All You Never Wanted (11 page)

“Here I am,” she calls foolishly through the window, once he’s closer. Not what she’d meant to say. What she’d meant to say was something like
I can only stay a minute, I’ve got to dash
, and for a split of time she is horrified, she’s not in control of her words, her intentions,
run​run​run
, as she pushes up her sunglasses and climbs out of the car and then leans against the door.

Casually, arms folded. As if her heart isn’t hemorrhaging at a thousand stabbing beats a minute.

She waits, letting Xander approach. He’s downshifting himself through the wild grasses of the steep-sloped front lawn. She can’t stop staring at him; no matter how bizarre it gets, she refuses to break eye contact. They’re both holding on to this same suspended moment as Xander stops and acknowledges that they’ve landed at each other and are waiting for something. Maybe waiting for Alex to do what she does next, which is to knife through the distance between them. To fit her hands low at Xander’s belt loops. To pull him in and kiss him with the most secret and insistent gnaw of hunger in her body.

Immediately, she knows that she needs him. She can’t undo it, can’t unwant what she wants, and in her desire, she won’t acknowledge his hesitation—in all honesty, she doesn’t have the faintest idea if what she’s doing is about Xander or about the dare of Xander. Or maybe she’s just too empty-bodied and light-headed to care that she might have floated right out of her own sanity.

It’s been months since she’s allowed herself to acknowledge any surplus of want. She’d shut down from all that. Punished and condemned it. Except banished doesn’t mean broken. And now she is electric with the fact that yes. Xander is kissing her right back. Kissing her and kissing her. Returning her craving for him, her need for more and more of him. First with only a hint of surprise, and then with all the force and assurance she’d hoped for from him.

And she doesn’t ever want it to stop.

Uh-oh, doorbell. It sounded demanding—almost crabby. The way a stranger presses the bell. But if I didn’t answer it, nobody would. Joshua and Alex had left already. Lulette gets the weekends off. The gardeners wouldn’t be here till afternoon. So it’s not any of them. Deliveries are always brought around to the back.

Problem was, I was in the shower, alone and naked as a muskrat, like I was starring in the Greenwich, Connecticut, remake of
Psycho
.

Eek, there it went again.
Barrrr-rrring!
With a stab on it that told me it wasn’t a friend, or even FedEx. I yanked off the taps and jumped out, wrapping on my robe and chasing my feet down the stairs.

A cop.

No, two cops. Of course. They always work in pairs.

“Hi, Officers. Can I help you?” Isn’t that what they said in movies? My teeth chattered my words. Water was ice-pebbling my skin.

“Are you the owner of a 1999 black Chevy Silverado?”

Cold as I was, my body temp nosedived by an extra twenty degrees. “Who, me? No. No, I’m not.”

“You sure about that? Black Chevy Silverado flatbed pickup, model twelve hundred?”

Joshua’s truck. The cop who was talking to me was Hispanic.
Oldish but handsome-ish, with a twitchy throwback mustache. His partner was a blond woman taller than us both. I leaned up against the door. Which was the good cop? Or was that some kind of TV-show myth? Were my eyes darting around too criminally?

“I can get you my driver’s license and show you my car, it’s not a truck, it’s a—Oh, wait.” Ouch. “It’s at school.” I’d been grinding my teeth against my bottom lip and now I tasted blood. Somehow it seemed deeply dumb, not to have my own car parked in my own driveway. “But I don’t drive a truck. Definitely I don’t drive that truck.”

“Can we come in?”
Snap-crackle-pop
was radiating off their shortwaves. I imagined all the area Connecticut cops looped into a giant, crime-fighting sonic brain that I had to obey.

And so I did. I stepped back to let them inside. In their eyes, did Camelot itself look somewhat guilty? People hated this house. It was way too something. Like it might have been bought with Arthur’s drug cartel money, or maybe had bodies buried out in the garden.

But I held on to my last handful of nerve. “What makes you think there’s anything here?”

“The truck was caught on a video loop. A black Chevy Silverado leaving a mini-golf range out in Stratford at about seven last night. Registered to a Joshua Lee Gunner. You know this kid? Anything about him?”

“He went to my high school. He graduated last year.”

“We picked up some video footage as the truck drove through Round Hill Manor Security. We’ve got reason to believe it was parked at this house for the entire night last night. Leaving, oh, about an hour or so ago.”

