by Maisey Yates
“What?” Lane asked, sadly keying into what Finn had said.
“It wasn’t a big deal. And,” she continued, directing her words at Finn, “I’m here, so clearly I’m okay. Also, if you were so concerned maybe you shouldn’t have let him drag me out of the bar.”
“You said that everything was fine. You insisted. But, I did regret letting you leave.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what the context of that was. It made her stomach do weird things. Tighten. Turn over.
“Start at the beginning,” Lane said, her voice sharp. “What happened?”
“I was dancing with Rebecca, and some dude took issue with it.”
“That’s not the beginning,” Lane said, the color in her cheeks darkening. “You were dancing with Rebecca?”
Finn’s expression hardened. “Yeah,” he said, “I was.”
“How did that come about?” Lane asked, her tone a little bit too casual.
Oh great, now Rebecca had the feeling she had stepped in the middle of something. But, Lane was always the first person to insist that there was nothing going on between herself and Finn. Still, she was a little bit too interested now for Rebecca to believe that was entirely the case.
“I knew him,” Rebecca said. “And I wanted to dance.”
Finn arched a brow. “Yeah,” he said, not doing his part at all to sound convincing. Whatever he was doing right now, he really had to stop because she needed to preserve her own self and he didn’t seem remotely interested in that.
“Okay,” Lane said, her expression dark.
“I’m fine,” Rebecca said pointedly. “Everything is fine.” She began looking for something to busy herself. “I was promised cheese.”
“You can’t have cheese. Not until you provide me with a sufficient explanation.”
Rebecca stamped, feeling more frustrated than the situation warranted because everything felt too big and too strange inside of her right now to deal with a Lane Jensen inquisition. “You cannot hold French cheese hostage, Lane. It’s cruel and unusual.”
“You were dragged out of a bar by a man after dancing with Finn. I think if anyone is owed an explanation, it’s me.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot that time you bought front-row season passes to my entire life.”
“You’re being impossible. Most people would just tell their friends what was going on. Actually, the biggest reason I think there’s something going on is that you won’t tell me. Because, if nothing had happened with the guy from the bar, why wouldn’t you tell me what happened?”
Rebecca gritted her teeth. “Fine. Nothing happened with the guy from the bar.”
“Who was it?” Lane pressed.
Her face heated and she knew that she was the color of a ripened raspberry. Finn was standing there, his arms crossed over his broad chest, and Rebecca was ready to kill him for bringing any of this up in the first place. The problem was, he knew exactly what had happened, because he knew why she had been at the bar in the first place.
She was pretty inexperienced when it came to men, but she knew that the two of them had been on the same page. Not that they had wanted each other extravagantly, but that they had at least been willing to take each other on as consolation prizes.
Or, if not specifically a consolation prize on his end then a little bit of casual entertainment. Either way, he knew too much. And she suddenly felt embarrassed, exposed and more than a little humiliated.
“Who was the guy?” Lane repeated.
“I just needed to have a little talk with Gage,” she conceded finally.
“Gage. Gage West? The guy who is offering to sell me this building.” Rebecca could see everything slowly coming together in Lane’s mind, watched as the dots connected and formed to make a picture of horror on her friend’s face. “Who is the guy that caused your accident. And is the guy you’re working for,” she said, her words coming faster and faster as she began to put all the pieces together.
“Yes. That’s him. We just needed to talk about… You know, the details surrounding our agreement.”
“Which is why he grabbed you like a jealous boyfriend?” Finn asked.
“Rebecca,” Lane said, frowning. “Is everything okay? He owns your business, and he’s completely invaded your life, and now I hear that he has dragged you out of a bar like he has some kind of claim on you.”
“Nobody has a claim on me but me. So, you can just stop with that dramatic nonsense right now. There’s nothing… This is nothing…” Suddenly, horrifically, she felt her eyes fill with tears.
She felt like all of the invisible seams from where she had once been stitched back together were beginning to tear open. And that all of her insides, all of her secrets, her fears, her everything, was going to spill out right here in the mercantile, in front of Lane and Finn.
If that happened…she just couldn’t have them knowing. What a mess she was. What a damn freak show beneath all the I’m fines.
“Excuse me,” she said, rushing past Lane and heading into the bathroom, closing the door behind her and locking it. She put her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sob that was building inside of her. She was unsuccessful.
She wanted to tell Lane what was happening. And, she never wanted her to know. She never wanted anyone to know. She was ashamed and embarrassed and upset that Lane might have been hurt because Rebecca had been trying to avoid dealing with her own stuff and had brought Finn into the mix.
Finn, who Rebecca should have known was off-limits, regardless of what Lane said. Even if he wasn’t a boyfriend, even if he never would be, it wasn’t right for Rebecca to step in the middle of that relationship. It was too complicated to do something like that. Sure, Finn wasn’t her friend, but it was still idiotic of her.
