Calling His Bluff

by Amy Jo Cousins

  There was nothing else he could say to her. He waited for her last words before she walked out the door.

  There weren’t any.

  Sarah turned her back on him and left, leaving the door wide open to the cold rain that still fell outside. He leaned against the door after shoving it closed and punched his fist into the steel sheet. The low thunk of his blow echoed emptily in the silent room.

  The sound of the buzzer going off over his head made him jump. He pulled on the heavy door, heart thumping.

  Please, let it be Sarah.

  The long-haired teenager on his doorstep reeked of pot and was balancing a flat box on one hand.

  “I checked the address three times, dude. Please tell me you ordered a pizza.”

  Chapter Twelve

  This wasn’t the kind of thing you could share with a brother. Not unless your intention was to get someone kneecapped with a baseball bat.

  But she’d never in her life been so glad to have sisters.

  After three miserable days of curling up on the sofa in a warm blanket and watching crappy movies with car chases and explosions and no love story for miles while eating can after can of sour cream and onion Pringles and fending off worried phone calls from her boss, who was convinced that she must be near death after taking sick days for the first time ever, she gave in and called her sisters.

  The humiliation of explaining exactly how closely her love life resembled a National Enquirer cover story was conquered by the need to vent some outrage—make that rage period—over J.D. and his manipulative, lying ass. Since she didn’t actually want him dead, no matter what a bastard he was, she kept her brother in the dark.

  Like, spelunking a mile underground and your headlamp burns out dark.

  But her sisters. Her sisters were exactly what she needed. Smart, tough, funny women who were totally on her side, and yet could be trusted not to jump on the Violence Express speeding straight to Beat Up My Boyfriend City.

  Maxie had been her first call, on the theory that her married sisters would be incapable of keeping a secret like this from their husbands. And sooner or later one of the guys would tell Tyler, if only to beef up their vigilante party when they set out to murder J.D.

  Her baby sister was currently rummaging through her closet, hangers rattling, random winter scarves and hats bouncing out onto the hardwood floor behind her.

  “And I swear to God, I think he said it was my fault! Because I wasn’t understanding or…or…or sympathetic enough when I woke up and first thought we’d had a quickie wedding I didn’t remember.” She was pacing the floor in her living room, doing laps around the coffee table, still wrapped in the blanket. Her going-on-three-days pajamas didn’t smell so good.

  Come to think of it, she didn’t smell so good in general.

  Focus. “Because that would have been a pretty good time to say something like, ‘No, Sarah, you lush, we didn’t get married last night, but thanks for the look of horror’ instead of ‘Don’t you remember, baby?’”

  “Do you still have Dad’s old golf clubs in here?” Maxie’s voice was muffled. Was she actually buried in the coats?

  “What? I don’t know. Can you come out of the closet and talk about me please?” Someone had told her in veterinary school that even animal doctors networked on the golf course, so she’d dug out her father’s old set of clubs from her mother’s basement years ago. That was almost a decade ago now, and she’d never actually played a round. God only knew why Maxie wanted them. Some new indie play maybe?

  A pale hand, middle finger raised, was thrust out the door. But Maxie’s attempt to enter Narnia through the back of the wardrobe didn’t slow her down for a minute.

  “Let me clarify. Was this before or after the smokin’ hot sex?”

  Talking about the sex was not allowed. It had only been three days and she was already making herself crazy with her inability to stop thinking about it. The weight of J.D.’s arm draped heavily over her waist in bed. The slide of his long fingers into her hair and up the back of her skull as he pulled her in for a long, slow kiss. Running her hands over the hard, thick length of him beneath the denim of his jeans until he growled and tugged her body up against him.

  Sarah blinked and found herself standing still in the middle of the room, staring at exactly nothing.

  New rule: Thinking about the sex wasn’t allowed, either.

  She shook her head and felt her brains rattle. Focus. Right.

  “Did you hear the part about where ex threatened to contest their divorce and for ten minutes I thought I might be married to a bigamist? That was fun.”

