Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (11 page)

“I couldn’t,” she said. “There’s no way I could impose more when—”

“And you need to stop apologizing, and stop using the word
impose
,” he added. “Immediately. That’s also part of the proposal.”

She pressed her lips together, and Ben stared at them.

May needed a friend, not a lover. He needed to prove to himself that he was the kind of man who could be May’s friend without making a hash of it and driving one more good thing from his life.

Maybe it was a stupid idea.
Probably
it was. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this way—like somebody else’s problems mattered so much, and like he might actually be capable of helping with them.

Christ. He wanted to keep playing the white knight.

He thought he
could
, too, if he had a few more days to practice. He could figure out how to make her talk. How to make her smile.

He wanted to change her mind about New York. Six years here had convinced him there was nowhere on the planet he’d rather be, and the last six months working with bees had sent him to all kinds of interesting places he’d enjoy showing off.

He knew this city, and he loved it. He could give that to May.

“You’re not allowed to say no, either,” he said, squeezing her hands.

“What am I allowed to say?”

“The only thing you’re allowed to say is yes.”

“All right,” she said. “Yes.”

The steering wheel jerked in Allie’s hand as the station wagon hit a washout. She yanked it to the left, aligning the tires back with the road.

“Jeez, Al,” Matt said. “You think you could slow down?”

She glanced at her fiancé. He wore a rumpled denim shirt over a green T-shirt, and his light brown hair looked like he’d finger-combed it after getting out of bed this morning and ignored it ever since. Which she was pretty sure was what he’d done.

Her own hair was a frizzy mess, floofing from beneath the baseball cap she’d pulled on when she caught her reflection by the front door of the cabin.

Not that it mattered. They were in cabin mode, and she didn’t care what she looked like. Matt didn’t care, either. He loved her unconditionally and absolutely. He had since the day May brought him home from her biology lab to their shared college apartment.

I think I’m in love
, Matt had said when she came in the kitchen.

Allie had assumed he was joking.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can you check my cell again and see if there’s a signal yet?”

A mile from the general store, she knew the phone wouldn’t be working, but she kept hoping anyway. It happened, right? Rogue weather pushed satellites out of alignment, maybe? “Is there weather in space?”

“No.” Matt swept his finger over the screen of her phone. “No atmosphere.”

He said it without judgment, but privately Allie added the
Duh
she deserved.

“You still don’t have any bars.” He tossed her cell back on the wagon’s green vinyl upholstery. They jounced through a pothole, sending the phone skittering to the floor as Matt reached for the oh-shit bar. Their sheepdog, Roscoe, whined in the backseat.

“You wanted to come with us,” she muttered irritably. But a glance in the rearview mirror told her that poor Roscoe had curled up in a ball of misery. She eased her foot off the accelerator. Matt’s knuckles were white, and she was being ridiculous, even by her own standards.

There was no reason to expect May to be at the store, or even to hope she’d left another message. She’d said she was on her way. She would get here when she got here.

Allie managed the rest of the drive over the rutted gravel road at a more reasonable speed, and soon enough the store and gas station came into view. As she pulled into a parking spot, Matt put his hand on her knee. She cut the engine.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

She unbuckled her seat belt and covered his hand with her own. “Yeah, thanks. I’m just kind of … discombobulated by this whole thing with May.”

“You seem distracted.”

Allie managed a little laugh. “I’m always distracted.”

He smiled.

She remembered thinking, when they first became friends, that Matt had the best smile of anybody, ever. Totally open, it was a pure reflection of his unblemished awesomeness. His eyes, too—but these days, she had trouble meeting his eyes.

“More than usual,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

“With the wedding coming …” He trailed off. Not a question, but an open invitation to tell him what was going through her brain. A promise that he’d understand, whatever it was.

And he would. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he’d be understanding and lovely—and God, how could she tell him how much she hated that sometimes? How
impossible
it was to imagine spending her life feeling like the bad one? The petty one, the craven one, the moody one—name a fault, and she had it. Not Matt, though. He was a better person than her by every possible metric, and damn him, he was even better-looking than she was.

