by Brent, Cora
He was confused now. “Didn’t you tell her he did?”
“No! I never said that. Never. And it never happened. If that’s what she said she made it up, Dad. She fucking made it up!”
“Oh.” He didn’t appear shocked. A few decades married to Luanne would desensitize anyone. “I’m afraid your mother went overboard sometimes,” he sighed, casually as if he was discussing a woman who was guilty of adding too much sugar to the cake frosting.
“So Ryan Jedson believes that the reason he had to leave town was because I said he was a murderer who’d tried to sexually abuse me?”
Eddie opened his mouth. Closed it.
“He left,” my father said. “I did not think he would ever come back.”
But Ryan had come back. He’d come back to Emblem, deliberately infiltrated my life, learned how to seduce me with his attention and his body and his dishonest compassion. He’d come back for revenge. And then, with Eddie’s help, he managed to get it.
I stood up so fast I knocked my chair over. “Damn you!”
Eddie Brandeis wasn’t about to apologize anymore. He rolled his eyes in weariness. “Leah, stop it.”
I smacked my open hand on the patio table so hard I might have broken a bone. “Damn you and I hope Luanne is burning in hell and as for Ryan Jedson I’m sure he’ll be really excited to hear that he got exactly what he came for and now I hate him as much as he hates me.”
My father did not pursue me or even weakly call my name as I ran from him. I didn’t expect him to. And I had no plans to turn back.
I went to the only place I really thought of as home anymore. I refused to allow my eyes to fill with tears as I took a seat at one of the center tables and stared at the door.
He’d show up sooner or later. And I was going to wait right here until he did.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ryan
There was another hour until the bar opened but I figured Leah would be here already and I was right. Her car was right there, crookedly parked in the lot.
As soon as she left after breakfast I began preparing for exactly what I was going to say to her. She understood the bar was in financial trouble, more trouble than she’d be able to fix on her own. I’d apologize profusely for going behind her back and securing the sale through Eddie. If I was lucky she’d forgive me immediately and if not then I wouldn’t stop trying until she understood how sorry I was, how much I wanted her in my life, how I’d crawl over a football field of broken glass for the opportunity to make things right.
I couldn’t see in through the glass door with the sunlight at my back but I assumed she was inside. I tried the door and found it unlocked so I walked in.
Leah was waiting. She sat alone at a table with her hands clasped in front of her. Her face was deathly pale and unsmiling.
“You let yourself in,” she said. “Almost as if you own the place.”
FUCK.
“Leah.” I took long strides over to the table and sat down across from her. “Let me explain.”
She was expressionless. “You planned this. You planned it all along, didn’t you?” She stood up and and screamed. “Didn’t you?”
The air left my lungs. I would not lie to her. Not anymore.
“Yes, I did.”
She wasn’t expecting that, an admission. Her hand went to her mouth and she choked out a sob.
“Because you hate me.”
“Not at all.”
“He told me.” She was pacing back and forth. “My dad told me what she said. What she told you I said. You thought I said you were a child abusing murderer. So of course you hated me.” She leveled me with a severe glare. “Of course you did.”
“I was wrong. I was wrong to listen to Luanne.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if it’s true?”
“I know it’s not true, Leah. I know you didn’t say that. I know Luanne was an embittered lying bitch who tried to destroy anyone who challenged her.”
“But you thought it was true.” She kept pacing, speaking aloud as if trying to keep up with her own thoughts. “You thought it was true and you decided to get revenge. To hurt me. To take something you knew I loved because you blamed me for it all, for Celeste’s death, for everything.” She whirled on me, too devastated to even cry yet. “Well done, Ryan. You got what you wanted. You took my bar. You took my trust. You took my self respect.”
I’ve known some atrocious moments in my life. None were worse than this. There was no one in the world I wanted to hurt less. There was no one in the world I’d managed to hurt more.
“I guess I should leave now.” She tossed her keys on the table. “Here are the keys. I hope you won’t fire any of our, excuse me, your employees. This isn’t their fault.”
I blocked her exit. “Leah, please listen to me. I made assumptions. I went behind your back to buy the bar. I am desperately, horribly sorry. But I need to tell you how much you mean to me. I want us to make this work together. No one would be better at running the Cactus than you. I came here today intending to tell you everything and to ask you to please stay. With the bar. With me. Please stay.”
She stared at me. “That’s what you think I’ll do? Remain here under your thumb, working for you by day and then lying down on my back at night whenever you feel like using me?”
“Fuck no. That’s not what I’m proposing at all.”
She laughed. “Sorry, Ryan. I’ll never need a job badly enough to become your personal whore.”
“I would never want that. I want you to be mine.”
Leah was frozen in place so I dared a step in her direction. I held her face in my hands and she didn’t stop me. I kissed her lips. She remained rigid for a second and then kissed me back, tentatively and then hard, with furious passion, pressing her body against me and reaching down to stroke me as I strained against my pants.
“I wanted to know you,” she whispered, barely pausing between hot kisses, guiding my hands to push up her dress. “I wanted to understand you. To be with you.”