  Maxie emerged from the depths, Laura Ingalls Wilder pigtails in disarray, pink gingham-check dress twisted around her, with what looked like a five iron in one hand.

  “Oh, I heard, all right.” She looked like a very scary and very grim square dancer. “He lied his ass off, scared you, humiliated you, made you fall in love with him and broke your heart.” She paused, and if anything, her eyes slitted even tighter. “He’s a dead man.”

  She whipped the golf club through the air like a baseball bat. It made a whooshing sound.

  Apparently she was taking practice swings for J.D.’s decapitation.

  For someone who didn’t participate in sports unless they were written into a play or took place on a stage, Maxie looked like she could hit it out of the park if someone would only pitch her a fastball.

  “Jesus, Maxie,” she said, almost laughing, which had become so unfamiliar it actually felt awkward. “Step away from the weapons.”

  Her sister winged one dark brow higher. “You think I’m kidding? Remember when that kid was picking on you in junior high?” Maxie, two years younger than quiet, thirteen-year-old Sarah, had walked right up to Josh Palmer and punched him in the nose, shouting, “Leave my sister alone!” Years later, Sarah found out that J.D. and her brother had heard about it and cornered the kid after school one day, the big men of high school, and threatened to come after him if he so much as looked at her funny again. Sarah felt a flush rising to her cheeks. She hoped Maxie couldn’t tell how every frigging thought led her back to J.D.

  No worries. Her sister was still reliving her sixth grade triumph, a fierce light shining in her eyes. Maxie licked her lips like a cat.

  “He won’t know what hit him.”

  “Hit him? Oh, for crying out loud. This was why I didn’t call our brother. You can’t clobber him with a golf club, Maxie.”

  “Fine. I won’t hit him.” She slapped the club against her palm as she turned for the door. “But I’m gonna find his car and smash every last window. Even those stupid little triangle ones on the side, in back.”

  “Maxie!” Jeez. She’d just wanted a general bitch session. Not this over-the-top, hyperbolic reaction. Obviously, she shouldn’t have called the sister who was, quite literally, the drama queen. Even if Maxie did take offstage roles more frequently than onstage ones these days. “Yes, it was the worst practical joke in the history of crappy ways to make people feel stupid.” She took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out. “But it’s not like anything was hurt other than my pride.”

  Maxie dropped the golf club and ran over to her on tiptoes. Surprisingly strong arms snaked around her shoulders, pulling her in for a tight hug.

  With a sniff, Maxie pushed her back, still holding her by the shoulders. Her lower lip trembled.

  “He broke my sister’s heart.”

  “Oh, kiddo.” She did love her baby sis. Enough to admit for the first time since she’d walked out of J.D.’s apartment what she knew was the truth. “That one was all me.” She reeled in her sister and rocked her in middle of the empty room like she wanted to rock her own wounded self.

  “It was mine to break,” she whispered into Maxie’s hair and heard the truth in her own words. She had no one to blame but herself. Flying to Vegas on a whim with her high school crush, secretly hoping he’d realize what he’d missed out on all those years ago? Who was she kidding?

 
; She’d jumped in headfirst and grabbed at the fantasy with both hands. If J.D. had spun her a tall tale to make up for her casual dismissal of him, and she’d admit that, too—she’d thought of him as a bad boy teenager, not taking him seriously as an adult until it was too late—then she’d certainly sat at his knee and listened, all ears, to her favorite fairy tale.

  She knew better.

  Any story that started with “Once upon a time” was never going to end with “Happily ever after” anywhere except in storybooks.

  And maybe Vegas.

  Unfortunately, she had simply ignored the truths she knew perfectly well. The only real thing she’d brought home with her to Chicago was an expensive cocktail dress.

  After a while, she gave Maxie a pat and pushed her out the door, hanging on to the five iron and promising to call in a few days. Time to stop wallowing. She’d simply take the next in a series of seemingly thousands of deep breaths and move on. She’d been hurt. She’d get over it. But the anger and the rage had washed out of her like an ebb tide leaving the shore.

