Birthright

by Judith Arnold

  “You’re right, though—it was foolish to go walking along the river dressed like this.” She plucked another twig from the hem of her skirt, then touched her glass to her lips without drinking.

  She had beautiful lips, at least as beautiful as her eyes. Her husband might have died young, but before he died he’d gotten to kiss those lips, and for that alone Aaron envied him.

  “I guess you must miss him. Your husband, I mean,” he clarified when she looked bewildered. Her smile vanished and he felt like a jerk for having mentioned her loss. “I mean, you said you were sad. I guess going to a party without him must be hard.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she lowered her glass to the table with a trembling hand. He swore silently. Thinking of himself as tactless was too kind. He’d just skewered the poor woman.

  A quiet sob escaped her and he launched himself to his feet. He had tissues in the house somewhere—in the bathroom, he was pretty sure. He raced through the house, found a box, tore off the cardboard seal and brought the tissues outside to her. A good thing, too. She was weeping as if her husband had just died yesterday, as if she would never recover from it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said lamely.

  She shook her head, wiped her eyes, sniffled and wiped her eyes again. “No—I’m sorry.”

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned—”

  “No. I don’t care. You should have.” She pressed the tissue to her wet cheeks and let out another muted sob. “I don’t miss him at all,” she confessed, her voice so soft and shaky he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

  But then she looked at him with her watery eyes, and he saw the truth shining through her tears. She really didn’t miss her husband.

  He didn’t know what to say. I’m not sorry, then. I’m glad your husband died. Hey, let’s break out the champagne!

  He’d already done enough damage for one night, so he kept his mouth shut. Sitting on the edge of the hammock, he hunched forward and rested his forearms on his knees while he watched her go through the methodical process of pulling herself together. She took a fresh tissue, dried the last of the moisture from her face, took another sip of water and placed the glass carefully on the table next to the box of tissues. She eyed him briefly, glanced away, then circled her gaze back to him. “I’ve never admitted that to anyone before,” she whispered.

  “I won’t tell,” he promised, then gave her a smile, hoping it would help her relax a little.

  “He was an alcoholic. We had a terrible marriage. I know I should be missing him. Everyone thinks I’m in deep mourning over the loss of this wonderful man, this perfect marriage…” She sighed, a long shivery exhalation. “If people knew, they’d realize what a fraud I was.”

  “A fraud?” He frowned and shoved his hair back from his brow. “Just because your marriage wasn’t perfect doesn’t mean you’re a fraud.”

  “I let everyone think my marriage was perfect. It’s what everyone expects of me. They think I always do everything right, and I don’t. I married the wrong man. I was miserable.”

  “So why didn’t you leave him?”

  “Then everyone would have known.” She sighed again, less shakily. “Stupid, right? But people have these expectations and we’re supposed to live up to them.”

  “Or down,” he said lightly. “Maybe people thought you were perfect. They thought I was trash.”

  “No.”

  “Of course they did. Me and my mother. The cheap waitress and her bastard son. Everyone expected the worst of me.”

  “No,” she said again, although she didn’t sound quite so vehement this time.

  “I defied everyone’s expectations, though. You can defy people’s expectations, too.”

  “I think it’s a little different when everyone expects the best from you, instead of the worst. For you, defying expectations means making a good life for yourself. For me, defying them means making a disastrous life.”

  “It means letting the world know you’re human.” He allowed himself a grim smile, remembering that he’d been just like everyone else, thinking Lily was a princess, an angel, pure and blessed. He never would have predicted that she’d marry an alcoholic and have a lousy marriage.

  “I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to talk to you, Aaron,” she said, lifting her glass once more and running a finger along the frosty surface, tracing a line through the dampness.

  He could guess. “Maybe it’s because we didn’t really know each other back when everyone was busy expecting you to be perfect.”

  “Or maybe—” her gaze narrowed on him, as intense as a laser “—it’s because we’ve both defied expectations. Or because we’re both outsiders.”

