Up to Me (Shore Secrets)

by Christi Barth

  “This—” she swung her hand between them, slower than if pushing through deep water, “—this thing between you and me has gotten very real. Very intense. Very fast.”

  Gray nodded. “Skipping the usual first-date conversation left us with nothing to do but jump ahead. Feels like we’re having fortieth-date conversations.”

  “Well, it feels like I’m doing all the talking, and you’re just listening. I’ve shared enough all by myself. It’s time to turn the tables.”

  Gray jerked his thumb toward the door with a weak grin. “I think that’s my cue to leave.”

  Pretty much what she’d expected him to say. That just meant Ella had to push harder, delve deeper. Because either he opened up to her tonight, or this...non-dating...thing of theirs was over. She’d dropped her guard from the get-go. Gray still wore about three suits of emotional armor. Ella damn well intended to strip them all off.

  “I’m serious. You’re pulling all this soul-searching stuff on me. It’s only fair you reveal something deep and dark to me. Everybody’s got something. And with your vague comments about guilt and blame, I’m pretty sure you’re hiding a doozy of a secret.”

  He startled at her words. But still said nothing. Could he be scared? Did he not think she was trustworthy? Or not worth the effort? Why wouldn’t the man freaking talk to her?

  Ella grabbed her keys from the desk drawer. “A change of venue should help. Come with me. But talk while we walk. What makes you the expert on handling blame?” She turned off the lights. Jiggled the knob to be sure Brooke had locked the door when she left. Took Gray’s hand to lead him down the pale green hallway past all the treatment rooms. And wondered if she’d pushed too hard. Gray was silent. He came with her, without resistance, but also without words. Finally, he squeezed her hand twice then held on tight.

  “I haven’t hidden the fact that I don’t like small towns. My hometown—well, it tainted me against anything smaller than a metropolis with, at the very least, their own baseball and football teams.”

  Ella unlocked the door to what looked like a closet. What was in fact not only a closet, but a secret passageway. “Why?”

  “My mom and I were persona non grata there for three years. Mom stayed because she had nowhere else to go. I stayed to get my diploma...which got me a full ride to college. Never looked back.”

  She lifted the empty shelf third up from the bottom. With a squeak, the back wall swung outward, revealing a steep stone staircase. “Okay, again, I have to ask why. What turned them against you?”

  “Holy hell, Ella, what is this place?” Gray stood on the top step, peering down into the darkness.

  “The Manor was built at the start of Prohibition. My relatives weren’t fans, to say the least. They’d hide wine barrels and casks of hard spirits down here until transport could be arranged. Hence the secret passageway. Grandpa Mayhew transformed it from a storage room back in the ‘50s.”

  Ella walked down four steps, reached up and pulled the string to turn on the lights. The sight of the enormous swimming pool in the center of the stone cavern drew an amused chuckle out of Gray.

  “Not that I object, but aren’t we breaking some rules sneaking around down here? Because the note on my dresser says the pool’s closed this week.”

  “It was. The chemical balance was off. Not that much, but we don’t like to risk our guests’ health. But the pool company gave me the all-clear right before you showed up. It’ll open to everyone tomorrow. Tonight, however, it’s just for us. All the doors to it from the gym are locked. Guaranteed privacy for you to spill your deep, dark secrets.”

  Rough-cut stones edged the pool, some big enough to lie upon. More curved up into high lips almost covered in cascading water. Fat stone pillars (exactly seven strokes apart, as Ella knew well) were staggered the length of the pool and the two whirlpools. Brass sconces topped the pillars and threw cool, blue light across the top of the room echoed by the underwater lighting.

  “Take off your shoes and socks,” she ordered as they descended. “Nothing relaxes you at the end of the day like cooling your feet in a pool.”

  Plus, the low lighting should make it easier for them to continue to spill the shadows on their souls. Ella needed to know what put that haunted look in Gray’s eyes. Sure, a small part of it was about equity. Pretty embarrassing talking about her emotional meltdowns and not getting any equally embarrassing dirt from him. But more than that, she cared about Gray. Truth be told, she cared about him much more than even made sense, given how short a time they’d known each other. And in order to fix whatever made him so unhappy, she had to start by learning the cause.

