When He Saw Me

by Amelia Wilde

  “But you have time all day to cook from me. And tease me. And drive me crazy.” She gives a little sigh. “Ben, if you’re a secret trust fund baby, just tell me. You don’t have to pretend to work.”

  “I’m not pretending to work.” I narrow my eyes. “Are you pretending to work?”

  “Hell no!” Eva shouts, and it makes me laugh. But she’s serious. “I’m not faking this. This is really working. It’s working so well that...that I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

  I study the curves of her cheeks, the lines of her face. “Then why do you look like you’re about to attend someone’s funeral? Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  “Maybe not for you.”

  “See?” I pull her face toward mine and kiss her. “You’re the cryptic one. I’d bet my dinner you’re not going to tell me what that means.”

  Eva presses her lips together. “I’m willing to make a deal.”

  “I like the deal we already have.”

  “You would.”

  “What does that mean? Should we check and see how much you like it?” I reach between her legs, but she bats me away.

  “Throw me a bone, Bennett Powell. Are you really and truly a fact-checker?”

  I can’t deny her. “Yes. You saw my dashboard. But I can’t show you the individual projects, because my company contracts with government agencies.”

  Eva’s mouth drops open. “You’re a military Internet spy?”

  “No.” I laugh out loud. “I’m a fact-checker who used to be in the military. There’s nothing James Bond about it. We’re in a little bit of a lull right now while another project ramps up, which gives me more free time to spend with you.”

  “Were you getting ahead, then?”

  “Getting ahead?”

  “I saw you out here, you know. You’re sitting in front of an open window, and you were working hard all afternoon.”

  Sooner or later, I’m going to have to tell her.

  Sooner or later, we’re going to have to face this.

  “I’ll tell you more.”

  Eva waits.

  “For another thousand—”

  She jumps up from the chair with a frustrated shriek and storms for the cabin. “Fine,” she calls over her shoulder. “Be that way.”

  “Be a famous writer,” I call back.

  Eva pauses. “Fine.”

  Then the door slams behind her.

  17

  Eva

  I can’t sleep.

  Being with Bennett Powell has turned my mind on again. I’m not sure exactly when it happened—if there was a single moment when he flipped the switch—but now I can’t turn it off.

  This book is starting to infiltrate everything. Ben is starting to infiltrate everything, if I’m being honest with myself.

  After he fell asleep, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling fan whipping its blades, up there in the dark. I didn’t want to be the asshole who tugs at the blankets and makes the bed shift from side to side all night, so I turned over carefully. Left side. Right side. On my back again, considering the fan. The cabin has central air, so a fan isn’t strictly necessary, but the low hum of it is a comforting sound in the night. It didn’t matter. Ceiling fan or not, nothing felt good enough to lull me off to dreamland.

  So I got up as quietly as I could, tugged on a pair of leggings and a hoodie, and came out here, into the moonlight.

  The story wends its way through my mind, the little tendrils of action and reaction growing like vines. I can see them now, the throughways into the next chapters. They get clearer all the time, like a ship drawing close to shore out of the fog.

  I should use that metaphor in my book. It’s a good one.

  I think of that ship, and then my main character, Chloe, and all the trouble she’s in.

  There’s a blanket on the couch in the cabin, and I sneak back inside and get it. All quiet on the cabin front, no hint of movement from the bedroom. Ben has got to be down for the count. He leaves it all on the field when we have sex. It’s the kind of single-minded focus I would definitely highlight if I were putting him in a romance novel. Or, really, any novel. Who says thrillers can’t have a romance in them?

  All of my heroes would turn out to be just like Ben.

  The heroines, on the other hand, they probably wouldn’t be like me. They wouldn’t harbor a secret fear that their new sexy cabin-mate might discover the very worst parts of them.

  Or maybe they would.

  An idea for a spinoff novel begins to form, and it feels like a sip of warm hot chocolate. Not the idea itself. Thrillers aren’t supposed to be comforting like that. But just having an idea still seems like a small miracle.

  I wrap the blanket around my shoulders and try one more time to convince myself that I’m tired enough to sleep.

  It’s not to be.

  The lawn chair in the center of the lawn seems like the place to be. One of those outdoor swings would be even better, but you can’t have everything.

  The moonlight is concentrated in a pale ripple out in the center of the lake, and watching it is the kind of meditation I don’t get from my app. My fingers itch to keep typing, and watching those little waves cools that itch. I know it’s not going to last forever—the creative energy, I mean. I know it will get hard again. I have to ride the wave now, while it’s still cresting. Once I’m done out here, I’ll go back in and work for an hour. I can always sleep late if my mind will settle.

  The breeze kicks up, rustling across the shoreline and the sand and the grass, smelling like summer. There are so many stars visible at this place. It’s nothing like the city, with its light pollution and its constant noise.

  Not that nighttime by the lake is quiet, exactly. There’s the gentle lap of water against the sand. Crickets and frogs sing in their relentless rhythm. The night is as close as the blanket around my shoulders.

  It reminds me of another night like this one.