  It worked great in theory. For about twelve hours.

  When she woke up with the sun rising over rooftops the next morning, she was still pissed. Apparently the venting process needed a little more work before it could really be considered complete.

  She gave it a valiant effort, calling first Addy and then Grace, looking for a blank wall to bounce her mad against. But each time she tried, she ended up spending most of the conversation defending J.D., the dirty rat. Somehow she was spending all her time explaining how he wasn’t such a bad guy.

  She had practically stalked him, for god’s sake. Showing up at his place with wine. Hopping onto the next flight to Sin City with him. Besides, if they wanted to talk blame here, it was her own family members who had set her up in the first place, sending her over to J.D.’s loft with a story about a sick cat. How could they not know she was going to fall for the guy who answered that door when she banged on it? They really should have seen that one coming.

  There was plenty of blame to go around.

  But it seemed that for her sisters, J.D. was simply the last straw. He was the one guy they couldn’t forgive, if only because so many other jerks had screwed her over in the past.

  She was the first to admit that he capped a long run of terrible men for her. But while the other men had been careless with her feelings, she couldn’t honestly lay that charge at J.D.’s feet. What he’d done had been wrong and she didn’t think she’d ever forget the gut-wrenching moment of realizing how very deeply she’d fooled herself. Even so, she couldn’t accuse him of carelessness. He’d cared too much, perhaps, about what she thought of him. About what everyone in their family thought of him. Enough to be hurt by her and by them. But she’d trusted him because she knew she could.

  J.D. would always have looked out for her in the end.

  The boy with no home and the girl who sat quietly in that corner of hers would always be all right with each other.

  And she guessed it was true. If you made someone repeat something seven or eight thousand times, you really could brainwash them into believing it. Because, sure enough, after several days of explaining to everyone she knew that whatever had happened between her and J.D., they’d done it to each other, she’d truly come to believe it. And when the sun rose over the rooftops one morning, she wasn’t mad anymore.

  Sad, she was still working on.

  Not until the week before their mother’s surprise birthday party did she find out from her brother that J.D. definitely wasn’t coming back to Chicago anytime soon. He’d flown to California the day after she’d left him, dropping his keys off at the bar after informing Tyler that he would kill him if he fucked up with the two surviving kittens.

  “So he’s back with Lana?” She hoped her question sounded casual as she twisted from side to side on one of the stools at the bar in her brother’s first pub. He might step out to visit his other two properties or any one of the establishments managed by Grace’s restaurant group, but he always returned to the original Tyler’s.

  Based on the glance he cut her as he waited for a Guinness to settle before finishing the pour, her nonchalant tone wasn’t fooling anyone. Her brother might not know exactly what had gone down—J.D. obviously hadn’t told him and she sure as shit wasn’t going to—but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that his sister had pretty much moved in with his best friend at one point and the fact that two kittens and Mama Cat hadn’t been left with said best friend’s somewhat live-in veterinarian girlfriend had to be an obvious red flag. Even before her blatant fishing expedition.

  “Don’t ask me,” he said. His eyebrows said, WTF? How do you not know more about this than I do?

  She ducked her chin and looked up at him, trying to appear pathetic enough for him to take pity on her.

  Not too much of a stretch, probably.

  He slid the now-full pint down the bar to a regular and heaved a giant, sarcastic sigh. “I don’t think they’re back together, no. He just said that his business in Cali might take a while and he needed me to see to the cats. Speaking of which…”

  “On it. I’ll pick them up on my way home.” She drew her finger through the condensation puddling on the varnished wood beneath her pint glass. It was strange to realize that the thoughts in her head must have marched in lock step with J.D.’s at some point. Neither of them had told her brother a thing. She wondered if J.D. thought of her in moments like this, like she thought of him. She wished she could at least say to him, “It’s okay. It’s over and I’m sad, but it’s okay.”