His only fault was loving her.

“You’d tell me, right?” he asked. “If there was something really wrong.”

“Of course,” she lied. “Always.”

He leaned in to kiss her, and she kept her neck loose. She kept her mouth soft and welcoming. She muffled the part of her that had always whispered doubts about Matt and had resorted lately to dialing up the volume to a full-on klaxon
ah-oooooo-gah
noise every time he kissed her and she had to force herself to let him do it.

She had to work so hard to want him, and that was her fault. One more fault that Allie possessed and Matt didn’t.

When he said
mmm
and scootched closer, she closed her eyes and hated herself.

When his hand smoothed up her arm and cupped her shoulder, his thumb rubbing back and forth over her collarbone through her T-shirt, she hated herself even more.

She hated herself all the time, lately.

Something wet poked behind her ear, warm and insistent.

Matt placed his palm against Roscoe’s neck and pushed him into the backseat. “Damn dog,” he muttered. But he was smiling.

Always smiling.

Allie looked away, out the windshield, and caught a glimpse through the storefront window of someone tall, with pale hair. She flung herself from the car so fast, she startled Roscoe, whose claws scrabbled over the seat in his excited confusion.

“Where’s the fire?” Matt asked.

“May’s in there!”

Allie skipped over a small patch of lawn and burst into the store, ready to fling her arms around her sister and crazy-hug her. Or possibly shake her. She wasn’t even sure which, she just needed to
touch
her.

Born eighteen months apart, they’d spent their whole lives together, and it was bad enough that May had moved to New Jersey. Now she was involved in some kind of scandal, and Allie couldn’t stand being left outside of it. She needed May to tell her what was going on. She needed May to
be
here.

It was damned uncomfortable, being crippled by doubt a week before your wedding when you didn’t have your sister-confessor around to spill your guts to.

But when she scanned the entryway of the store, she didn’t find her sister. Just a long-haired man with a camera slung around his neck, chatting with the suspicious store owner.

Telephoto lens. Journalist? Photographer?

He couldn’t be here because of May. That would be too bizarre.

But then, so was the idea of May attacking Dan with a utensil, and Allie had seen that video footage with her own eyes.

She checked the bulletin board near the door. No new messages.

None yesterday, either. No calls. One piddly email that said nothing Allie could sink her teeth into.

The fist of anticipation in her stomach tightened, and she released a long exhale and
headed toward the coffee. Coffee was the ostensible reason for this errand: Matt only drank decaf, and they’d run out. But honestly, Matt drank maybe three cups of coffee a week. Mom had sent them out because she was just as anxious for news as Allie was.

Allie had watched the YouTube video fifteen times at least, always wincing at the part where Dan—with his typical Labrador earnestness—basically called May ordinary and boring, when anybody with eyes in their head could see that she was made of awesome.

Or maybe they couldn’t
see
it. Allie had been forced to impose a news blackout Thursday in the aftermath of the luncheon when some dickweed sportscaster called May “plain” and Matt read a sports blog that called her a “Packers groupie” whom Dan had elevated to the good life. Allie had lobbed a slipper toward the computer—not hard enough to actually hit it—and took Roscoe and Keller for a long walk.

Then she’d come home and watched the video some more.

Every time, she felt a sympathetic, curling disappointment deep in her stomach. When Dan sank to his knee, May’s back was turned to the camera, so Allie couldn’t see her sister’s reaction as Dan said that the most important thing in his life was football. She couldn’t see what May had felt when she heard him say that she kept him grounded, helped him focus, made him a better
player
.

She could imagine it, though. May’s hurt. Her disappointment. Maybe even a fleeting anger, though anger and May weren’t well acquainted.

She just couldn’t imagine any expression on May’s face that would lead to her attacking Dan with a fork. It wasn’t
May
.

