Slightly Imperfect

by Tomlinson, Dar

  He straightened, gazing at her. "Get some friends. Girlfriends to talk to, so the time will pass faster."

  "I don't want friends." Only him, friend and confidant. She kept nothing from him and trusted no one else. "There's no one like you, Coby."

  "Yeah?" He grinned. "How's that?"

  "They don't like the same things... even the same music. They say Bon Jovi is old enough to be my father."

  "They're right. Way past." Positive debate for his suggestion that she get friends.

  She smiled and curled her mouth derisively. "But Eric's not my father. Pierce is, and he doesn't have a clue about the real world. You're the only one who understands."

  He smiled conspiratorially.

  "The other kids are childish." She stopped, considering, summarizing. "They aren't you, Coby." He knew all of this. They had talked about it before he left last fall, agreed. Redundant reasoning, now.

  "Thanks. You're a real fan." He attempted cockiness, but his tone was listless.

  She took up a stack of briefs and placed them in the corner of the bag, squared them with her hand. She considered taking them out again, flinging them about the well-ordered room. "Do you have a lot of friends at school?"

  "Sure."

  Her head jerked up voluntarily.

  "But they aren't you, Tori." His smile was sweet, consoling.

  "We'll beg them," she determined. "I'll tell them how much I miss you. You tell them how much you don't want to go."

  "It won't do any good."

  His resolve threatened her. "We'll talk to Anna. Tonight, before we pick up Pierce to go to dinner." A scheduled back-to-school, farewell dinner. "Maybe she can persuade him."

  A soft, bitter laugh lay on the air above the bed. "Don't talk to Anna. She has my number."

  "What do you mean?" She didn't know, couldn't imagine what Anna could know about Coby that she didn't, or how it could influence his not being allowed to stay with her.

  "Never mind, Tori." His soothing big-brother voice, but it failed to work now. "You can come to Maine with them for parents' weekend in February. I'll be home for ten days at Easter. In May I'll be home for the summer. Meanwhile, we'll play their game." Then he added, "We have no choice."

  It wasn't enough. Victoria hated games. "Don't go, Coby."

  He looked at her in silence, his blue eyes swimming for an instant before he blinked, looking away.

  "We can try," she urged. Don't leave me.

  "Shower time," he announced with bravado, as though she hadn't pleaded, as if he didn't hurt too. "Care to join me?" He smiled menacingly, flirtatiously.

  "Yeah, right."

  She tried to match his earlier tone, to clone his phrase, attempting to negate her misery and alleviate his. She curled on his bed and fell asleep, Bon Jovi blasting from the bathroom stereo, and the sound of the shower running.

  She woke to a presence in the room, an ominous feeling having nothing to do with the fact she was snuggled against her cousin, spoon fashion, her head on his arm, his other arm resting lightly across her waist. The sense had nothing to do with the comforting sound of his breath floating gently on the near darkness, the soft vapor caressing her ear.

  "Coby. You promised me."

  Victoria opened her eyes to the stressed sound. Twilight streamed through the leaded glass window across the room, framing their mother's slender form at the foot of the bed.

  Coby sat up fast, jolting Victoria into full awareness. "I was only holding her."

  A towel wrapped his body, his hair still wet from the shower. The room was too dim to see his face, but Victoria heard the same guilt in his voice that suddenly consumed her. Stiff new guilt that had never involved Coby and her before. Her shame hinged on her mother's defeated posture, the disappointment in her voice.

  "It's okay, Anna," Coby said. The big brother voice again. Victoria sometimes had to share it with Anna.

  "No, Cailen Jacoby. It isn't," Anna assured him. "I expected you to keep your promise."

  Victoria felt their mother's green eyes move to her.

  "Go to your room, Victoria. Get dressed for dinner. I want to talk to your cousin."

  When the chauffeur drove them to the newspaper plant to pick up Pierce, no one talked in the car. Victoria and Coby sat on either side of Anna, their clasped hands resting in her lap. Victoria felt the stiffness of her mother's normally compliant body, just as she felt the warm strength in Coby's moist grasp.