“We can have that.” I lifted her, sucked at her neck, whispered promises. “We can have everything.”
She slid down, sinking to her knees, opening my pants, pulling the zipper down. And I helped, releasing my dick and pointing it at her mouth because I couldn’t help but want her and I would never refuse her, especially not if she needed this from me for whatever reason. She took me in her mouth and I groaned with my hands on the back of her head while she sucked my dick halfway down her throat. I’d give this girl anything. Fucking anything on earth.
Leah stopped, letting me fall out of her mouth while she regarded me from down there on the floor with tortured eyes.
Her whisper was so deadly. “You think I’m terrible.”
I caressed her cheek. “Baby, no I don’t. Come here.”
“No.”
“Leah.”
“I’m not her.”
“I know.”
“FUCK YOU, I’M NOT HER!” She shrieked the words and began gasping with great wracking sobs.
My breath stopped. My heart cracked.
I closed my pants and dropped to the floor, reaching for her, desperately trying to hold her. She refused to let me, scuttling around me to get to the door.
She was sobbing so hard I feared for her safety if she got behind the wheel so I stopped her out in the parking lot, wrapping my arms around her and on the verge of breaking down myself.
“You can think the worst right now, Leah. But know this. You and me. That’s real.”
She pushed on my chest. “Nothing about us is real, Ryan. Nothing!”
“Leah, please. Let’s sit down and talk.” I tried cradling her in a loose hug and she snapped, lashing out with her fists, part of her that had once been small and ill-treated now grown into a raging fire that I’d lit myself with the world’s cruelest match.
She only flailed wildly for a few seconds and it seemed to take everything out of her.
“I have to hate you
now,” she whimpered, one small fist pounding tiredly on my chest as she cried into my shirt. “I have to and I don’t know if I can.”
I closed my eyes, aware that I needed to let her go. Unable to let her go.
Tires screeched to a halt nearby.
“JEDSON!” The voice was familiar and yet it wasn’t.
Steven Pike glowered from the passenger seat of a tow truck. In an instant he hopped out, stumbling but then recovering. The jagged scar on the side of his head was not covered with a baseball cap today and his chubby cheeks were flushed. The damage done to his brain had reduced him to a perpetually agreeable dolt obsessed with other people’s sex habits but he never got angry anymore, never shouted, never closed his hands into fists and held them up at chest height like a cartoon fighter.
“You leave Leah alone,” he demanded. “You leave her alone and you get out of here right fucking now.”
Tristan Mulligan bolted from the driver’s side, the menacing look on his face meaning business while Pike raised his fists in his absurd fighter’s pose. The idea that Pike could physically challenge me on any day of his life was ludicrous. If he made a move, I could bat him away like a hummingbird.
Mulligan would be a hell of a lot harder to handle. But I didn’t want to fight him either. I didn’t want to fight anyone.
I gently released Leah and she kept crying as she stepped back. Mulligan quickly moved between us, silently telling me that if I closed in on her again I’d have to plow through him first.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll leave Leah alone.”
Mulligan glowered at me with a toxic threat in his eyes while Pike went to Leah and awkwardly patted her shoulder like she was a sad puppy.
I turned to my truck because I’d already done enough damage for one day. Pike’s voice followed me.
“You don’t need to cry. He’s gone. I won’t let him hurt you. It’s all right.”
Nothing was even close to all right. It was all broken beyond reckoning.
This time I’d broken it myself.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Leah
Tristan made me come to his house. When I acted like I might resist he joked that Cadence would stick his nuts in a vice if he failed to protect me. I really didn’t need protecting from Ryan. I didn’t know what I needed. But I had nowhere else to go so I agreed to sit in Tristan’s living room until Cadence got home from her job at the high school.
She’d obviously been already briefed by Tristan, who’d returned to work for the afternoon to finish his shift at the tow truck company after he dropped Pike off at home. Cadence flew through the front door all wide-eyed and worried and I felt horrible because I really needed to stop inflicting my world of drama on my friends.
I checked my watch and realized someone would have needed to open up the bar by now. Or not. The bar would be Ryan’s problem tonight. And every night from now on.
Cadence brewed some cups of tea and then settled down on the couch beside me, prepared to listen as long as I needed her to. Then Tristan arrived home. He said Steven Pike appeared to forget today’s events right after we left. He’d just sighed and asked to go home so he could watch television because there was one woman who appeared on a soap opera at two o’clock that he’d been thinking about fucking.
His girlfriend gave him a look of gratitude and he stopped at the couch to give Cadence a kiss. I’d come to a decision.
“I want to tell you the whole story,” I announced. “About Ryan Jedson. About what happened six years ago. I want to tell you even though I’m terrified you’ll think badly of me after you hear it.”
“Leah.” Cadence reached over and held my hand. She radiated compassion, understanding, friendship.
“I’ll leave you girls alone,” Tristan said and started to back out of the room.
“Tristan.” I stopped him. “I don’t mind if you stay. I mean, we’re friends too, right?”
He looked uncertain, like maybe he wasn’t sure he wanted to suffer through some heavy handed emotional sob fest but then he nodded.
