Lay It Down

by Cara McKenna

  She laughed softly. “Jesus. You’re such a dick.”

  “Probably. But you’re gonna miss me.”

  Her smile dissolved as her arm locked tight around his shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” Dear God . . . how on earth could she have gotten so hung up on a man in so short a time? She wanted to blame the rebound, or the sex, but she knew in her heart, it wasn’t nearly so trite or convenient as that.

  “Good,” he said again. His heavy hand stroked her hair. “’Cause I’m gonna miss you, too.”

  She wriggled a bit lower to tuck her face against his collarbone, then sighed loudly against his shirt.

  “If I weren’t hell-bent on getting you onto a plane as soon as humanly possible, I’d have liked to mess up this bed one last time,” Vince said through a yawn. “Give myself plenty of good memories to put myself to sleep with, once you’re gone.”

  “Pushy.”

  He smiled, then kissed the crown of her head, once softly, then again with a dark hum. “Yeah, I am.”

  “That’s okay. I kind of like it.” She slipped her arm around his waist. “You’re the last man I’d ever have imagined myself falling for.”

  “Guess you don’t know yourself as well as you thought,” he murmured.

  “No. No, I guess I don’t.” But as she drifted into an exhausted haze against his strong body, she couldn’t help thinking she liked this woman she was turning into.

  • • •

  A smear of uneasy dreams, a quick shower, some hasty packing, and suddenly Kim was pulling shut the passenger’s-side door of Miah’s truck as Vince woke the engine.

  They barely spoke for the first hour, their affair seeming to rush by too fast, same as the desert and mountains and brush, a hot blur. They were heading back to Elko, though no night of filthy passion awaited them in a hotel. Only good-bye.

  “I’ll still be here, like I said. Same town, same old shit.”

  Her stomach soured. She pictured Vince in Benji’s on a Friday night, the music playing, him and Casey and Miah and Raina joking around, hot-blooded girls in attendance. Vince and Kim were lovers, period, and fondness aside, there was absolutely nothing to stop him from getting his needs met with someone else, in a couple weeks or a few days, or tonight, for that matter. The only deterrent was courtesy, really, and Vince wasn’t exactly the poster boy for sexual etiquette.

  The same goes for me, she reminded herself. She was free to hook up with whomever she liked.

  But I won’t. Christ, why did she have to be such a stereotypical girl about shit like this? She could get herself in a position to sleep with some guy tomorrow, probably, but even if she went for it, she just knew a pang would twist in her gut or her heart and she’d stop, knowing it was too soon. Knowing she’d be too consumed with getting back here, resuming this mad affair. But Vince . . . How might his thinking go? Bang another girl, and even if confronted, he’d probably just shrug and say, It wasn’t special or anything. It’s different from what you and I had. Don’t take it personal. Goddamn, she wished she could operate that way. Care so little, be capable of separating sex and attachment.

  “You’re quiet over there,” Vince said.

  “Just tired. And annoyed that you’re sending me away.”

  “I think you know me well enough not to hold your breath, expecting an apology.”

  “And I’m scared, too. About what’s going to happen. Scared I’ll get sent a photo of that foreman, and that I won’t recognize him. And scared I will.”

  After a pause, “Anything else?” Shit, he could tell. It was too unfair that a man so blunt could also be so intuitive.

  The truth rushed out of her, fast and breathless, too painful to keep inside. “And I’m scared you’ll be fucking some other woman inside a week.”

  A laugh—a huff of surprise. “Jesus.”

  “Some other woman who makes a million times more sense for you than I ever could.”

  “The fuck you talking about? Since when does attraction have to make sense?”

  Kim grunted her frustration, feeling gnawed on by the insecurity.

  “Sure felt like you and I made perfect sense all those times we hooked up,” he said. “Doesn’t that count?”

  “I mean . . . somebody like Raina or whoever,” she mumbled. “Tough like that, or wild. Someone like you. Were you and her ever . . . ?”

  “Me and Raina?” He shook his head. “No, never.”

  She blinked. “Oh.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am. How come?”