  They settled on a low, smooth boulder. Gray rolled up his jeans. Just the sight of his ankles, dusted with dark hair, sent another pulse of heat into Ella’s belly. Bare feet and ankles immediately transported her mind straight to the bedroom. How those feet would look on top of kicked-off sheets. How they’d look tangled around her own legs. Which was even easier to picture once she tucked her denim skirt under her knees, pulled off her turquoise Converse and dangled her feet in the water next to his.

  “Relaxed now?” she asked.

  Gray’s right eyebrow shot up into an arrow. “After two seconds? Not so much. How about you check back after I’ve at least blinked a couple of times?”

  Okay. So she was a little bit eager to turn the tables and get the goods on Gray. He’d been on a roll, and she didn’t want the quick break to sideline him from continuing. “I’ll ask again once you finish your story.”

  “Spoiler alert—it won’t be good.” Even in shadowy profile, Ella could see his lips compress into a thin, tight line. He fisted his hands on the rock, pressing down hard enough to make the tendons on his forearms stand out. “You’ve shared some powerful things with me. Your openness is the only reason I’m about to tell you about my fucked-up life. I don’t go around blabbing this to anyone. Ever. Which I’m sure your ex-shrink would have a field day with.”

  “I could swing a friends-and-family discount for you with Dr. T.,” she teased. The words didn’t reveal the double-time kick of her heartbeat. Ella wanted to know his story. Heck, she wanted to know everything about Gray. This sounded like a major revelation, though. The kind that changed everything. And even though it had been her idea, Ella was suddenly unsure about yanking the lid off of Gray’s emotional baggage.

  “If I don’t want to tell you my sob story, I sure as hell don’t want to tell a shrink.” He shook his head. Cracked his neck. In other words, stalled. “Regardless, fair is fair. So here goes.”

  But he didn’t launch in right away. First, Gray kicked his feet slowly through the just-warm-enough water. Waited until the ripples he’d created drifted past the first stone pillar. “I grew up in a small town. So small that nobody locked their doors. Not until my sophomore year in high school.”

  “What changed?”

  “A girl in my class, Laura Costello, woke up, middle of the night, to discover a man standing over her. One of his hands held a camera. The other was pulling the sheets down. She screamed. Her brother came running. Pounded the shit out of the man. Probably would’ve killed him if the police hadn’t arrived so quickly.”

  Ella slid a hand over to cover his still-tight fist. Maybe to comfort herself as much as to comfort him. “That’s horrible.”

  “It gets worse,” he said with a sardonic upswing to his voice. “They haul the guy off. The next day they’ve got a search warrant for his house. In the attic they find a box of pictures. Photos of at least half the women in town. Going back almost twenty years. He’d been sneaking into bedrooms, watching these women at their most vulnerable. Occasionally stealing trophies as well. Little stuff. Trinkets, the odd pair of panties that people wrote off as misplaced or forgotten. But things they recognized once the police brought them to the station, because they were a subject in a photo.”
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br />   He told the story as though reciting it from a newspaper article. Like a disinterested third party. Which clued her in to how deeply personal it must be, that he had to distance himself from the telling. Ella didn’t need to ask the obvious question. She was already quite sure of the answer. And it broke her heart. But she thought that Gray needed to say it out loud. “Who was the man?”

  “My father. Joseph Locke. Currently a resident of Elmhurst Federal Correctional Facility.”

  “Oh.” She breathed in deeply of the chlorine-tinged air. The acrid scent helped cut through the tears choking the back of her throat. “Oh, Gray, that must be awful for you.”

  “Which?” Another kick at the water. “A father in prison? Knowing why he went there in the first place? Or essentially losing my father at age fifteen?” He kicked harder after each question, until both of them were soaked to the knees. The splashing echoed loudly as it slapped against the rocks.

  “All of the above, I imagine.” Ella didn’t know which facet was worse. She could only imagine the multiple levels of pain and betrayal and loss that the teenaged Gray had faced. Still faced today, probably, given the sharpness of his tone.

