‘Cause I’m always in a damn genial mood. ‘Cause I know how important it is to keep up appearances, show off my best side, keep my emotions off my damn face.
But all the rules get tossed and shredded when Evan’s in the picture.
I wait forever. I wait so long, I get worried, and, even though I know I’m the last person she wants to see, I crack open the ladies’ room door and rap it with my knuckles.
“Evan?”
I listen for sobs or a tantrum or the silence of an empty bathroom, but she answers.
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
Her voice is ice-rimmed and flat.
Five minutes go by. Ten. The place starts to fill up with people. Women and little kids go in and out, but Evan doesn’t make an appearance. I keep tabs on the frazzled moms and elderly ladies entering and exiting, and when the bathroom finally empties of extra people, I slip in and make my way down the row of stalls until I see those crazy sexy sandals with the tie thingies under a stall.
“Evan?” I keep my voice low.
She gasps. “Winch! Get the hell out of this bathroom.”
“Not without you.” I run my finger along the crack in the door. “C’mon. You asked, I told. I knew you wouldn’t like what you heard, but that’s my truth. If it makes you feel better, I was picturing this exact moment in my head every time I wanted to pick the phone up and call you last week, so that’s a big part of why I didn’t.”
Her sigh stops short. “You predicted this?”
“Not Carey’s specifically. Not all the details. But you finally hearing about me, all about me, and wanting me gone, out, done? I knew that was coming. Because being with you? I thought it would probably be amazing, but I had no idea, you have no idea, how hard I’ve fallen for you already.”
I wait, but there’s no sound except the cautious movement of her feet, edging closer to the stall door. I think I hear someone swing the heavy outer door open, but it’s a false alarm. Someone will come in soon, though, and I’d love to get out of the bathroom with her before I cause a ruckus.
“Every time I think I heard the worst version of your story, it gets even worse.” One eye peers through the crack at me. I can hear her voice, clear and summer-creek-sweet. “I get that you’re keeping me in the dark to protect me. But you have to stop. I have to know. Everything. All of it. Every piece. No matter how bad you think it is.”
I can see her fingers toying with the stall bolt. I want her to slide it open.
“Alright. Full disclosure. I swear. But you gotta come out of there. I can’t talk to you about this in the girls’ bathroom. I don’t need to get arrested for this.”
It’s meant to be a joke, to break some of the deep, pitch black ice that’s surrounded us, but she slides the lock over and steps out, her eyes flashing.
“You don’t need to get arrested for this. But you’ll get arrested again, right? If Remy needs it, you will, and that’s kind of okay with you?”
I look down at my spit-shined shoes and think about the night before, Remy’s crazed behavior, the neighbors I had to pay off, the family I had to reassure. He’s running wild and wounded as hell, and it’s only a matter of time before he gets his ass caught in a bear trap so big and sharp, no amount of money or apologies will manage to smooth it over for him.
“I might.”
Her frown is the last thing I want to see, and I wonder how frequent that look on her face will be with me.
“You wanted honesty.” I take her hand in mine, pull her to the door and brace it open a crack. “C’mon. I’ll let you play Twenty Questions with me, alright?”
The faintest glimmer of a smile breaks back over her face, and I go loopy at that look.
“What if it takes more than Twenty Questions to figure you out, Winch?”
Her dark hair brushes my arm as she leans with me to check up and down the hall.
“Twenty-thousand Questions then. You happy with that?”
It’s all clear, so I pull her through, past the tables with plates left for the busboys and the mismatched, half pulled-out chairs, and out into the baking sun.
“Twenty thousand?” She rubs her slightly pointed chin. “Will that be enough?”
I shrug and twine my fingers through hers. “I think I’m pretty simple. But we can find out. Wanna walk and talk?”
I’m edgy, nervous and a little excited to try and pull this off. I want her. I’ve never wanted anything so much, and I like a fight, a challenge. Maybe I can do this, keep her, let her know it all and still manage to win her over.