  “She broke my best friend’s heart,” he said with a shrug. “Even I’m not that tacky.”

  “What about before?”

  He smiled, looking flustered, or maybe confused. “You want me to say she’s like my sister or something?”

  “I dunno . . . maybe.”

  “I love her like a sister, for sure. But I’m not gonna tell you that’s the end of it. That’d be a lie, sweetheart.”

  She fought to hide her disappointment—and failed at it, to judge by the pitying look he cast her. “Oh.”

  “But I don’t hold a torch for her. That’s the God’s honest truth. Never have. Girl like Raina could never get stuck under my skin that way. I need to feel like a woman relies on me, and she refuses to rely on anybody, now her dad’s gone.”

  “Oh,” Kim said again, not much consoled. “She just seems so much more your type, I guess.” And makes me worry I’m just a novelty.

  He reached over to give her thigh a squeeze. “Yeah, about types . . . She and I have had our whole lives to turn into something, and nothing standing in our way. But we haven’t. You and me, we had every reason not to get involved, yet you had me moaning your name inside two days. Hell, inside two hours if you count the things I got up to on my own.”

  Her cheeks burned at that, with pleasure as much as embarrassment. “I guess that’s fair.”

  “I’m not fucking some other woman anytime soon. If I did, I’d be thinking about you the whole time anyhow, and I’m old enough now to admit that feels shitty.”

  Kim didn’t know what to say, and in her silence, he went on.

  “You want to hear that this is special, whatever the fuck we’ve become this past week?”

  She pursed her lips and met his eyes. “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know what we are.” He turned back to the road. “But you’ve done what no woman has, not since I was just a stupid kid: got under my skin, like I said. Whether you’re a fever or a tattoo—fleeting or forever—I couldn’t say. I’ve never felt ‘forever’ with anyone. Couldn’t begin to guess what it’s like. But you make me crazier than I’ve ever felt for anybody. That much I know. So I’m not fucking anybody else until well after you’ve come to your senses and realized you can do way better than me. Dunno if that’ll happen the second you land or next week or next year. But I’m not dumb—I’m playing way outta my league here, scoring with you. You’ll move on first, before or after you decide you might want to come back here. So don’t waste your time worrying about me fucking other chicks.”

  Holy crap, this was romantic. Crude and inelegant, and sort of wrong and definitely not movie-worthy, but undeniably romantic in spite of it all. It made Kim’s heart light and expansive, her head dizzy. All the hard heft of jealousy, inverted.

  But still. I can’t care this much. Not this soon. And God, not now. Not when he was sending her away . . .

  A skittish part of her had to wonder, was he truly sending her away for her safety, or because his everybody-leaves-me script was a self-fulfilling deal? Would the candle she wanted him to hold for her fizzle and go out, nothing left but acrid smoke when time twisted his memories and had him thinking she’d wanted to go all along? That she’d left him on his own to pick through the mess, like those crows outside his house, and inked across his skin?

  She stole a long look at Vince’s face while he was distracted, passing a semitruck. The rising sun was bright silver behind him, edging his profile in a white hal
o. That face that had beamed so much hot mischief at her was set now. Serious. Strained.

  She’d thought she recognized something in him, that very first evening. An enemy. A familiar threat in a strange new guise, a bully finally dressed as a bully, as opposed to the respectably costumed ones she’d always known. She’d had it wrong, though. He was bossy, but not a bully. In some ways, the opposite of those men she resented—passion and humanity camouflaged in dusty denim and cracked leather.

  And Christ, she was going to miss him.

  Just as much, she was going to miss the woman he’d brought out in her. Time would tell if she stayed as she’d become, or if Vince had made those things bloom, like a flower that opened only in the desert heat. Perhaps she’d wither again under the gray northwestern sky.

  Do I love him? she wondered. She’d thought she loved Ryan. Why? Because he’d made her feel secure, filled that gap where her sense of structure had been, lost when she’d cut her father out of her life. He’d completed her in a sense. Been a foundation to support how rickety she often felt, as an individual.

