This Much Is True (6 page)

He traces my lips with his fingertip. “What are you thinking about?” he asks.

“Boys to men.”

“Ah…the band? Was that one of their songs?”

“No. I don’t think so.” I smile because he’s so misinterpreted my secret thoughts. I almost laugh, and he’s looking at me even more intently.

Somewhere along the way, the music has stopped; but we’re still swaying to all these secret musical notes that apparently only the two of us can hear.

“Do you want to get out of here?” He gets this shy, hopeful look.

I laugh a little because,
yes, I do want to get out of here with him,
and he’s quite charming with this innocent
I’ve-never-done-this-before
kind of look on his face. “I want to get out of here.”

The music starts up again, louder now. He smiles and shouts something to Charlie the party host, who briefly nods and absently waves a hand in our general direction. I manage to give a little secret hand wave to Marla to text me later with the plan. We always have a plan. She lifts an eyebrow, takes a long practiced look at my conquest, and covertly assesses his worthiness as a hook-up. She finally gives me the subtle finger-lift of approval.

Linc leans in and whispers, “This way. Follow me.”

He clasps my hand in his and hauls me out of the party in an experienced two-minute drill.

This is going to be fun.

As I follow him out, I swear I hear Holly’s contrived whisper asking me, “are you sure?’ I nod my head in an attempt to dispel my mind’s eternal quest for hearing her voice just one more time.

“I’m sure,” I say as the cool summer breeze stirs my hair and lifts his at the nape of his neck. Linc glances back when he hears me say this, and he smiles.

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tally  ~ A sure thing

L
inc pulls me along through the back door of the kitchen and then directly across the expansive lawn toward a nicely trimmed hedge. He lithely climbs up the few steps that lead to a charming stone guest house located in the back of the Masterson’s gigantic property. He produces keys, unlocks the door, and steps aside, allowing me to pass through first.

“My place. When I’m here. They let me stay here whenever I want,” he says by way of explanation.

He still grasps my hand, keeping me steady. His smile is strangely reassuring.
Like I need reassurance.
His light seems to chase away the shadows that have plagued me all these months. It’s true; the darkness actually diminishes within his illuminating presence.

We enter a large great room. The walls are painted white with dark accents all around while high wood beams stretch across the ceiling in a crisscross pattern. There’s a large stone fireplace at one end that matches the exterior of the house and a kitchen is located at the other end. It’s charming. Cozy. I like it. It feels like a home. He hits a couple of switches, and lights come on and then automatically dim to a pre-programmed ambiance while the gas fireplace roars to life.
Instant seduction scene.

He leads me down a long hallway where we enter the master bedroom. The door latches behind him and I pretend not to notice the sudden intention for confinement.
This is what I came for.

I do a full circle in the center of his bedroom and look over at him somewhat quizzically, while he just stands there and manages to look a little unsure of himself.

Surprisingly.

“My place. I stay here. When I can.” He pauses. “I said that already. My aunt and uncle let me stay here. I’m at Stanford. My parents used to live here a long time ago, but they moved to L.A. and then…my dad still lives there.” He gets this twisted-up smile. “I’m not sure why I felt the need to explain all of that.” He shakes his head and gets this rueful smile. “There’s a restroom right there.” He points to another door to my left.

My mind clicks with swift understanding at all he’s just said. “Lincoln Presley.” He nods. “You’re Charlie Masterson’s cousin? The baseball player?”

He nods. What are the odds that I would run into the very guy Marla wanted me to meet? I kind of laugh; I’m somewhat awestruck by the guy’s attractiveness and my whimsical ability to recall his talent, even though I seriously hate baseball.
One word I would use to describe it? Boring.
I put this sudden clarity to realizing who he is down to the acute but overwhelming effects of the party punch. He gives me a definitive smile as I disappear into his bathroom.

Minutes later, I emerge equipped with knowledge for his favorite cologne—Armani. His shaving preferences—a razor. “The art of shaving?” I tease.

Linc laughs. “My college roommate got me hooked on that. It really does work.”

I make a point of touching his face as I stroll past him to get a better look at his bookshelf. “Smooth.”

The thrill of him begins to work its way through me. All at once, I’m thankful Marla picked out the black lace leggings with the red mini for me to wear. Thankful for my sister’s black leather boots—calfskin, silky soft, and practically reaching my thighs. Thankful, I shaved my legs and permanently borrowed my sister’s Dolce & Gabbana “The One” perfume and lightly sprayed it all over. The scent is now faint, but it’s still there. I’m thankful for it all because here is this baseball player from Stanford—Lincoln Presley—and he will expect these things. I wave my free hand toward his bedroom wall of self-achievement and look straight at him. “Famous.”

He shrugs.

Modest.