“Are you sure?” I crossed my hands at my chest. “Those security cameras would only see the truck come into Round Hill. So how do you know it stopped exactly here?”

“There are ten homes on the left entrance turn,” said Officer Blonde. “And there are no other, um
—young people—
in residences on the left entrance turn.” As Officer Mustache shot her a look.

They had nothing. They were brutes with badges on a witch hunt. When I saw Joshua, I’d use that phrase exactly.

“Don’t you need a permit to check this house?” I was logic meets adrenaline, sharp as scissors pointed at them. “And don’t you have to tell me specifically what you’re checking for?”

Officer Blonde hefted from one black shoe to another. “Sweetheart, we have reason to believe …,” she started. But then she couldn’t offer me more than this.

“My stepdad’ll beat me to a bloody pulp if I let police blast through his house without a warrant,” I said. “His home, his privacy.”

Mustache sucked in through his teeth. He hadn’t counted on resistance. “If you’re telling me one thing about Gunner but we find out you know something else, the results might not be too pleasant for you, Miss.”

“Everything I’m saying is one hundred percent true.”

Then it was me and Mustache in a stare standoff. Broken by me as I moved to close the door. “Listen, I’ve got a full day today,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

An’ now git
.

Would Joshua buy it? If I described them exactly? Maybe I’d leave out that last part, telling the one cop about my “full day”
today. And closing the door on them. Nobody would do that. To make a story work, you had to “visualize” it. That’s what they taught you in field hockey. Lying was pretty much the same.

I shut off the taps. I’d been steaming in here for a long time, thickening my story, and my skin was poached soft as salmon. If I told Josh that a pair of cops came to the house looking for him, what I’d really need to emphasize was, They Weren’t Looking Anymore. That I’d Saved His Ass.

But I couldn’t sound too much like I trounced them, or else I’d come off like an idiot. Like an actress on a network crime show.

Or, worse, an amateur liar.

Imagine if Joshua believed it, though? Believed that the cops had hunted him down. Until I pointed my finger and—
poof!—
banished them. How thankful he’d be.
Check out Thea. Out on a limb, winging it. Chill under pressure and saving my ass
.

Okay, I’d try. He’d buy it if I sold it just right.

“Seriously? Seriously?” Joshua couldn’t stop shaking his head and saying that word. He didn’t even turn around until he’d finished straightening the last row of puddle-brown bowling shoes. “That’s messed up. With a hand on the Bible. Do you seriously swear it all happened just like you said?”

“I swear. But there was no foul, no harm. The cops took off when they knew they had nothing.”

But Joshua hadn’t even bothered sitting down to hear me out. I’d told the story to the back of his head, mostly, while hounding him from the shoe rack to the snack bar to the arcade and back again. Which is never good. To make credibility count, you need
those trust-building moments of eye contact. It’s like Rule Number One.

Joshua was possibly over-terrified. Sometimes seat-of-the-pants storytelling can catch you on the teeniest snag. As in: What if Joshua was
already
in trouble with the law? I hadn’t paused to confront that angle. Maybe I’d gotten overconfident, assuming that my powers of improv would supply me with all my sorcerer’s story magic. Another good idea at the time gone wrong.

Maybe I’d hustled over to Ten Pin Alley too quick. Driving in Arthur’s antique Mercedes-Benz 770, which he’d bought last year as a wedding anniversary present to himself. And which probably should not be driven on any public roads, although this old geezer is in perfect diesel-powered working order.

Either way, I’d flopped. All I’d done was scare Joshua. My words came too fast. I’d been stupid. Lying was stupid. “You’re right,” I blurted. “I thought it’d be funny to give you a scare. So—ha-ha. Scared ya. Bet you really did believe me a second, right? And imagine if that really did happen, huh? If the cops really came?”

Joshua could have been made from Pompeii ash. It must have been fifteen seconds before his fingers pivoted another brown shoe forward. I could almost hear his next comment, about how immature I was. What a ditz, what a child.

“Joshua?”

He grunted. I had no intuition about that grunt.

“So you’re mad?”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry. It was just a dumb story. A joke. I don’t even know why I told it.”

He turned. And then, smooth as the peel of a sticker from its
backing, a smile spread over his face. “
Damn
, girl. You
had
me. And nobody,
nobody
gets me.”

