by Jane Graves
Shannon reached beneath her shirt to refasten her bra. She yanked her shirt down and ran her hands through her hair.
“What are you doing?” Luke asked.
“She can’t see me like this.”
“You’re answering the door?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she knows I’m here. My truck is out front.”
“Sooner or later she’ll have to go away.”
“You don’t know my mother. She never just goes away.”
Shannon rose from the bed. On her way to the living room, she stopped at her bedroom door for a few seconds and looked back, her eyes telegraphing a nervous command Luke read instantly. Don’t you dare let my mother see you here!
As she hurried to the living room, he felt a stab of anger. He’d been in a situation a whole lot like this before. He hadn’t liked it then, and he sure as hell didn’t like it now. And he’d be damned if he’d sit in this bedroom and be Shannon’s dirty little secret all over again.
He rose from the bed and walked to the doorway leading to the living room, his steps slow and deliberate. He folded his arms and leaned against the door frame, watching as Shannon faced her front door, running her hand through her hair one last time. Then she opened it.
“Hi, Mom,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Loucinda said as she swept into Shannon’s apartment, a fluffy little Pomeranian pattering along at her feet. “But I saw your truck out front. What took you so long to answer the door?”
Luke felt an instantaneous sense of loathing. Loucinda North was representative of everybody in this town he’d hated as a kid, full of entitlement and overflowing with disdain for those she deemed less worthy than herself. And it was clear nothing had changed in that regard. Her holier-than-thou attitude still emanated from her like radiation from a nuclear blast.
“I was…unloading my dishwasher.”
“Didn’t you hear the door?”
“Yes, but I had my hands full.”
Just then the dog caught sight of Luke. She let out a little yap. Loucinda turned, her gaze falling on Luke, and the temperature in the room instantly dropped ten degrees.
“Hello, Mrs. North,” he said.
Shannon whipped around, her eyes dropping closed with dismay when she realized he was standing there.
Loucinda stared at Luke for the count of three, with an expression that could have frozen a sun-baked Texas prairie. Then she looked at Shannon, whose cheeks were flushed with a just-kissed look even the most oblivious person could have read at twenty paces.
“I don’t understand,” Loucinda said.
Shannon opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“Why in the world is that man…?”
Loucinda stopped short, drawing herself up into a tall, upright pillar of judgmental attitude.
“We’ll talk another time,” she told Shannon.
With that, she opened the door, walked out of the apartment, and closed the door behind her.
Then, silence.
Shannon spun on Luke, speaking in a harsh whisper. “Did you have to do that?”
“Do what? Say hi to Mom?”
“Yes!” Shannon said, striding toward him. “You could have stayed in the bedroom!”
“Yeah, I could have. But look at all the fun I would have missed.”
“Fun? You call that fun?”
“I bet if it had been Russell Morgensen coming out of your bedroom, she’d have been thrilled.”
When Shannon didn’t respond, Luke knew just how true that was. He kept his face impassive, but his stomach felt as if a lariat was coiled tightly around it. He told himself he didn’t give a damn what Loucinda North thought. But the moment she looked at him as if he’d committed murder just by being there, all those old feelings of inferiority came rushing back.
He sat down on the sofa and reached for his boots.
“Where are you going?” Shannon asked.
“I’ve had enough for one night.”
Shannon let out a breath and sat down on the sofa beside him. “I’m sorry, Luke. Really. I’m sorry. It’s just—” She floundered around, searching for words. “It’s just that my mother is so judgmental.”
“I didn’t hear you telling her that.”
“Are you kidding? That’s a can of worms nobody in his right mind would open up. If you’d grown up the way I did, you’d understand.”
“Oh, yeah. I bet that was awful.” He yanked on one of his boots. “Am I still that despicable?”
“Of course not!”
“According to your mother, I am.”
Shannon sighed. “She’s still seeing the kid you used to be, that’s all.”
That was all? Luke shook his head. That was everything. It meant there was no such thing as redemption, and that a grudge was something to hang on to through eternity.
“You’re angry,” Shannon said.
“Nope. Not angry. Just fed up.”
“This isn’t just about tonight, is it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is also about what happened when we were kids.”
Luke’s heart thumped harder. He stared down at his other boot as he pulled it on. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That night in the hayloft.”
Luke’s stomach twisted with the memory. He didn’t want to talk about that. He still remembered the anguish he’d felt when she’d left that hayloft, making the heavenly feelings he’d had only moments before go straight to hell.
“You were angry that I didn’t want anybody to know what had happened between us,” Shannon said.
“Let me tell you something,” Luke said. “There were two kinds of girls in this town. Half of them didn’t want anybody to know they’d been with me, and the other half couldn’t wait to tell everyone they knew. I didn’t give a damn either way.”
“But you left town the next day, so I thought—”
“I was leaving town anyway.”
“You never told me that.”
“Back then I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone much of anything.”
“I’ve always felt guilty about that night. I thought I hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Luke said. “Considering where I came from, I was pretty much immune to hurt.”
