Strange Secrets

by Lexy Timms

  “What?” I asked him as I handed him the glass and wrinkled my nose at the smell of the smoke. It reminded me way too much of all the people who had smoked that shit when I had been working in an industry that was way more open to it. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t blame Luke for needing to take the edge off now and again—I saw how hard he worked, and sometimes I wondered how he could manage to get out of bed every morning knowing the sheer level of stress that he was going to have to deal with for the rest of the day.

  “There was a guy there,” he explained. “Not a local. He booked a table in advance, but I’m pretty sure he gave a fake name...”

  “Do you remember what it was?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “No, I can’t remember much,” he admitted, wincing. “But he looked...off. Like he didn’t fit there. I can usually tell when someone is just stopping by, but the Rosewater isn’t somewhere you’d come if you’re just looking for a roadside dinner, you know?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I muttered.

  “And he was watching me,” he continued. “At first I thought that I was just being paranoid, but the more I noticed it, the more he was looking over at me, and it was like he got more brazen each time. By the time that my shift was nearly done, he was staring at me wherever I went. I thought he must have known me from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him.”

  “Did you remember anything about what he looked like?” I asked.

  He shook his head again. “Not much,” he admitted. “He was wearing a big coat, and it looked expensive. And his head was shaved. That was about the best that I could get.”

  “That’s something,” I muttered. Expensive wasn’t exactly new around Kingston, but if Luke noticed it enough to mention it to me, then there was probably something to be said for it.

  “And just as I was packing up for the evening, he came over to the bar to talk to me,” he continued. “Ordered a drink then asked if I had a second for him.”

  “And what did you say?” I asked.

  “I said yes, obviously,” he replied. “He’d been tipping the staff well all night long, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”

  I glared at him. He needed to think of himself first. But he always looked out for his staff; that was why so many of them were so loyal to him. What made him a good boss always had me worried about him, but that, I supposed, was what I got for never being open about everything that I had been through.

  “He asked about you,” he continued. And I felt my heart slow in my chest, the world around me seeming to catch a breath for a moment.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He asked for Jesse McCoy,” he continued. “Used your real name and everything—”

  “Miller is my real name now,” I reminded him. “It’s both of our real names.”

  “Yeah, of course,” he replied, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Whatever it was, he asked about you. Asked if I knew you.”

  “And what did you say to him?”

  “I said that I didn’t,” he replied. “And when he said that he’d heard that we were brothers, I told him that we’d fallen out a long time ago. Didn’t talk anymore. And I said that I had no idea where you were these days.”

  I sank down on to the couch beside him, staring into space as I tried to make sense of what he had just said to me. Someone was looking for me. Someone who knew me by the name that I had used before I had gotten out of my old life. It was strange even hearing my brother call me that—as though he was referring to someone else entirely.

  “And I didn’t have a good feeling about the guy,” Luke went on, shaking his head. “I came back here, and I had—well, it started with one beer...”

  “It always does,” I replied grimly, looking around the mess that he had left behind and shaking my head. But I knew why he was scared. He might not have understood the depths that my old life had gone to, but he did know that it was something bleak, something dark, and something that no person could every really get away from.

  “What do you think we should do?” he asked.

  I sighed heavily. “I had hoped that it wasn’t going to come to this,” I admitted. “But I think that we need to—I think we need to keep our distance.”

  “Right,” he replied. I could tell that the thought of it was enough to sting him, deeply. I didn’t blame him. The two of us had been through hell already, and we were the only family that we had left. To take a step away from one another would be to accept that the two of us would be on our own for a while. But it was for the best.

  “And you keep telling anyone who comes to that place that you don’t know who I am, that you’ve never met me, all of it,” I continued. “It might be hard, I get it, but you need to let go of the idea that it has anything to do with you.”

  “Seems like they want to make it that way,” he replied, his eyes locking on to mine, suddenly losing the woozy edge that they’d taken on since I had gotten here. He might have been high, but that didn’t mean that he had suddenly become stupid.

  “Yeah, seems like it, but the good news is that we don’t have to play by their rules,” I pointed out. “We make our own. Don’t worry, Luke, I’ve got this, okay?”

  He looked at me, and, for a moment, I saw the kid that I had grown up with—the one who had bawled at our mother’s funeral, the one who had run away with me because I was the only person left that he trusted. I had sworn to myself then that I would never let him down, and I wasn’t about to let that happen now. I cared for him too much. And I knew that, somewhere, my mother was looking down on the two of us together, and she was making it as clear as she could that I was the only one she trusted to take care of him.

  And I was going to do that. I was going to do everything I could to make sure of it. No matter what it took, no matter how hard I had to push to make sure that it happened, I was going to take care of him the way that he needed to be taken care of.