Dan’s proposal had sucked, but Dan was Dan. This was a guy who’d put green beans in his nose at the dinner table. True, Allie had egged him on, but even so. Green beans. In his nose. What had May expected, violins and roses?

Whatever she’d expected, she hadn’t gotten it, and Allie hated that. She hated that May almost never got what she hoped for, and she loved May for never letting it get her down. It was the most glorious thing about her sister—the way she always found some new source of hope.

Roscoe barked outside, a brief moment of disobedience as Matt left him at the curb, having clipped his leash to a signpost. Possibly-a-Reporter Guy sauntered into the coffee aisle and looked her over, then turned his attention to the herbal teas.

Allie scanned the coffee until she found the kind Matt liked. She heard him greet
someone warmly near the front of the store.

Typical. They were hundreds of miles from home, but somehow Matt had found a friend.

She wandered back toward the meat counter to pick up cold cuts and cheese. Reporter Guy trailed behind her, feigning interest in the Entenmann’s coffee cakes.

Shit.

Allie kept her face turned away and tugged her hat down over her forehead. If he recognized her, would he follow her and Matt back to the cabin? Did he know May was supposed to be here soon?

She ordered pimiento loaf, salami, and Muenster cheese. Snatches of Matt’s conversation floated to her, interspersed with the grating sounds of the slicer.

“—surprised me, dude, that’s all—”

“—not sure. Sometime today, but—”

“—disappeared on me, and I kind of lost it, to tell you the truth. I hopped in a cab—”

“—have practice? There’s a game in a few days, right?”

“—Thursday. But I’m not supposed to be here. I think Coach is going to cut off my nuts. I just got her note, and I went straight to the airport. I actually made it up here last night, but then I didn’t know where to go.”

That was when she figured out who Matt was talking to. And started saying all the really bad swear words in her head.

“—find it?”

“They all look the same in the dark, dude, and May’s not answering her phone. I’m glad to see you, because—”

“Will there be anything else?”

Allie blinked. The man behind the counter was slapping a sticker on her plastic bag of salami, and Dan was here.

Dan was at the front of the store, talking to Matt.

She snuck a glance at the reporter. He was staring fixedly at her.

This was nuts. It was Labor Day weekend. On Labor Day weekend, the Fredericks family played cards, drank beer, and ate too much junk food at the lake, and Allie filled the annual drama quotient quite capably by herself.

When she was eight years old, she’d knocked out both her front teeth in a bizarre,
impossible-to-replicate waterskiing mishap.

At eleven, she fell asleep with gum in her mouth and woke up with it stuck to her thighs and tangled in her hair.

At seventeen, she’d laid out in the sun all day covered in baby oil and somehow, despite distinctly overcast weather, managed to contract sun poisoning, after which she’d spent most of the weekend huddled in a dim room, shivering.

And now she was twenty-four, about to get married, and scared to death she was making a mistake. She’d spent three weeks telling herself to calm down, because she would have a chance to talk to May at the cabin. Every time she imagined how
that
might go down, she’d had to admit that it seemed likely she’d crown a lifetime’s Labor Day stupidities by jilting the one man in the world who loved her more than oxygen.

Instead, May had gone AWOL, and her NFL quarterback boyfriend had hauled ass to the North Woods to throw himself at her feet. And at least one reporter was here chasing the story.

Weird
didn’t begin to describe it.

“Ma’am?”

“Sorry. What?”

“Anything else?” The butcher extended the assorted bags of sandwich stuff, and she rose to her tiptoes to take them.

“No, thanks. That should do it.”

“All right. You have a good day now.”

But it hardly seemed possible. Dan was here, and May was not.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

“Matt?” she called loudly. “Hon?”

“Yeah?” he called back.

“You and, uh … Dave should take the rental and head on back. I’ll be done in a sec, and I can follow you guys in our car.” She crossed her fingers.
Catch on, Matty. Catch on
.

“Who’s Dave?” he called back.

Allie barely resisted smacking her palm to her forehead. The guy with the camera started walking in Matt and Dan’s direction.