by Sophie Gunn
“That’s why you like the hawk,” he said. “You’re on its side.”
“I’m not on sides. I’m afraid of the hawk, too.”
“It’s like your Enemy Club,” Tay said. “You keep your enemies close.”
“Maybe I do. But only because I admire them. They’re interesting, fascinating, beautiful. I like to study them. Watch them. Life’s more interesting with them around.”
“But what if a friend gets close?” Tay asked. “Is that even scarier?”
“A little,” Lizzie admitted. “I’ve been burned, Tay.”
“It’s hard sometimes to know your friends from your enemies.”
“It’s true.” She was thinking about Ethan, sure. But also about Annie, who wouldn’t admit to doing anything in her house but looking for a sweater that never existed even when Lizzie had confronted her. Lizzie watched the hawk circle. “All my friends start out as enemies,” she pointed out.
“Like me. You wanted me gone.”
“That’s true.”
“Then you feed them and they get tame.”
She smiled. “Most of them do.”
They watched the hawk fly off, circling in the sky.
“I feel the opposite of tame when I’m around you,” Tay said. “The longer I spend with you, the more feral I feel.”
“Feeling feral right now?”
“I am.”
She smiled. “Hmm… what are we going to do about that? I have an idea. Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Go back to your place.”
“What about the green what’s-it-called? What about the hawk?” he asked.
“I think they can fend for themselves. We can’t control the world, Tay.”
He smiled. “I can’t even control my own body when I’m around you.”
“That’s what I’m counting on, big boy,” she teased.
CHAPTER
33
Even after spending Sunday morning with Tay, Monday still couldn’t come fast enough. Lizzie got to Tay’s house just after one, and by one-ten they were naked. Tay had Lizzie’s back up against the wall by the front door and her legs were wrapped around his waist and they were making love like animals, furious, desperate, groping sex that was nothing like the soft lovemaking they’d had the day before.
When her fingernails dug into his back and she threw her head back and howled, he finally let himself go and then, slowly, she untangled her legs from around him and they staggered together to the couch and fell onto it.
“I made us turkey sandwiches,” he said after a while.
“God, Tay. That was amazing,” she said. “You okay?”
“I’m wonderful.” He had his arm around her and he pulled her to him and she swung around so that she was sitting on his lap, naked, straddling him, and he thought he was going to die of happiness and lust, not necessarily in that order.
“Me, too,” she said.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “For an entire year, I was miserable. I ate a half-decent plate of spaghetti and all I could think about was how Linda would never eat spaghetti again. And now, I’m thinking, how can I get more of that spaghetti? I want to eat spaghetti day and night until I’m too fat to move. I love the damn spaghetti.”
“I’ve never been compared to spaghetti after making love before,” she said. But she heard what he was saying and had no answer for the mystery, so she stroked his shoulder, his arm, took his hand.
“What is it about you?” He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her. “This is too perfect.”
“Maybe it is,” Lizzie said. She felt a chill.
“What?” Tay asked.
She slid off him and padded to the door to get her clothes. It felt delicious to walk around naked after making love in a cabin by the lake to a beautiful, kind man. But then there was reality. She pulled on her underwear, her uniform. “Paige knows about us, Tay. I was going to tell you yesterday, but then I didn’t because I wanted to not care. But I realized last night, after I went home, that I cared. She heard through the Galton grapevine. When we were building the path, and her boy-crew showed up, she said that if I can have a man do my dirty work, so can she.”
He didn’t move from the couch. “Does it matter that she knows? She’s a big girl. And so are you.”
Lizzie picked up his boxers and his jeans and tossed them to him. “I was going to call to tell you that I wasn’t coming today. That we had to cool it. Then I changed my mind and decided that I was going to come here to tell you that this is all over. I can’t have Paige thinking that men are the easy way to solve problems. Or that if a man does a favor, he gets—”
“Naked?” Tay suggested.
She fell next to him on the couch. “Exactly.” She traced a finger down his thigh. “When I heard Ethan was coming, I was so afraid that she’d look to him as a savior. So I didn’t want to set a bad example by letting her see me depend on anyone. That’s what I was going to say when I came out here today. That we need to go slow, to cool it, at least until her father comes and goes. But then, well, I guess I jumped on you and the rest is history.”
“You can tell me now,” he said. “The last thing I want is to mess up things with Paige.” He hadn’t pulled on his clothes.
She closed her eyes and leaned against him. “I’m not sure I can get by anymore without my turkey sandwiches.”
He kissed her hair. “I do make a mean turkey sandwich.” He jumped up and pulled on his pants and went to the kitchen to make lunch. She stayed behind on the couch, enjoying that someone was making her food for a change.
“Paige is no dummy,” he said from the kitchen. “I think she knows exactly how to play you.”
“You’re just saying that because you like to make me sandwiches,” she said.
“Well, that’s true, I do.” He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dishrag. Was there anything more delicious than a shirtless man cooking? Especially when the man had a chest like Tay’s. “But I think Paige knows that you’re not easy. I think she knows that you’re not using me and I’m not using you. Because we’re not that kind of people. I think a lifetime of being a good person makes a difference, and I think you put in the time. Liz, I think you don’t give the kid enough credit. She’s old enough to recognize the difference between lust and love. And old enough to play you for everything she can.”
