by Tessa Bailey
Something she never thought she’d say and actually mean, but in this case, home was the lesser of two evils. Maybe not right this second. But the deeper Aaron swam into her father’s end of the pool, the more corrupt he would become. And she’d been distancing herself from those who sought to control or manipulate far too long to take another chance. That separation guaranteed she wouldn’t make another mistake by trusting the wrong people, believing truths that were nothing more than falsehoods.
When they finally turned down the road leading to her family home’s endless driveway, Grace unhooked her seatbelt. “You can let me out here.”
“What?” His incredulity was thicker than the night’s dark edges. “You think I’m going to pull over and let you out on the side of the road?”
“You can’t very well pull into my driveway, can you?”
“No. I’d thought of that.” He sounded grave. “There’s a dirt turnoff before your driveway—I almost turned down it by accident on the way over. I’m assuming it leads to the woods near the guest house. Close enough that I can walk you.”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re making me real nervous over here, Grace.” The turnoff approached, illuminated by the Suburban’s yellow-tinged headlights, and Aaron took it, traveling over the bumpy, familiar terrain Grace had only ever gone over on foot. It did nothing to calm the nerves jangling in her belly. “Did I…Jesus, did I hurt you?” He stamped his foot down on the break, sending them sliding through mud and snow before the vehicle groaned to an abrupt stop. “Did I?”
Confusion flashed like jagged lightning, unwanted at first, but it snapped Grace out of the paralyzed shock of learning Aaron’s political specialty. What he would be doing for months to come. How it was the one thing she couldn’t get past. Ever. “No, you didn’t hurt me.” Her hands were unsteady as she reached down to button her coat, all the way up to her neck. “But you were right before. We don’t make sense. You said I shouldn’t come within ten feet of you…and I won’t anymore. I don’t want to.”
Grace only looked over long enough to glimpse Aaron’s face turning white before she shoved open the creaking door and jumped out. In a million years, she never expected him to follow. Why would he? Since they’d met, he’d done nothing but explain what made them different, remind her they shouldn’t be in each other’s orbits. So when she heard his feet hit the ground, it startled her enough to spin around. Enough to go still and watch him advance like a wary hunter coming toward a spooked deer. Is that what she looked like?
“Just when I thought I was getting used to your curveballs, huh?” The stilted delivery of his joke—and the stiffness in his shoulders—made it fall flat. “I’m fucking lost here, Grace.”
“Why?” Genuine curiosity was the only thing keeping her from turning tail and losing Aaron even more. That’s what she told herself. It wasn’t the fact that he looked totally bewildered and something about the utter lack of his usual confidence made her chest ache. “Why are you lost? I’m finally agreeing with you.”
“I don’t have to like it,” he said, almost to himself. “I need to know what I missed. You were fine one minute—”
“No. You never thought I was fine. Everything you’ve said? I’ve been listening.” She took in a pull of cold night air. “You think I don’t know my own mind, and if you knew…if you knew how much I resent the insinuation that I can’t think for myself, you would have thought twice.” Grace tried to rein in the accusation dying to be issued—accusing didn’t fix anything—but it knocked free all the same. “Maybe you didn’t want me to know my own mind, so you could make it up for me.”
Aaron drew up short. “Is this about my job?”
“Yes,” she whispered, squaring her shoulders in the face of his astonishment. “Partly. I’m so confused by you. I see one thing—I see and see it—and then it vanishes. And it makes me doubt my own judgment. I’ve doubted my judgment around someone like you before and it ended badly.”
“Yeah. Someone like me.” Out of everything she’d said, those three words seemed to have the largest impact. They paled his face, made the lines around his mouth more prominent. “Just like I’ve been telling you from the beginning, right?”
Grace lifted her hands and let them drop. “Yes.”
For long moments, all he did was stare at her, the soft puffs of falling snow sounding at their feet. “But it seemed like you weren’t believing it…when I said there was no good in me. Or you didn’t want to.” He made the statement almost to himself, but they lanced her nonetheless. “You don’t even have some doubt left?”
