Games People Play (9 page)

Chapter Ten

S
ydney took her time walking to the neighborhood park. It was only a half-mile away, and she always enjoyed strolling there at night when families were tucked in their houses. Like a wayward voyeur, she loved the ones where the curtains weren’t yet closed for the evening, where the sight of everyday people living everyday lives painted itself in golden light.

Now, though, she hardly saw any of it. Her heart was in her stomach, and she couldn’t admit why, only that it had something to do with Colm hooking up with Cherise. He’d proved Sydney right—that she needed to fly free of men for a long, long time, no weights pulling at her when she spread her wings. Why should she be surprised?

She reached the park, its silence and chill washing over her in fresh, cleansing waves. She thought about swinging on a swing—such a silly thing, and pure magic. But the merry-go-round beckoned her and seemed to suit her life better. One big, fat circle, around and around.

Tucking her coat beneath her backside so she wouldn’t freeze on the cold metal, she seated herself on its edge and cast off with her foot. She rotated toward the streetlight, toward the winding road that led to the house . . . and that was when she saw him. A shadow, tall, graceful, walking in that easy, level way that had become familiar to her much too quickly. Sensing his purpose, she lightly dragged her foot in the sand and created a mini-moat around herself before she slowed and stopped the merry-go-round. Then she tucked her legs beneath her and waited.

Colm crossed the lawn and stopped at the edge of the circle where the grass had worn away. His eyes glittered in the glow of the playground night lights like a nocturnal creature. Sometimes she really did think he could read her secrets.

“You weren’t in the studio when I came back,” he said.

“I wasn’t?” She didn’t smile as she gazed up at him.

He set his hands on his hips and looked away toward the street, his eyes following a passing car.

Sydney set herself rotating again with the push of a sneaker. “How did you know where to find me?”

He shrugged as she circled past him. “I asked Hans.”

“Ah, yes. Hans knows everything. Even my hiding places.”

“He said you hadn’t come into the house, and that sometimes you come over here.”

“Hmm. I think he likes you too much to mind his own beeswax.”

Silence again. She made two rotations on the merry-go-round and had nearly passed him again when he stopped the ride with his foot.

She studied his clothing. He was still wearing the same brown Doc Martens oxfords, jeans, a long-sleeved maroon T-shirt advertising some restaurant in Virginia Beach, and his open leather jacket over that. She’d seen every inch of him naked tonight, and yet for some reason his appearance in that nondescript outfit seared her just as much. As always, her mind slid a paintbrush across the canvas, capturing him, half shadow and half man. How ironic, and frustrating, that in the few days she’d had him standing before her as a model, she hadn’t even finished a single sketch of him.

He shifted his weight and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “I sent Cherise home.”

Warmth curled through her veins, but she kept an impassive expression. “That’s nice.” Then, because she couldn’t help herself, “I thought you might have a date.”

“No,” he said.

He was probably planning to get with her later. But if Colm was the gentleman he seemed and did take Cherise out for a real date instead of a late-night booty call, where would they go? To a midnight movie, then home to his place in the city? She tried to envision his bedroom and came up with an imperfect image of an unmade bed with wrinkled sheets, khaki walls, books or magazines scattered on the floor by the bedside table. An empty beer bottle on the windowsill. Condoms in the bedside table drawer.

She wanted him, but he could never know what she was thinking, sitting here before him while her existence, her life as she knew it, dangled dangerously close to the edge of destruction.

“What are you doing, Sydney?” His voice came gentle, as though he read her mind. “Here? Alone?”

She swallowed and looked past him at the empty swings swaying gently in the cold night. “Thinking about my secrets,” she said finally. “I have a lot of them.”

“I know.”

He knew because in a mere five days, he’d looked into her and torn off her defenses in slow, bleeding strips. She rubbed a hand across her eyes and tried not to meet his gaze. He was deadly.

His foot, braced on the edge of the merry-go-round, gently swayed the steel structure on its axis, back and forth, while it squeaked like a cranky child. “I have them, too, Syd.”

