by Skye Warren
I opened my eyes to round, mischievous blue eyes. “Bailey!”
She blew out her lips, and wetness sprayed me. Nice.
I wiped my face with the sheet, wincing at the contact of fabric on abraded skin. “How did you get in here?”
“My fault,” Colin said.
I looked over at the bathroom where he was shaving with the door open. In jeans and nothing else, he looked delicious. How the hell did men get hip bones like that? Even though Colin was not skinny, nor really even lean, there they were. Mine were all padding.
“It’s no problem,” I said, pulling Bailey under the covers with me. She squirmed and kicked until she was free, lounging on Colin’s pillow like a princess.
I stretched, and my muscles screamed a protest. No, last night wasn’t a dream. Damn. I looked at Colin again, who was now pulling on a T-shirt, facing away. He headed for the door.
“Colin?”
“Yeah?” He definitely wasn’t looking at me.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m sorry for being so fucked-up, but you knew that when you signed up with me. Yeah, that’d go over great. They should print that on greeting cards. So I settled on, “What are you doing today? Want to hang out?”
“I’ve got to work. Early meeting.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
A beat passed. “If you want, you guys could come for lunch.”
“At the restaurant?”
He nodded.
The only time I’d ever been there was when I’d asked him out. He hadn’t asked me back. But here was an invitation, almost engraved. “Yes! We’d love to. Wouldn’t we, Bailey?”
“No,” she said.
“She means yes,” I told him.
“No, no!” she said. Goddammit.
Colin smiled faintly, I could see from the side, and then left the room. With a heave, I sat up and settled the pillows around Bailey. Then I went into the bathroom.
Oh, shit. That explained why Colin wasn’t looking at me. The left side of my face was…wrecked. It was all black, a little bit green, and my eye was puffy. Christ, it hurt more to look at me than it had last night. Maybe. I’d been pretty zoned out. He hadn’t hit me. More like the floor had hit me, slowly, in a long, painful punch that had pushed harder with each thrust from behind.
I’d be able to patch this up some—some ice and a heavy foundation job would do wonders. But for now I looked hideous. I fretted about whether to say something about it to Colin while I got ready, but when Bailey and I went downstairs, he’d already gone. Ugh, avoidance was contagious.
I puttered around the house, making breakfast and doing some chores, mostly waiting for lunchtime. My face was a half an hour project, so that was a nice distraction. In the right light I looked like someone who’d done a horrible job with her makeup. Looking like an idiot was preferable to looking hurt.
I packed up Bailey’s lunch in the kitchen. Hmm, dessert. I eyed the chocolate tart that I’d taken out of the fridge earlier. I did want some. Badly.
More importantly Colin might like it. He was freaked, justifiably, and possibly mad at me—also justifiably. It would be a peace offering, even if I’d initially made it for myself. I mean, if I gave it to him, he’d still share, wouldn’t he? Two birds with one stone and all that.
I wrapped the tart in plastic wrap and then bundled us into the car. It only took ten minutes to arrive at the restaurant, and then the unbundling process commenced. Finally Bailey and I sat at a table in the corner near the office hallway. I was debating whether to knock at the door when he emerged.
“You came,” he said, sounding surprised. That gave me pause. Did he think me so unreliable? Or worse, did he think our relationship was irreparable after last night? Please, no.
“Of course,” I said. “And I brought a cake. You do like chocolate?”
“You made it?”
“Yes…did you notice the bowls and pots covered in black goo in the kitchen?”
He considered. “No.”
“Okay, that’s…disturbing. But yes, I made it. Do you have a fridge or something where it can sit?”
“Sure.” He took the tart from me and disappeared into the kitchen. I returned to Bailey and pulled out her lunch. I hadn’t been sure what they’d have here for her, so I’d packed the full complement—pasta, mixed veggies, and milk to drink. We hadn’t had much opportunity for eating out, but we’d been here before, at least. Bailey took to her restaurant high chair with aplomb. It was the eating part she struggled with. In minutes the floor around her was littered with lunch. So much for planning.
Colin returned and took a seat across from me. “I ordered for us already. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all.” I smiled, fishing for one from him. “I bet you know what’s best here, don’t you?”
He gave a short nod. He looked out the window, at the table, at Bailey crunching carrots—anywhere but my face.
I sighed. “Is it that bad?”
“Is what bad?” he said.
“My face.”
He looked at me, and then away. A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Yes.”
Well, damn.
Our food came shortly. I suppose since he owned the place, he’d better get prompt service. So we busied ourselves with eating. When we were done, I offered to go back and find the tart, but he went into the back himself. I liked the way the employees looked at him, both with respect and a sort of affection that I recognized in my dealings with Rick. It was a contrast to the formality he’d been dealt at Philip’s house.
He returned and, for the first time that day, looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
Crap, it’d probably ended up sitting on a lukewarm burner and melted or something. “It’s ruined?”
“Sort of. I put it in the back, and my manager thought it was available. He moved it to the front case.” He paused. “It’s gone.”
“Wait, like sold?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well.” So much for my apology cake. “That’s okay, I guess. At least someone enjoyed it.”