“Stop.” Stop what? She had no idea. Stop making her question the decision to put distance between them, stop looking so torn up, stop making her throat burn. In an attempt to forcibly remove any temptation to stay around Aaron in the hopes of seeing beneath his exterior, Grace reached up and yanked all four ribbons out of her hair, approaching Aaron just enough to dump them into his palm. “I know you’ll be working with my father, and I promise I won’t jeopardize that, but we can’t be alone together anymore.”
Aaron’s gaze was riveted by the shredded red fabric in his hand. “How will I know you’re all right?”
She started to back away. Before she did the exact opposite and took a flying leap into his arms. Why did he insist on choosing now to be so silent and still? “I’m always all right. I make myself all right.”
The intensity of his answering look nearly buckled Grace’s knees, but she forced herself onto the path leading home, counting steps to distract herself. She didn’t hear him start the Suburban until five minutes later, when she reached her back door.
Chapter Nine
Aaron entered the cabin he shared with Belmont, a hand already extended toward the bottle of whiskey he kept on the nightstand. His fucking head was pounding like a giant demanding entry to a castle—the inside of his esophagus felt like it’d been scrubbed with bashed-up asphalt. The drive home seemed like it had taken place ten years ago, not one single turn or stoplight recalled.
Ridiculous. The whole situation was so stupid, he felt a laugh form in his throat. Someone had to be playing an elaborate trick on him. Right? The kind of trick that made his fists shake with their need to plow through a window? Or rip out his hair? Only…no. No one in this world knew him well enough to crawl up inside his psyche and find something to wreck his head like this. Not when Aaron himself hadn’t even been aware of the apparent…weakness.
That is what he was dealing with. A weakness. Something about Grace—unbelievable that a mental recitation of her name made breathing awkward—forced him to reexamine himself and his business, and that was a dangerous idea. You plowed forward, making calls that moved you to the next level. You took steps to ensure you couldn’t get burned. And you sure as hell didn’t question those tactics or look past the surface to determine what they meant about you. As a person.
Aaron registered Belmont’s presence in the room, but didn’t acknowledge his brother in any way. Taking the time to throw an insult across the room would mean delaying his trip to the bottom of the whiskey bottle, and he would avoid distractions at all costs. But that first slide of fire down his throat didn’t deliver the liquid salvation he’d been hoping for. Instead, he remembered the maze of silence that had descended in the Suburban after he’d told Grace about his role with the campaign, how she had locked up, that haunted look replacing the joy in her eyes. When he remembered how flippant he’d sounded about something that obviously resonated with her, his stomach threatened to lose his first draw of liquor.
What was it? What had happened to her? The not knowing was goddamn insufferable. That’s what it was. Because he dealt in information. He didn’t like living in the dark about anything. Not just Grace.
Right. Right, you giant, fantastic, fucking liar.
“Did you feel it?” Aaron didn’t even realize he’d decided to speak until his voice broke the cabin’s thick silence. “When we pulled up at the campgrounds. Did you fe
el that prickle on the back of your neck? Should have left then.”
Great. He’d lost his mind. Maybe he fit right in with the Clarksons after all.
Belmont hadn’t moved from his epic brooding session, sitting against the far wall in a chair, arms crossed. “Been feeling it most of the trip.”
Aaron’s head jerked up when his brother actually answered one of his questions. Possibly for the first time since they’d left California. It figured that the first thing out of Aaron’s mouth to make zero sense got the response. “Yeah? Well, I don’t believe in voodoo. I don’t feel prickles. And I don’t dance in fields with hippie girls.”
The chair creaked as Belmont leaned forward, clasping both hands between his knees, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Didn’t mean her to run into me like that.” He cleared his throat, but his voice still contained the usual amount of rust when he spoke again. “She didn’t let me get an apology together.”
