Happy Ever After (32 page)

He’d needed to be with her, just
be
there, with her, in that ordered space she created where somehow everything just made sense.

Needing something—someone—that was jumping off a building without a safety harness. He’d learned the hard way he was better off taking care of himself, dealing with himself and what was his. Period.

Except he’d started thinking of her as
his
. He’d already told her bits and pieces of things he’d never told anyone else, and didn’t much see the point in thinking about.

So . . .

Better he’d pissed her off, he decided. Better she’d tossed him out. They’d both take a couple of breaths, simmer down. Reevaluate.

He checked the modifications, moving from the front end to the rear.

And over the music of the Foo Fighters he heard the distinctive sound of high heels on concrete.

He only had to angle his head, and there she was, wearing one of her sexy business suits, that arresting face unframed, a bag the size of a Buick on her shoulder.

“The door wasn’t locked.”

“No.” He pulled the rag out of his back pocket to wipe his hands.

She shouldn’t be here, he thought.The place smelled of oil and engine and sweat. And so, he imagined, did he.

“I thought you had a thing tonight.”

“I did. It’s finished.” She gave him that cool-eyed stare.“But we’re not, so would you mind turning that down?”

“I’ve got to get the wheels and tires on this thing.”

“Fine. I’ll wait.”

She would, he concluded. She was good at that.

So he figured the Foo Fighters would have to learn to fly without him. He put down his tools, shut down the iPod, then opened the cooler he’d put on the bench beside it. He took out one of the two beers he’d packed. “Want one?”

“No.”

He opened it, took a long pull while he eyed her.“Something on your mind, Legs?”

“Quite a bit, actually. I heard about the accident, about those three girls.Why didn’t you tell me about it last night?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it.” The image—shattered glass, blood, blackened metal on a rain-slicked road—flashed back into his mind. “Still don’t.”

“You’d rather let it eat at you.”

“It’s not eating at me.”

“I think, I really think, that’s the first lie you’ve told me.”

It infuriated him, unreasonably, that she was right.

“I know what’s going on inside my gut, Parker. And talking about it doesn’t change squat. It doesn’t make those girls any less dead, or keep the couple in the other car from a fucking world of hurt. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.”

The heat he spewed did nothing to ruffle her cool.

“If I really believed you were that fatalistic and callous, I’d feel sorry for you. But I don’t.You came to me last night because you were upset, but you couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me why. Maybe getting mad at me helped, maybe you could displace the upset with anger. But I don’t deserve that, Malcolm, and neither do you.”

Chalk up another in the
She’s Right
column.The score, Brown: 2; Kavanaugh: 0, just pissed him off.“I shouldn’t have come by last night when I was in a crappy mood.You want an apology? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you know me at all, Malcolm?”

“Christ.” He muttered it and took another swig of the beer he didn’t really have the taste for.

“And don’t take that dismissive
male
attitude with me.”

“I
am
a male,” he shot back, pleased he’d scraped away a layer of that calm, revved to scrape away more.“I have a male attitude.”

“Then you can stuff this in your attitude. If I’m with you, I’m with you when you’re doing flips and handsprings, and I’m with you when you’re in a crappy mood.”

“Yeah?” Something choked him, twisted in throat, in gut. “Couldn’t prove that by last night.”

“You didn’t give me—”

“What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ don’t you get? And how the hell does this get turned around into being about you and me? Three kids are dead, and if they were lucky, they died fast. But it wouldn’t have been fast enough. Five, ten seconds of knowing what’s coming is forever. That and never getting to grow up, never getting to push the rewind button and say ‘let me do that different this time’ is a hell of a price for some girl who barely had her license a year and two of her friends to pay for being stupid.”

She didn’t jolt when the bottle he heaved smashed against the wall, but let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hum of sympathy. “I nearly did that same thing last night after you left. Then I thought what good would it do, and I’d just have to clean it up. Did it help?” she wondered.