She plunked down on the closed toilet seat, resting her elbows on her legs, burying her face in her hands. She was just going to go ahead and internally berate herself for everything, even things that weren’t her fault. Even the things that weren’t her responsibility, like Finn and Lane’s whatever-the-hell friendship. Because she felt crappy, and for some reason that compelled her to try and make herself feel crappy all the way down.
She was an idiot to have ever let Gage touch her. No, she was more than an idiot. There was something wrong with her. As if the scars he had given her ran so deep, and were so pervasive that they had screwed up everything. Even her ability to be attracted to a normal, good man who hadn’t…hurt her.
It all involved him. Somehow, he was tangled up in all of it.
She couldn’t even tell Lane. Because she was too ashamed. Because she didn’t like telling people anything. That was his fault too. All of it, every last bit.
She wanted to cry and wail and scream a little bit too, but instead she kept it all bottled up. Kept her hand planted firmly over her mouth, and dashed each and every tear away as it fell.
Gage had messed up her life pretty bad seventeen years ago, but this part of it, all of this, was on her. She was the one who had gone after him. Well, then he had gone after her. After she had kissed him. She was the one who had made it like this. She had really, royally messed up her own life, and there was no one to cast aspersions on but herself.
She straightened, brushing her hands over the front of her clothes, then turning and looking in the mirror. Yeah, she looked like she had escaped into the bathroom to cry. There was no recovering from this. She might as well just go and brazen it out. Then there was a knock on the door.
“Rebecca?” She heard Lane’s voice through the door.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I think when you storm into a bathroom and lock yourself in, you probably aren’t fine. Basing that hypothesis on most of the episodes that occurred during my teenage years.”
Rebecca let out a shuddering breath, then reached out and unlocked the door, turning the knob and pulling it open. “See?” she asked. “Fine.”
“You aren’t usually emotional,” Lane said, her voice muted.
> The accurate and painfully honest assessment hung between them. Rebecca didn’t like it. She didn’t want it. Why did Lane have to be such a good friend? Why had she let her get this close? Surface stuff was so easy. A worse friend would have just said okay after Rebecca said fine.
Lane was not a worse friend, sadly.
“I’m a little bit messed up right now,” Rebecca admitted, her throat closing up.
Lane laughed, a leaden sound that did nothing to buoy the mood. “Who isn’t?”
“Nothing happened with Finn,” Rebecca offered.
Rebecca watched as Lane’s expression went through four seasons. From hot to cold and everywhere in between. “It wouldn’t matter if it had,” she said finally.
It was Rebecca’s turn to try and be a decent friend. To press instead of letting lies sit.
“It wouldn’t? Really? You can honestly say that you are completely okay with all of that?”
Lane let out a slow, unsteady breath. “Look, I would rather if you didn’t sleep with him, just because it would be weird.” She tucked a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “I don’t… I don’t really think of him as a man.”
Privately, Rebecca had to call bullshit on that, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. She had a feeling she’d reached the end of where she could push. And anyway, she was too committed to hanging on to her own bullshit, hoping that Lane wouldn’t say anything to call her out directly.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t push a little.
“Right,” Rebecca said. “So, it would be weird if someone that you were close to thought of him as one.”
A crease appeared between Lane’s eyebrows. “Do you? I mean, do you think of him as a man?”
“Yes,” Lane said, honestly. “He’s…he’s really good-looking.”
“But nothing happened,” Lane said again.
“Nothing. And, nothing is going to.”
“But…it was,” Lane insisted, her tone strangely flat. “It was going to happen, wasn’t it?”
“No,” Rebecca said, and the minute that she spoke the word, she knew it was true. She would never have been able to do with Finn what she had done with Gage. She would have gotten to his house and freaked out completely. Because for whatever reason a good portion of her issues seemed to need to be worked out on Gage. She had genuinely hoped that it wouldn’t have to be, that she could just forget he existed, but that didn’t seem to be happening so all she could really do was follow that particularly fucked-up arrow where it was pointing.
“I did dance with him,” Rebecca said. “And I…thought about maybe doing something more. But it wouldn’t have happened. Even if Gage hadn’t shown up.”
“What…what happened with Gage?”
Rebecca’s face felt like it was on fire. She squeezed out of the bathroom door and into the little antechamber that separated the small room from the rest of the store. She could lie. She wanted to lie. Her friend was going to think she was a complete psychopath.
But of course she was also acting like an absolute crazy person so a lie was only going to look like a lie. That wouldn’t be good. She could feel it. In the way the air between Lane and herself felt brittle.
Lane had been the first real friend she’d made after high school. She’d been so isolated in school, and she’d imagined she always would be. But she’d met Lane after they’d both gotten jobs at the Crab Shanty, and then they’d stayed in each other’s circles ever after.
Thanks to Lane, Rebecca had a group of friends.
Rebecca owed Lane so much. But even so, she’d always kept her friend at arm’s length. They got together and watched movies. They ate snacks and talked about sexy celebrities. But Lane didn’t know that up until last night Rebecca had been a virgin. She hadn’t known the name of the man who had caused Rebecca’s accident.
