Remembering her struggle, he thought of Patsy running the little café all on her own for so long. Was that what had made The Roost feel so familiar?
“And I worked some odd jobs,” he added, “to pay off those damned inspectors. I didn’t want my mother to have to deal with the bastards, not after what they did to Dad.”
She took his hand in hers. “You were a good son.”
“No. I was a stupid son,” he said bitterly, “because even after the lesson I’d had about what it meant to be a Langley in that town, I still believed the other guys—the guys from the right families—could be my friends.”
“Langley,” she echoed softly, trying out the name.
It felt strange hearing someone say it. Strange and oddly uplifting, for all the years he’d struggled to keep his legal identity hidden. The effect gave him the courage that he needed to continue.
“John Charles Langley,” he told her, his own name breaking from him like a storm. It was the final barrier, one whose collapse presaged a reckless flood of memory. “One night I let those sons of bitches talk me into heisting beer out of the coolers in the barbecue shack. Afterward, we started drinking out near a place the locals call Bone Lake. I was showing off, acting like the big deal on account of how I’d been the one to provide the drinks for a change.”
She squeezed his hand, encouraging, confessed, “I’ve made mistakes, too….”
“I’d never really drunk much before that,” Zeke went on. “Just enough to act like I was part of things. For one thing, I had responsibilities those guys didn’t, you know? But the night I stole from my own family, I shotgunned one beer after another. Trying to get over feeling guilty—trying not to think about how we couldn’t afford the loss or worry about how to say no the next time they got after me to do it. Still hurts like hell to think about how stupid—”
“You were just a kid,” said Rachel. “Sure, you screwed up, but you can’t mean to say you ran off for twenty years over something like that?”
He shook his head, wishing he could shake off the memories of that night. He remembered peering out through hooded eyes, watched an unresisting body being shaken. Face pale behind its mask of blood, one shoe untied and half off. “I—one of the jobs I had was looking after this kid named Willie Tyler.”
“So you babysat?”
He frowned, then shook his head. “Willie was no baby. He was the same age as the rest of us, except he was a little slow. Well, more than a little, I suppose, but not so much that he wasn’t desperate to try and fit in with the cool guys. The trouble was, he would do anything to be accepted.”
Rachel winced.
“He was a nice kid, really, from a good family. They had a lot of money by East Texas standards.”
“You’re from East Texas?”
Zeke nodded and went on with his story. “The family had timber money from the old days, but they weren’t assholes about it. Willie’s folks heard how I stuck up for him when the jokes went too far and put a stop to it when some shit dared him to swim the length of the lake in January. So they came to me one day, told me they’d make it worth my while to be sure their boy didn’t get himself into anything too serious.”
“It doesn’t surprise me. You don’t tolerate abuse. Not toward animals or people.”
“You’re giving me way too much damned credit,” Zeke growled, not only wanting but needing to snuff the admiration out of her eyes. “I was getting paid to watch out for him. And I did a piss-poor job of it that evening.”
“That night? Do you mean he was with you? When you stole that beer and went out drinking?”
“When I got so fucking drunk I didn’t pay a lick of attention to what he did.” His eyes burned with self hatred. “To what any of them did—because I passed out face-first in my own damned vomit.”
She blew out a long sigh. “I’m almost afraid to ask what happened.”
He hung his head and squeezed his eyes shut, but now that they’d been resurrected, the ghosts of that night refused to go away. Ghosts of the sons of his hometown’s movers and shakers, from Aaron Lynch, the high school team’s star baseball pitcher, to Shane Drake, the junior class president, to Sam Henderson, the valedictorian and wrestling captain who had graduated a few short weeks earlier. And most especially the ghost of little Willie Tyler, with his goofy laugh and crooked teeth, the absolutely guileless way he’d asked, “You wanna be my buddy? Want to go to my house and see my baseball card collection? I’ll let you pick your favorite. I’ll give you any card you want if you’ll come over.”
There had been other bribes as well. An offer of his mother’s brownies or the chance to peer through a secret peephole while one of Willie’s sisters was changing her clothes. He’d made the same offer to anyone who’d listen, until all of his good cards were missing and there was hardly a senior in the class who hadn’t seen the older—and more developed—of his two sisters naked. Marlene, Zeke remembered, had been the subject of a lot of fantasies.
“Willie ended up dead.” His words came out a hoarse croak.
“You didn’t—” Rachel’s breathing rasped, audible above the final gurgles of the coffee. “You weren’t so drunk you—?”
“I didn’t kill him. I know that much. Or at least I wasn’t the one who thought it would be funny to haul off and punch him in the face.” Zeke still wasn’t certain who had struck the fatal blow, only that when he had come to, head spinning, he had heard his three friends’ panic as they’d realized Willie had stopped breathing and couldn’t be revived.
“Oh, my God. So he died just like that, from a punch?”
Zeke nodded. “I don’t think they meant to kill him. It was more like rough horse play that got out of hand. But Willie was a little guy, maybe five-six and one twenty, and the punch that took him down—it must’ve hit him exactly wrong. Snapped his neck or made his brain bleed.”