“God, you’re a piece of work. Not everything has a neat, practical answer. Everything doesn’t always add the fuck up. If it did, three girls wouldn’t be dead because they were driving too damn fast and texting friends.”

Her heart hurt at the waste of it all. “Is that what happened? How do you know?”

“I know people.” Damn it, he thought, and shoved at his hair as he struggled to box in the rage that had blindsided him. “Listen, they’re keeping that under wraps until they finish the investigation.”

“I won’t say anything. Mrs. Grady knows the driver’s mother, and it’s hit her pretty hard. Maybe listening to her, making her tea, holding her hand didn’t help all that much. Maybe it wasn’t a neat, practical answer, and maybe it doesn’t all add the fuck up. But I had to do something. When someone I care about is hurting or upset or just sad, I have to do something.”

“Whether they want you to or not.”

“Yes, I suppose so.To my mind, reaching out, reaching for one another doesn’t make what happened to those girls less of a tragedy, or make anyone less heartsick for them and their families. But point taken.You don’t want me to listen.You don’t want me to hold your hand. So that makes the need to do those things about me, not you.”

She took a long breath, and he heard the unsteadiness of it. That, more than anything she’d said or done, cut at him.

“You throw the glass against the wall, then you clean it up and throw it away.That’s your practicality, Malcolm.”

“Sometimes a smashed bottle’s just a smashed bottle. Look, I’ve got to get the wheels back on this Jeep.”

It wasn’t anger he saw on her face, and her anger had been the goal. It was hurt. It was that single, unsteady breath.

She nodded once. “Good luck with that.”

For a moment, just as she turned to walk away, he wished he still had the beer bottle in his hand. Just so he could smash it again.

“I thought I was dead.”

She stopped, turned. She waited.

“When it went wrong, when I knew it was going south, I thought I could pull out of it. But the whole thing was fucked. Technical glitch, miscalculation, and some budget cuts that didn’t get passed down to those of us on the line. Several people up the chain made a bad decision, doesn’t really matter why. The why’s the reason I ended up getting a big fat check at the end of the day.”

“The why’s the reason you got hurt.”

“Put it down to a clusterfuck.” That’s what he’d done. That’s what he’d had to do to get past it. “Anyway, I had that initial moment—gag’s gone south; then the next—I can deal. Then . . . then the next when I knew I couldn’t and thought I was dead. We’re talking seconds from one point to the next, but it all slows down.There’s noise—snatches and bursts—and outside this tunnel you’re in, it’s just a blur. But inside, everything’s slowed down so that few seconds is endless. And it’s goddamn terrifying. That’s before the pain.”

He had to take a breath, had to calm a little.While he did, she walked to the workbench and took out the bottle of water he’d tossed in with the beer.

She opened it, and with her eyes steady on his, handed it to him.

Jesus, he thought. Jesus, she
was
a piece of work. An amazing piece of work.

“Okay.” He cooled his throat. “After the pain, you know you’re not dead. You just want to be. Inside you’re screaming, and that sound’s barely human. You can’t get even that sound out when you’re choking on your own blood. When you can’t breathe because your lungs have started to collapse. It’s more than you can stand, those seconds, trapped in the pain, waiting to die. Wanting to so it’ll just end.

“What good does it do for you to know this?” he demanded.

“It’s part of you. We’re not blank slates, Malcolm. What we’ve done, what we’ve survived, all go into us.What happened to those girls, your reaction to it—”

“I don’t know why it hit me the way it did. Maybe because it had been a long day, maybe because it was close to home. I don’t flash back to my own crash every time I deal with a wreck. It’s not like that.”

“What is it like?”

“It’s over, or I wouldn’t be standing here. It started being over when I woke up in the hospital. Not dead. It’s a pretty big deal, not being dead, and I wanted to stay that way.”

He put the water down to get the broom and dustpan, and started sweeping up the broken glass.

“If it had to hurt like ten levels of hell, okay. I’d lived through the crash, I’d live through that. Need to put me back together with pins? Go right ahead, as long as I walked out of there. I started making plans to do that; it was a way to get through. No more living day to day.”