“Sure.” She nestles close to me despite how damn hot it is, and I think about the long litany of ‘fucks’ I listed outside the bathroom. Maybe they were all premature. She clears her throat.
“First question: when do you plan to stop taking care of Remy so you can start your own life?”
And maybe those ‘fucks’ were as warranted as I initially thought.
I watch the cracks in the sidewalk as she practically skips by my side, waiting to see if I can pass this test. It was shitty of her to start with a trick question, but I still need to answer and do it honestly.
“I’m gonna have a life and take care of Remy until he’s back on his feet.”
I wish I had my cigs, but I’ve been cutting back since Mama found a pack in my bedroom and went on a screaming tirade about lung cancer and my Great Uncle Pepe and his voicebox.
“I do work, Evan. It’s for my family, but I don’t just get handed a pile of money for sharing my dad’s last name. I work long, crazy hours, and I get fair money for what I do.”
“If you didn’t do what you do for your family, what would you want to do? For yourself?”
A little bit of a breeze comes rushing down the street and lifts the hair off the back of her neck, exposing skin that’s glistening with sweat.
I direct her around another uneven break in the concrete, using any excuse to drag her closer and keep my hands on the warmth of her skin.
“If I didn’t work for my family?”
I watch two guys jog down the street in matching lime green spandex outfits. A group of college girls in flowery skirts with big sunglasses and shiny hair walks by and giggles. The breeze whips through again and flags clang on their flagpoles. I’m trying to answer these questions like I’m playing a game of chess, but my head is buzzing with the crowd of all these other things I see and hear.
I wind up just answering, giving this random answer that may not be totally accurate, but it’s definitely totally true.
“I don’t know. I like to work with my hands. Maybe stonework?”
Evan tilts her head and swishes all her hair over one shoulder, leaving the long, perfect line of her neck exposed.
“Stonework?”
She has the tiniest bit of an overbite, and it’s more noticeable when she’s trying not to laugh.
“You making fun of my dreams?”
I rub my thumb over the ridges of her knuckles, still being careful, but optimistic. This girl likes me. I can do this.
She squeezes my hand. “Nope. It just sounds really…”
She trails off and chews on her bottom lip, this time I’m sure to keep from laughing.
“What?” I bump my shoulder to hers gently. “Come on. I know you’re laughing at me. My feelings are already hurt. You might as well tell me the joke.”
“Stone work is, like, a really stereotypical mafia job.” She tenses and relaxes her hand in mine, because we’ve come to another tipping point.
“Well, since I’m not in the mafia, I guess that little detail never occurred to me.”
I drop her hand and wrap my arm around her shoulders instead, loving the way she fits nestled against my body like she was custom designed for me.
“Are you going to tell me why?”
She leads me off the curb without even checking for traffic, and we run to the nearest square, where she flops on a bench and I follow, collecting her against my side again.
“Why st
onework?” I clarify.
She nods and I pull her tight to me, gather her legs over my lap and glare at the old couple who click their tongues at us as they dodder by. I lay my hands on the skin right above her knee, where they started this morning, in her grandparents’ damn foyer. This time I keep them put and explain what I’ve never uttered out loud to anyone in my life.
“The job I do now? For my family?” She sits a little straighter, out of my hold, but I fold her back near me. She looks down at the glossy blue polish on her nails and waits. “The job I do is keeping the peace. It’s lots of talking, arguing, finessing. I talk all day. I talk until I’m sick to death of the sound of my own voice. And I talk so much bullshit, I hardly ever go to bed without a couple aspirin and a shot of Jack.”
She tips her dark, cat eye-sunglasses down and purses her lips. “That doesn’t sound good.”
I can see like an x-ray that she’s biting her tongue in her mouth, not saying more about it, even though she really wants to. Instead she tumbles to the next question.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve done?”
I take a breath so deep, it feels like it starts at the soles of my feet and just works its way up to my addled brain. My fingers drum on her tanned skin.
