Lie to Me (16 page)

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I remember saying. The ravioli was exploding in the boiling water, little bits of cheese floating everywhere, and I had no idea why. Weird detail to remember.

Anyway, Lo went on.

“The point is, it’s a big moment, and I was looking up and everything, but I was totally still in the book. And Lisa comes up to me and she asks me what I want for my birthday. And I just kind of stare at her, thinking about Vronsky and Anna Karenina, and I guess I looked…I don’t know? Emotional? Or, like, pensive? And then Lisa gets this expression on her face…”

I turned around, forgetting about the ravioli. “Oh, shit,” I said.

I remember Lo smiled, and covered her mouth like she felt kinda bad about smiling, but not really. “Yeah. She looked like she’d just accidentally killed a puppy, like her asking me what I want for my birthday was the only possible thing that could have reminded me that I can’t have my parents back. Like I’d forgotten they were dead right up until she said something. I swear I could actually see the thought progression on her face. And I didn’t even mean to, I just…wasn’t paying attention.”

We looked at each other for a beat before we both started laughing.

That was the thing about Lo. Her parents were dead, she only got to see her little brother once a week if she was lucky, she had to live in this house with strangers, and when she turned eighteen everything was going to get more complicated. She was working without a safety net, except for me.

So when she could, she found ways to laugh about it.

“Ok, don’t give me the dead puppy dog face,” I said, spooning the soggy ravioli onto plates. “But I want to know what you want.”

I got the Harlow eye roll.

“I’m serious, Lo,” I said, sitting down with her.

“I want Chinese,” she said, looking at the plate.

See? Funny.

“We can get Chinese,” I said, laughing. “Think about it if you have to. But tell me what you want more than anything else. Something real. I’ll get it for you.”

“I don’t need to think about it,” she said softly. I remember she poked at one ravioli, like she might wake it up. Then she looked up at me, her blue eyes big and wet. “But you can’t get it for me. I want Dill.”

I watched her pretend she wasn’t on the verge of crying for a few seconds. I had to be careful. This was big.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I want custody of Dill. As soon as I turn eighteen. I want my brother back.” She looked back down again, moving the ravioli around aimlessly. “I can’t believe I told you that. I know it’s not possible, I just…you know how scared I get that something might happen, and he’s going to grow up and not even know who I am at this rate, and—”

“Hey,” I said to her. I reached across the table, grabbed her hand. And then I said, “Ok.”

Lo snapped her head up. I guess she recognized my tone.

“What do you mean, ‘ok?’”

“I mean we’ll work on it. It’s not impossible, right? You just have to grow up quicker. I’ll help you train for that, too.”

Man, what an idiot I was. I meant that one hundred percent, too. Totally ignorant of the process, having no idea about lawyers and the rest, but I sat there and told Harlow that I would help her get her brother back. She looked at me with this kind of dreamy expression, this half smile, like she couldn’t believe what I was saying and was maybe humoring me.

Irony is a bitch.

But anyway, as I’m heating up the pan for the duck six years later, with Harlow right over there, slicing veggies like old times, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about how Harlow told me herself that she wanted Dill back more than anything else in the world, that she wanted her baby brother.

Or maybe I’m just thinking about all that because it’s the only thing that makes me feel like less of an asshole. It’s like a shield, the only thing that can protect me when I look at Harlow and see how much I hurt her by leaving the way I did. The only thing that can protect me from how much it hurts her now, that I can’t tell her why I left. That I can’t give her the answers she needs.

As if on freaking cue, Alex Wolfe calls me.

I hit the ignore button and throw the duck on.

“You hungry?” I ask.

“Starved.”

“Good.”

We sit down in silence, and I can’t help but watch her, beautiful as always. Maybe it’s all the thinking I’ve been doing, but I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t not give her something.

“I wasn’t kidding, you know,” I say to her. “About proving it. That I have proof that I never stopped thinking about you.”

She looks up sharply, but doesn’t say anything. 

I say, “That proof, it’s on the way.”