  Anna rallied, somewhat, when Pierce joined them. Having noticed her frequent rallying for Pierce's sake, Victoria deemed it a form of denial, refusal to admit anything could be wrong. She wasn't sure what Anna chose to deny, or for whose benefit.

  Victoria relished the surreptitious admiration from the hotel tourists. Unfamiliar with the Chandlers, the strangers obviously believed her and Coby to be twins. They sat side by side, dressed in the same color, at a rectangular table for four in the staid old dining room in the Valdez Hotel. They'd been coming to there for special occasions since her earliest memory. Tonight she had momentarily regained the attention that being the other half of Coby always assured, attention she hadn't known she thrived on until it had been disrupted by separate schools.

  The occasion was marred, however, by Anna's discernable reticence and Pierce's attempt to camouflage it. A contrite shroud, a feeling of having failed a test she hadn't known she was taking, settled on Victoria. When she caught Coby's eyes she thought she saw defiance in their blue depths. She found the look both disconcerting and stimulating. Neither of them brought up the crushed possibility that he might not go away.

  Deep into the night, certain her parents would be sleeping, she went through the open door to his adjoining bedroom. Her legs folded Indian fashion, bare feet tucked into her Lanz nightgown, she sat on the end of his bed, leaning against a different pencil post.

  "Hi, Tori." He didn't sound as though she had woken him from a deep sleep.

  "What did you and Anna talk about after I was shipped off this afternoon?"

  "Don't sweat it."

  He propped himself on one elbow and peered at her in the dark. She could feel his eyes, and, in her mind, see their azure infinity. She had learned the word in English this year and thought it fit his eyes perfectly.

  She insisted that he tell her.

  "She thinks I've displaced my libido."

  The scorn in his tone had a distinct bearing on qualifying her personal opinion, as well. "What does Pierce think?"

  "Who knows?"

  She felt his shrug, but the obvious hurt, centered on his lack of communication with Pierce, made her rush to negate the question.

  "Is that why she's pouting?" She smiled and the expression carried into the semi-opaque room. She heard his soft, begrudging laugh, felt the bed shake gently and ventured into an uncharted wilderness. "Have you... displaced it?"

  "What do you think, Tori?"

  She considered, tried weighing it in her mind, based on her limited, fourteen-year-old libido expertise.

  "I like being held." By anyone.

  "Then don't sweat it."

  Quiet fell between them. The clock ticked. The air conditioner droned familiarly. A car cruised by on Broadmore. She considered lying down with him, the way they'd been when Anna found them.

  But he read her thoughts. "Go back to sleep. We have to be at the airport early."

  She went back to her own bed.

  The next day Anna called an interior designer to begin converting two seldom-used rooms on the second floor into a new bedroom suite for Victoria, and to convert the two adjoining rooms she and Coby had always shared into a suite for him. As the new rooms grew nearer to completion and the imposed wedge of severance between them grew evident, Coby's warning echoed in her head. "Anna has my number."

  Her mother apparently believed she had Victoria's number as well.

  The connotations of the hammering and paper hanging made her wonder what the difference might have been if she hadn't fallen asleep in Coby's arms t
hat fateful afternoon.

  She suspected the extreme distance of the school selected for Coby was to inhibit their seeing one another in secret, something they had phone-fantasized about in the year past... .

  "I got the picture, Tori. Thanks."

  "Do you like it? I found it in Anna's dresser drawer."

  It was a snapshot of the two of them on a blanket, outside somewhere, snuggled together, his front to her back, her head on his arm. His other arm crossed her waist, their legs intertwined. Their position in the photo was the same as Anna had found them on Coby's bed when they were fourteen. On the back of the photo Anna had documented: Victoria and Cailen Jacoby, Age 3.

  "It was buried beneath her panties and bras," she told him. "I had copies made for us and put the real one back."

  "She hid it. She didn't want us to see it."