  How old could I have been? Not very old. Five? Six? Old enough to know that I didn’t particularly want to sleep in our family’s pop-up camper. It smelled old and slightly musty, and the padding on the sleeping platform was worn in places. I don’t think we even used it much. But the time I’m remembering was a family reunion.

  It was my mom’s family. She didn’t have any siblings, but she had lots of aunts and uncles. They all seemed uniformly old to me, but they were nice enough. One of them—I think her name was Kathy—would sit in a folding chair by the water while I splashed in the shallows for hours.

  So I should have been tired enough to sleep in the pop-up. But I hadn’t been. I was too hyped-up, too drunk on the adrenaline of being with so many people all day, listening to so many voices.

  My parents weren’t paying much attention to me. After the big dinner that night, they hadn’t noticed the pop I’d snuck or the half-bag of marshmallows. My mom hurried to put me to bed that night. She didn’t stay to make sure I fell asleep.

  That was how it went at those things. The adults sat around the campfire into the wee hours of the morning, talking about all sorts of bullshit that a six-year-old wouldn’t care about. Still, their voices drew me in. I’d perched on the bench of a little picnic table outside the ring of light, wrapped in my sleeping bag, and listened.

  My sister loved the pop-up.

  Of course she did.

  She was perfect.

  She loved camping, and she loved being a part of that adult conversation. Emily sat next to my mom in a kid-sized folding chair, wearing one of my dad’s hoodies. I thought she looked so cool. I though I could never be the one to sit there, up late, because I never had anything on her level to say. She was only two years older than me, but she might as well have been thirty. That’s the way I saw her then.

  But it wasn’t what Emily did or said around the campfire that burrowed its way into my memory. She didn’t do much of anything, aside from sit there. She must have been listening.

  No, it was what my mother said that I never f
orgot.

  The screen door creaks behind me.

  “There you are. I woke up and you were gone.” Ben’s voice is low and gravelly with sleep. Plastic scrapes on brick, and a moment later, he comes into view next to me, dragging the other lawn chair. He plants it next to mine and sits down in it, stretching his arms over his head. “Are you okay?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  He tilts his head back against the chair and looks up at the stars. I follow his gaze until I catch him looking back at me. There’s just enough moonlight to tell. “Story on your mind?”

  “It was.” The breeze whispers through the leaves on the trees.

  “That’s good. Are you still working on the plot? Or did it get its claws in you?”

  Somewhere in the distance, wind chimes ring, low and mournful. “I was. My mind moved on to other things.”

  “You can’t tease me like that.” Ben clears his throat. “What other things?”

  I wait for the anxiety to come back. I’ve spent so much time the last few months drowning in a sea of it that the thought of telling Ben my unfiltered thoughts should bring it raging back, but it doesn’t. Maybe the cover of darkness is my sweet spot.

  “A memory. From a camping trip I took with my family when I was a kid.”

  He sits up straight and pushes his hands into the pocket of the sweatshirt he’s wearing. “My dad used to take me on camping trips after we were solo. What were you remembering?”

  It was warmer that night, almost too warm to sleep. Or maybe it only seemed that way because of the campfire. And afterward, my cheeks burned so hot I stayed awake until the light began to leach into the sky. I wait for the warning to sound in the back of my mind, telling me that I shouldn’t get into this with Ben, but it’s so muted by the water and the stars that I just talk over it.

  “We used to go to these family reunions. Our house was usually quiet, but this kind of weekend was loud.”

  “And drunk?”

  “Hell yes, the adults were drunk.” This earns me a laugh from Ben. “Buzzed, really, because I think that’s the only way to enjoy a family reunion. But I wasn’t.”

  He pretends to be shocked. “You weren’t a teenage lush?”

  “At this one, I was only five or six, so no on both counts.”

  “You wouldn’t have taken the risk anyway. Too much of a people-pleaser.” Ben shakes his head. “You were probably one of those insufferably perfect kids.”

  He’s kidding, but there’s a little stab of pain. “No, that was my sister.”

  “At the camping trip?”

  “Always.” I take a deep breath and let it out. “The trip was at a cabin kind of like this one, by a lake. My mom was an only child and an only niece, so nobody else had any kids with them. It was my parents, me, my sister, and my mom’s aunts and uncles.”

  “Old people.”

  “They seemed ancient. But some of them were nice.”

  “If they were so nice, what happened?”

  I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “What makes you so sure something happened?”

  “The look on your face.”

  I give Ben an exaggerated smile that must look hideously creepy in the dark, and he laughs.

  And then he waits.

  “I was supposed to be sleeping.”

  Ben runs a hand over his face.

  “We were staying in this pop-up camper. Did you ever have one of those?”

  “My dad had a tent he bought right after he got out of the army.”

  “Maybe I would have liked a tent better.” I think about it for a hot second and decide—no. I would not have liked to be so close to the ground. “Anyway, I was supposed to be sleeping in our pop-up, but like I said, there was enough beer to go around and nobody was really paying attention to what I was doing.”

  “And you got up to no good? I don’t believe it.”

  “Yes. I did the incredibly risky thing of sitting at a picnic table in the yard.”

  “My God.” Ben shakes his head. “Maybe I don’t know anything about you, Eva. You’re a daredevil.”