“Did anybody call for help? An ambulance, or—”
“Eventually. After the three of them hammered out their story. That was the part I heard when I came to.”
Syllable for syllable, it replayed inside his head, an endless loop of “My dad’ll kill me” and “What about my scholarship?” “I get nailed for underage drinking again, and my folks are gonna damn sure sell my truck.”
Until finally, while the boy that Zeke had been had struggled to lift his face out of his own filth, had fought to see if there was something—anything—that could be done for Willie, one of them had said, “Hey, I know what. Langley did it. Was Langley hit him so hard, it laid him out like that.”
They had scrambled onto the idea like drowning rats clawing their way onto a scrap of floating bark. Clinging tightly to how Zeke’s dad had died in prison two years earlier, how Zeke himself had stolen from his own mom this very night. How no one expected much better from the Langleys, who lived in a peeling, tumble down bungalow on the edge of the black part of town and associated with that kind far more than was considered healthy. Then of course the term white trash came up, and they started asking themselves why the cream of the town’s crop, the kids with real futures, should go down over a one-in-a-million freak accident that had killed some little retard.
“Besides, if Langley hadn’t got us beer, none of this would’ve happened in the first place.”
Zeke told Rachel all he remembered, including how his own terror had sobered him up enough to make a run for home.
“And so it was your mother who pushed you into leaving,” she said once he had recounted that last, heartbreaking conversation.
From the corner of his eye, Zeke caught the gleam of her tears. He wanted to tell her he didn’t deserve them, but instead he nodded numbly, emotionally spent. “She gave me every cent she could scrape together and all but shoved me out the door. Because she already knew there would be no justice, that the way the wheels spun in that county, I’d end up in prison if I kept my mouth shut, and as dead as my old man if I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have—I couldn’t. I would’ve run my mouth u
ntil it got me killed, like him.”
“Twenty years ago…” she whispered.
“There’s no statute of limitations on a charge of murder. And the last time I tried contacting my mom and sending money, she begged me not to come back—or to give them any way to find me. I still keep that letter, tucked inside one of my books. It’s the only thing I have left. The only—”
“She loved you, Zeke. Loves you still, I’m sure.”
He looked into Rachel’s brown eyes. “She doesn’t even know me. She only knows a boy who died that night, the same as Willie.”
“It was a mistake, a tragedy. But you didn’t kill him.”
“Might as well have thrown the punch myself. I knew good and well the only reason those guys put up with Willie’s presence was to make a fool of him. What I was too damned blind to see was that they hung with me for the same reason.”
“Kids can be cruel sometimes. Cruel and selfish. But you can’t blame yourself for that boy’s death.”
“I would think that, more than anybody, you would understand why I do. In spite of everything he did to you, you still blame yourself for Kyle’s.”
She stood abruptly and walked into the kitchen, where she rattled around a cupboard. Looking for mugs, he supposed.
“How do you take your coffee?” Over the sound of liquid pouring, she called to him, her voice as tightly strung as he felt.
“Rachel…” Rising, he wondered if he’d been wrong to bring up Kyle’s name, especially after what Patsy had told him to night.
She stared at him across the pass-through counter. “You know, too, don’t you? I can hear it in your voice, see it in your eyes.”
Instead of denying it, he nodded before going to where Rachel stood, her back now turned. He gently rotated her shoulders, then embraced her. Instead of resisting, she laid her head against his chest with a defeated sigh.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I knew something was bothering you, but until Patsy told me what that bastard did—”
“My stepmother talks too much.”
“She’s concerned about you.”
“Really?” Rachel stiffened, pushing back to look him in the eye. “Or was she just trying to warn you that I’m damaged goods?”
“C’mon, Rachel. Give her—give both of us—a little credit,” Zeke said, though Rachel’s doubts reminded him of his own about Patsy, earlier.
“This news,” he went on to ask, “is this the reason the lawsuit might be dismissed?”
She nodded. “I can’t imagine his mother wanting it to come out that her precious angel was a—that he’d do something like that to a woman. It’ll be easier to keep Kyle a ‘victim’ if the suit’s dropped now.”
Zeke ran a fingertip along her cheekbone, then stroked the soft hair at her temple. He could have supplied the word she had avoided, but he didn’t want to use it either. Didn’t want to think about that bastard using her unconscious body.
She pushed his hand away from her face, but instead of turning it loose, she slid her fingers downward to interlock with his. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “In the back of my mind I thought maybe, but I couldn’t handle the thought, so I came up with excuses for why I couldn’t remember that night. The flu, maybe, or…I had a hundred arguments for my attorney, and the psychologist I talked to. But right now, that’s not important—”
“It’s important, Rachel. Important that you learn to live with knowing. Maybe get some help, so you won’t—”
She shook her head and backed away to look up at him. “To night, there’s only one thing that matters.”
He frowned, not understanding. “What do you mean?”
“Getting the hell away from here—both of us—before Castillo shows up to arrest you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible con flict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
—George Eliot,
from Middlemarch
Zeke brought Rachel’s hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against it, mainly to disguise the fact that her offer had left him speechless. Choked with emotion that she would offer up her life here, and a family that loved her, to run with him. That she would throw away her chance at a real future—one that wouldn’t involve a lifetime of looking over her shoulder—for a chance to be with him.
