thudded heavily in his chest. “Including the man who raped you?”
She jerked her hand back. “Why are you doing this?”
He leaned forward, hands fisted in his lap. “I came to South Dakota with Cooper knowing there was a good chance we’d meet. I couldn’t be sure you still lived in Sentinel Pass, but I never forgot the name of the place. Remember in class when the instructor made us stand up and tell something picturesque about our hometown? You made Sentinel Pass sound like a place I knew in my heart, without ever visiting.”
“Seriously? I remember being so nervous I swallowed my gum. I have no idea what I said.”
“You talked about catching butterflies with your best friend in a green meadow filled with waving grass that tickled your legs.”
She made a quiet sound. “Libby and me.”
“And there were other times, too, that I overheard you talking with your friends. That probably makes me sound like a stalker, but it wasn’t like that. You just talked with such passion and joy that I couldn’t help but listen, too.”
“And that’s why you came here? To find me?”
“When Coop read me Libby’s e-mail, the name clicked and I knew I had to come to see for myself if you were still here. If you were okay. Happy. Living the life you’d talked about in college.”
“But you barely knew me in college. We couldn’t have exchanged more than a dozen words. I was too shy and you were too cool.”
His laugh sounded caustic to his ears. “I hid behind that beard and long hair you thought was so hip. It was my pathetic attempt to distance myself from my family—in particular, my clean-cut, ROTC-type brother.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know the exact moment, but at some point, I realized that Adam wasn’t just temperamental or high-strung or moody. He was amoral, narcissistic and lacked any sense of boundaries. Our father called him a chip off the old block. Our mother pretended nothing was wrong.”
“So you split.”
“Sooner rather than later. In high school I was the one in trouble. I smoked pot, let my hair grow, ran with a crowd my father didn’t approve of. Adam was a National Honors Scholar, played in the band and was senior class president.” He looked at her. “You’re the kind of girl he would have dated. Never for very long. Girls talked. Pretty soon he had a reputation for liking rough sex. But he was very charismatic. I saw him talk girls into things they had no intention of doing. It was all about power.”
He could tell by her rapt look that he had her complete attention. She was quick enough to know where this was going and draw her own conclusion, but it was too late to take the easy way out.
“I’d told my mother I was thinking of changing my major to film. My father was mortified. He even called me to say what an embarrassment it would be to him if I ‘went off the deep end,’ as he put it.”
Why can’t you, for once, be more like your brother?
“Why would that be embarrassing?”
“My father came from money. Bankers, lawyers, politicians. Anything in the arts was too bohemian for his taste. My grandfather called Joseph McCarthy his friend. What does that tell you?”
“Got it.”
“So, Adam made a surprise visit to Brookings to see me. He was attending Loyola. There was talk of him doing an internship with some congressman the following summer. He was very smug and full of himself, and he promised Dad that by the end of the weekend he’d have talked some sense into me.”
She didn’t say anything, but he could read her growing tension in her body language. “I knew how to play the game, Jenna. All I had to do was nod and pretend to agree, then do my own thing once the furor had passed. That’s what I always did growing up. It’s how my mother managed to stay married to my father for forty-some
years.
“But, for some reason, that weekend I snapped. I just couldn’t take being bullied by my own twin anymore. We had a huge fight. I stormed out and went to the party. Adam followed.”
Jenna frowned. “I remember seeing you come in. You walked past me as if I wasn’t there and grabbed a bottle of beer like you’d just crossed the Sahara.”
He nodded. “My goal was to get smashed. I scored some weed and was hanging out in the garage with the other stoners when somebody told me Adam was there. I looked in through the window and saw him talking to you. You were laughing. That’s when I left.”
“Where’d you go?” she asked, her voice squeaking a tiny bit.
“I hit a couple of bars. I was passed out when Adam came in. I woke up because he was packing to leave and making so damn much noise. I looked at the clock and it said three-eitheen. He told me he’d been watching TV but he couldn’t sleep and was heading home. I took him at his word.”
She edged back slightly. “I have a feeling I know where you’re going with this, but if you’re going to accuse your brother of being the guy who raped me, now—fifteen or whatever years later—you have to remember that you provided him with an alibi.”
“I honestly couldn’t see him doing anything to jeopardize his prescribed future. He never had any trouble getting girls to go to bed with him. There was no reason whatsoever to think he would have attacked you.”
“Drugged and attacked,” she corrected, in a tight voice. “But now you think differently, right?”
He was about to break his promise to his mother, but first he had to make her understand that she wasn’t the only one whose life had been impacted by this act. “What happened to you changed me, Jenna. I can’t explain it completely, but seeing you in the backseat of your parents’ car…all the hope and possibilities I’d read in your face every time we passed on campus gone. I dropped out of school without telling anybody. I let my mother know that I was alive and living in Los Angeles, but I didn’t see any member of my family again until my mother’s hospice provider called to tell me she was dying.”
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