He went back into the kitchen before she could answer.
Love?
What?
He had stood there, said that word? She replayed it over and over in her mind. He was making her lunch, without his shirt, after mind-blowing sex, and he loved her?
Lizzie followed him into the kitchen. “Hi.”
He didn’t turn. “Hi.”
Maybe he hadn’t said it.
“Looks good.” She didn’t mean the lunch.
“Should be. My usual.” He was spreading mustard on bread.
Okay, maybe he hadn’t said anything. She picked up where their previous conversation left off. “Paige only knows what she hears in town.”
Tay’s back was to her. “She knows what she sees.”
“But what does she see, Tay? Nothing. She’s at school all day and she hears about me taking long lunch breaks.”
“Let’s change that.”
“Okay,” she said carefully. What exactly was he offering? “Tay, if we get Paige involved, then we have to be careful. What you said a minute ago—”
He put down his knife and turned to her. “About me loving you?”
“Yes.” She gulped. Her knees felt wobbly.
“How else can I explain being able to taste again?” He was across the kitchen in an instant, his arms around her, his lips on hers, sending waves of warmth through her. He took her hands and whispered in her ear, “I don’t know, Liz. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m crazy. But I think we have something that’s worth taking seriously. So, yes, let’s get Paige involved.”
“I think so, too, Tay.” She was thinking about saying
the word, forming it in her mind, aware of what it meant and wondering if it meant the same to him. But how do you say that word if you haven’t said it to a man in fourteen years and the last time you said it—the last time you heard it—everything went wrong?
He interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t sweat it, Lizzie. Let’s eat.”
She sat and he brought her food. She watched him carefully as he ate, imagining him and Paige at her kitchen table together eating breakfast, eating lunch, eating dinner. Paige doing her homework while he watched sports in the living room. “Do you like sports?” she asked.
“Sports?”
“I’m trying to imagine a life together,” she said. “Would you be watching baseball while Paige did her homework?”
“How about the three of us do something together?” he suggested.
“Okay. Like what?” She hoped it wouldn’t be sports.
“I dunno. We’ll think of something. How about we go bird-watching?”
“Paige hates bird-watching. She thinks it’s lame.”
“Oh, thank God. It was an awful suggestion.”
“But maybe those blue herons are still there. They’re definitely not lame.”
“I haven’t checked their nest lately. I’ll check it today. If they’re not there, I’ll track them down and drag them back,” he said.
“Just don’t throw anything at them,” Lizzie warned.
“Those blue guys are huge. They’d have me for lunch,” Tay said.
They finished eating and made love again, this time more slowly and carefully, his words echoing around in Lizzie’s head, He loves me he loves me, and before she knew it, she had to leave. “I didn’t even get to tell you about setting Georgia on fire,” she said as they stood at the door.
“Then you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“I can’t keep borrowing Annie’s car to get out here. You know how she is. She told me today I can have it whenever I want just so long as you keep fixing our house.”
“I kind of like being your boy-toy handyman. Makes me feel virile.”
“Tay!”
“Take my truck,” he said.
“How will you get around? Plus, it’a a stick. No. You come and pick me up at the diner tomorrow.”
“Are you sure? People will talk.”
“People are already talking. I don’t care. My break’s at two tomorrow.”
“And then, I’ll drop you back at work and I’ll get started on your porch.”
“In the afternoon?”
“In the afternoon. Because you’re going to invite me in for dinner with you and your lovely daughter.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I owe you.”
“Not because you owe me. No deals. Just doing what’s right and what we want. Because you love me, Lizzie.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
“I do,” she said.
He kissed her to seal the deal.
CHAPTER
34
Tommy waited for Joe Pendergrast, the head of campus security, to come to the phone. The last few days had been torture. He had promised Annie he wouldn’t call Joe, but the mystery of the money was killing him and he couldn’t wait another second.
“Joe, here.”
“Joe. It’s Tommy.”
“Mr. Wynne! How is Galton’s finest man in blue?”
“Hey, Joe. Terrible, actually. This is a business call.” He inhaled, hoping that he’d be better at lying over the phone than he was in person. “Meghan and Annie were in the campus gorge awhile back, and Meghan lost her blue bunny, Bun-bun. I hate to bug you with stuff like this, but I was wondering if anything had been reported missing in the Campus Road gorge? I mean, found. Anything out of the ordinary down there?”
“Bun-bun, huh? That’s serious stuff, Wynne. Hold on.” Tommy could hear Joe shouting to his secretary. “Okay. Julie’s on it. She’s checking the lost and found for you. How’s the family?”
“Great.” Terrible. My wife is a thief and it’s been so many days since we’ve had sex I’ve stopped counting. “How’s things on campus?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Drunken kids. High kids. Kids who can’t handle the stress of being Mummy and Daddy’s little lawyers-in-training. Oh, hey! We did have an interesting day a few weeks back in that gorge, now that you got me thinking about it.”