  Although she sensed that, she hated him saying it. Hearing the words made her suspicion too real.

  "When I look at it, I feel like crying," he said.

  "I wanted to make you happy." She had thought she did, but suddenly she felt glad he missed her so much. When she looked at the picture, it made her throat feel too full, achy. "You were so cute, Coby. Your hair was so long. Almost white."

  "You're still cute, Tori. You're beautiful."

  She shivered with the intimacy in his voice but then looked at herself in the mirror across the room. She saw a thin girl, taller than her peers, braces, hair too fine to stay in place. She thought of Pierce, wondering what he saw when he looked at her. "I'm only beautiful to you."

  "Good," Coby said.

  The phone bills were staggering. Sometimes he talked her to sleep. She wasn't sure how he managed, considering his dorm accommodations, but she found it easier to fall asleep, listening to him talk, than to wonder. When Pierce expressed his displeasure, the first financial curtailment she could recall, she offered to contribute her allowance. Rather than accept, Pierce issued an edict. She and Coby could talk only three times each week.

  After that she called Coby on their parents line, when they were out of the house in the evenings. Pierce and Anna never seemed to detect the breach, and the fulfillment of talking to Coby outweighed her guilty conscience. If other boys called, she'd make them hang up, in order not to tie up the line. She had no desire for boyfriends. When the other girls shared their phone conversations, mornings after, she always talked about hers with Coby.

  They planned a clandestine meeting the first year he was away, settling on a location halfway between Texas and Maine. They would simply disappear for a few days and take their punishment when it inevitably came. But the anticipation made Victoria too ill to travel.

  While she bent over the bathroom commode, purging herself of anxiety, Anna found the airline ticket purchased with Victoria's cleaned-out savings account.

  Within the hour, Anna came down with the same malady, causing Victoria to wonder if they'd both been plagued with a virus. She and Anna never talked about the voided trip, and Anna never told Pierce, or, if so, repercussion never came.

  When she grew quiet, Coby's doctor studied her intently. "And you believe the two of you have come to terms with your attraction, Victoria? That you can lead a normal life with a conventional sibling relationship?"

  She nodded, unable to voice her fears.

  "Do you believe your cousin is ready to be released?"

  * * *

  "What did you tell him, Tori? My fate's in your hands." Coby smiled his most disarming smile. "As if it hasn?t always been."

  "You need to know something, Coby."

  He crooked one brow, but kept smiling.

  "Zac Abriendo is in love with me."

  A marked silence suddenly charged the air. "Are you reciprocating?"

  "Will my answer affect your reaction?"

  He sat brooding, the engaging smile dead.

  "How do you feel about what I told you, Coby?"

  "How do you feel about it?"

  "I feel... I could never bear to have happen—"

  "What did you tell my doctor?" Priorities.

  "That I need time to think." She met his azure gaze evenly, her eye muscles straining to hold the course.

  "Why?"

  "Because you need time to think. Zac Abriendo is in love with me. He wants to sleep with me. You think about that, and then we'll talk again."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Victoria opened the door on Monday night, immaculately dressed, hair swept up close to her head. Sky-high heels, perfume, lots of jewelry. "Come in, Zac. I'm just on my way out."

  He followed her into the suite, keeping his face expressionless.

  "Marcus," she called softly up the stairs. "Zac is here, darling."

  "I like the way you do that, Victoria."

  "What?"

  "Love Marcus with your voice and defy me at the same time with your eyes. That's impressive."

  Her lips threatened to smile, but recovered.

  The twins' shrill voices drifted down the stairs, along with the soft television drone. At the bottom of the stairs, Zac and Victoria kept their gazes pointing upward until Marcus appeared on the landing.

  "I knew you'd come." His tone confident, he laced the smile he gave Victoria with tender derision.

  "Bring your book, amigo." The moment Marcus was out of hearing range, Zac faced Victoria, his eyes questioning.

  "I thought you might not—"

  His look quieted her. "That's not going to happen." He tried to soften his voice, swallow his agitation. "Please don't confuse him over what's going on with you and me."