  Vince offered none of that. He was pure trouble, chrome and steel rumbling beneath her at a hundred miles an hour, the reverse of the still, steady concrete that Ryan had offered to be for her. The stuff that would’ve kept her in place. Rooted, she’d thought, but in reality, tethered. Ryan had been a hand holding her back. In Vince, she had a strong, cut, tattooed arm extended, rough hand open and inviting her to join him in a life of motion and momentum, promising breathlessness, maybe the occasional crash. But excitement, undeniably.

  Now that hand was a halting palm, a pointing finger telling her to go, just as she was yearning to stay.

  Un-fucking-fair, she thought, staring at the passing landscape.

  If it weren’t her actual life possibly on the line, she’d tell him to go to hell.

  Tell him she was staying put, right where she wanted to be.

  Far too soon, they were turning off the highway at Elko, pulling into the airport. Parking, then moving toward the entrance. Toward good-bye.

  The small airport felt busy, lots of families milling around, about to head home after a last-gasp adventure before school started up.

  Kim’s own adventure was coming to an end, and just as she’d begun to love its scary pulse. Vince carried her bag for her, then waited to the side of the ticket counter as she booked the trip that would take her home.

  Christ, this was it. Farewell. And for how long, she didn’t know—if he even decided she should come back. No matter the sweet things he’d said on the drive, it felt wrong. Yet again, she was living at a man’s behest. The injustice of it would’ve burned, if she hadn’t grown numb to it so long ago.

  And if she didn’t care about this particular man so goddamn much.

  Her bag was tagged, and she headed to where Vince stood. His big hand came out to cup her shoulder. “Guess you found something.”

  She nodded. “Leaves in an hour and a half, with a stop in Salt Lake City.”

  “Good.”

  Her gaze caught on his chest, on black cotton hugging taut muscle. Jesus, she’d miss his body. His voice. His touch and his energy. Everything. “This feels wrong,” she murmured.

  “Not to me.”

  She met those hazel eyes—nearly gold in the sunshine streaming through the big windows.

  “Second you’re on that plane,” he said. “I’ll be able to breathe again. Knowing you’re safe.”

  “I won’t know you’re safe.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She took a deep breath, then said the thing that was gnawing hardest at her heart. “You know I’m only going because you’re making me. And I’m coming back. When you decide it’s safe, and if you want me to . . . I’ll come back.”

  “I wouldn’t hold anybody to that promise,” he said softly, “but you’re sweet to make it. Between you and me, though, I hope you get back to your nice clean city, find yourself a nice, clean, upstanding man. Who’s not on parole, or saddled with two or three decades’ more nursing-home duties. One who’ll make you happy.”

  She felt cold. What was this, exactly? A breakup speech? Why did it feel so precisely as though he were pushing her away?

  “You do make me happy,” she said. “And more awake and alive than any nice, clean man you think I’d fit better with.”

  He swallowed, held his tongue.

  “I’ll be back,” she added firmly. It was no promise this time but rather a hard fact. “Challenge me on that, and I might not wait for your permission.”

  “Okay.” Those four little letters were limp, so limp.

  She stood up straight. “Experience has told you I’m never coming back. Or that like your brother, I’d only ever come back if it’s a matter of life and death. But you’re wrong. I’ll come back because of you—of my own free will. And believe me when I tell you, I’m not a woman who’s had much practice with her free will.”

  He took a deep breath, looking stymied. She’d not seen him wear that expression when faced with any of the recent dangers, yet here he was suffering uncertainty. Because of her. Because of what he felt for her.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” she told him. “Just don’t act surprised when I prove you wrong. Because I’m telling you what’s going to happen, right now.”

  Finally, he cracked a smile. “I’m a big boy, Kim. I’m not going to wind up on a shrink’s couch, crying like some neurotic pussy because I think you abandoned me.”

  Only because you’d never go to a shrink.

  “You gotta go through security now so I can quit worrying about you,” he said. “And I’ve got a tough day ahead of me. So we’d better say good-bye.”