  He laughed at that. “You’re no outsider, Lily.”

  “I feel like one. If people knew the truth about me…”

  “What? That your husband was a drunk? Big deal.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not the person they think I am. I’m not one of them. Not anymore.”

  He thought she was being awfully hard on herself, but he didn’t argue. Someday when she was feeling better, he would set her straight about the fact that she was still a princess, kindhearted and virtuous. Of course, once she was feeling better, she would never indulge in such an intimate conversation with him.

  “I’m sorry I barged in on you like this,” she said abruptly, putting the glass on the table and rising from the chair. “You probably think I’m a pest.”

  “Not at all.” He heaved himself to his feet, then slapped a mosquito that had landed on his forearm.

  “That’s a pest,” he said, flicking the dead bug over the deck railing. “You’re…”

  “A benefactor,” she supplied with a wry smile.

  “I’ve given your program money, so now you feel obliged to humor me.”

  “If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I don’t humor anyone,” he said.

  Her smile lost its ironic edge. “I believe it. Maybe…” She looked oddly hopeful. “Maybe you could think of me as a friend?”

  He swallowed again. A friend was probably one thing he could never think of her as, and yet, it seemed the only word that would work right now. “Sure,” he agreed, aware that after his earlier bluntness, he owed her this gift. “A friend.”

  “I’ll leave you alone now,” she promised.

  “That’s one thing friends should do for each other.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he argued, although he knew it would be best if she did. Friendship implied emotional involvement, and for damned sure, that was something he didn’t want to have with her.

  Fortunately she spared him from his own good manners. “No, I really must leave. It’s late and I’m tired.”

  “How’d you get here?” he asked. “Did you walk from the party?” If she’d driven to his house, he would have heard the car. The world around his house was full of natural sounds—the chorus of crickets, the murmur of the river and the occasional crunch of a squirrel or raccoon moving through the underbrush. The sound of a car engine would have stood out.

  “I parked down River Road a way,” she said. Evidently sensing what he was about to offer, she added, “I can walk back. I’ll take the road. It’ll be safe.”

  “It’s dark. I’ll drive you.” Without giving her a chance to argue, he ducked back into the house, grabbed his wallet and keys from the top of the microwave where he’d left them and reemerged onto the deck.

  She conceded with a reluctant smile. He led her down the steps and around the side of the house to the open-front shed he’d built to house his car and the cords of wood he stored during the summer months. He held open the passenger door for her, refusing to feel inferior just because he drove a ten-year-old Pontiac and not a late-model BMW ragtop—he’d seen her car through the open doorway when she’d come to the gym last Monday. She was rich, and she drove a rich woman’s car. He was just squeaking by, and he drove a car to match. No apologies required.

  He backed
up to the turnaround, then drove down the packed-dirt driveway to River Road. “I’m parked this way,” she said, pointing right. He made the turn.

  The moon had risen above the road, slicing down through the trees in blades of silver. The night had grown cool, and he wondered whether her friends were still partying without her, talking about her, worrying. He wondered whether they would worry even more if they knew she was with him. Aaron Mazerik, the kid from whom everyone expected nothing.

  He spotted her car tucked off the road in a turnoff, its glossy surfaces gleaming in the moonlight. He pulled off the road behind it.

  “Thank you,” Lily said.

  “No problem.”

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t thanking you for the ride,” she said, as if that explained everything. Then, before he could stop her, she leaned across the seat and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

  It lasted less than the time it took to blink. And then she was out of his car and gone from view.

  But her kiss was still there, burning on his lips, burning into his soul.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHE LAY AWAKE long into the night, thinking. About her friends, whom she couldn’t confide in. About Aaron, whom she could confide in. About her marriage, about how the first thing Aaron had asked—“So why didn’t you leave him?”—posed an idea Lily had never even considered. She’d married Tyler for better or worse, in sickness and in health, and she’d believed his drinking was a sickness. If she’d left her husband, she would have broken a vow. Instead, she’d stayed and come to hate him.