  And if that meant taking some time to break up what we had, I would do it. Because his safety mattered to me more than anything else.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sarah

  “OH, YOU’RE GOING TO look so cute!” Tiffany exclaimed as she pushed an earring into my ear. I winced—how long had it been since I had worn those? I couldn’t remember, but it felt as though she was breaking a brand-new hole into them.

  “Yeah, I better, after all this effort,” I grumbled, mostly joking, but a little bit not. I knew that Tiffany was just excited that she had a chance to get me all dressed up, given that I didn’t usually like to put on anything other than the mere basics for work. But she had brought out her makeup kit and had turned me into a real, actual human woman—put on lipstick, done my brows, cleaned up the old mascara that had been clinging to my bottom lashes.

  And I had to admit, I actually looked pretty good. I had never put too much stock in the way that I looked—didn’t seem much reason for it, in all honestly, given that I hoped people would take me seriously for my work and not the way that I dressed or had my hair. But Tiff had straightened out my curly locks and let them flow down my back, and had dug out this old black dress that I hadn’t worn in months, and even found a pair of heels to match it. And now, I was about as feminine as I was ever going to get—and I sure hoped that Jesse liked it as much as I did.

  “You know, it’s just like a fairy tale when you think about it,” she remarked as she smoothed out a few kinks that my rebellious hair was still throwing up for her.

  “How so?” I asked curiously. I knew that she had always been more of a romantic than me, and maybe I could do with getting into that romantic mood now that I was going on an actual date. It had been such a long time since I had actually gone out with someone who wasn’t either her or my parents that I had almost forgotten what it felt like, and I needed someone to kick me into high gear and remind me how to do the romance side of things.

  “Running into each other like that, just by chance, on the street,” she sighed. “It’s perfect. It sounds li
ke a story that you could tell your grandchildren.”

  “I told you,” I reminded her playfully, “I’m relying on you to have kids so I can be an eccentric aunt to them. I don’t want any of my own.”

  “Oh, you’ll change your mind,” she told me with a wink. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. I knew that she thought that she was just being funny, but it sometimes irritated me the way that she spoke as though she knew better than me. As soon as you were a woman who dared admit that they weren’t that interested in churning out a bunch of kids, everybody else suddenly had opinions on what you were going to do with your life.

  “And if you do, you’ll be able to tell them about this,” she replied. “It beats just hitting on him in a club, doesn’t it? Way more romantic...”

  “So I’m told,” I replied, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I was being sarcastic only because I was nervous as hell, and worried that I was going to fuck this up somehow. I didn’t know what I was expecting from myself, but I needed more than what I’d already had—I needed to prove that I could do this. That I wasn’t going to make an ass of myself or anything.

  “So you’re told,” she replied teasingly. “You don’t have to be so formal, you know that? This is supposed to be a date, not an interview.”

  “You’re the one who told me to go after him so that I could find out more about him,” I protested. “You’re the one who got me started on all of this...”

  “Yeah, and I’m the one who can see how much you’re looking forward to it,” she pointed out, cocking her head at me in the mirror. “I’m your best friend. I can tell these things, you know?”

  “I guess you can,” I admitted. “Thanks for helping me get ready. I don’t think I’d have been able to do this without you.”

  “Well, benefits of having a friend who works in beauty, right?” she replied, waggling her eyebrows at me. “Now, if you’d just let me give you that waxing-”

  “I told you, I might love you, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to trust you anywhere near my nether regions,” I warned her, and she laughed and clasped her hands together as though in prayer.

  “Oh, come on, give me a shot!” she pleaded playfully. “Could be fun. And hey, maybe that’s how your new man likes it...”

  “I don’t care what any guy likes, I’m not about to let anyone put hot wax on my genitals,” I replied. “And besides, he’s not my man, so it’s irrelevant anyway.”

  “I think the order you put that in is very telling,” she remarked, nodding to me in the mirror again. “You’re hoping he’s going to become your man, right?”

  “You need to stop reading in to everything that I’m saying to you,” I warned her. “You’re worse than I am.”

  “Yeah, I could write a whole article on you right now if I had to,” she agreed, and she stepped back and looked me up and down. “There. Done. I think you’re ready to go blow his mind.”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I replied, and I leaned over to give her a hug. “I promise I’m not going to need you to do this every time...”

  “I don’t mind, it’s fun,” she replied. “And besides, I want you to feel great tonight.”

  “I think I’m feeling as good as I ever will,” I replied, hoping that it was enough to sate her for now. I didn’t want to let her down—I didn’t want to say or do anything that might admit to her that I was starting to have second thoughts about this date. And most of all, I didn’t want to let her know that I had some seriously good reasons for feeling that way.

  Ever since Mo had shown me that picture the night before, I had found myself wondering if I should just call this whole date thing off. I should, right? Probably. Because I had no idea who this Jesse Miller guy actually was, and the fact that he had changed his name before didn’t exactly fill me with all the confidence in the world. What was he trying to hide? What had he been trying to keep away from us? And, if it was so important to him that he keep it all quiet, why the hell had he decided to go on a date with me, the person who had pushed him for more about the past that he so clearly didn’t want to talk to anyone about?