“Big talk,” she says, and takes a sip of wine.

“Lo, I know I’m not really out of the dog house,” I say. “Why’re you being so nice?”

Harlow looks up, grins. “I could say the same with this spread. When did you learn to cook?”

“I’m serious, Lo.”

She looks down, and for a moment I see that it’s all still there. The hurt, the anger, the confusion, the frustration. It hasn’t gone away. Then she just shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I think I’m just tired of being hurt, of all this stuff. It’s tiring. And it’s easier for right now to just…not. I know how to be around you like this.”

Yeah, I know what she's talking about. There’s something familiar about this. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.

“For now,” she says again.

I nod. That makes more sense to me. I smile at her and say, “I can wear you down slowly, no problem.”

Lo pauses almost imperceptibly, cutting her meat. I know exactly what she’s thinking about. I’m the only man on the planet who could know what she’s thinking about. Her seventeenth birthday dinner didn’t end when she told me what she wanted more than anything else in the world. We ordered out quick Chinese food and put it on fancy plates, eating and laughing, sitting across from each other exactly like this, stealing looks at each other, each of us wondering the same kinds of things. I know, because she told me later, that she’d been wondering what it would be like to kiss me.

And then, at the end of the night, she took my wrist in those delicate little fingers of hers. She tugged on me. I remember that still; it was such a gentle thing, but I just somehow…knew. I gathered her up in my arms and held her close to me, right against my body, and just held her. Breathed her in.

Christ, I wanted her so bad.

And I knew she wanted me, too. The way her hands slid up my back, the way she leaned into me, the way she buried her face in my neck. I could feel it.

But I also knew how fragile she was. Could feel that, too. How scared. She wanted me and was scared of it at the same time. I was safe to her, the only person in the world that was safe. So I kissed her softly on the neck, then on the cheek.

And I said, “I’ll always be here.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Another thing I'll always remember, right there. Later she told me it was like we wore each other down slowly.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long before she was ready. Before we both were. But I would have waited forever, and I would have done it with a smile on my face.

That’s what she’s thinking about now. What we’re both thinking about as she looks up at me, her hair framing her beautiful face, her eyes big and open, her mouth so soft it’s all I can do not to run my tongue along that bottom lip. I’m thinking about how that was the day we both knew it was going to happen. And then when it did…holy shit.

I’ve lived on the memory of her for five years.

My eyes trail down her long neck to those collarbones again, and then to her perfect breasts, and I’m thinking about how they used to peak just when I’d blow on them.

I’m thinking about how I could get her to come so sweetly with just my hand.

I’m thinking about what it felt like to bury myself inside Harlow Chase, look into her eyes, and feel her come all around me.

Yeah. I’m definitely ok with wearing her down slowly, if that’s what I have to do.

Harlow recovers first, breaks the stare. She takes a sip of wine and clears her throat, trying to play it off like we weren’t both just thinking about it.

“When did you get so ruthless?” she says, pretending to look shocked.

I don’t even miss a beat.

“Five years without you,” I say.

chapter 11

HARLOW

I feel like I’m slowly waking up from a dream. The better my ankle feels, the closer I get to full consciousness. These past few days with Marcus living in my house—sleeping right by my bed—have been utterly surreal. I haven’t had the energy to stay constantly mad at him. It’s almost just been easier to recede into a past that made sense, with him around like this, than it has been to deal with the present reality.

Except the facade is cracking. I can’t pretend I don’t want him. I can’t pretend I don’t spend every second in his presence in an amped up state of sexual frustration. I can’t pretend that even while I’m so turned on, just by the way he gets up to clear dishes (seriously, what is that), there’s this constant worry tearing at the edges of my perception, this reminder that there’s ugliness coming. There’s terrible things underneath all of this, things I don’t want to feel.

It’s not like my broken heart has been magically healed. It’s more like I’ve drugged it into submission. And now it’s coming down off that high.

It really doesn’t help when he insists on inspecting my ankle.