“She’s—” Aaron stopped, angry at himself for feeling such a pressing need to reassure someone who hadn’t given enough of a shit to speak with him more than a few times over the last decade. “I don’t know if she’s okay,” he said instead, wishing the honesty didn’t feel so good. “I won’t know anymore. When I met her, I didn’t realize I’d be working for her father. And it doesn’t matter. Okay? It doesn’t matter because she finally figured me out. She saw me.”
Liquid sloshed in the glass bottle as Aaron tipped it back, hoping this time when the burn hit his belly, he would stop seeing how beautiful Grace had looked with snow in her hair, eyes lit up toward the sky. You feel it, too? You feel the good we did? Had he? Maybe for a second? He sure as shit wasn’t feeling it now.
“What did she see?” Belmont asked. It took Aaron several beats to gather a vague memory of what they’d been talking about, and oddly, his brother seemed to realize his head was somewhere else. Seemed to understand the affliction, even if he was clearly uncomfortable repeating himself. Talking at all, probably. “You said she saw you. What did she see?”
This was the danger zone. Like lying down on an operating table and having his ribs pried open without the benefit of sedation. But miracle of miracles, Belmont was actually conversing with him, and maybe tomorrow he would refuse to admit it, but talking about Grace was making the sudden separation from her easier. When he woke in the a.m., perhaps the whole ordeal would be off his chest, and he could get back to business. “She saw a manipulator. That’s what you see, too. I see it when I look in the mirror. I’m good at it. And I own it. I’m not ashamed of it.”
Belmont lifted an eyebrow, as if to say, If you say so.
Aaron pushed to his feet with a curse, taking another long swig of liquor. “You know how freeing it is? Admitting something most people would hide from or make excuses for?” His declarations rang hollow, giving him pause. He’d always thought the first time he’d made those statements out loud, they’d be rife with conviction. Hoping to bolster himself with more whiskey, he brought the bottle to his mouth, but it dropped to his side before a drop passed his lips. “Something bad happened to her. She won’t tell me what. But I remind her of it.” His laughter scattered about the cabin. “What can I possibly do about that, right? Fuck all, is what. I just have to move forward.”
Something about what Aaron had said drew Belmont’s full attention. He leaned back in his chair, brow furrowed in what most people would interpret as a scowl, but Aaron knew was just his brother’s resting asshole face.
If Aaron hadn’t been distracted, it would have occurred to him sooner why his mentioning Grace’s unknown tragedy interested Belmont so much. It was similar to his own experience of being trapped in the well at age eight, after wandering off during a school field trip. Four days had passed until he’d been discovered, his voice gone from shouting for help. It wasn’t until later, when he’d regained his speech, that Belmont explained he’d screamed so much in the beginning, he’d had no voice left to call out when he heard people walking past later on. For four days. Ironically, with the return of his voice, Belmont had stopped speaking unless completely necessary and brought the pattern into adulthood with him.
“Do you want to leave it like that?” Belmont rumbled. “With her thinking of something bad and coming up with you?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Aaron said. “And she wouldn’t be the only one who thought of something shitty and recalled my face. You do it, don’t you?” Now that the question was out, Aaron couldn’t take it back. Maybe it was the whiskey or dire need for a distraction, but it was out now. “I was the one who found you in the well, wasn’t I? At your worst moment, tell me you don’t think of my face staring down at you.”
Belmont’s blue eyes—so different from the golden brown ones owned by the other three Clarkson siblings—seemed to lighten. Or maybe Aaron was just remembering the bright blue sky dredged from his memory bank, how it seemed to reflect off his brother so far below, encasing his curled-up form in sunshine. “Is that what you think?” Belmont asked.
It was too much. Past and present conspiring to wreck his head. For someone who almost never shined a spotlight inward, the excessive illumination set off alarm bells. Answers were usually his best friend, but in this case, maybe even when it came to Grace, they were the enemy. Aaron propelled himself toward the bathroom door, closing himself in before another word could be exchanged. Thinking fast, he reached over and turned on the shower, before sliding down the wall to the floor and taking another long drink of whiskey.
