Strange Secrets

by Lexy Timms

  “Oh, and that guy’s just an asshole,” she remarked to one. I laughed.

  “How would you know that?” I wondered aloud. She shrugged.

  “I know a lot about this town,” she pointed out, flashing me a smile. “You don’t get to work at the Press without putting in some time getting coffees for random radio hosts, you know?”

  “Right,” I chuckled, and I pulled the car to a halt outside the restaurant. “Well, we’re here.”

  “Wait, this is where we’re eating tonight?” she asked, and she sounded totally shocked. I nodded, a little proud that I had managed to earn that response from her.

  “This is where we’re eating,” I agreed, and she smiled at me and shook her head.

  “You really know how to treat a girl, don’t you?” she asked me as I stepped out of the car and opened the door for her. I nodded.

  “I pride myself on it,” I replied. “Here...”

  I offered her a hand to help pull her to her feet, and for a split second as she came upright, she was just an inch or two from me—I could smell that perfume even stronger than before, and I could practically see the particles of it sparkling on the curve of her neck.

  “We should get to our table,” I remarked, and I turned away from her at once. The last thing I wanted to do to her was freak her out by staring way too hard for too long. I had to stay focused—I had to keep my shit together. I had to make sure that I didn’t freak her out. It had been so long since I had had a first date like this that I had almost forgotten how to conduct myself, and I had to fight to contain the rush of want for her as we headed inside to our table.

  I had made sure to phone ahead and let them know that this was going to be a romantic engagement, and the restaurant, one that I came to when I had someone to impress, hadn’t let me down—the table was draped with a spotless white cloth, a small vase in the center holding three perfectly-bloomed roses, and a couple of candles serving a flickering light to show us the way there. She smiled as she reached the table, and I pulled her chair out for her.

  “This place is amazing,” she murmured, looking up at me with something that seemed close to surprise.

  “I don’t scrimp on first dates,” I replied, and she clasped her hand to her chest in an act of faux-shock.

  “Wait, this is a date?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Because I brought my dictaphone thinking that we were just continuing the interview...”

  She let the joke play out for another second or two, and then burst out laughing and shaking her head.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” she replied as the waiter approaches with the wine menu. “You should have seen the look on your face...”

  And, with that, the evening had really begun. I found myself starting to relax a little—I didn’t even realize how much tension I had been carrying until I felt it begin to lift once more, but she made it pretty easy to forget everything that I had been worrying about before I’d come here. She told me about her time in this town, about how certain she had been that she wanted to work at the Kingston Press and that nothing had ever deterred her from that—I appreciated her attitude, the sureness with which she seemed to approach things, and I knew that she would be the kind of girl who would never back down in the face of a challenge. Maybe that was why she had decided to come on a date with me—maybe I was the challenge that she thought she deserved.

  “Is it just me, or are a lot of people in here looking at us?” she asked, lowering her voice and glancing around.

  I chuckled. I hadn’t even thought about that. “I guess I’ve just gotten used to it,” I replied. “It happens when I’m out and about sometimes. And now that I’m on a date, I guess more people than ever have something to say about it.”

  “Well, they can keep it to themselves,” she replied, making a face and shaking her head. “I don’t want to be a spectacle while I’m here...”

  She looked over at a woman who had been watching us for a while, an older, matronly type with a tight bun of hair and a slightly incredulous expression on her face. As though she couldn’t believe that she was really seeing what she was seeing.

  “Just ignore it,” I assured her quickly. “People will lose interest soon. Just make sure you don’t give them anything to talk about, right?”

  “Oh, and there goes my plan to flip the table before dessert,” she replied, sighing and shaking her head. I laughed. I liked her sense of humor. Now that we were out of the interviewer-interviewee dynamic, she seemed to have chilled out a bit, and I was enjoying seeing this other side to her, this easy, confident attitude that told me that she knew that she had the run of this place.

  “Tell me more about your job,” I suggested, reaching for my glass of wine. Honestly, I would have been happy listening to her talk all night long—I knew that, eventually, she was going to want to turn it back around and find out some stuff about me, but for now, I just wanted to listen to what she had to say.

  “I always wanted to write,” she continued as she dug in to the steak that she had ordered—she was eating as though she was ravenously hungry, and I appreciated how much she seemed un-beholden to the urge for women to eat daintily.

  “My dad used to read the paper over breakfast on a Sunday morning, and I would be running around trying to get his attention,” she explained. “And I realized that the only way that it was ever going to happen would be if I wrote something in that paper, right? And that’s when I decided that I was going to do it for a living, no matter what.”

  “I like that,” I replied. “You’ve really been committed to it for that long?”

  “ I really have,” she replied, shaking her head as though she could hardly believe it herself. “Doesn’t feel as though it could possibly have been that long by now, but it is.”