  Gray waited until all the ripples subsided to speak again. “The town hated us. Froze out me and my mom. Blamed us for whatever had warped in his mind. But we were flat broke after paying Dad’s legal fees. So we stuck it out.”

  “You weren’t to blame.” The lack of caring, the lack of basic human sympathy from his neighbors shocked her. To Ella, a community had a responsibility to pull together and help their own. No matter what. “For crying out loud, you were a child. How could they possibly blame you?”

  “Yeah. But the worst part? Dad wouldn’t see me.” Gray crossed one arm tight over his chest. Propped the other on it and stretched his hand across his forehead, holding his temples as though they pounded. Or maybe it was the pain of finally letting all these emotions out.

  “From the day they took him to jail, he refused to speak to me. Yeah, I was disgusted by what he did. Wanted to scream at him for how he ruined my life, and my mother’s.” His voice, already low and with a hitch in it, dropped to a raspy rumble. “But this small part of me wanted to tell him, one last time, what a good father he’d been those first fifteen years. Thank him for teaching me how to throw a curve ball. How to whistle. For not laughing when I cried after he pulled out my first tooth.”

  Ella couldn’t take it anymore. She crab-walked back until she sat behind Gray, pulling him flush against her body in an embrace. They both needed to be soothed after that story. He grabbed onto her hands, tight. Rolled his head into her shoulder and just breathed, hard and long, for a few minutes. She breathed with him, marveling at the strength it took to rise above such tragedy and isolation to become the thoughtful man he’d shown himself to be with her.

  Finally some of the tension drained out of him. Gray reached down to caress her ankle. “Six months ago, he started emailing me.”

  His words shocked her. “About what?”

  “He wants to see me.”

  The nerve of the man. To ignore his child for years and then think he had any right at all to ask for a single thing? Ella had to fight to keep her outrage in check. Gray didn’t need her getting him any more worked up. As calmly as possible, she asked, “After all this time without a word? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t opened any of them. I’ve built up a lot of anger about his sixteen-year radio silence. Too much time has passed.” He twisted around to look at her. “But what if he’s sick? Do I have an obligation to talk to him? The man who didn’t check to see if I was alive or dead all this time? I can’t wrap my brain around whether or not I should feel guilty about not answering him.”

  This was a no-brainer. She tightened her hold, as if trying to press the words into him. “You can’t carry guilt about your father, seeing him or not. He made his choices, and has to live with them. How you live with his choices is out of his hands.”

  “You mean it’s all up to me?”

  Ella bit her lip. How had Gray’s completely different situation ended up mirroring her own? “Yes. You’ve got to protect your heart, first and foremost. Nobody else will look out for it as well as you can.” And that was probably enough heart-wrenching sharing for both of them. Hopefully he’d take her words to heart as easily as she took his. She touched his cheek. Smoothed a finger along the shadows beneath his eyes. “You look stressed.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly talking baseball stats here.”

  His humor and resiliency amazed her. Gray was a man she could fall hard for—and if she had to be honest with herself, had already started that tumble. Not that it mattered. He’d be gone in just over a week. But Ella could pack a lot of fun into the days they had left together. Over the last six months she’d bounced all the way back to normal. Embracing this time with Gray would seal her leap back into embracing life fully, the way she used to.

  “Nevertheless, it’s my job as manager of the spa to make sure my guests leave looking happier and more relaxed than when they arrived. You’re going to be walking bad press. Come do yoga with me tomorrow.”

  “I’m a guy. We’re all about being hard and stiff, not soft and bendy.”

  Ella blinked rapidly to clear the images of a naked, hard-muscled Gray that popped into her mind. And hardness...other places. “Don’t be so close-minded. Didn’t you end up enjoying the massage I gave you?”

  “Yes.” He sounded adorably sulky at being forced to acknowledge it. Why was it that men found it so hard to admit when they were wrong? Definitely a topic of discussion for her next margarita night with the girls.

  “See? You can’t dismiss something out of hand without at least trying it.”

