The Truth About Air & Water (Truth in Lies #2) (25 page)

I wait for Sam and decide we will have the Lincoln Presley discussion on the walk home. I silently congratulate myself for inadvertently planning ahead by invoking the aid of darkness. Yes, I can take much-needed protection in the dark, which will hide any unexpected tears because I might cry. It happens. Sam just won’t see it or know it, although I have recently concluded that I am all cried out. There appears to be no tears left for the baseball player.

Thus, my unexpected debut at
The Promissory Note
.

It’s another ninety minutes before the last of the bar patrons clear out after having been served last call. Sam’s clearing all the remaining empty glasses they left behind as the last one files out.

Finally, we exit the restaurant’s front doors. I patiently wait for him as he locks up while attempting to breathe and appearing normal.

What am I doing?

Why am I here?

Sam looks calm, cool, and collected as if girls come by the restaurant every night to ask him for a walk home.
Maybe, they do.
He gets this lazy smile as he comes toward me. Still, I’m taken aback when he deftly takes a hold of my left hand as soon as we step out onto the sidewalk together.

In the next moment, he brings it to his mouth, brushes his lips across the top of my hand, and then plants an actual kiss on the inside of my wrist. I avoid crying out but just barely because his simple, sensuous gesture has just about unraveled me already. I’m being outplayed on the seduction front.
This
, I am not prepared for.

He slides his arm through mine and matches my gait within seconds. I try not to think of Linc and the way he would do this too. I try not to think of
him
at all, but of course I do.

“Merry Christmas, belated,” he says.

“Merry Christmas, belated. And Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year. So, how’s the baseball player?” Sam says with a sign of clairvoyance. “What I mean to say is how is he doing? I mean you’re here, and he’s not.”

Hidden by darkness, I take perverse delight in hearing the trembling in his voice and note the quick succession of false-start statements. Still, I say nothing. Instead, I just shrug my shoulders and keep on walking. I revel in my penchant for silence.

“I tried to follow the stories for a while,” Sam says after a few minutes. “But then, they seemed to stop with the ending of baseball season until the thing four days ago.”

“The
thing
four days ago. That’s a nice way of putting it,” I say with a hint of sarcasm.

“So how is he?”

“He’s fine? I guess. I don’t know,” I manage to say in a low, husky voice. “We’re not together. He’s concentrating on baseball among other things,
obviously
.” The bitterness left behind by the salacious news story in LA is still fresh. “I’m concentrating on ballet. There’s a no-contact agreement in place for the next six months because…it’s complicated.” I shrug my shoulders and have to hope he’ll take the hint and drop it.

He doesn’t say anything more. I keep my eyes focused on the sidewalk because suddenly this act of putting one foot in front of the other has become complicated. Sam is right beside me, gripping my arm ever tighter, which proves lucky when I almost trip over a raised edge in the sidewalk.

“Careful, now,” he says softly. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“No.” I gaze up in silent wonder at Tremblay’s house.

How did we get here so fast?

Tremblay’s house.
I still call it that because I am incapable of thinking of it as home actually. Carelessly, I admit this to Sam and then wince because he’s probably been here hundreds of times with Tremblay. They dated for something like two years.

“I shouldn’t have brought Allaire up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s been a while. Almost a year since she…really a year and half since we were…you know
together
.”

I nod in the darkness. I’m not sure he sees it.

And, I cannot care.

“Right. A year. Almost. Many months. Years. But time just…marches on, doesn’t it? Just like they say. You think we’re the only ones that count it so maniacally?”

“I don’t know,” he says sounding hollowed out all at once.

“See, Sam?” I say softly. “That’s what I do I destroy your most pleasant thoughts and memories of someone with all these tainted fucked-up ones about the passage of time and death. And now, I’ll apologize for a second time. Keep track. There will be more of those.” I raise my arms and offer it up as a prayer or penance, one of those, to the dark cloudy sky above us.

Sam doesn’t say anything of course.

What could he say? I am a piece of work and he best find that out right the fuck now.