“Of course we’re friends,” he said, taking a seat beside Cadence.
I told them. About Luanne. About Ryan. About Celeste. About that night six years ago that altered so many fates and how lies had shrouded the truth for so long until I found myself screaming at Ryan Jedson in front of the bar that no longer belonged to me.
The two of them were excellent listeners, a quality much appreciated because I badly needed to say everything out loud to try and make sense of it. I excluded last night’s most intimate details. I was still furious with Ryan Jedson but I hadn’t been the only one in that room in pain today. He’d suffered too. He’d suffered for a long time, the result of a poisonous chain reaction that began so many years ago the first time Luanne corrupted him with her venomous touch.
When I finally finished talking Cadence immediately hugged me. She assured me I’d proven I was a strong person. She said I simply had to be to survive all that and still be the Leah she knew. I wasn’t sure I agreed with her about my supposed inner strength but it was nice of her to say.
Tristan still had questions. “So what’s Jedson’s endgame here?” he mused. “What does he think is going to happen now?”
“I’m not sure,” I said as Cadence kept her arm around me. “Maybe he’s not sure either. My god, I was so angry with him. I still am. But now that I’m thinking back I’m wondering if he might feel as heartsick as I do.” I took a deep breath. “I guess I should talk to him. If for no other reason than for the sake of the bar and the people who depend on it.”
“You don’t need to talk to him today,” Cadence insisted. “Not if you don’t want to.”
I winced as I remembered how I’d behaved, the words I had screamed, the way I’d gotten on my knees, the fury in my heart. Right now I was still a raw, bleeding wound and I didn’t have any energy for Ryan Jedson.
“I don’t want to talk to him today.”
“Then you don’t have to,” Tristan announced. “And if he comes around looking for you I’ll introduce him to my lethal right hook.”
“You have a lethal right hook?” Cadence questioned.
In response Tristan stood up and began shadow boxing the living room air. He looked kind of ridiculous. His girlfriend thought so too because she laughed out loud.
Tristan sulked. “Trust me, I can be intimidating as fuck.”
“I believe you, honey,” Cadence said, although she struggled to keep a straight face.
Cadence offered me the use of the spare bedroom tonight and Tristan thought it was a good idea too in case Ryan tried to confront me. I wasn’t worried about Ryan, wasn’t even slightly afraid of him. But neither did I want to deal with him right now. Or my father for that matter. So I gratefully accepted and joked that their spare bedroom was becoming my second home.
Cadence smiled. “Maybe you should just move in then.”
Tristan thought we should all go out to dinner and since there wasn’t anyplace in Emblem suitable for a sit down meal we drove to Grande. I didn’t look up in the backseat of Cadence’s car when we drove down Main Street. I didn’t want to see what was going on at the Dirty Cactus.
My friends did their best to keep the mood sunny as we lingered over dinner. Tristan and Cadence had a very entertaining dynamic and it was easy to laugh in their presence. I did send a text to my father to let him know I wouldn’t be home tonight. He texted back with the word ‘Okay’. And then, about fifteen minutes later, ‘I’m really sorry.’ It was the only apology I was likely to receive so it would have to suffice.
It was nearly ten by the time we returned to Emblem. Both Cadence and Tristan needed to wake up early for work tomorrow. I was used to being a night owl thanks to the bar hours so I wasn’t tired at all but I didn’t let Cadence know or she would have tried to stay up with me.
Once I was alone my thoughts kept straying back to Ryan and to last night, when for a little while I could have sworn we we
re falling for each other.
My phone rang at nearly midnight and I tensed but the name flashing on the screen shocked me. I answered instantly.
“Daisy?”
“Hey, Leah,” my sister said as if we spoke once a week and not semi annually. “I figured you’d be awake. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard.”
“From who?”
“Eddie called. He left three voicemails this afternoon and it got annoying so I finally called him back to see what he wanted.”
“What did he want?”
“To talk about himself. And about how sad he was but that Nancy Albertson was tending to his needs.” She sighed. “And about how he sold the bar without telling you and now you’re pissed at him.”
I flopped back on the bed. “All true.”
Daisy was silent for a moment. “Is it really a great loss, the Dirty Cactus? Seems like it’s been disintegrating for a decade.”
Losing the bar was still an open wound. It would take a while to heal. “I’ll miss it.” I said, unwilling to share every terrible detail once again. “You’re still in Los Angeles, right?”
“Sure.”
“What have you been doing?”
“What people do in Los Angeles. Acting.”
“Acting?” I had to grin at the thought of my surly sister mugging for the camera. It seemed so out of character, so Luanne. “What are you acting in?”
“Mostly movies.”
“No shit, how many?”
“Sixteen. Eighteen. I forget.”
“What movies? Where can I see them?”
She chuckled. “Not the kind of movies you’d want to see, little sister.”
“Oh.” I cringed. “Sorry.”
“I’m not. It’s good money. And I enjoy the work.”
“So are you usually, um, the star?”
“One of them,” she replied cheerfully. “The one-on-ones are okay but I prefer reverse harem.”