  Aaron’s way would have been better. But it would have taken more guts than she had. As a child she’d been brave enough to jump off a tree limb into the river. As an adult she’d been too cowardly to jump at all.

  She thought about whether going to Aaron’s house proved she was regaining a little of her childhood gutsiness. She thought about how incredibly easy it had been to talk to him, how incredibly comfortable she’d felt with him.

  She thought about his chest.

  Even if not out of modesty, he should have buttoned his shirt for the sake of her mental peace. But he hadn’t. And while they’d talked, one small but stubborn sector of her brain had remained focused on the stretch of torso visible between the open cotton flaps. He’d been an athlete and still was; that he had an athlete’s body was no surprise. His legs were a runner’s legs, all muscle and sinew. His chest…she’d glimpsed it last Monday and now she’d had far more than a glimpse. It had looked smooth. Warm. Sleek and golden, tautly muscled. Nothing bulging, nothing overdone. Just a lean, tensile, very male chest.

  She wanted to touch him. She wanted to press her lips to that smooth, warm skin. It had been so long, so very long since she’d felt such an urge. Since a man had aroused her.

  And Aaron hadn’t even done anything deliberate to arouse her. All he’d done was sit across the deck from her with his shirt hanging open.

  She shouldn’t have kissed him. It had been an impulsive act, a gesture of gratitude for his having tolerated her uninvited visit, for not laughing at her when she’d suggested they could be friends. But underlying the gratitude, churning it, roiling it like a quake on the ocean floor, a seismic event hardly visible at the surface, was desire.

  Even as a teenager, she’d desired Aaron in some barely acknowledged way. He’d been like an exotic beast in their sleepy little town, dark and angry, a wounded creature desperate for a healing touch yet apt to sink its teeth deep into anyone who tried to touch him.

  What if she had reached out to him back then? Would he have nuzzled her hand meekly, thankful that someone had tried to save him? Or would he have bitten her to the bone?

  She had been afraid to find out.

  Tonight she’d been the one in need of a healing touch. And Aaron had provided it. There’d been something in his manner she wasn’t accustomed to, something that intrigued her and challenged her and made her actually look forward to the possibilities of her own life.

  HE BRUSHED HIS TEETH for the third time, a man possessed. Then he rinsed his mouth and stared at himself in the mirror above the sink in his closet-size bathroom. And cursed, a low, agonized syllable echoing in his heart, in his mind.

  How could she have kissed him?

  She didn’t know, obviously. If she’d known, she might have aimed for his cheek, or she might have been smart enough to leave things at a handshake.

  Or she might have been really smart and not come to his house at all.

  He gave up trying to scrub the sensation of her from his mouth. With one final uttered profanity, he turned off the light, trudged into his bedroom and sprawled on the narrow bed. His window fan could have cooled him down, but when he turned it on, the gentle hum of the motor sliced through his brain like a buzz saw. He needed silence. He needed to hear, see and feel nothing.

  But that would never happen, not now that Lily Holden had kissed him.

  His skin protested each wrinkle in the sheets, each degree of temperature in the air. His hair felt too heavy on his scalp. The scent of pine wafting through the open window irritated his nostrils.

  God. She’d kissed him. He wanted her more than ever.

  And she was his sister.

  He ran it through his head one more time: the visits from her father; the way Dr. Bennett would talk to him, study him, seemingly memorize him; the cash he’d paid Aaron’s mother at the end of each visit—child support in an unmarked envelope.

  Aaron had given up asking his mother about his father years ago. It hurt too much to ask. She’d made a promise, she told him, and it was a sin to break a promise. One night, when Aaron was about fourteen, he’d retorted that it was a worse sin to keep your son from knowing who his father was.

  “I promised your father,” his mother had said. “I gave him my word. If anyone ever found out his identity, it would ruin him.”