“Yeah?” Tommy held his breath. His hands went clammy and he gripped the phone tighter. This was what he was hoping for. Joe was a famous talker, you just had to get him started.
“Yeah—wait. Here’s Julie. Huh? No Bun-bun? Hear that? Sorry, Toms. We haven’t found her yet. But we’ll put out an all-points bulletin.”
“Hey, great. Thanks. Meghan just goes a little nuts without her bunny.”
“Been there. Done that. It’s good to be old. Pull coins out of my grandkids’ ears and they think I’m so corny, they don’t want to come near me.”
“Well, I have something to look forward to,” Tommy said. “So, um, what happened a few weeks back in the gorge?” He tried to sound casual.
“Oh, Right. A jumper. At least, some kids thought it was a jumper. Got a call that a kid climbed over the rail. Six of them called it in on their cells. Six! Two of ’em even said they saw a body go down.” Galton University was famous for students’ diving into its deadly gorges when the going got tough.
“You found a body?” If the person who owned the money was dead, of course there would be no report of missing money. Tommy’s whole body had gone cold. Was that good or bad for his marriage? How could he think of his marriage when they were talking about a dead kid? “How come we didn’t hear about this downtown?”
“Aww, you know we’d call you boys in for a jumper. It was nothing. False alarm. My boys searched, and believe me, if a person went over that rail, they weren’t getting far. I’ve cleaned up four jumpers from that bridge since I started twenty-six years ago. None of ’em got far.”
Tommy felt sick. He’d had his share of gorge “incidents” under the bridges and off the vertigo-inducing cliffs. The worst were the drunken kids who were out swimming and cliff diving, just trying to perfect their swan dives to impress their friends. An inch misjudgment, and they hit the sides, the bottom, their necks broken in an instant. “What did he look like?”
“Who?”
“The nonjumper. The kid who climbed the rail?”
“Dunno. We got there too late to see anyone and our eyewitnesses were obviously MOCP.”
“MOCP?”
“Our new campus code for Morons on Cell Phones. Jimmy made it up. Funny, huh? The law enforcement community is gonna have to address that cell phone problem soon, Wynne. Anyway, all I can tell you is that most of them agree that he was a she with long black hair and she had parked her huge black BMW SUV on the bridge, backing up traffic something awful before she disappeared into thin air. Manny forgot to get the license plates, he was so focused on the invisible jumper. Who knows, maybe she could fly. Students. Think they own the world.”
When they’re not tossing themselves into gorges.
Joe kept on talking about his men climbing around in the gorge, Bill Twosome getting a nasty case of poison ivy—imagine that, this time of year!—the uselessness of teenage eyewitnesses, all on their cell phones and texting, only half in reality. “One even turned in a blurry cell phone movie of nothing but Bill slipping around like an idiot down there. Like maybe that was evidence or something. I’m sure it’s already up on YouTube called something like, Dumb, Fat Cop Slips: Funny!!!” He sighed. “So you tell your Annie to come up and visit us with that beautiful baby of yours. You hear? We never see her anymore. And tell Meghan we’ll find her Bun-bun. Joseph Pendergrast always gets his man.”
Or woman. With long black hair in a black BMW SUV. Tommy hung up the phone. He still felt queasy. What did it mean? Did the witnesses see the bundle of cash going down? But even if they were idiots, as Joe had complained, how could they mi
stake a tiny wad of bills for a body?
CHAPTER
35
Wednesday morning, and the Enemy Club was assembled by ten minutes before seven, a minor miracle that didn’t escape Lizzie’s notice.
“So, spill,” Jill demanded once they’d all settled. “I heard you’re taking long lunch breaks to be with your handyman at the lake house. Betsy Coffit saw you guys from the deck of a house she’s selling across the way.” Jill was practically squirming with excitement. Lizzie wondered just exactly how much she’d seen. She felt her face go hot.
“Tracy Luge, in my Tuesday four o’clock yoga, told me that he’s always at your house, fixing stuff, no matter when she goes by.”
“Tracy Luge is stalking me?” Lizzie asked.
Nina sighed. “She said she couldn’t help but go by after that crime blotter report and that now she jogs that way every day just to watch him. She thinks it’s so romantic. She says she cries a little bit every time she passes.”
“It is romantic,” Georgia said with very little conviction. “But dangerous. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Of course she does,” Nina said before Lizzie had a chance to speak. “Look at her. She’s glowing. You can’t deny the glow.”
When they all finally settled down, Lizzie leaned forward and whispered, “I’m not telling you guys a thing.”
“It’s serious!” Jill said, slapping the counter. “We’ve lost her.”
“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so, so happy for you,” Nina said.
Georgia remained silent.
Lizzie grinned, then turned to Georgia and her grin faded. “What’s wrong?”
“What about the accident, Liz? He hasn’t worked through that.” Lizzie had told them all everything about the accident over the last few days.
“He has,” Lizzie insisted. “He said he realized that there’s nothing he can do to turn back time.” She wasn’t about to tell Georgia that he said love cured him. That she cured him. That he’d said love. That she’d said love. In the bright glare of the diner, none of it sounded as plausible as it had in the dappled, soft light of the cabin.