“You pushed the rewind button.”

He glanced back at her. “Yeah, in a way. Or maybe I switched to forward. But I knew when I woke up, and my mother was sitting there, when I saw her face, I knew I wasn’t going back. I’m not going to say I’m all she had, or has, because she’s more than that. But I could stop living the kind of life that put the rest of her family at risk that way. I got the chance to do something for her, and to move forward for myself.”

He sighed now, dumped the glass with a clatter into the trash. “She wouldn’t go home. Even when I got strong enough to yell at her, to piss her off, I couldn’t make her go.”

“Is that what you wanted?” she asked quietly. “Did you want her to go?”

“I . . . No. God, no. But I didn’t want her to stay the way things were either. She quit her job, picked up work waiting tables out there. I walked out on her when I was eighteen, that’s basically what I did. Sure I sent her money, but I could count on one hand the number of times I came back to see her. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. I got a chance to change things, and I took it. That’s all.”

“You’re very lucky to have your mother.”

“I know it.”

“And she’s fortunate to have you.”

“We do okay.”

“Malcolm, how would you define you and me? What we have going on?”

“How would you?”

“No, no, you get away with that too often.The question is on the table. Pick it up.”

“Jesus, Parker, sometimes it’s hard to follow you. I apologized for last night, and I gave you reasons. More than I like getting into.”

“Do I take that to mean you can’t define what we have?”

“I wasn’t looking to define it.” He picked the water back up, put it back down. “If I had to, I’d say we have a situation.”

“A situation.” Her breath came out on a laugh. “All right. Do you think I want to be in a situation with you and not know how you dealt with a trauma, how it affected you, how it—or you because of it—changed the direction of your life?”

“Clearly you don’t.”

“It’s important to you to know how things work. Well, I can’t know how you work, or how we might work, if I don’t have all the pieces.”

That hit home with him. “I get that, but I didn’t like all the pieces, so—like I’m doing with this Jeep—I modified them. I don’t run the same way I did before the crash. I don’t think we’d be in this situation if I did.”

“We’ll never know, but I like who you are, Malcolm, and that includes where you came from. I don’t want to feel like I’m intruding anytime I ask you a question about where you came from.”

“That’s not how I want you to feel. I just don’t like digging through the past. It’s gone.”

“I just don’t agree. Don’t you remember the first time you rode a two-wheeler or kissed a girl or drove a car?”

“I remember the first time I kissed you, except you made the move. Fourth of July.”

All right, she thought, enough for tonight. Let it go.“That was to kick at Del.”

“I still got the benefits.” He glanced at his hands. “I’m not in any shape to touch you without messing you up. And that’s a nice suit.”

“Then hold still and keep your hands to yourself.” She moved to him, leaned in, laid her lips on his.

“I hope you don’t consider that make-up sex.”

“It’s the best you’re going to get under the circumstances.”

“Maybe you could hang out awhile. Guys love it when women hang out and watch them work on cars.”

“We do that to placate you.”

He lowered the Jeep a couple feet. “When did you ever date anybody who got under a car?”

“I haven’t—previously—but Mac did, so I have it on good authority.”

Relaxed, with whatever had been balled in his throat, in his gut, loosened, he grinned at her. “That’s sexist. I’ve known plenty of female motorheads.”

“That sort wouldn’t be expected to ‘hang out and watch.’”

“Fine. Can you reach the steering wheel?”

“I suppose, but—”

“Do me a favor. Go on up there, turn it all the way to the right. Then all the way to the left.”

“Why?”

“Because lifting the suspension like this involves a lot of mods, and I want to make sure there’s no interference before I put the wheels on.”

“What would you have done if I hadn’t come by?”

“Stayed mildly pissed off.All the way right,” he added, then got down on a creeper and scooted under the Jeep.

“I meant about the Jeep, but I actually prefer that answer.” She leaned inside, turned the wheel. “Like that?”

“Yeah, looks good. Really good view from down here.”