“Several someones,” he said. There was a note in his voice. Pride? “At eight dollars a slice and ten slices, your cake was eighty bucks.”
Shit. Eighty bucks. That was more than the bakery would charge, though I guessed that by-the-slice was the way to higher profits than selling full cakes.
Yes! There was a smile, however small. “Do you want it?” he asked.
“Want what?”
“Your money.”
“Uh, no thanks.” That barely covered the grocery bill from yesterday. Plus, it’d been made with ingredients bought with his money. “But I was just thinking. Do you think they liked it?”
“It was gone in twenty minutes.”
Okay. “Could I bring in more?”
He paused. “Yes, but you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. It will give me something useful to do, and besides, I love to bake.” And this could be just what I was looking for—a way to pay Colin back, at least a little.
He looked doubtful.
“I really will enjoy it,” I said. “And I won’t let it interfere with the house cleaning or anything.”
He scowled. This wasn’t helping.
I made big eyes, wishing I had Bailey’s baby blues. “Please?”
“Don’t work too hard,” he said.
Score! “I’ll be the laziest supplier you ever had,” I promised.
A smile flickered on his face. His smiles were like a collector’s item for me.
We said our good-byes, veiled in politeness.
Chapter Nine
Back at the house I declared Quiet Time, my nap replacement therapy while Bailey had her midtoddler crisis. She got a couple of plastic books I’d borrowed from the library. I pulled out a magazine—something I’d thrown onto the conveyor at the grocery store on a whim. Who had $3.99 to spend on articles about sex? That would be me, apparently. I opened to “Ten Ways to Blow His Mind with Your Thumb.”
I’d only gotten to “deep tissue massage” when Shelly showed up. She should write for Cosmo. Her tips blew more than just minds, I felt sure. She wore a gauzy blue dress that looked at once both naive and flat-out sexual. That contradiction was her specialty.
As she gave Bailey a kiss, I dropped the magazine onto the coffee table. “Do you think Colin wants me to put my thumb in his mouth?”
“Maybe.” She sat down, flipping her hair back. “But he’d like it better if you put it in his—”
“Okay.” I glanced pointedly at Bailey to stop her. “That’s what I figured.”
She grinned. “You’re cute.”
I scowled. “Shut up. It’s not like I’m innocent or something.”
“Compared to me, honey, everyone’s innocent.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
She examined her nails.
“You got it, didn’t you?” A way to contact Andrew.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Shelly, I have to,” I said. “It’s the best way.”
“You don’t just have a conversation with your rapist.”
“It’s something I have to do. And I think maybe I can even convince him to walk away. Now that he’s had time to really think about it, to get over the shock.”
She traced the wood knot on the side table with her fingertip. “Philip says if you press charges, that he wouldn’t have a legal claim.”
“I can’t believe you talked with him about it.”
“He brought it up,” she said. “I figured I might as well hear what he had to say.”
“Well, it’s more complicated than that.”
“I’m not saying it would be easy, but…” She’d always wanted me to report it, to press charges. And I’d tried, she knew that much. She looked up, anguish in her eyes. “At the hospital. What happened with that cop?”
The lunch in my stomach threatened revolt. The doctors and nurses had left, leaving only the two cops to question me. I could smell the alcohol and sickly hospital smell.
I shook my head to clear the memories. “Why did you push so hard?”
She demurred and sat back. I’d hit my mark.
I’d guessed long ago why she had been so ferocious toward Andrew. A friend would have supported me, but she’d practically taken up a war cry. She was a victim too; that was why. I didn’t know the details, but it explained a lot. Not just her reaction that day, but her subsequent profession. One day while I was nursing Bailey, she announced that she was an escort, as easily as if she’d gotten a paper route. It had been part of our tacit pact. She never brought up the rape—or the hospital—and I never questioned her work. She pretended like my “date nights” were normal, and I pretended like selling her body on a nightly basis was A-OK. We were enablers of the best sort.
“Give me the number.” My gaze held hers, willing her to do what I asked.
She pressed a few buttons on her phone, then slid it across the table to me. It was opened to a contact—JW, it said. Andrew Williams. We used to joke about the fact that our last names started with the same letter. Said I wouldn’t have to change my initials when…
I hit the Call button and waited.
“Hello,” and just like that, I was back in my childhood room, calling to tell him about the drama of second period. It took a second to return to the present.
“Hello,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Allie? Are you okay?”
I almost laughed at the concern. It felt real. No, it probably was real. Our friendship had been real, except for that one time when it wasn’t. “I’m okay. I think we need to talk.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Remember Pop Rocks?”
I smiled at the memory. There was a diner where we’d hung out and gorged on cheap cheese fries and free refills of soda. Then Andrew had made a miniature explosion with his drink and the fizzy candy, and we’d been banned. Not that it mattered now—only two years later and we were both unrecognizable. “I remember.”
“Meet me there in thirty,” he said.
“Okay.” I hung up the phone and handed it back to Shelly. “Can you watch Bailey?”
“Of course,” she said. “I miss my girl.”
My head was blissfully empty as I drove into that crappy part of town.