“Okay, then. How about how you hurt me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have any idea how I felt when I found out you were gone?”
Luke looked away. What else could he possibly have done but leave? No way on this earth could he have faced Shannon the next day, only to have her do exactly what she’d done tonight. I love having sex with you, she would have said, but of course we have to keep it a secret. You understand. If he’d stuck around to hear those words pass her lips, he’d have died all over again.
“Considering how you acted that night,” he said, “I think you were probably pretty relieved.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t relieved. I missed you, Luke.”
He remembered how he’d hit the highway with everything he owned in the world stuffed into his wreck of a Mustang, telling himself over and over that he didn’t care about Shannon, didn’t love her, didn’t want to ever see her again. And he remembered with equal clarity how hard it had been to drive with tears filling his eyes.
Shannon tilted her head, her eyes narrowing as she looked at him, as if she was searching for something deep inside him she couldn’t quite locate. “You may not believe this,” she said, “but I cared about you.”
Luke felt a swell of emotion coming from that place she was looking for. But he’d never let her find it. Never again. He intended to keep it locked away until the world turned to dust.
“Cared about me?” He made a scoffing noise. “There was only one reason you liked being around me. Because you were so repressed you could barely breathe, and you were dying to take a wal
k on the wild side. Being with me was your way of telling the world to fuck off.”
“So you think that was the only reason I was with you that night?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“So why were you with me?”
“I hate to burst your bubble, but I was there to get laid. And that’s all there was to it.”
He could tell he’d scored a direct hit, but she’d just have to live with it. He stood up and walked to the door.
Shannon rose from the sofa. “And all this time I thought I’d broken your heart.”
He put his hand on the doorknob and turned back. “Sweetheart, I don’t have a heart to break.”
With that he opened the door and left her apartment. He strode to his truck, trying to brush off what had happened, but all kinds of emotions took over. He was surprised Shannon had even brought up what had happened that night in the hayloft. He figured it had meant so little to her that the memory of it would be all but gone by now.
I cared about you.
He didn’t buy that. If she’d cared so much about him, she wouldn’t have acted as if she’d committed a sin by being with him. She cared far more about what her mother thought than about how he felt.
Then and now.
As he got into his truck, humiliation took over. Acceptance from people like Loucinda North had always felt like a hurdle he would never be able to clear, no matter how tall he grew or how high he learned to jump.
He started his truck and drove down Calico Court, telling himself it didn’t matter, that he’d grown past all this.
So why was it still eating away at him?
Luke thought about going back to the shelter, but just driving through the front gate would dredge up memories he didn’t want to deal with. Instead he headed for City Limits.
A few minutes later, he parked his truck in the gravel lot out front. He went inside to find the crowd sparse, with the only noise coming from the last inning of the Rangers game playing on the television over the bar.
The woman behind the bar approached him. According to one of the women he’d danced with the other night, she owned the place. She had long, curly blond hair, with intense green eyes and a body that would get any man’s attention. But she gave off a don’t mess with me vibe Luke recognized at ten paces. He had no doubt that any man who tried to get up close and personal with her had better mind his manners or he’d find himself flat on his back before he knew what hit him.
She introduced herself as Terri and asked Luke what he was drinking. He ordered a Guinness. She popped the cap and set it down in front of him.
“You’re Luke Dawson,” she said.
“That’s right. I’d ask you how you know that, but this is Rainbow Valley. Everybody knows everything.”
“You’re working for Shannon.”
Luke nodded. He’d seen Terri talking to Shannon and her friends the night he’d been there. Unfortunately, just hearing Shannon’s name made him want to drink until he forgot everything that had happened tonight, but he wasn’t sure Terri had enough beer in the place to accomplish that.
Terri looked back at the television. “I’m afraid the Rangers aren’t going to pull it out.”
Luke hadn’t noticed. He was too busy playing what had happened at Shannon’s apartment over and over in his mind. During the next commercial, Terri folded her arms and leaned one hip against the bar.
“Heard you used to be a real bad boy around here.”
Luke laughed humorlessly, thinking there wasn’t anywhere else in the world where that mattered except in this town. “Yeah, I was a regular juvenile delinquent.”
“Not that I hold it against you. I used to be a little wild myself before I came to live here.”
“Yeah? Which town did you tear up?”
“Past history,” Terri said. “I’d just as soon keep the details to myself now that I’m living here in Disney World.”
Luke nodded. He didn’t blame her. He’d caused plenty of havoc in Rainbow Valley. If he could find a way to make people forget everything that had happened back then, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
He took a long drink of his beer and watched the Rangers struggle through the top of the ninth, but he was having a hard time paying attention to the game. He was starting to reconsider the way he’d behaved tonight, coming out of that bedroom and flaunting his presence in front of Shannon’s mother like some angry kid who needed to push people’s buttons. What had he gained by doing that? The satisfaction of making Loucinda North’s jaw drop?
“Speaking of kids,” Terri said, “did you see the Pic ’N Go?”
“What about it?”