“Can I ask you a question about your question?”
She wiggles her toes in her sandals. “Sure.” Her knees rock back and forth slowly, a totally opposite rhythm from my rapidly tapping fingers.
“Do you want to know the worst thing I’ve ever done from a legal standpoint? Like the worst thing I’ve done if all the stick-up-their-ass do-gooders had a vote? Or the thing I think is the worst, according to my conscience?”
I watch her eyes stretch wide and her mouth work into a perfect o-shape.
“Both.” Her answer is greedy, but her face looks nervous, like she knows she’s going to regret having asked once I tell her.
The sun is high up, but the only light hitting us is the speckled, diffused stuff breaking through the dense, dark greenery of the trees in the park. Even in the shade, the heat sticks to us, making our clothes damp with sweat. I want to ask her to leave, but there’s nowhere to go right now.
The apartment I rented for myself got co-opted by some second cousin who just moved over from Hungary with a heavily pregnant wife, two little kids, no money, and less skills. He needed it more than I did, so I went back to my old set of rooms at my parents’ house, and they’re out of the question for me and Evan.
“Worst thing from society’s viewpoint,” I begin, and her attention is rapt. She even leans forward a little. “I broke a guy’s femur.”
She pulls her hands back and curls them into each other.
“On purpose,” I add. Then I take it a step further, “And I wish…I really wish I’d broken his other femur while I was at it.”
Her hands fly up to her mouth, and she gasps the question from behind her fingers. “What did he do?”
“Distributed child porn.” The horror in her eyes settles my conscience, not that even Evan’s disapproval would make me feel bad about what I’d done. “I found out because I do sweeps of the company computers for security breech stuff. My father brought him in for some, uh, accounting things.”
Since I was mid-story about breaking a guy’s fucking femur, it occurred to me that adding in the detail that my family hired the guy to cook the books probably wouldn’t matter. Still.
“He was damn good at his job. Damn smart with computers. It took months before anything came up. Then I saw a bunch of it, and I swear to God right now, Evan, that asshole is lucky all I broke was his femur, because I have never felt more justified about beating the shit out of anyone before.”
She takes one hand down from her mouth and puts it back in mine. “Okay. That actually makes perfect sense to me. What is your personal worst?”
I squeeze her knee and avoid her eyes for a minute, because here’s another story buried in the Shut the Fuck Up, Winchester Vault.
“I shot a horse.”
“You shot a horse?” The tone of voice she uses is more confused than accusatory, which makes it easier to go ahead and get it out.
“I had to hang out with these assholes my father was doing business with, and they were always out in the wild, hunting and fishing. One day we were tracking deer. I didn’t love being around a bunch of jackholes I barely knew anyway, and every one of them was armed to the teeth with every weapon you could imagine. Anyway, they wanted me to bag a deer, and I was scared shitless. Just wanted the day to be over with. I saw this brown shape running, and, I swear to you, I was trying to miss. I’m not really into the whole hunter thing. But I guess I was a better shot than I thought. Or worse. Anyway, I hit it. But it wasn’t a deer.”
She grips the back of the bench so hard little flecks of old paint cake off.
“You killed a horse?”
The memory of it is a bitter bite at the back of my throat.
“Everybody thought it was hilarious. The guy who owned the horse said something about meaning to put it down for a while anyway cause it was old and crazy. I had to laugh along, because that’s my job. That’s who I am. But I killed a fucking horse, and, I don’t know, I wanted to feel shitty about it.”
She bites her lower lip and something in her eyes drives my next point home.
“I realized how sick I was of hanging out with people who didn’t think it was fucked up that this horse got killed and that we should maybe, I don’t know. Maybe…”
“Be sad. Just be sad that something running and alive the minute before was suddenly gone.” Evan stops peeling chipping paint and puts her hand on my cheek, her fingers so damn soft on my face. “That’s sad. To always have to put on a show. To always have to pretend. Don’t you get really sick of it? Like sick enough to just want out?”