  “Something bothering you?” Tiffany asked me as she packed her stuff up into the box she had brought over. I shook my head.

  “Nothing,” I muttered. No need for her to know. She would tell me to back out now if I had a bad feeling about it, but I wasn’t going to let this slip through my fingers, not when I had just started to get close enough to find out something worthwhile.

  “Just nervous,” she replied, and she reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “I promise, you have nothing to be nervous about!”

  “I hope so,” I replied, and I tried my best to keep my face neutral. I didn’t want her to find out what was going on behind my eyes right now—I didn’t want her to find out what I had been trying to hide. That I knew that there was far more to Jesse than he might have wanted me to know. I needed to get to the bottom of this—no matter what it took.

  She went to the bathroom to wash up as I paced back and forth in my apartment and wondered what the fuck I was doing. There was still time for me to back out and come up with some excuse that would get me out of this mess before it went a single step further. I didn’t need to go through with it. It was a first date—people got cold feet all the time. Didn’t mean anything. I could just call him now and tell him that I wasn’t going to make it this evening, avoid his texts for a while, hope that I didn’t run into him...

  But then, I would have skipped out on the story of a lifetime. I knew that I had to find out more about him. I had to know where he had come from, and why he had changed his name. I had to get to the bottom of this, one way or another. And I wasn’t going to do that by chickening the fuck out right here and now.

  Could I go through with this, though, if I found something out about him after we got close? I had no idea. I didn’t know if I had it in me, no matter how good the story might have been, to push for something more. I had always thought that I was the girl who was ruthless when she needed to be, but the thought of him sharing some big secret with me and then me turning it into the basis for a story that I wasn’t even sure that I had the rights to...

  This was a date. Just one date. I had no idea what was going to come from it, but I knew that I wasn’t going to give up this chance just because I didn’t know. Nobody gained anything by giving up, did they? Well, that went for me just as much as it did everyone else out there. If I was going to find out what was up with that picture in the paper that Mo had found and shown to me, then I was going to need to put on my big girl panties and go on this date.

  Not that it was much of a pain to think of spending more time with him. He was one of the most desirable men in this whole state, that was for sure, and dozens of women would have killed to get a chance to spend just one evening with him. I was still trying to work out just what it was that he had seen in me in the first place, but I could figure that out when it came to it—right now, I just wanted to prove to myself and anyone else paying attention that I could do this.

  I had no idea what I was actually going to do with the information that I might or might not find out. I didn’t know if he was going to tell me anything—shit, I didn’t even know if I was going to get a second date out of this, and, given the way that I was overthinking everything right now, I doubted that he would be in too much of a rush to bend over backwards and make sure that he saw me again. I just needed to stay focused on having a good time, on relaxing and making sure that all of Tiffany’s hard work sculpting me into a passable woman hadn’t been for nothing.

  And whatever happened, I would face up to it when the time came. For now—I was just a girl on a first date. Nothing more.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jesse

  AS I PULLED UP OUTSIDE her apartment building, I tried to stem the nerves that were threatening to get the better of me. The same nerves that had been rushing around in me all day long. This was supposed to be something that I looked forward
to—not something that would make my life way harder than it had to be.

  I hadn’t been able to get what Luke had said out of my head all day long. Who the hell had gone to his restaurant the day before? I wished that I could go back in time and keep an eye on it, find out for myself, but I knew that my little brother had a hard enough time establishing himself away from me at the best of times—now he needed his space, and I was going to give it to him. No questions asked.

  Hopefully, they would just back off and leave me the hell alone. I didn’t want to have to worry about whatever asshole had decided to roll up on my family now. I needed to stay focused. I had a date—and I wanted it to be the best damn date that this girl had ever been on in her life.

  Sure enough, exactly a minute before she was due to meet me, the door to her apartment building opened, and there she was. All at once, the stormy thoughts that had been consuming my head for such a long time started to fade out. I smiled as she came over to the car, and I pushed the door open just before she got there.

  “Hey,” she greeted me a little shyly as she slipped into the front seat beside me.

  “Hey,” I replied. “You look...gorgeous.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, and she tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear and smiled at me. “So, where are we going?”

  “I have reservations,” I explained to her. “At a place just outside of town. You ready to get going?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” she replied. The scent of her light floral perfume had already started to circulate around me, filling the air in the car, and I knew that I could get used to this scent clinging to my clothes all night long. I wanted to lean over and inhale the smell of it straight from her skin, but I had to control myself for now.

  For now.

  We drove out of town, and she flicked through the radio stations, trying to find something that would appeal to her, and critiquing all the hosts as she came across them.