The diner was the same, still dirty but somehow smaller. I sat down in a creaky vinyl booth. The lamination was peeling off the tabletop. I rested my hands there, but it was sticky to the touch, so I put them in my lap.
The worst part of waiting was the thinking. What would I tell Andrew? It depended on his mood. He’d become increasingly capricious, up until that day—the emotional equivalent of an atomic bomb. It wasn’t personal; at least, I thought not. I just happened to be in the vicinity at the time—a casualty.
Thinking, thinking. I heard Shelly’s voice, What happened with that cop?
Then again in her voice, Don’t think about it.
I was trying, dammit. I really was.
But the alternative was to contemplate this sticky stuff on the table. No, seriously—what was it? I prayed it was some sort of food product, at least. Ugh, I couldn’t keep thinking about it. I reached for the menu the server had dropped off. I was hardly in the mood for eating. I’d already eaten lunch, and plus it was pretty gross in here. But, well, I was desperate.
I ordered chocolate pie. It took about ten minutes, and then the server reappeared with a slice of pie and a glass of water. I cut a small bite from the corner and tasted it. It was good. A bit too sweet. Oh, yuck. A kind of clay aftertaste. I took a gulp to wash it down—metallic water.
I coughed and sputtered. Andrew chose that moment to appear. I clapped my hand over my mouth as he folded his long body into the booth across from me.
“Not as good as you remember it?” He smirked.
I pushed the plate away and shuddered. “I don’t know how I ever ate that.”
He eyed the slice of pie. “We had a strict fries-only rule, if I remember right. And always order pop.”
Our eyes met. “Don’t drink the water,” we said at the same time. We smiled.
How strange, this camaraderie. Perhaps it had something to do with the location. We’d been friends here, so it was easy to fall into that role now.
We both stilled.
This wasn’t the paralyzing panic of our last meeting, after two years of snowballing fear and apprehension. For all I’d known at the time, he could have raped me where I stood. Of course, he’d done worse. He’d threatened to take Bailey from me.
Even as I marveled at my ease, cold fingers of remembrance clenched my insides. No, this grimy diner had been only a very temporary sort of amnesia. Memories assaulted my calm: flashes of pain, the blue eyes flashing darkly, almost too black.
“I missed you,” Andrew said softly.
I’d missed him too. My friend, Andrew, I’d missed. The guy he’d turned into that last night, not so much. In the past two years he’d filled out from a lanky teenager, but he was still lean. Probably would always be. I’d filled out too. From skinny girl to pregnant to young woman.
Andrew looked down. “I guess I fucked up pretty bad.”
It was both an understatement and stunningly accurate. It also stoppered any recriminations I might have thought to serve him. He knew what he’d done, and he knew it was wrong. What was the point of an accusation, when he’d already accepted the verdict? But there was one thing I wanted to know. “Why, Andrew?”
Remorse was in his eyes when he glanced up at me, but also confusion. He shook his head as he spoke, as if to negate his words. “I never would have thought… It wasn’t planned. I went a little crazy, I guess. More than a little.”
That was the rub of it. There was no magic answer.
He wasn’t the stereotypical rapist. He wasn’t a mean person. He wasn’t one of the guys I picked up at the bar. If he’d passed out from the alcohol that night, or if I’d left earl
y, or if so many things, then it might never have happened. Our lives would have been so different, never knowing how close we’d come to breaking.
And I knew all about doing things that were out of character, that went against our ideals, that hurt people. I’d done it once a month, and I’d done it last night. I didn’t even have the luxury of them being spur-of-the-moment. Mine were so deliberate.
“Where have you been?” I asked, because it seemed like the thing to say. And maybe I was curious.
“Marines.” He grinned, and little-boy Andrew peeked out at me. “You didn’t think I could do it.”
“Did they kick your ass?”
He made a solemn face, but his eyes still twinkled. “Absolutely.”
Idiot. “Good.”
“What about you?” And our daughter was unspoken.
“Nothing much. I worked in a bakery.” I wondered if he thought back to when I’d brought over chocolate-chip cookies, his favorite. Or when I’d made cupcakes as both our contributions to the school bake fair, since neither of us had mothers to do it for us. Or when I’d made brownies, laced with more adult things. I wondered but didn’t ask. The pain mixed with nostalgia—bittersweet.
“And now?” he asked.
I blushed.
“Ah,” he said. “Colin Murphy, right?”
Something flickered—had I told him Colin’s name? I must have. “Something like that.”
His eyes darkened as his gaze raked down the side of my bruised face. “He’s treating you right?”
I raised an eyebrow. As if he were one to worry about my well-being. He hadn’t only hurt me, but he’d kicked off the chain of events that had hurt me. The doctors and nurses, then the… Don’t think about that. “What’re you going to do if he’s not?”
“Hey, it’s not all sunshine and candy in the military.”
I gave him a full-body perusal back. He’d clearly gotten built since years ago, but he didn’t have Colin’s bulk. Nor did he have Colin’s determination, no matter if he’d matured in the past two years. I had the feeling Colin’s fortitude had been forged early, making him a lot older than the six years that separated us.
“Still,” I said. “I wouldn’t pick a fight with the guy, if I were you.”