  “He ruined you,” Aaron had argued. “He got you pregnant. He stuck you with me.”

  “Yeah.” His mother had sighed and lit a cigarette.

  “A son like you, in and out of trouble all the time—you’re right. A kid like you can ruin a mother.”

  Aaron had wanted to smack her, his rage had been so great. Instead, he’d stalked out of the apartment, stormed down the stairs and taken a long walk. His own mother thought he had ruined her life. Not the bastard who’d knocked her up but the bastard who’d resulted from it.

  The charade he and his mother were playing gnawed at him, chewed him up, mangled his soul. It was such a joke, pretending he didn’t know who his father was. Dr. Bennett wouldn’t have kept coming to the second-floor flat, checking up on him and paying Evie Mazerik guilt money, if he wasn’t Aaron’s father. He didn’t give a good goddamn about saving Aaron’s mother the cost of bringing her son in for checkups. If she’d been broke and her son had needed medical attention, either Dr. Bennett could have seen him for free or Evie could have applied for public assistance. Or she could have saved her tip money and paid the doctor.

  Aaron knew why Dr. Bennett came every month, struggled through those awkward little chats with Aaron and paid Evie. He came because he wanted to see his son.

  “It’s Dr. Bennett,” he’d accused his mother that night. “Just say it. It’s Dr. Bennett.”

  “I’m not gonna tell you, Aaron, so stop asking.”

  “Damn it, I’m your son! I have a right to know who my father is!”

  “No, you don’t have a right. I made a promise. I loved that man, and I’m not going to betray him. Not even now.”

  She loved that man more than she loved her own son. The night he’d stormed out of the house to avoid hitting her, he’d forced himself to accept that cruel truth. He’d walked long into the night, smoking cigarettes from the pack he’d stolen from her purse, hiking as far as River Road, a mile west, and then down to the river’s edge. He’d sat on a rock above the water, smoked cigarette after cigarette and cried like a baby. He’d been a man by then, already towering over his mother, his voice
gravelly and his upper lip in need of daily razoring, but he’d wept because his mother had denied him his birthright.

  Promise, hell. A mother had an implicit promise to her son, too, a promise that ought to take precedence over any promise made to the bum who’d planted his seed and refused to do the right thing about it.

  During that cold endless night, it hadn’t mattered to him that he had long ago figured out who his father was. All that had mattered was his mother’s rejection of him. He’d shivered in the cold, wrapped his arms around himself and smoked one more cigarette. When it had burned down to a butt, he’d tossed it in the river, watching the bright orange arc of the still-glowing tip. It had hit the water with a tiny hiss and vanished.

  Aaron had felt a kinship with that cigarette. He’d once been burning with the need to know, the need to have his mother prove that he mattered to her—but that ember had been extinguished by the unfeeling river of his life.

  That was a long time ago. He’d come to terms with it, developed some calluses, learned not to care anymore.

  He would have been all right if only Lily hadn’t kissed him.

  But one light touch of her lips against his, and he wanted her more desperately than ever. He wanted her sweet innocence, her kindness, her loyalty. He wanted her blue eyes to fill with devotion to him, her soft mouth to open to him, the curves and hollows of her body to mold to him. He wanted her. As much as a man could want a woman. In his arms, in his bed. And she was his sister.

  Another curse shaped his tongue, and he heaved himself to his feet. He was sick, perverted. What kind of a man had such cravings for his own flesh and blood?

  He would have to avoid her. He couldn’t let her near him, given the risk that she might kiss him again. If he had to return her generous donation to the basketball program, he’d do it—even though he’d already run an ad on the Internet and a print ad in the Riverbend Courier, looking for water-safety instructors who could fit a part-time position into their schedules. He’d already phoned a member of the high-school basketball team and attempted to lure him away from his summer job bagging groceries. “I can’t pay what you’re getting at the supermarket,” he’d said, “but I can give you a chance to stay on top of your game and teach other kids at the same time. Great experience and lots of fun. Think about it.”