You Make Me (3 page)

It had been a good long break from one of those, at least three weeks, and I wasn’t looking to have my solitude interrupted.

My parents collected foster kids for the government checks. It was my mother’s full time employment and the only thing she was capable of doing since she had let the psych ward electroshock her in her twenties, when I was a baby. She couldn’t remember things, like how to use the stove or where the bedroom was. Every day she spent wandering around confused, muttering to herself.

My dad was a lobster fisherman until he lost his hand in the ropes pulling up a trap. After that he did odd jobs and collected disability and the foster kid checks. I think he kind of liked the chaos of random people in and out of our house. Otherwise, he’d have to stop and think about my mom, and he wasn’t good at facing facts. He liked to pretend everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.

The social worker climbed the porch steps. But I ignored her, because her passenger had gotten out of the car and was walking towards me with a confident, but defensive stride. He was about six feet tall, lean but muscular, and his hair was dark, shaggy, in his eyes. There was stubble on his chin, and his jeans were worn, dirty, but fit his body in a way that made me very aware of my own. My mouth went hot. My cheeks burned. My breasts tingled in a way that shocked the hell out of me, and I squirmed, aware that I was only wearing a tank top and little bitty denim shorts. I was sure he could see my nipples since I didn’t have a bra on. But he wasn’t even looking at me.

His gaze was straight ahead, focused on the door, and it seemed he was purposefully not acknowledging me. I sat up straighter, pulled my shoulders back. I bit my lip in an instinctive flirtation. I’d never been particularly into boys, but this one… he looked sexy and mature and dangerous. I understood all at once why girls at school fell all over themselves to talk to guys, and lacquered their lips with seventeen layers of lip gloss. I’d always been a tomboy, and it hadn’t interested me, the primping and the effort.

Suddenly it did, and I was aware of my dirty feet, my unshaven legs. I wanted to say something to him, but nothing came out of my mouth. He just moved up the stairs past me and into the house after the social worker.

I felt like he had just done the same thing to me all over again, five years later.

Only this time I wasn’t going to scramble to follow.

I tried to regroup. I did. I danced and laughed and drank entirely too much of Ethan’s flask, desperate to recapture the excitement and pleasure I had felt when I’d walked up to the house an hour earlier. But I couldn’t shake the anxiety, or the need to glance over my shoulder and see if he was there, anywhere. The longer I thought about it, the more none of it made sense. We were well over an hour away from Rockland, the ferry stop for Vinalhaven, where I’d grown up. Where had Heath been? Was he enrolled for classes at UMaine? If he was, why hadn’t I seen him before? It was a decent-sized school and the campus had some sprawl, but it seemed like we might have crossed paths at one point.

All my thoughts raced around and around, and I played with the engagement ring on my finger, sitting on Ethan’s lap in distraction. He was nuzzling my neck and I barely felt it. Especially when I saw Heath again.

Only this time he was just passing through the hallway. Holding a girl’s hand. She was blonde, and petite, and had muscular shoulders and biceps in her strapless dress. She looked like a gymnast. It hit me like a roundhouse kick to the gut, shocking me at the ferocity of the unexpected pain. This was worse than the shock of seeing Heath again so suddenly. This was proof that he had moved on. Without me.

Of course I had known that, but seeing it was brutal. Wherever he had been for the last four years, he hadn’t been pining for me.

For the first time in an hour, I leaned closer to Ethan, wanting the comfort, the security he offered. He had never hurt me. I kissed him, and his touch was solid, familiar.

But I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over to gauge if Heath had seen me.

The second I did it, I was furious with myself. Heath totally saw me. He was watching me as he led Blondie on by, and he gave me a smirk and a nod.

I wobbled on Ethan’s lap, tongue thick from the whiskey. The room seemed loud and hot and I wasn’t sure if that was the alcohol or my nerves. I wanted to leap up, rush over, and shake Heath repeatedly. I wanted to scream at him.

But I couldn’t. I didn’t. I just met his stare boldly while he kept walking until our eye contact broke.

Aubrey came up to us. “Dude, I’m stealing her,” she told her brother.

“What? I don’t think so.” Ethan’s grip on me tightened.