The diminutive nickname sounded sweet to her ears. His scent floated on the breeze, warm skin and lime.

And out of nowhere, slicing brutally through her desire, welled an unbidden wave of tears.

“I’m a really damaged person, Colm.”

He didn’t comment on the choked quality of her voice. He lowered his foot and held out his hand. When she took it, she thought he meant to help her climb off the merry-go-round, but instead he urged her to scoot back on its diamond-plated expanse. “Lie down on your back.”

Her brows lowered, but she did as he instructed, bracing herself on her elbows so she could read his intentions. The metal seeped cold through her coat, chilling her butt and spine, and she felt awkward with her legs dangling off the side.

“Put your feet up so they don’t touch the ground,” he told her. When she obliged, he moved to lie beside her, separated from her only by the steel handlebar. He braced one foot on the platform and used the other to push the merry-go-round into rotation again.

After a moment, Sydney glanced at him. He didn’t look back, so she watched his profile, so finely sculpted against the glow from the playground lights. He had one arm tucked behind his head, his gaze fixed on the sky. The moon was high, an ivory crescent sliver, the shadow of its dark side a blacker promise than the night could offer. She finally laid back, too, and let her head rest uneasily on the metal platform. The stars radiated in all their glory, so many they looked like pinpricks on the surface of heaven. She thought of a long-ago man named Greg, first her mother’s lover and then her own. Rage squeezed her throat again. Rage and shame and grief for lost innocence.

Colm’s foot pushed them a little faster. Now the stars blinked and blurred. A silken breeze raised goose bumps on her naked arms beneath her coat sleeves, dried the moisture trickling from the corners of her eyes and down her temples.

“Truth or dare?” he said.

Shock and amusement assailed her at the same time. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Do I have to do this?”

“You’re chicken.”

“I’m not chicken.” She sighed. “Truth.”

He thought for a moment. “What’s the worst thing you ever did as a kid?”

So many things. Too many to count. She searched for something safe, circumvented the greatest sins of her life. “When I was fourteen, my mother went out of town and made the mistake of letting me stay by myself for a night. I took the car and drove it around the city.”

“Did you get busted?”

“No. She never knew the difference.”

She sensed his amusement but didn’t check for his smile. The last time he’d smiled at her, in the midst of something Garrett had said earlier tonight, a spear of desire had caught her right in the stomach. Then he’d laughed, and the sound of his laughter, warm and genuine to her ears, suited him perfectly. Every part of him was designed in the image of something so much more beautiful than anything she’d known.

If he smiled again, she would reach for him.

“Truth or dare?” she asked instead.

“Truth.”

“Same question you asked me. Worst thing you did as a kid.”

“There’s a long and distinguished list.” He considered, then said, “I broke into my high school on a dare and got caught. Arrested. My parents let me rot in jail for twenty-four hours before they bailed me out. My cellmate puked on me.”

Sydney pressed her lips together to keep in the laughter that pushed through her sadness. “He just . . . walked up to you and
blaaaah
?”

“Yeah. A big, threatening guy who didn’t like scrawny kids with smart mouths. I tried to disappear into the bench.”

“Did you think he was going to hit you?”

“Absolutely. His fists were the size of hams. But then he puked on me instead.”

She laughed and rolled her head to look at him. “I bet you smelled like a rose the next day.”

“Jeez.” He shuddered. “My dad wouldn’t let me in the car. He made me walk home from the jail. Three miles.”

Now she really laughed, one arm flung over her head and the other falling across her stomach to keep from coming apart. She didn’t remember the last time she’d genuinely laughed.

She stopped when he said, “Truth or dare, Syd? Any girl with guts would choose a dare now.”

But she didn’t trust him enough. She didn’t know how. “Whatever. Truth.”

“What’s your biggest regret?”

Her mind went blank. She didn’t want to think about any of it. She had to swallow before she could reply. “That I ran away from home at seventeen and never went back.” She didn’t give him a chance to ask about it. “Your turn.”

His fingers curled around the metal bars on either side of his legs, and he changed feet, hooking his other heel on the edge of the merry-go-round. “Truth.”