  “Hey, you got what you wanted out of it,” I pointed out. “That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, as soon as my parents get back from their vacation, I’m going to be in the paper and they won’t be able to ignore me on Sunday mornings any longer,” she laughed, and she reached for her wine and took a long sip of it.

  “I think it’s sweet that you’re so close with them,” I remarked. “Not many people our age still look up to their parents like that, you know?”

  “I guess,” she replied, and she locked her gaze on to mine for a moment. I could see something steely there, something that was clearly meant to cut straight down to my core and find out what I had been hiding all this time.

  “What about you?” she asked me.

  “What about me?” I replied, though I was sure I knew what she was talking about.

  “What about your family?” she remarked. “I know about your brother; he runs that restaurant in town. But what about the rest of them? The two of you didn’t just manifest from nowhere in Kingston. Something must have brought you down here, right?”

  I paused for a moment. I didn’t know what to say to her. There was so much that I wanted to tell her, so much that I wanted to say, but I knew that I had to be careful. One wrong move, one wrong sentence, and I could come out with something that would change the way she looked at me for good. And, knowing this town, it would change the way the rest of them looked at me, too.

  But I was tired of holding it all in for myself. I needed to get some of this off my chest. I had asked her out on a date, and that meant that I had agreed to spend some real time with her, to offer her some serious truths about the way that I had lived my life up until now.

  I looked up at her again. I was tired of carrying about all these secrets by myself. If she wanted to know, then I was going to tell her. If she wanted to know, then she was going to get her hands on the inside scoop. There were some things that I knew would never come out of my mouth, but there were some things that I was tired of keeping to myself. And I was ready, finally, to tell her what the hell they were.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sarah

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO know?” he asked me. I co
uld still hear that slight edge to his voice, and I got the feeling that sharing the intimate details of his past wasn’t exactly something that he was enamored with—but he was willing to talk. And that was a step forward that I didn’t think I would get to take today.

  “All of it,” I replied. “How did you end up here? In Kingston? Did you grow up near here, or...?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he replied. Okay, so at least he was telling the truth there. I didn’t have a whole lot of information to corroborate his story one way or the other, but what I did, I was determined to use...

  Shit, I needed to stop what I was doing and slow the fuck down a little. I knew that I had to stay focused on everything that was coming out of his mouth, but at the same time, this was a date—a date that I had been enjoying since the moment he had come to pick me up in that fancy car of his and opened the door for me and greeted me with that gorgeous smile that made everything inside of me soften for a moment.

  “I grew up in Nashville,” he explained. “Long way from here. I never liked it much, though. Never suited me.”

  “Yeah, I can’t imagine you as much of a country boy,” I remarked, and he shook his head and smiled with amusement at the thought of it.

  “It was never my thing,” he agreed.

  “You grew up there with your brother and the rest of your family?”

  “Something like that,” he replied, and he took a deep breath and locked eyes with me. There was something in his expression that was nervous, questioning, as though he was attempting to figure out if he should really come out and tell me all of this or not. I wanted to tell him, any way I could, that anything that he was thinking, I could handle. But I had to let him come to this on his own terms. I couldn’t push him to deliver something that I knew he wasn’t comfortable with.

  “We didn’t have a good time with my father,” he explained. His voice was a little stilted, as though he wasn’t used to saying all of this out loud. I didn’t say a word, not wanting to trip him up or get in the way of what he was coming out with. I needed to hear what was going to come out of his mouth right ow, and I swear I was holding my breath to make sure that I didn’t say or do the wrong thing to freak him out.

  “He was...he was a real asshole.” he continued. There was a sharp, angry edge to those words, and I knew they were an understatement. I shivered at the thought of what his father must have done to them to curdle the familial bond that they shared—to make it so that Jesse still spoke about him as though he wished that he could reach inside himself and claw out the DNA that his father had left in him.

  “But he didn’t stick around for a long time, at least,” he continued, picking up his wine and then putting it down again, clearly not sure what to do with himself.

  “So it was mostly just me, my brother, and my mom when I was growing up,” he went on. “And I was pretty happy with that, to be honest. I loved the hell out of the two of them, and I knew that they had my back no matter what. Things were tough as shit—my mom had to work her ass off just to support the two of us, but she never seemed to make enough, no matter how hard she tried, no matter what she did.”

  He paused for a moment to catch his breath, as though he was reliving everything that had happened to bring him to this moment. It was hard for me to believe that he had really been through all of that. The man who sat in front of me right now was far removed from some young boy who had to struggle and fight to make ends’ meet. I wished that I could have known him then—I wished that I could have seen that side of him. I knew it was crazy, but some part of me wanted it more than anything in the world. I knew that the man sitting in front of me now was the only version of him that I was going to get, though, and I just had to coax as much truth out of him as I could.