  Suddenly, the story is like water beating against a levee. If I could just get it out of me and into the night, I could leave it behind at this cabin.

  “Yeah, I—” My voice catches, and I can feel the shift in the air between us. Ben leans forward, as close as he can get to me, and takes my hand.

  “I’m sorry, Eva. I shouldn’t have been joking.”

  Anger flares like an errant firework. “It was what she said that was such a disaster.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  18

  Bennett

  The way Eva says “my mother” gives me chills. Really, it does. The two words are anger edged in pain, and I am fully, sharply awake.

  Eva is different in the dark, which is true of most people, but this is different. For one thing, she’s holding my hand so tight I’m losing circulation. But she doesn’t seem to notice it. She’s watching the water like something might emerge from the tiny nighttime ripples and drag itself, gasping, over the sand.

  Maybe I’m the one who’s different in the dark.

  “You know, it was so many years ago that it shouldn’t matter, but....” Her voice is trembling now. When I first came out here, she sounded contemplative, like she was slowly turning over ideas for her book in her mind after a long day. I get that feeling. I’ve sat in parks near apartments and hostels all over the world, going through the day’s mistakes and the next day’s plans.

  This is not that feeling.

  Eva hesitates, her free hand coming up to brush at the corner of her eye. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time. There’s no need to—”

  “Tell me. I swear to God, Eva, whatever it is, I can take it.”

  She laughs bitterly. “I’m the one who can’t take it. I’m the one who’s still thinking about it days and months and years later, like a stupid child who can’t get over the fact that….”

  I’m actually going to lose my hand. My fingers are in imminent danger. I raise both our hands to my lips and plant a kiss at the base of her thumb.

  Eva makes a frustrated noise. “You can’t do that. You can’t just...override my brain like that.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.” I start to pull my hand away and she holds on tight.

  “It’s over and done,” Eva says, mostly to herself, and then she sucks in a deep breath and lets it out. “My sister was always the perfect one. You know how that is.”

  “I don’t have any siblings, but I’ve seen plenty of movies.”

  “She really was,” Eva insists. “She was everything my parents wanted. She was so smart, and so dedicated, and so...everything that I could never compete. Not that I wanted to, unless it came to…. This isn’t making any sense.”

  The sound of the night presses in around us, but every time Eva speaks again, all the noise settles. It’s like the entire world is listening to her, and I’m only part of it. It’s the opposite of how I felt in Afghanistan, when they’d send me out on patrol. It was always dark on the overnight shift, there at the edge of the FOB. Back then, I was the one trying to listen to the world, trying to hear who was sneaking under cover to plant the next seed of chaos. Sometimes it would be them. Sometimes it would be us. But it was always chaos.

  “My mom was sitting next to one of her aunts, with my sister on the other side of her. At first, I wasn’t following the conversation, because all of them were talking at once, and it was such a nice sound, all those voices by the fire.” A little smile flickers across her face and disappears. “And I don’t know why I caught what she said, but my aunt said something, and my mom said, ‘Eva might never catch up with Emily. She’s just too different. Off, sometimes.’ That’s what she said.”

  Eva presses her lips together and lifts her chin.

  What the hell am I supposed to say to that?

  What the hell was her mom thinking? I’m not one of
those judgmental dicks who’s going to have an opinion on every word that comes out of a parent’s mouth, but with her other daughter sitting there? Christ. I used to live across the street from two brothers named James and Carl, and it’s a miracle that James, the younger one, made it out alive. It doesn’t sound like that’s what happened with Eva’s parents. It doesn’t sound nearly that extreme. But I guess you never know what goes on behind closed doors. Maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg.

  She lets out a short, sharp breath and I think she might shake it off, stand up, go back inside, but instead, Eva claps her hand to her mouth to cover a ragged sob.

  I’m out of the chair faster than I’ve ever done anything, including running for cover in Afghanistan.

  I go to my knees in front of her.

  She cries and cries, and there’s nothing to do but be there for her, and it fills me with adrenaline and a new kind of strength.

  “You’ve probably seen way worse.” Eva’s face is puffy in the moonlight, her green eyes colorless but bright. “Way worse things, just from traveling and the army.” She shakes her head. “And here I am, blubbering about something my mother never intended for me to hear. It’s so fucking stupid.”

  “It’s not.

  “It is. It’s one of those things I should have left in the past a long time ago. I shouldn’t be bothering people with dumb shit like this.”

  A laugh wends its way up and out of my mouth. “Do you ever bother anyone about anything? I mean, really. I’d bet all the money in my bank account that you never told Whitney why you left her party.”

  She scowls at me. “Whitney doesn’t need to be burdened with—”

  I cup her face with my hands. “The people who love you don’t consider this kind of thing a burden.”

  “The people who love me….” Eva’s eyes going wide. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Ben.”

  It’s a warning, undeniably true; I shouldn’t make promises I can’t keep. I shouldn’t pretend that the things I need to know won’t take me away from her. But right here, right now, I’m seeing her. She’s the rawest she’s ever been, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I will always want to explore her. Her mind. Her body. Her soul. No matter what takes me away, the beautiful mystery of her will always bring me back.