“
Your
biggest regret in life. What’s good for the goose . . .”

He didn’t speak for so long, she poked his arm. “Come on. Spill it.”

“My wife died in an accident.”

Sydney turned her head to look at him, but all she could see was his profile silhouetted against the golden lights they passed.

“I was driving,” he said.

“Colm.” When she sat up, he reached for her hand.

“We’re still playing the game.” His voice came low, unemotional, even as he slid his fingers between hers and squeezed her hand. “Truth or dare?”

“I’m so sorry. Colm. I’m sorry.” She met his eyes when the merry-go-round rotated out of shadow again, and withdrew her hand from his warmth. “I can’t do this. It’s not right, not after what you just told me.”

“Truth or dare?” he repeated, the words coming harder now, insistent.

She blinked once, then again, her stomach aching and hollow. “Truth.”

“Tell me why you’re so afraid. Of men. Of me.”

Her own regret and misery paled before his confession. But she couldn’t block the memories, or stop the fresh tears, a river of them now, as she released a breath, and with it, the darkest truth she could muster. “It’s ironic, really, my fear, considering what I’ve done . . . but . . .”

“But?” he prompted gently.

“But I had an affair with my mother’s boyfriend when I was sixteen.”

The merry-go-round stopped abruptly under his direction.

She drew a shuddering breath, tangled in feelings of horror and sympathy for the secret he’d just shared with her, and the deepest shame for her own. “I was an angsty, multi-pierced teenager who looked like trouble. The guys my mom brought home—they liked to come after me, but she never believed me when I tried to tell her. And then she started dating Greg, and he was different. He actually listened to me and talked to me when she ignored me. He acted like he cared.”

The tightness in her throat threatened to choke off the words. Why in God’s name was she admitting any of this to Colm? And why did it matter that he would likely find her as disgusting as she still found herself fourteen years later?

Fresh tears squeezed through her lashes as the teenager in her rose up and finished the story she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “This whole thing went on for a few weeks behind my mom’s back, but eventually she put two and two together. It wasn’t until she kicked him out that I started thinking maybe . . . maybe it wasn’t okay that a forty-year-old man had wanted to be with someone as young as me.”

She drew a shuddering breath and hung her head. “Then I hated him, but my mother hated me more. So I ran away. Came to D.C. After a few years of waiting tables and living with college students, I met Max at a party where I was a waitress. He had such a mental force, and at the same time he gave me the sense that he would be my family—that I would finally have a family if I trusted him. He believed in me. So I—”

She couldn’t finish; she was too sick inside. Slowly Colm sat up beside her, but he didn’t touch her. He gave the merry-go-round another push with his foot. The cold breeze gently lifted free the strands of hair that had stuck to her damp cheeks.

She wiped her eyes on her shoulder and finally found her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said quietly. “It’s just a game.”

She swallowed. She didn’t want his pity. She wanted him. His realness. His rawness. His honesty. “Truth or dare?” she managed to ask, and prayed he’d tell her something else that would lift them both from the darkness.

Grasping the bar overhead, he ducked his head to look at her as they passed into shadow again. “Dare,” he said. And before she could draw another breath, he leaned in and kissed her.

* * *

T
o his astonishment, she didn’t kiss back. Damn it, her mouth didn’t move one bit, not even when he angled his head and slid the tip of his tongue across the soft seam of her lips. He could taste the sweet saltiness of tears and went hard just that easily. He tried again, licked her top lip, then her bottom, but while her mouth quivered, she didn’t invite him in. Finally, he eased back and met her eyes, which shone liquid with tears.

“Why did you do that?” she whispered.

“You dared me.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No.”

“Didn’t you?” He lifted a hand to brush the unkempt hair back from her temple. He loved her like this, so broken and imperfect. He breathed in her scent, flowers and fruit. “Just like last night in the studio, we’re alone here. You have tears in your eyes. I want to kiss them away. I want to kiss you, again and again.”

“You can’t.” She put up a hand and climbed off the merry- go-round before he could act on his words. “Not last night, not now, not ever.”