“Yeah. I do. But everyone gets sick of what they have to do sometimes. That’s life, right?”
I close my eyes and just focus on the feel her hand, let its realness be all I focus on for a minute. I feel good. I feel happy. I feel like I don’t have to put on a show with her.
The sun is intensely hot. I unbutton the top button of my shirt and think about the beach. I haven’t gone to the beach with a couple beers and the whole day spread in front of me in so long, I can’t even remember the last time.
And then I think about Evan in a bikini. She’s always got these cute ass outfits on, so I’m willing to bet her bikini is tiny and hot as hell.
“You wanna go to the beach today?” I ask, and Evan’s whole face brightens to the point where it would be easy to forget about the sun, no matter how hot it blazes.
“Do you have a bathing suit with you?”
She reaches up and unbuttons the next button on my shirt, then one more.
“I don’t even know if I still own one.” I slide a finger along the golden-tan of her shoulder and down to the point of her elbow. “I bet you have a couple.”
“Of course.” She bats those sexy long eyelashes. “All of them itsy bitsy.”
“So.” I don’t want to ruin where this is going, but we’ve been flipping and flopping since this morning and I want to know which direction we’re taking now. “You were pissed about what I do and my family, and I get that. But, is it just that you seriously love the beach, or are you going on this date because you and me make sense somehow?”
She straightens up and takes a deep breath, squints her eyes at me, wrinkles her nose, and shakes her head, slowly, side to side.
“You…” She pulls her shoulders up and squeezes her eyes closed. “You make me crazy, okay? And I think what we’re doing might be stupid. Correction: what we’re doing is stupid. I don’t want to get in a relationship with someone who’s going to break my heart. But I can’t stay away from you, Winch. I want you. So much.”
I lean my forehead on hers and curl my hands around her shoulders, resisting the urge to jump up and scream to every random person walking by, “Hey! This girl is mine! This girl wants to be with
me!”
I hug her tight and smell her shiny hair, sweet with the scent of wildflowers.
“I will never break your heart. I will never hurt you. I might fuck up, I might not be perfect, but I’ll never hurt you, Evan. You have my word.”
No man in my family gives his word lightly, so, whether or not Evan trusts what I just said, I’ve made a vow as a Youngblood, and that’s not something I can just go back on.
“So, we can just be a normal couple on a date going to the beach today?” Evan asks.
I nod and kiss her neck, lick the salty warm place where her pulse is beating hard.
“Yeah.” I say, running my hands up and down her back.
“And you’ll be in half a suit, and I’ll be in a tiny bikini?”
She rubs her nose on mine, some cute little Eskimo-kiss thing so adorable, I never would have expected it from someone as sexy as Evan.
“Yeah.” This time it’s hard for me to get the word out.
She hops off the bench and grabs my hand, pulling me up and dancing a quick little jig like the one she did just for me in her room. We head back through the park, across the street, into my car, and get back to her house. She runs inside while I wait, my hands gripped on the steering wheel, and my heart pounds like I’m about to have an attack.
Or I think my heart is racing heart-attack fast.
Then I see her rush back down the stairs, and the only hint I get about what that bikini looks like is the two tiny red strings that go over her collarbones and tie behind all that shiny dark hair.
And as if my heart isn’t already pounding out of my chest, my brain fast-forwards to the beach and slow motions through Evan peeling off that tiny black coverup, running down the sand, jumping in the water, tanned skin wet and shiny, tiny bikini barely covering her curves, and my mouth dries out.
I get out and open the passenger side door for her, catching her against my body just before she slips in. “You’re torturing me, you know that?”
“The beach is not torture.” She leans up on her toes and presses her lips to the side of my mouth. “It’s fun.”
“Sand whipping everywhere. No escape from the sun. Sharks. Sounds like torture to me.” I smile as her lips move across my jaw and to my ear.
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