Tonight was an anomaly. Tomorrow he would resume his purpose and ignore the bullshit trying to make its way beneath his skin. It wouldn’t succeed.
His final thought before turning off the shower and slipping into unconsciousness was of Grace dropping four red ribbons into his palm. And even as he berated himself for the wussy gesture he’d made cutting up his tie, Aaron’s hand slipped into his pants pocket to close around them, dragging them out and falling asleep with them pressed to his mouth.
When Aaron awoke to a head full of wet cement eight hours later, he stumbled to the cabin’s front door—noting Belmont’s bed was empty—hoping a breath of fresh air would calm the roiling whiskey waves in his stomach.
He was greeted by a sea of news cameras, instead.
“What is your name? State your name toward the camera, please.”
“Is it true you stole thirty thousand dollars in campaign money from Senator Pendleton and left it at a YouthAspire shelter last night?”
“Do you consider yourself a modern-day Robin Hood?”
What. The fuck.
Chapter Ten
Grace never watched the news. It wasn’t that she didn’t care what was taking place outside of her immediate world. She did. And whatever small amount of time was spent with her father—or in the vicinity of his staffers—always resulted in her being educated on world politics. The shortcomings of the current administration’s foreign policy. Cabinet changes, Main Street, Wall Street, health care. As if that wasn’t enough, when her father had made the decision to run for president, she’d been placed with tutors who’d filled in any remaining blanks, then quizzed her on everything from first ladies to first pets.
So when it came to watching television, she avoided any mention of the upcoming election like the plague. The Discovery Channel usually won her vote—especially programs about bears. Or anything about abandoned structures that had deteriorated over time. The latter made her sad—seeing places once filled with life and laughter being left to rot—so she usually only watched them when something was bothering her, but needed that extra push into a therapeutic cry.
Crying might have helped her unsettled state this morning, but she wasn’t ready to let go of the agitation just yet. Her fingers fidgeted in her hair, feeling for the ribbons she’d tugged free last night. She’d only had them in for a few hours; they shouldn’t have made themselves feel so permanent. Every time she assured herself severing ties with Aaron had been the smart move—the move that woul
d eliminate any inner conflict—she remembered his concentrated expression as he cut his tie. The way she’d opened her eyes that time as he kissed her and seen his own shut so tight. So tight. The heat of his body when he hovered close, the rasp of his clothing, his breath.
Wasn’t this what people like Aaron did, though? Create a false sense of security? Make a person feel wanted? We’re in this together. There’s no one else. If your family cared about you, they wouldn’t have sent you away for two months.
Grace slumped down onto her couch, gasping under the impact of the unexpected flashback. She’d gone years without hearing that voice, the one that used to haunt her relentlessly, long after it had been silenced. Needing to replace the lingering echo, her hand fumbled for the television remote, her intention to switch on the Discovery Channel losing momentum when Aaron’s face greeted her. No…that couldn’t be right. She was seeing him now because her thoughts had been full of him all morning. That had to be the explanation.
She reached down and pinched her arm. Along with the twinge of pain came a sinking sensation in her stomach. It was Aaron. On television, beneath the words From an earlier broadcast. She couldn’t be imagining his presence on the screen because she’d never seen him so disheveled. Stubble covered the lower half of his face, dark shadows cupping the bottoms of his eyes. His hair…if she didn’t find the situation—and her bone-liquefying reaction to his appearance—so alarming, she might have laughed. It stuck out in six angles, like he’d just come from an orgy, filled with handsy women.
For once, Grace didn’t appreciate where her imagination went. Didn’t like the idea of Aaron being fondled by a sea of hands. Really, really didn’t like it. Anxious for Aaron’s voice, needing it to banish the mental orgy taking place in her mind, Grace turned up the volume and listened.
“What is your name? State your name toward the camera, please.”
“Is it true you stole thirty thousand dollars in campaign money from Senator Pendleton and left it at a YouthAspire shelter last night?”