  She nodded. “Be careful, for God’s sake.”

  He reached out, held her shoulder in one hand, the back of her head with the other, studying her fondly. “You be reckless,” he said with a smirk. “Keep up all the bad work Fortuity’s done on you.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He stroked her cheek, then bent low to kiss her lips. She ached for one of those bone-melting, breath-stealing Vince Grossier kisses, but this one was brief and light, a tease. He felt so far away already as he drew back.

  What to say? I love you might feel true, but she couldn’t—

  “Go,” he said gently, and turned her by the shoulder with that pushy hand.

  “Bye,” she said, stealing a final glance.

  “Bye, Kim. See you when it’s the right time, maybe.”

  She smiled over her shoulder as she headed toward the TSA line. “Yeah, you will.”

  “Until then . . .” He held up his palms, just as he’d done at the threshold of her motel room door, the night she’d shot him down. The night they’d first met. “Till then, I’ve got these.”

  She laughed and turned away, let him have the last line. By the time she rounded a corner in the security corral, he was gone.

  She made it through after a brief investigation of her camera bag, then found a coffee and a cinnamon bun and her gate with an hour to blow before boarding.

  The heat where Vince’s palm had touched her cheek had barely cooled, and already she missed him. A thug? Probably. A criminal, frequently. A caveman at times. But so big, so comfortable in who he was, a person who knew himself inside and out. A force, larger than life. Returning to her old world was like being sentenced to dwell in a cave, now that she’d been with someone who shined so bright and hot.

  There was a TV mounted on the nearest pillar, broadcasting the morning news. Mundane local stuff—a school fund-raiser to buy a new bus, a mayoral race in Deeth. Some feel-good story about a mutt who’d found a lost child.

  “Heartwarming,” said the female anchor with a broad smile. “Also found last night—an estimated seventy thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamines. The drug bust happened outside Lime, overseen by Brush County Sheriff Chuck Tremblay. KBCN was there.”

  The anchor was replaced with footage from the previous evening—bla
ck sky in the background, strobing cruiser lights, officers in khaki milling around. A man’s deep voice-over said, “This is one of the bigger busts I’ve authorized, the past couple years. We’ve got five men in custody, and one suspect still at large.”

  The guy kept talking, but Kim suddenly couldn’t hear him for the blood rushing in her ears—the picture changed, his face centered in the frame, lit brightly against the dark scene. She knew that face—that plain, middle-aged face, biggish nose, blue eyes. She knew that voice. Remembered words this man had spoken.

  “You don’t hear Dunn talkin’ now, do you?”

  Oh fuck.

  She pulled out her phone and dialed Vince. Straight to voice mail, and he’d be on the road for the next hour or more . . . She could just imagine the device, tucked in his jacket pocket and buzzing in vain, his bomber tossed across the passenger’s seat. “Fuck.” She left a disjointed, ranty message.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Kim made a snap decision. She had her phone, purse, laptop, and camera on her. Her clothes and toiletries were tagged and heading for Portland . . . But fuck it. She’d worry about that later, same as all the shit she had at Ryan’s.

  She gathered her things and ran through the terminal, past the security zone, past the baggage claim to the rental car counter. She had her credit card on the desk before the clerk had even ended the phone call he’d been fielding.

  “I need the fastest car you’ve got.”

  Chapter 25

  The return trip from Elko had seemed about ten times longer than the drive out, Vince thought as he pulled Miah’s truck back into its spot. He felt worn out and empty and edgy, defeated, restless. In no mood to head inside and make cheerful chitchat if he ran into Don or Christine. Instead, he left the keys on the seat, mounted his R80, and headed for home.

  Fifteen minutes later, he parked behind Casey and jogged up the steps. He was nearly grateful for the headache of a day that lay ahead of him. The second he took a breath he was going to remember Kim was gone, and he was still here. Still stuck here, surrounded by old sights, new question marks.

  Casey was at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich and flipping through an old Garfield compilation that’d been kicking around their house for the past quarter century. Busy chewing, he raised a hand in greeting.