  She watched herself draw wet hearts on the bar. It didn’t take much to make a grown woman revert right back to feeling like a high school student.

  Tyler spotted what she was doing and snorted. A second later his hand smacked down a stack of beverage napkins right in the middle of her masterpiece.

  “Save yourself the drama.” She opened her mouth, ready to offer some kind of explanation, if not the full story. He thrust one hand at her, palm out, and stared off into the distance over her head. “No. Absolutely no way. I can only talk about your sex life once, and J.D. got to me first. Go do the girl talk thing with a girl. Please.”

  She wrinkled up her nose at him, deciding to cut her favorite, and only, brother some slack.

  “Or just call him. Tell him you want to talk to him when he gets back.” He leaned his elbows on the bar and reached out to tug on the ends of her straight hair. “Whatever it is, you can work it out, Sarah Bearah.”

  She didn’t look at him. Just shook her head.

  J.D. wasn’t coming back.

  “All I know is that I’ve never heard J.D. talk about anyone the way he’s always talked about you. And that goes back to when we were kids. What’s between the two of you is special.” He paused. “Just talk to him when he gets back, okay?”

  Silence hung on a still, golden thread between them for a moment. Then Tyler whipped the bar towel off his waistband and started rubbing vigorous circles into the spotless bar.

  “Fuck. You just turned me into a girl.”

  Standing up on the footrest of her bar stool, she leaned across the shiny expanse of rich dark wood and pressed a kiss to her brother’s cheek. So the one sibling she’d been ducking this entire time turned out to be the one who could give her what she needed. Not a sounding board for her anger, but the gently optimistic suggestion that it could still all work out.

  “Yeah, but you’re my best girl,” she said and mustered up a cheerful little wink for him.

  Then she had to go home and get into bed and maybe cry just a little.

  Because her brother could repeat the words “when he gets back” all he wanted, but it didn’t change the facts. He might not be with Lana, but the guy she’d fallen for wasn’t coming back, they weren’t going to talk about it and this was how it was going to work out.

  * * *

  Knowing that J.D. was gone left an open ache in her heart, but it made things simpler, too. S
he strung his ring on a chain and wore it around her neck because she was a total fool, but she stopped wondering if he was going to call or drop by her place. She wasn’t skittish with nerves at the idea of walking into Tyler’s pub. She brought home Mama Cat and the kittens and let them curl up in her laundry basket on top of a week’s worth of dirty clothes that she would surely appreciate being able to wash and wear again some day. Then she invited her niece and nephew over for dinner one night because they “miss da kitties” and she hadn’t even known that they’d visited J.D.’s apartment. After that she harassed her siblings until they told her no, she wasn’t a slacker, but yes, they could still use help with the party and could she be the one to get their mother to the pub on Saturday night without blowing the surprise?

  After a couple of weeks of struggling to get out of bed in the morning while masquerading as an actual human being for the rest of the world, getting a sixty-year-old woman to show up in a bar at eight o’clock on a Saturday night seemed like a manageable challenge.

  Sarah didn’t believe in over-complicating matters. She told her mother that she wanted to take her out for a one-on-one dinner before the whole family got wrapped up in birthday excitement. She said she’d been feeling sort of blue lately and a little Mom time was just the thing to cheer her up.

  It certainly had the ring of truth to it.

  Crap.

  As soon as that thought floated through her brain, Sarah decided she’d had quite enough of the worn-out doormat thing. Seriously. Even she couldn’t take any more of her own misery.

  Done with the mad. Check.

  What about the sad? Hell, yes.

  She couldn’t shut it off like a light switch, although that was a superhero power she would pay serious cash to have, but she could choose to set those feelings aside and remember all the things she quite liked about her life—the career she loved, guinea pig–devouring pythons and vomiting cats aside, her fabulous and supportive family, and her darkly humorous certainty that the next guy absolutely had to be a better choice than the ones who’d come before.