“Somebody nailed it. Nice graffiti job. No gang signs, but plenty of dirty words. Poor Myrna must have had a heart attack when she saw it.”
Luke shook his head. Myrna had more than she could deal with already. The last thing she needed was to have the side of her building look like a New York subway station.
“Does the sheriff know who did it?” Luke asked.
“I imagine he’ll round up the usual suspects.”
The usual suspects. Luke had definitely been one of those. If a leaf so much as fell off a tree unexpectedly, he got blamed. That had infuriated him back then. But the rationality of adulthood had taught him that a person was judged by his actions, and his actions had been worse than most.
Luke downed the last of his beer, then set the bottle on the bar. “Do you ever think about the stuff you did when you were a kid?”
“What do you mean?” Terri asked.
“Have you ever wondered what the hell you were thinking?”
Terri shrugged. “Kids do shit. That’s just the way it is.”
“Not all kids.”
“Nope. Just the ones with nobody to teach them any better.”
Was that why he’d done the things he had? Because nobody was around to teach him any better? If so, what was his excuse for what he’d done tonight?
If he’d been smart enough to stay put in Shannon’s bedroom, they’d be in bed right now taking each other to heaven. Instead he was sitting on a barstool in a deserted honkey tonk, drinking his troubles away, and Shannon was going to have to deal with her mother. Why the hell had he done that to her? Because of some eleven-year-old hurt he couldn’t get over?
He watched the rest of the game. After the Rangers lost, he tossed a few bills on the bar, said good-bye to Terri, and left the building. By the time he got into his truck to head back to the shelter, darkness had settled over the highway. A few minutes later, he approached the Pic ’N Go, its lights shining brightly through the night. He wheeled into the parking lot, where he brought his truck to a halt and stared at the wall that faced the highway.
“Well, shit,” he muttered.
Terri was right. In red and black spray paint, somebody had filled that wall with the kind of sentiments nice people didn’t even whisper, much less permanently apply to the side of a building. Luke had stopped there yesterday afternoon and hadn’t noticed it, so the place had probably been hit last night.
He pictured a kid zooming into the parking lot at midnight, leaping out of his car with a couple of cans of spray paint, and going at it. After a six-pack of beer and an hour or two of anger seething inside him, it had probably seemed like the only thing he could do to release some of the fury and frustration that lived inside him every minute of every day. With every slash of spray paint, he spelled out harsh, angry words designed to make the rest of the world regret that they had ever messed with him.
Or maybe Luke was just remembering what it had been like for him.
As he looked at the graffiti now, he wondered how that boy he’d been in his other life could have done something as stupid as this. He wished he could go back and talk to him. He would tell him there was life after high school, life after this town, life after the hell he’d gone through with his father. He’d tell him he didn’t need to do crap like this to get back at the world, that inflicting senseless revenge on nameless victi
ms was only going to leave him feeling even more hollow and lost than he already did.
But knowing the kid he’d been back then, would he have listened?
He remembered how he used to wish he’d been born the kind of guy a girl like Shannon would want. Yet with every sarcastic word he spoke, every angry move he made, he proved to the world he was just the opposite. If he’d been her mother, what would he have done? Welcomed him with open arms?
For maybe the first time, Luke saw himself from the point of view of people who’d watched the stupid, destructive things he’d done as a kid. And he hated what he saw. How was all that supposed to simply vanish from Shannon’s mind, or Loucinda’s, for that matter? And as he looked at the graffiti, he figured nothing about the past was leaving Myrna Schumaker’s mind anytime soon, either.
Maybe it was time he did something about that.
After Luke left, Shannon called Eve and told her she was coming over. She endured her sister’s protest that it was too late and went anyway, because she wasn’t going to be able to sleep with this on her mind. Ten minutes later, she climbed the outside steps that led to Eve’s apartment over the Red Barn. Eve came to the door wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants covered in Winnie the Poohs.
Lucky, her big bruiser of a tomcat, was lying upside down on her purple shag rug, looking like a prizefighter who’d hit the mat in an uncontested knockout. Three years ago, Rita told Eve she had a tomcat so tough he’d fallen twenty-two feet out of a peach picker he’d stowed away in and lived to meow another day. Eve was sold on the spot. For her, it was all about the story that came with whatever she collected. Antiques, animals—it was all the same to her.
Shannon came inside and sat on Eve’s sofa. Brynn, Eve’s Welsh corgi, jumped up beside her, and she stroked the dog’s head. Five years ago, Eve had leaped out of her car to rescue her from the median of Interstate 35 with cars zooming by at seventy miles per hour. Amazingly, neither of them had ended up as road kill.
“Sorry to come over so late,” Shannon said.
“What’s new about that?”
“Hey, I don’t do it very often.”
“Only when you have a problem you can’t make logical sense of and you’re desperate to talk to somebody about it. You won’t talk to Tasha, because she keeps asking you what you think, like she’s some kind of new-age shrink. But if you knew what you thought, you wouldn’t have to ask her. So you’re stuck with me.”