So many things that Rebecca kept buried down deep because she didn’t know how to have those sorts of conversations without feeling horribly exposed.
Whenever she thought of it, she thought of what it was like when the gauze bandages were removed at the hospital right after her accident. When a nurse had unwound the bandages with Jonathan and her mother in the room.
She didn’t know what they’d expected to see. But Jonathan’s face had turned to stone, and her mother had burst into shrieking tears that felt like salt on those unresolved wounds.
Exposing them to the air had hurt. Seeing their reactions had been even worse. She had always thought they’d both expected her to look more healed. To be more okay.
But if she turned Lane away now, she would break something in their friendship, and she couldn’t risk that. Not when everything was so messed up. Rebecca hated to need anyone. She really hated it.
This wasn’t need, but it was a really strong want. And it was going to win over her desire to hide.
“I…” Rebecca’s throat felt like it had been packed full of sand. “I went home with him.”
“To…see his new knitting pattern? To discuss War and Peace?” Lane’s suggestions sounded hopeful and desperate and it made Rebecca feel even worse.
“War and Peace,” she said.
“Holy hell, you slept with him.”
Rebecca let out a long, hard breath. “I mean, not really. Because I didn’t stay the night so we didn’t sleep.”
“I thought you hated him.”
“I do,” she insisted. And then felt like she was lying. She wasn’t sure she hated him. She wished she could. But she didn’t think she did anymore.
“But you slept with him.”
“You’ve never slept with a guy you didn’t like?” she asked.
“No,” said Lane. “I mean, I have often come to dislike them after the fact. Depending on how things went, sometimes very soon after the fact, but not…during.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, feeling helpless. Sounding helpless.
“Obviously you can’t do that again.”
“Right,” she said, even while her stomach turned over at the thought of doing exactly that.
“Rebecca, he’s evil. He caused your accident and he’s messing with everything.”
“And selling you your store.”
“I didn’t know about the connection,” Lane said.
“I know. But I just mean…he’s not evil.”
“Even if you thought he was evil… Would you have not done it?”
Rebecca didn’t like that question, mostly because there wasn’t a good answer for it. Well, there was a lie. Which was that she had clearly decided that he was a man of excellent character, and therefore had made an extremely reasonable decision to follow her completely normal attraction to him.
The truth of the matter was there was no logic involved in any of this. She had made absolutely no decisions about the quality of his character. She had just been feeling. She spent so much time doing her very best not to do that, and here she had gone and done it spectacularly.
She had led—if not with her heart—then with her pants. There had been absolutely no reason or logic involved.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, rather than going for strict honesty.
Lane arched her brows. “You move your lips and you say words. You just don’t know how to answer it because you don’t know how to have honest conversations.”
“Hey! I’m having a conversation with you. Insulting me is not the best way to get me to give up information.”
“I’m sorry,” Lane said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “But, I really don’t think it’s the best idea for you to get involved in such a complicated relationship.”
“It’s not a relationship. I just… Look, I guess it’s messed up for him to get involved with me, and I know it’s messed up that I got involved with him. But I just think it’s something that needed to happen. Sex is…a release. And I think there was some pent-up stuff. That needed to release.”
Lane looked at her skeptically. “If you’re in some kind of hostage s
ituation just blink twice.”
“No, I did this to myself. And obviously I’m feeling a little bit messed up about it. But, it happened. And he didn’t hurt me.”
Lane looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “Was it good?”
“What?”
“The sex.”
Rebecca had to seriously consider how to answer that too. “Is sex ever really…bad?”
“Yes. Sometimes it’s very bad. If you haven’t had that experience, that just makes me mad. So I’m curious. Is having sex with somebody you don’t like actually good? I’ve never done it outside the context of a relationship.”
“Really?”
“Really what?”
“You’ve never had sex with a guy you weren’t in a relationship with.” She hadn’t really considered that. She just sort of assumed that almost everybody else was much more casual about it than she was.
“No. I’ve never really seen the point.”
“Oh. Well, I can honestly say that this was… That… I…”
“That good?”
Rebecca covered her face. “I’ve never felt so good in my entire life. Followed by being incredibly embarrassed and never feeling quite so bad in my entire life.” And then there had been all of that at the hospital. Witnessing the way he cared about his family but didn’t quite know how to build bridges between them.
That made her feel things. Things that weren’t entirely negative. She had felt… Well, in that moment she had felt almost like she understood him.
“Come on,” Lane said, tightening her hold on Rebecca’s shoulders. “You need cheese.”
She propelled Rebecca out of the small space between the bathroom and the main part of the store, and back toward the entryway. Finn was still there, and Rebecca wanted to melt into the floorboards.
“I didn’t see any of this,” he said, climbing back up the ladder and fiddling with another light fixture.
“Appreciated,” Rebecca mumbled.
“Cheese,” Lane said, reaching into the cooler and producing a wooden board with thin slices of meat and some precut cheese, covered by saran wrap. “And a promise of discretion from me too.”
“Thank you,” she said, her throat tightening.