“What’s up?” I asked Aubrey, grateful for a distraction. I was already attempting to stand up. Not because I wanted to follow Heath. Because I didn’t.

Not much anyway. If I happened to go in the same direction he did, that wasn’t following, was it?

Ethan made an exasperated sound, but it didn’t have any bite to it. He released my waist. “Don’t be gone too long. I need you.”

It was a weird thing to say. Very un-Ethan like. I paused to look down at him but he was just smiling, looking handsome and confident the way he always did. “Need me for what?”

He just shrugged and gave me a charming grin. “I can’t dance without you.”

I tried to laugh, but it sounded a little brittle. My hands trembled when I bent over and touched his shoulders to give him a kiss. “Back in a sec.”

Aubrey pulled me through the crowded kitchen, people and alcohol scattered all over the room. “Where are we going?”

“The garage.”

There was an attached garage added at some point in the seventies from the looks of the style, slapped right on to the back of the colonial. It was probably supposed to store a lawnmower and garbage cans but the guys had turned it into a very cold lounge, with a pool table, dart board, and a whole lot of pot smoking. The house rule was you could smoke out there, but you couldn’t leave your butts or your bowl lying around.

“Holy shit,” I said as we walked into a cannabis cloud. “I’m going to get high just standing here.”

“It’s better than being outside.”

“Being in the house is even better,” I told her pointedly. “We could stay there.”

About a half dozen guys were lounging around on a couch and a bench in the far corner, a couple of girls with them. There was some giggling, but for the most part it was chill.

“But I can’t hear anything in there.” She stopped and crossed her arms across the front of her dress. “So who the hell was that guy?”

It didn’t surprise me that she wanted to know. She hadn’t even heard the conversation we’d had. “It’s my foster brother. I haven’t seen him in four years. I didn’t know he was here.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Your foster brother? That didn’t look like a brotherly hug.”

It wasn’t. “I was really shocked to see him. In a good way. I thought something awful had happened to him.”

“So why haven’t you ever mentioned him?” The hurt was evident in her voice. “I’m your best friend. I mean, he’s obviously important to you. Or was.”

Busted. I shrugged, not wanting to lie. Unable to tell the truth. “If I didn’t know where he was, what was there to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know, like maybe a story here and there about growing up together, about something funny that happened in high school. It just seems like at some point it would have come up.”

“I didn’t grow up with him.” It was an evasive answer.

She knew it. “Did you have a thing with him?”

“A thing?” I steeled myself to lie. I really did have to at that point. Because I couldn’t ever speak about how much it had hurt when Heath had left. How betrayed I had felt, how absolutely and utterly heartbroken. I couldn’t share that with anyone, least of all Ethan’s sister. How could she ever trust my feelings for Ethan if she heard the truth from me? “He was a friend, someone to hang out with. It was lonely living on an island with only a thousand people.”

He’d been a friend and a confidant, that was true. But he’d been way more than that. I waved my hand in front of my face. “It stinks out here. I want to go back in. Ethan is waiting for me.” She couldn’t argue with that.

Aubrey opened her mouth but seemed to think better of it. But then she said, “It’s pretty fucking awesome we’re going to be sisters, isn’t it?”

It still didn’t feel real, the idea of marriage to Ethan. That he would want me forever. That I would want him. Forever. “Totally awesome. Where is Colton, by the way?”

“He’s over there smoking a blunt.”

“Shouldn’t you at least like say hi or something?”

She rolled her eyes but she said, “Yeah. Probably. Shit. I hate being a nice person.”

That made me laugh. “I’ll see you later.”

Determined to go back to Ethan and forget about Heath Deprey, I opened the door to the house.

And came face to face with everything I wanted to avoid.

“Cat,” Heath said. “I was looking for you.”

A shiver rolled up my spine.

Chapter Three

“I was looking for you,” Heath had said to me just a few weeks after he arrived at our house. Mostly he had been lying low, not speaking to anyone, only appearing to forage for food. Otherwise, he spent the majority of his time outside, walking the rocks, trekking into town and not returning until dark. I had wondered where he went, what he did in town.