The moon decides to go behind the clouds starting to form. We’re apparently lost in all these separate but tortured thoughts of our own making because the sudden darkness envelops us into this long protracted silence. Together, we study the clouds and search in vain for the lost moon and our missing breaths.

“Missing persons,” I whisper. “That’s what we are.”

“Maybe,” he says on a sigh and then clears his throat and reaches for my hand. He smooths it over and over with his long tapered fingers, and I inadvertently smile. “So, Tally, what—”

“
Why
did you want to walk me home?” I interrupt his speech and forcefully pull my hand back from his. I seek out his face in the confounding darkness, suddenly disturbed by his touch and my automatic aching for it as well as my inability to clearly see his face.

“Because I
know
you want to talk about it.”

“No. I really don’t. There’s been enough
talking
about it. In fact,
everybody’s talking
about it.” My smile disappears altogether. “Thanks for walking me home. You should go now. I mean it. Run like hell. I am a very bad idea, Sam Wilde.
Trust me on this
.”

“Thanks for the warning.” He smiles in the dark at me. I gasp when he suddenly pulls me along toward the house.

Fascinated in some way by him, I watch as he stoops down and retrieves a key from the flower box where Allaire must have hidden it years before. He raises it in triumph while I watch in stunned silence as he unlocks the door, turns on the porch light and then all the living room ones inside as well as if he owns the place.
Maybe he did at one time.

He guides me through the doorway touching the base of my spine, gently pushes me down onto the sofa, and disappears in the direction of my unused gourmet kitchen. I’m too surprised to even respond.

This is what knights do, apparently. They take over.

A part of me can admit to liking that about him.

I take respite in counting the minutes since he left me in the living room.

Ten.

I can plainly hear him working away in my kitchen. Good luck with that since my food offerings consist of Cheerios, milk for Cara, and plain yogurt for me. Perhaps, he’s a magic chef and can conjure up real food too. I grin at the prospect.

I’m still smiling when he finally appears bearing two steaming cups of hot chocolate on a fancy silver tray.
A wedding gift. One of those early ones someone sent before it all went to hell.

All should be warned; I remain in rare form. I returned nothing. I let them all figure it out when the date came and went and no wedding ensued and no thank you card was ever sent. I blame my bad form in the etiquette department all on Lincoln Presley or Davis Presley. One of those Presley men is surely to blame for all of this—the fucked-up turn my life has taken, including the faux pas in not sending thank you notes to anyone for the early wedding gifts.

My anger for all of it, especially after the LA incident grows exponentially—upwards, and downwards, and sideways—like a bad weed, or better yet, raging bacteria that the greatest antibiotic is unable to kill off.

I must hate him now. I love him and hate him at the same time. I wield this newfound rage deep inside, so deep that no one sees it, but it’s there growing and changing and getting stronger with every passing day.

It’s true that my heart first broke in October when he didn’t remember me, but the pain keeps going and breaks up the rest of me from the inside out like the spreading of shattered glass, one irreparable crack at a time.

Yet, I feel nothing but the pain.

I must warn Sam, at some point, but not tonight. Tonight, I will live and breathe and be with a man who wants to be with me, obviously.

I will not feel the pain.

I will take a respite from the pain.

This I will do. For me.

I will take and not give back, and I will enjoy it.

Somehow.

I look over at Sam.
And some minuscule part of me finds the strength to smile at him.

Shit.

Do not care.

You cannot afford to care.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kiss -TALLY

My silent soliloquy leaves me on edge when Sam hands me the mug of hot chocolate with a jaunty waiter flourish just like before at the restaurant. I attempt to appear at ease and gracious, and try not to count the calories but I do anyway. The melting marshmallows on top are throwing me off. I frown and start over.

“Let it go,” Sam says as if he knows I’m counting.

He probably does. He dated Tremblay. He probably lived here at some point.

Surely, he knows how the dance world works. It’s either splurge and purge or starve and live small.
The Boxer’s Diet. It’s my religion and basically the only one I follow these days.

Religion.
My mind flashes to Pastor Dan and the gorgeous church overlooking the Pacific and briefly strays to thoughts as to what could have been my life by now. I get lost for a little while.