His unassuming look almost undoes my bravado. I turn away and resume the impromptu tour of his room, examining his baseball trophies and covertly studying his photographs. Linc runs the bases. Linc makes the winning pitch. Linc holds a gold trophy high over his head. His winning smile flashes from all the photographs. All his achievements.
Always the winner.

I turn around and consciously assess the real one before me. He’s slightly built, surprisingly, but he’s tall and lean and incredibly attractive. In an attempt to still play it cool with him, I again study all the newspaper clippings someone has proudly framed of the guy. The headlines proclaim his fast ball is his specialty, and he holds the number-one spot as lead pitcher on athletic scholarship at Stanford. According to the sports world, Major League Baseball has been circling and assessing him for some time and may soon call upon Lincoln Presley—the superstar—to further explore and exploit his talent. A scholarship. Ten trophies. Five blue ribbons. Two reds. Four gold medals. I touch each one as if receiving benediction for doing so and trail my fingers over one of his winning medals. It hangs from a gold ribbon like a talisman. I slip it over my head.

“You’ve collected a lot of trophies already, Lincoln Presley.”

“It’s not about the trophies. It’s about winning. At least, that’s what my dad says.” He sounds apologetic as if he wishes things could be different.

“We must be perfect for the parents.” He studies my face for a long moment. He gets this look of regret and slowly nods with some kind of shared recognition. “At least, we have to try,” I say with a little grimace.

“Yes, we have to try,” he says back to me.

It’s true that I shoulder perfection in every way possible for my parents now. They depend on me to be perfect. They
need
me to be perfect. I shudder all at once tired of the shackles and their expectations that I be the fun, smart, and accomplished daughter—that I
be Holly for
them. The burdens are heavy. The expectations are high. Yet, the grief threatens, and surges ever higher, poised to engulf all of me.
Perfect. The only thing I’m just about perfect at is ballet. Someday everyone is bound to figure that out.

I force myself to smile like Holly would and glance over at Linc because we share this quest to be perfect.

He gets this sexy smile. I incline my head in acquiescence because I know where this is going. I’m ready for the respite from the pain I still carry, and I instinctively know Lincoln Presley can take it from me for a little while. He comes over and puts his arms around my neck and pulls me close. I breathe in his cologne while he trails his mouth along my neck again. He leans in and kisses me and lifts me up off the floor and then starts to hold my body above his, but I move out of his hands quickly and involuntarily moan at the instant pain.

“Sorry,” I say, forcibly breaking the moment. “Normally that move would send me over the edge, but I broke three ribs three months ago and if I let you lift me like that I’ll be screaming for all the wrong reasons.” I shake my head in embarrassment and kind of laugh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to kill the mood like that.”

“Let me see.” He moves to lift up my shirt and spies the heavy ace bandage wrapped tight around my mid-section. The black lace Wonderbra does little to camouflage the hideous beige bandage, and it’s decidedly so not sexy. “I’ve got this miracle salve that works wonders on aching muscles and broken ribs. I broke a rib a few years ago, miscalculating a steal for third.” He looks straight at me. “It hurt like hell for months, but this stuff works wonders, like I said.” He gets this thoughtful expression and then disappears into his bathroom. He soon returns and holds up this little green jar.

“What is it? Or do I even want to know?”

“No, probably not,” he says with a laugh. “But it works. Do they hurt right now?”

I nod and bite at my lower lip. “Probably shouldn’t have shown off so much on the dance floor. They’re raging in protest right now. It’s hard to even breathe.”

“And I thought that was my special kind of magic making it so hard for you to breathe.”

I laugh a little. “You’re weird, Elvis,” I say airily. “You’re seriously weird.” He looks taken aback. I start to laugh again and realize that it actually feels strange to be laughing, to be curiously happy for no reason at all. I stop myself and look at him more intently. “No one’s ever called you weird before, have they?”

“No.” He gets this little smile. “I’ve been called lots of things. With a name like Lincoln Presley, the imaginations of kids from seven on are pretty ruthless and know no boundaries. But, Elvis? You call me
Elvis
…all the time…since we first met.” He looks at me intently as if I should have figured this out by now. “
Why?
” he asks.

Why.

Why?

“Why,” I say slowly. “I don’t know. No reason. You have dark hair, blue eyes. Do you sing?”

He gets this slight smile and bites at his lower lip but concentrates fully on the task at hand. I’m suddenly shy as he directs me to lift my arms and then deftly strips off my black lace blouse and slowly undoes the final wrapping of the ace bandage around my ribcage.

My ribs have been tightly wrapped for the past fourteen hours. Their inevitable release from the ace bandage is accompanied by this deep visceral pain—the price to be paid for seductive dancing and a rigorous pointe class done all in the same day. “God. I overdid it.
Oooohhhh.
That hurts something…
fierce
.”