“Have you tried putting weight on it?” he asks, holding my leg gently.

“I can kind of limp around,” I say. I sound tense not because it hurts when he touches me, but because it sends shimmering heat up my leg, right to my core. “It’s not so bad, actually.”

Marcus is silent a moment, looking down at my ankle as though that’s the most important thing in the world. He knows that as soon as I can walk around freely there’s no more reason for him to stay here. And whatever it is he wants from me, he apparently hasn’t it gotten it yet.

Was there ever a real reason for him to stay here? If I’d put my foot down, metaphorically speaking, Marcus would have left. But I didn’t. I let him stay. I put myself through this.

I am at war with myself. I have needed something this easy for so long. For years. Nothing has been easy, not since Marcus left, and just being with him is so, so easy. So damn safe.

As long as I don’t think too much about how badly he hurt me. And as long as I don’t think about the future, when he’ll inevitably choose something else over me again, when he’ll hurt me all over again. If I let him.

I close my eyes and try not to think about how my skin feels electrically alive, just being in contact with his. I’m about to speak when he beats me to it.

“You heard from Dill?” he asks.

My eyes shoot open and I see him staring back at me as if this is actually important to him. We’re sitting on the couch again, in the middle of a Die Hard movie marathon while it pours outside, another one of those summer storms. I’m waiting for Shantha to get back to me about how the initial publicity for the fundraising event at the bar is going. The idea is to get the neighborhood organized, raise enough money that we can attract some real press, put some pressure on the zoning board. Maybe if we make it too expensive and too annoying to continue the developers will go somewhere else. It’s my only shot to save Dill’s home.

And Dill doesn’t even know what’s going on. He’s in love with his programming camp, totally oblivious to everything else. I didn’t even understand half of his last email—it’s like it was written in actual code—but I can tell when the kid is happy.

And I have Marcus to thank. Partially, anyway.

“Yeah,” I answer him finally. “He’s having a blast.”

Marcus smiles like the freaking sun. “Good.”

He still has his hand on my leg. I don’t want to move it. I want to just continue to feel his hands on me without having to take responsibility for that particular decision or deal with any of the consequences involved.

It’s not the sex that makes me uncomfortable. God no. It’s the closeness. The real-but-fake intimacy. Like we’re playing house. Like we’re getting way too comfortable with each other, like I’m forgetting how he’s capable of hurting me.

I figure someone who can ruthlessly leave you with no explanation once can do it twice. No explanation, no way to understand it. No guarantee he won’t just do the same thing again. So no forgiveness. Definitely no forgetting.

“Hey, you ok?” Marcus asks me.

He’s worried. He doesn’t have the right to be worried about me. I take my leg back, move down to the other side of the couch.

“I’m fine,” I say. It’s a lie. I feel like the storm outside is just a mirror image of what’s happening inside me, like my skin is just a thin layer preventing a freaking hurricane from ripping through my life, making all sorts of bad decisions, falling in love with ghosts all over the place.

That’s how I have to think of him. The ghost that haunts my life. The ghost I need exorcised.

“You hungry yet?” he asks.

I can’t believe he learned to cook. It’s like he found his one flaw—besides the disappearing thing—and was like, oh, I’ll just go take a class and become a world-class chef. No big deal.

Ok, for food made with his current skills, I can maybe let some things slide. Temporarily.

“Maybe,” I say, narrowing my eyes.

He’s grinning.

Then he gets up and lifts me up in his arms, totally inappropriate, totally crossing boundaries left and right, and it gets me to laugh anyway. Actually it gets me to scream and giggle, and I bat at his shoulders as he sets me down.

“Smile occasionally or I’m going to have to tickle you,” he says.

I can’t help but smile back at him. Whenever he smiles, it’s absolutely infectious, and he’s giving me the full Marcus smile now, trying to get me out of my funk. The thing is, he’s beautiful. It take a real physical effort not to let my hands linger on his hard chest, not to feel the grain of his muscles through the thin material of his white t-shirt, not to press myself against him. He smells incredible.