  “Things were all right until our mom got sick,” he continued. He was speaking a little softer this time. As though the memory of what he was pulling into his head was too painful for him to think about. His eyes had softened a little, and I found myself leaning forward toward him so that I could hear every word out of his mouth. I didn’t want to miss a thing. I wasn’t sure whether it was the journalist in me or just the girl on a first date determined to figure out everything that she could about the man that she was spending the night with, but I wasn’t going to let my instincts drop.

  “What did she get sick with?” I wondered aloud. I winced as soon as I heard the words come out of my mouth. They weren’t exactly as careful as they had sounded in my head, and I instantly felt like an ass for being so blunt with him.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, and he looked up at me again. Damn, those eyes were gorgeous. In this soft light, there was a sweetness to them that I had never seen before. A girl could easily get addicted to looking at them, to having them look back at her like that, the way he was staring at me right now.

  “It’s okay,” he replied at once. “She was...it was cancer. We thought that she would be able to beat it for a long time. It looked like she would, to be honest. She was near remission and everything, but then it came back, worse than it had been before.”

  I could tell that this was painful for him to talk about. Not because of the emotion in his voice, but because of the lack of it—because he seemed to have to switch off that side of himself in order to get through telling me about it. I wished that I could have gone back in time and taken back the question that I had just asked him, because I could tell that it was painful, so painful for him that he could hardly stand it. But if he was willing to talk, then I was willing to listen. It was as simple as that.

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “Things got worse,” he told me bluntly. “A lot worse. She had to take time off from work, and then she didn’t have the health insurance that she needed to pay for her treatment, so things started getting real bad, real quick.”

  “What did you do?” I asked. For the first time, he hesitated before he answered the question. He must have known that this was coming, but he clearly didn’t want to come out and tell me the truth of what had happened at that time in his life.

  For a moment, I could see the boy in the picture that Mo had showed me. Angry. Filled with sadness. No wonder that version of him had ached with so much pain, visible even through the slightly crumpled old newsprint that I had seen him on. He and his brother had been through so much, more than any kids their age should ever have had to go through. I wished that I could reach back through time to him, to the version of him that had been forced to shoulder this heavy burden and tell him that everything was going to be okay. Even though I knew that it would be anything but.

  “We had to do things that she didn’t want us to,” he replied. His voice was careful, every word chosen as though to make sure that he didn’t leak any more than he intended to. I cocked my head to the side, letting some of my journalistic instincts get the better of me.

  “Such as?” I pressed him. He paused again, and this time, I could see him working out the pros and cons of coming out and telling me the truth. I knew that whatever it was, it likely held the answer to the question of how he had ended up here in Kingston and what had happened to drive him away from the world that he had been a part of before. I held my breath, worried that even breathing wrong would be enough to get him to think better of it.

  “There are some things about my past that I keep to myself,” he replied, and his voice was sure this time, taut. Not letting a moment of light in to what he was saying. He was not opening up the floor for debate—he was telling me, without a shadow of a doubt, that we were done here, and I felt that pull between the two versions of myself once again.

  Half of me wanted to keep pressing to get what I wanted so badly. I needed to get into this, I needed to find out what he had been hiding all this time, and I knew that I was on the very brink of getting my hands on it.

  But there was another part of me, a part that was demanding my attention right now, that told me to back the fuck off. That I was on a date with a guy who I really liked, a gu
y who had just spilled more to me than he had probably intended to, and that I would have done well to just let it go before I did something that would get him to stand up and leave before I could stop him. I reached over the table, took his hand, and offered him a small smile. I knew it wasn’t much in the way of apology, but it was the best that I could manage for the time being, and I was glad that I had the restraint not to just go nosing around any more into the life that he clearly wanted to keep to himself.

  “That’s okay,” I replied, and I felt a shiver run down my spine as he traced his thumb over my knuckle for a moment.

  “We all have secrets,” I continued, trying to ignore the way that the softness of his touch made me feel. How the hell was I supposed to restrain myself when all I wanted to do right now was throw myself across the table at him, wrap my arms around him, and kiss him? I could almost feel my lips tingling at the thought of it, the thought of his tongue in my mouth...

  I reached for my wine again. I was acting crazy. I needed to calm the hell down. And keep it in my pants for tonight. Because I had no idea exactly what I wanted from this man—and no idea how to figure it out, either.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jesse

  “ARE YOU SURE?” SHE asked me as I put my card down on top of the bill and nodded.

  “I really am,” I replied, for what had to be the hundredth time since I had asked for the check. I appreciated that she was so willing to come out and pay for her own dinner, but I was determined to treat her. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. And I knew that my mother would have risen from the grave to kick my actual ass if I had dared to do anything other than that.

  “Thank you,” Sarah replied, and she picked up her wine glass and sipped on the last few drops, clearly determined to get the very most out of this night that she could. I knew how she felt. Our knees had been pressed together under the small table all evening, and I was aching to feel something more of her, to take things a little further just as soon as I got the chance.