  Gray wrinkled his nose. “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.” Ella brought up her other hand to cup his face. “You deserve to be looked after. It’s not much, I know, but let me help you in the only way I can.”

  “I’ll do it—”

  Ella bounced a little. “Terrific.”

  “—on one condition. I’ve just come up with a good plan for stress release. Let’s try my way first.” Gray wove his fingers through the loose knit of her turquoise sweater. In one swift move, he pulled it off over her head and tossed it into the corner. “Come swimming with me. Right now.”

  Was he serious? To stall for time while she processed the preposterous suggestion, Ella stammered, “We...we don’t have suits.”

  “You said the pool’s still officially closed. No one will interrupt us.” He toyed with the strap of her matching tank. “You’ve got this thing. I’m wearing boxer briefs. We’ll be more covered up than in suits. Unless you don’t think you can control yourself around me?”

  That was it in a nutshell. Not that she’d admit it to Gray. Not when he had that sharp eyebrow arched and a smug quirk to his lips. If he was trying to shock her...well, he had, no denying that. But what better way was there to embrace life fully than to embrace a dripping wet, mostly naked Gray? While she’d never work up the courage to tell him, this was the kind of activity Dr. T. would probably applaud. Or at least give her a gold star. He had asked her to email him with progress reports if anything big happened. Unable to resist, she glanced down at Gray’s crotch. Ella expected something very big, indeed, was about to happen.

  “Water’s extremely therapeutic,” she said in her most serious, I’m massaging you but not judging your naked body in any way professional voice. “Swimming is a good counterpart to yoga. They use the same long muscles.”

  Yup. Her matter-of-fact delivery dropped his eyebrow back to its usual straight line and wiped the smug from his lips. Ella kept the surprises rolling. She stood, unbuttoned her skirt and let it slide the floor into a big blue puddle. Then she reached out, grabbed his wrist, and yanked him sideways into the pool with her.

 
The simultaneous body flops slapped noise and water all around the room. Ella recovered first, treading water while waiting for Gray to get his bearings and surface. Keeping her head above water was easy. Breathing, however, was not, as she was laughing her head off at catching him off guard. Finally, with much thrashing and churning of the water, Gray popped up near the middle of the pool.

  “What the hell?” he yelled, his voice bouncing off the rocks with a hollow echo. “I’m wearing clothes!”

  “So take them off,” she yelled back. Geez, it was his idea. Ella had just implemented it without talking it to death first. She’d thought he’d appreciate her spontaneity.

  Gray stared at her for a minute, totally unreadable. Then his head disappeared beneath the water again. In fact, he sank straight to the bottom. It worried her. But just until a heavy, sodden pair of jeans landed like a giant blue spitwad in front of her. Laughing, she tossed them over her shoulder in the general direction of their shoes. Then Gray’s shirt appeared, floating near the filter. Something she’d have to remember to retrieve before morning when maintenance would make their final sweep before reopening the pool.

  She felt Gray first. His head brushed against her stomach. Using her body like a swim ladder, he climbed it with his hands until just those brilliant blue eyes broke the surface. Blinked at her once. Then he tilted his head back and arced a stream of water from his lips to the dead center of her forehead. Laughing even harder, Ella reached under his shoulders to pull him the rest of the way up.

  That’s when the laughter stopped. When buoyancy slammed his oh my God so hard cock right against her. When it was the most natural thing in the world to wrap her legs tight around him to keep him nestled against all her heat and what felt like every freaking nerve ending in her body. And when she twined her arms around his neck just for the thrill of rubbing her breasts across his chest.

  With two powerful kicks, Gray propelled them to the wall. He sandwiched Ella against it and hung on to the rocks to keep them both afloat. “I’m on board with your idea. As you can tell.” He ground against her in a way that absolutely proved not only that he was enthusiastic about stripping, but that there was definitely nothing between them other than two thin, skintight layers of cotton. Gray’s impressive length was no longer just an impression or wishful thinking. It was hard and long and she couldn’t wait to impale herself on him. For now, she locked her ankles together and let the water do most of the work of bobbing her up and down in a rhythmic, full-body caress.