Not mad. He was the opposite of mad. I could feel my own smile, eager and too happy. “It was just for fun.”

“For fun,” he repeated. “You’re a nutjob, Thea. Anyone tell you?”

“You, now.” I could breathe again. “I thought you were mad. And all I’d wanted was to make you laugh.”

“Cops on my tail. Damn. I need that like a hole in my head.” And yet from the way Joshua Lee Gunner was sizing me up in his wide-lens eyes, I felt like he saw the whole composition of everything I, Theodora Parrott, really was. The fake and the real, the good and the bad. He saw it and accepted it.

Had I impressed him or just made an impression on him? At least I’d adjusted Joshua’s focus on me. And I knew that from this moment forward, I wasn’t just and only the little baby sister, the slobbery hound panting on the passenger side anymore. I was something more complicated. Something of my own invention.

It would be hard to look away from me now.

Xander’s bedroom. Whoa. She’d been wrong on many counts.

No aquarium. Not even one lonely goldfish circling a bowl.

Not one single Joy Division or
Clockwork Orange
type of vintage poster.

No ironic, deliberately unfashionable swivel office chair.

It’s an adult room. There are no jokes here, no goofing around, no self-conscious cleverness. The only thing she’d nailed was the corkboard. But everyone had a corkboard. And what she hadn’t foreseen was how organized Xander’s was. Each pushpin standing alert. The flyers and posters creating a pattern. So she’d gotten that one wrong, too.

But the real surprise is that Xander’s room is like a tree house. Painted lost-in-the-woods green. Chunky woodsman furniture. There’s a navy, fleece-lined L.L. Bean sleeping bag on the bed. The tacked-up burlap curtain in the window could have spent a previous life as a Civil War mailbag.

It was Xander’s idea to come here. Alex agreed by not saying anything. By slipping her hand into his. They’d squeaked past, seemingly unnoticed, and up the stairs. Everyone is on the other side of the house anyway. She can hear the conversation drifting between the back porch and the barbecue grill.

On the stairwell, Alex sees the photographed journey of the Heilprin family. At her tug, Xander stops and lets her look.

“My mother’s Japanese, my dad’s a Russian Jew. Molly and I are what you get.”

“Two kids? Amazed. I’m sure that’s never happened before.”

“Funny.” He twists her hair in his fingers and kisses the exposed back of her neck. His touch burns her up. But she also wants to examine his family. These are the pictures you can’t find on his Facebook. His petite mother, his sweetly rumpled father. A lanky, bespectacled Molly, who appears to be the older one. There’s Xander and Molly proudly summiting a mountain. Here’s Xander looking freckly in a soccer uniform. There he is in a canoe, with a bad case of Long-Armed Eighth Grader.

“Hey, Xander,” she whispers. “Won’t your guests come looking for you if we just disappear on them?” He’s detached her from the photos to lead her down the hallway. She drags back. She wants to check out the homey details. A braided rug, a painted chest under a chapel-style window. This is the type of house that’s cozier on the inside. She can feel his mom’s love of being here, making it snug and safe. It pains her as it comforts her. Reminds her of her old home, and another time.

“We’ve got a few minutes,” he says. “I want to hang out alone together.”

So does she.

And so that’s why now they’re in his tree-house room. With the door shut and the Papa Bear chair pushed in front of it, and they zip up together in the sleeping bag like naughty campers because this thing is a lit match and nothing’s going to stop it.

Except, except—when’s the last time she ever did something so deceptive? Alex was practically born to be a dutiful girlfriend. Ever since her very first “date”—pizza and a 3-D movie with
Tommy McClatchy the summer between sixth and seventh grade. She never cheated once with anyone on anyone. Would guilt about Joshua invade her brain the moment Xander started kissing her again …?

Apparently not. She is a thousand buzzing signals of response to his touch. And the experience of Xander is so completely different from the experience of any other guy she’s ever hooked up with. They’re alive with each other in the confined warmth of the sleeping bag. Nose to nose, but Xander’s approach is all angles—almost as if he’s sneaking up on her. His mouth takes on her shoulder blade as if it’s sacred. Then her neck. Her jawline. His lips catch hers at the side, and it’s thrillingly intimate, the way he can find her along her edges. Xander has a spine-tingling sense of time. He knows how to stretch the moment. When he captures her ear, his tongue moves slow, tracing its shape. She finds his hands and palms them with her own.