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. She turned and disappeared through the hallowed door at the far end of the large room, the door Zac had not yet been privileged to enter. Later, while he and Marcus worked from the Spanish book, she passed through the room, calling a soft goodnight before leaving.

  Apparently, Spanish pillow talk was all she cared to know.

  * * *

  Zac pitched a computer printout back into the center of Luke's desk and settled in his chair across from Luke.

  "If you fell in a sewer, Zac, you'd come up holding a silver dollar."

  "Thanks, Luke, I guess." He smiled dubiously. "Business is up, profits are good. All you needed was a new partner who doesn't know enough about the restaurant business to screw you up."

  "Maybe." Luke shrugged. "How's the surrogate father business these days?"

  "I like it. We're having fun."

  "And the surrogate mom? How's she on a scale of one to ten?"

  "I don't know," he admitted. "Yet."

  Luke laughed.

  "But this is it, Luke. God meant Victoria and me to be together. It's just a question of time."

  "Sometimes, Zaccheus, I'm not sure you operate with your sharpest knife."

  Zac looked puzzled.

  "She has three kids."

  "Right. And that puts me two ahead of where I was before Allie died, but Victoria and I call them children. As soon as we have our own, life will be perfect." He punctuated his declaration with a smile. "Again."

  "Still holding out for perfect. Huh, Zac?"

  "I'm getting closer. If I don't get anxious and screw up."

  "If God made this woman for you, bro, it's too bad a couple of other guys got there first."

  Yeah. The Abriendo family wasn't wild about Victoria. He pushed down his initial reaction, told himself Luke had his best interests at heart and would try any tactic to prove a point. But Zac had the answer for Luke's little test; he'd spent some time thinking about it.

  "Not really bad. That was conditioning. For both of us."

  "Papa isn't going to be happy about you taking up with another gringa."

  "He likes Jan just fine. Adores her, I'd say."

  "She's proven herself. When we split up he called her Anglo scum. Her coming back did it for Papa." He cocked a brow. "Is Victoria willing to prove herself?"

  "I don't know, Luke. I sure haven't gotten that far. It's kind of like a Disney movie. You
know—gentling a spirited animal. I'm treading quietly. She's pretty wounded."

  "You mean over that scandal involving Tomas Cordera and her brother?"

  Zac considered trying to explain the cousin-brother relationship, but, lacking the skills, he only nodded.

  "Another plus for Jan," Luke said. "Her picture wasn't smeared all over the Houston paper for days on end."

  "Papa remembers that?"

  "One of the girls reminded him. Concepcion, I think."

  "Nice," Zac murmured, then brightened. "Papa will get over it. He may be crippled, but he's not blind."

  Luke's laugh had a begrudging edge.

  "And it's time Papa conformed to the brave new world."

  A brief silence fell between them. Luke sipped coffee, leaning back in his chair in a settled-in way that made Zac want to give him more facts, bring him along as a constituent.

  "I like being in love. Being loved in return. But I really like being needed, being able to make a difference, and that could definitely be the case with Victoria."

  His brother studied him, waiting.

  "I don't know, Luke. She... touches something in me."

  "So did Carron. You felt needed there, as I remember—thought you could love her enough to keep her from dying. It didn't work, Zac. You screwed up a lot of lives and got your heart broken. This might not work either. Whatever mission you've staked out for yourself."

  "This is different."

  "Always." He smiled. "But, are you sure you want to compete with a ghost?"

  "Why not?" He raised his brows. "You mean just because her deranged obsession with Cordera destroyed a marriage, a political campaign and got Cordera killed? No problem." He shrugged, feigning confidence with a grin. "I'm conditioned for hardship. I was the longest distance runner in high school, the fastest in college. I win every fishing contest I enter, and I could lift the heaviest crates on that freighter. I'm victory material."

  Luke's smile turned tolerant. "That doesn't count, Zaccie. Affairs of the heart and mind don't require stamina or brawn. You'd better give it some thought."