“Are you…” He pauses. “Are you, like, trying to stop yourself from swearing? Because of me?” He laughs. “Because I can completely handle it.”

His mocking makes me almost laugh, but that makes it hurt worse.

“Shit. Don’t make me laugh, Elvis.” My eyes fill up with tears. “Damn. It’s incredibly
fucking
painful.”

“That’s more like it. I love a girl who can swear like a truck-driver.”

He dabs his fingers in the salve and moves toward the front of my chest and starts rubbing it in. I wince, prepared for an onslaught of pain; but there is none. Yet, surprisingly, I experience this general embarrassment at the size of my breasts, which have been unceremoniously unmasked for him in this unexpected clinical way. Which is strange, in and of itself, because I—Tally Landon, as I like to think of myself in the third person at inopportune yet completely mortifying times like this—have never suffered from a single moment of embarrassment or regret over my small breasts until this particular moment. “It’s the price to pay for fame,” Holly used to say. I mutter these very words to him now.

Linc stops what he’s doing and looks at me. “It’s the price to pay for fame,” he says back to me. “What’s that in reference to?”

I don’t say anything. I point to them. He nods with sudden understanding and keeps rubbing the medicinal stuff into my ribcage like nothing has changed between us.

“What a way to kill the moment,” I say looking away from him. I intently study the fame wall again.
What the hell is wrong with me? I need to plan my exit. He probably thinks I’m the biggest loser.

“You think the size of your breasts kills the mood for me?” He takes my right hand and moves it over him. I feel his erection through his jeans.

“Oh.”

He pulls me up to a sitting position on the bed.
Not what I was expecting.

“Raise your arms.”

I do, dutifully.
He re-wraps my rib cage, sans Wonderbra. He pulls the lace blouse back over my head and straightens my clothes as if he’s dressing a doll. I start to feel disappointment, but then he gently pushes me back to the bed and kisses me while being careful not to lean too heavily into me. He raises his head from exploring my neck for a moment and looks at me quizzically; making his intentions clear once again.

His seductive move plays extreme havoc with these dormant notions of what love could be like. I’m not sure if it’s the effects of the laced punch from earlier or his magnetic attraction or his amazing physical presence, but I have to secretly admit that no one has ever made me feel quite this way.
Undone. In want of more. Need. I need this. Him.

I smile up at him as he looms over me.
I want this. I want to be with him.
Being with him is exactly what I want to do because Holly isn’t here anymore, and my parents are too besieged by grief to care properly. It’s just me now. But tonight, I don’t want to be alone. I want to be with him. I want to be with someone, who is still alive and makes me that way again, too.
Because it doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore.

“How old are you?” Linc asks suddenly. “
Really.”

“Old enough.” I look at him in defiance. “How old are you?”

“I’m definitely old enough.” He shakes his head side-to-side at my answer. “I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three. October.” He hesitates.

He doesn’t believe me. It fuels me.

“Twenty.” My seventeen-year-old lips curve into a slight smile as I tell this lie. In a little over eight hundred and two days, this will be true.

Satisfied with my answer, Linc plays with my hair, traces my jaw line, and then my lips. He trails kisses across the tops of my breasts and doesn’t care about their size. I can feel myself dissolving away. I savor the building intimacy with this stranger, but not. This super god, so designated in the sports world, is here with me. Lincoln Presley’s reputation for athletic stardom and dating every hot girl is somewhat legendary. At Paly. In the papers. I heard things. I read them, just like everyone else. I can handle it, handle him
handily;
I decide.

“You’re on the pill…right?”

A solicitous question.
“Of course I’m on the pill, Elvis,” I joke. “Every twenty-year-old girl in America is on the pill. It’s practically handed out along with your college course list.”

He looks suspicious at my flippant answer while I silently count backwards. How many days has it been since I took one of those birth control pills? Two? Maybe three at the most. Does it matter? Yes. Think, Tally.

The lies have just built upon one another. One follows the other like connected dots on a road map; but this path leads me to him, and I can’t stop now. Not yet. I hold my breath and take quick inventory one by one of the lies I’ve told him. Name. Age. Birth control.
What am I doing? Why am I doing it?

He shakes his head. Then he walks over to his night stand, blithely opens the drawer, and holds up a foil packet in triumph. I take in air and slowly exhale with relief and nod with approval of his Cracker Jack prize. When it comes to contraception, I’m normally better prepared than this—but then nothing is normal anymore.

“Oh, good. Yes, let’s use that, too.” Then my nerves get the better of me and begin to take over. I’m shaking.
What the hell is wrong with me? This is standard operating procedure.
I attempt to affect a casual air, slip off his bed and out of his arms, and resume my innocuous tour of his room. The top two rows are filled with books. I finger each one and read the names aloud. “Shakespeare, Hemingway, Cheever? Have you read any of these?”