He wanted to imagine it meant that she loved him as he loved her. He wanted to believe in the possibility of a future—however uncertain—in her company, an escape from the loneliness he had fought so many years to keep at bay. But when he looked into Rachel’s eyes, he saw despair, defeat there. He saw a woman who was desperate to escape the things she couldn’t face.
“You can’t want to go with me,” he told her. “Weren’t you listening to what I told you? What about Willie? And what about the fact that I’m not who I’ve claimed to be all these years?”
“I don’t know who you used to be.” Rachel stared up at him, her expression as pained as it was earnest. “And I don’t know who you might have been if that boy hadn’t died, but I’m in love with the man you are now. I’m in love with Zeke Pike. Just Zeke, not John Langley.”
He had to close his eyes, to let the words sink past his own selfish need to hear them. To sink soul deep, to the understanding that Rachel, too, had been shaped by tragedy, into the one woman who could possibly accept him—a woman who believed she deserved no better than a fugitive. Damaged goods, she’d said, using a term that should have died out centuries before. Yet she saw herself as such, regardless of what anybody else thought.
“It’s time for you to leave now.” Emotion roughened his voice, making it sound as gruff and unsociable as the armor he’d worn so long. “Time for you to go home.”
“Don’t do this, Zeke. Don’t shut me out of your life. I know you love me, too. I know it.”
He grimaced. “I’m starting to agree with you. About Patsy talking too much.”
Rachel looked so hurt, he couldn’t let it go at that. He wanted to pull her close, to kiss away her pain and confusion. But he couldn’t risk touching her, couldn’t risk the temptation to take—and keep forever—a woman who deserved more.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m not denying it. But loving you means doing the right thing by you, Rachel. It doesn’t mean letting you run from the people who’d be so hurt by your action.”
“I know my dad would miss me.” Her voice resonated with the pain of her admission.
“He’s already lost his mother. And if you think Patsy would be happy if you took off, you’d better think again. For one thing, that woman loves you. She’s just been too scared to admit it. Scared that you’ll flat out reject her.”
“If she does care about me, she’s got a strange way of showing it sometimes.”
He couldn’t argue that point. “And if you left without a word, she’d never have your father’s full attention. Because you know damned well he’d look for you until the world’s end.”
“All I’ve done is make trouble for them. They’d be better off without—”
“Don’t say that.” He shook his head. “Don’t ever say it. Because once a person starts down that road, he never can go back. He’s got to keep running and running until he’s so far from the person he used to be that it hurts to think about it.”
She picked up her coffee and took a sip. Steam rose from the mug, obscuring both her eyes and her thoughts. But she was thinking, he was certain of it. Thinking about what it would cost her to leave with him.
A selfish part of his heart prayed she would decide that he was worth it. Worth any sacrifice at all. Because he’d been alone so damned long, he felt it might kill him.
He drank from his own coffee in the hope of bolstering his willpower. But soon Rachel put her mug down and pushed her way back into his arms.
“I can’t stand this, Zeke.” She squeezed him hard and
pressed her head to his chest. “I want you to be safe, I do—but I can’t picture myself getting through this—even making it through tomorrow without you.”
After putting down his own drink, Zeke wrapped his arms around her and stroked her silky hair. Would this be the last time they touched? The final memory either of them would carry of a brief, doomed romance?
“You’ll be all right, Rachel,” he said. “I—I know you’re strong enough.”
But when she tilted back her head to look at him with eyes like melting chocolate, it was his own strength that he questioned. And when she whispered, “Please, Zeke,” that strength failed him completely.
He ducked his head to kiss her, to take her mouth so hungrily, his nerve endings crackled with sensation, electrical charges centering on a part of his anatomy that didn’t give a damn whether his failure was born of weakness or some self-destructive impulse. As long as he could keep kissing her, keep touching, keep his mind and body focused on this moment, this last…
He shouldn’t have reached beneath her shirt, shouldn’t have allowed himself to feel the warmth of her skin, the lower curve of her breast, covered by her bra. It was suddenly intolerable to have that much of her and no more, to know that he was so close, so damned close to what he needed. They both needed.
When Rachel pushed back, panting, his body throbbed in protest. Until she peeled her top off and unhooked the lacy black bra and reached for the top button of his own shirt.
He fought to remember why this was such a bad idea. “Weren’t you the one who said there’d be no more sex?”
“That was before you told me,” she said, “before you trusted me with the truth. And besides, this won’t be sex.”
Though he should have been relieved, he nearly groaned aloud, until she added, “This will be lovemaking, Zeke. Please…this one last time.”
He didn’t register the part about one last time, didn’t hear anything beyond lovemaking. After that, he couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted to, for his mouth had slanted over hers to claim the kiss she offered. Though gooseflesh formed along her bare skin, his head filled with the heat and taste of her mouth, with the honey-lemon scent of her hair, with her fumbling hurry to unbutton his shirt, too. When he slid a hand between them to cup first one and then the other of her breasts, she moaned in need, her nipples already hard and tight with excitement.
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