I had wondered a lot of things about him, but had been afraid to ask. He was intimidating, and while he had given me a few smiles and made a couple of comments about my ability to pack away a lot of food, he had never sought me out.

That he did then made my stomach tighten. A fluttery anticipation crawled over my flesh. “Yeah? Why?”

We were outside and I was stealthily filling a bucket of water from the faucet on the house where my father wouldn’t see me. He didn’t object to me having a vegetable garden, but he did object to me watering it because of the expense. I wasn’t sure how he thought the veggies survived and grew without water since it hadn’t rained in a week, but he didn’t seem to think about that fact. As long as he didn’t see an increase in the water bill, he happily ate the tomatoes, and I got to enjoy my hobby.

“I wanted to ask if you can cut my hair.” Heath held up a pair of scissors.

I paused with the bucket in my hands. “Cut your hair? Why? I don’t know how to cut hair.” His hair was a little unruly but it didn’t seem to me like it should be a big deal. Mine was way more unkempt than his was and I thought he looked cool with it all shaggy and bad boy.

He eyed my head. “I’m not even sure you know how to brush hair, honestly.”

My cheeks burned. “Hey!” Though I couldn’t really argue with him on that. I had long thick hair that was a pain in the ass to control so mostly I just didn’t. It was snarled and wild and usually either in a drooping bun or raining down my back. But that didn’t make it any less embarrassing that Heath had pointed it out. “Then why are you asking me if I’m clearly failing Cute Hair 101?”

I expected a snarky answer back. That’s what his type did. But instead he just reached out and took the end of my hair and flipped it a little, giving me a small smile. “I don’t trust anyone else here to come at me with a pair of scissors, that’s why.” He held the scissors up. “So yes or no?”

I was torn between the horror that I would completely jack his hair up and the desperate desire to both touch his head and to please him. Besides, no one had ever put their trust in me. My fear lost out to my curiosity and I reached for the scissors. “Sure.”

From then on, we were inseparable.

“Yes?” I asked Heath, fighting the urge to bite my lip and run the hell away from him. I wanted to know what he had to say but at the same time I was terrified. I was afraid it would hurt more then it already had, and that had been almost more than I could take. His leaving had sent me into a dark, ugly place that had taken months to crawl out of it and I didn’t want to fall down into that well again. “Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked then silently cursed myself for making it so freaking obvious I cared.

“Where’s your fiancé?” he countered.

“He’s in the house. He’s the Gamma president.” I don’t know why I said that. Actually, yes I did. I said it because I wanted him to understand that he might have left and tossed me aside like I was nothing, but Ethan wanted to marry me and Ethan was somebody. But it wasn’t the right tactic to take with Heath and I knew it the second the words left my mouth.

He rolled his eyes. “Well, good for him. I’m sure that will matter so much in ten years.”

“What are you doing here? Are you enrolled in classes?” Why the hell didn’t you contact me was what I really wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

“No. But Darla is a student and she talked me into this farce.”

“She’s very persuasive, I take it?” I heard myself, knew I sounded snarky and jealous and petty, but I was hurt.

He didn’t rise to the bait. “I do what I want, Cat, you know that.”

God, did I ever. “So what is it you want to do? Why were you looking for me?” This wasn’t at all going the way I had expected a reunion with Heath to go. I had fantasized a million times about this moment, about us hugging, kissing, about how he would explain where he had been and how he had never stopped loving me.

This sucked in comparison. This was a whole lot of freaking suck and I was fighting to hold it together.

He didn’t answer my question. He was studying me, his gaze intent. I thought for a second he was remembering, that he was allowing himself to feel something special for me. My heart melted just a smidge. My shoulders relaxed.

But he said, “I don’t like your hair all done up like that. It’s too sophisticated.”

So much for the melting heart. I felt slapped. “Thanks. Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Heath. Maybe I wasn’t sophisticated when you knew me, but I do all right now, thanks.”

I started to brush past him, tears stinging my eyes, but he blocked me with his bulk, his hand grabbing my wrist. “Cat. Wait.”

“Just let me go.” I yanked my arm but he held fast. When I realized I was staring at the floor, shielding my tears and humiliation from him, I resented it. So I forced my head up defiantly.