by Nicole Baart
“There’s no trouble, no trouble at all.”
They both knew he was lying.
18
MEG
Meg wasn’t ready to see Jess when he came home at Thanksgiving.
There was no closure in the wordless good-bye that had happened in the cab of Dylan’s truck, and in the interim Meg and Dylan hadn’t exchanged a single word. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t think about him all the time—nearly every minute of every day, as if he was a part of her, as natural as her breath, as close as the air on her skin. It was downright painful to see him in the halls at school; her chest clenched, her pulse quickened, and try as she might to ignore that he was there, when he walked away he took pieces of her with him, bit by bit, little by little, until she felt as if the wind blew through the holes he left behind.
Meg wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t dare. Part of her was afraid to hear what he had to say, and the rest of her was terrified to see him face-to-face, for fear she’d fall to pieces. She wasn’t the sort of girl who crumbled, but then again, until her indiscretion with Dylan, she hadn’t considered herself the sort of girl to cheat on a man who loved her, either.
Strong. She was strong. She had to be.
But as the end of November approached, she didn’t feel strong. Not at all. For the first time in nearly three months she was going to see Jess, and everything was supposed to be the same between them. It wasn’t. Everything felt different. It was as if they had never happened, or if they had, that her time with Dylan had negated any good thing that passed between them.
Confession fell hard upon her shoulders. As much as she wanted to shrug it off and pretend that they were okay, the memory of Dylan pressed her down with such a staggering weight of physical guilt that she wasn’t sure she would be able to stand up beneath it. She feared she’d see Jess and he’d know, really know. She felt like her mistakes with Dylan were altering enough to leave her a different girl entirely. Branded somehow. Changed. And it just had to be visible, as identifying as a letter emblazoned across her chest.
“Are you excited?” Linda asked a few days before Jess was scheduled to arrive home for the holiday.
“For what?”
Linda gave her daughter a searching look. “For Jess to come back.”
“Of course.”
But Linda was shrewd enough to know that Meg’s answer didn’t come close to the truth.
“Long-distance relationships are hard, aren’t they?” Linda’s expression invited her daughter to open up, but Meg avoided the question and refused to turn away from the book she was pretending to read. She had been on the same page for twenty minutes.
“You know,” Linda began, settling onto the arm of the couch where Meg had stretched out. “You’re young, honey. You don’t have to stay with the same boy forever. It’s not like you have to marry Jess.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying: it’s okay if you don’t want to see Jess anymore. I mean, you’re still just a girl, Meg.”
“Okay, fine.”
Linda braved contact, laying a tentative hand on her daughter’s arm. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Okay.” Linda nodded.
“Okay.”
But the older woman must have suspected that Meg was far from okay, because when Bennett came home for Thanksgiving break, the night before Jess was scheduled to arrive, Linda resorted to drastic measures: she sent her son in to spy. Meg knew her brother’s presence at the door of her bedroom was far from innocent because he cheerfully announced it in greeting.
“I’m here to spy,” Bennett blurted without preamble, edging the door open with his toe and staring at Meg as she sat cross-legged on her bed.
She was stiff and miserable, fed up with trying to find a comfortable position when she was agonizingly aware of all her uncooperative angles and lines. Nothing felt quite right, inside or out, and when Bennett showed up in her doorway, she gave up trying and stretched her legs in front of her with a defeated sigh. She sat like that, legs akimbo, arms limp beside her, and watched him walk into her room and close the door.
They weren’t close, not really, but his absence had allowed their faltering relationship to reach a new plateau of understanding. He still avoided her when he came home for breaks, but they acknowledged each other. When Bennett left for college and she had him in small doses, Meg found her brother more tolerable. As Meg matured, Bennett uncovered more redemptive qualities in her personality. He even passed on his English Lit books when he thought she would like them. More often than not, she did.
Meg groaned, watching her brother make himself at home in the wingback chair that sat in a corner of her room. “She’s resorted to spying? That’s low.”
“Nah, I think that’s what moms are supposed to do. It’s in the handbook.”
“There’s a handbook?”
“Sure.”
“Can I have one?”
“I think they hand them out when you actually become a mom.”
Meg yawned, shaking her head from side to side as if to clear it. “Not a mom handbook, a handbook for me. I want one for my own selfish reasons.”
“They don’t make one for that.”
“Who’s they? I think I hate them.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Welcome back, by the way.” Meg tossed a pillow at him. It was as close as they got to sibling affection. It was enough.
In reply, Bennett caught the pillow, fluffed it, and crammed it behind his head. Leaning back, he closed his eyes and kicked his legs up onto the bed.
“So, tell Brother Bennett what you’re doing that’s got Mom all in a fuss.”
“Brother Bennett? That’s disturbing.”
“What you call me is irrelevant. You’re just supposed to spill your guts and then I’m supposed to report back to Mom.”
“That’s heinous.”
“Pretty much.” Bennett opened his eyes long enough to wink at her. “I can’t say I care all that much about the soap opera of your high school existence, but I can promise you that I’d never rat you out to Mom.”
Meg studied her brother intently. “Thanks.”
“That’s just common decency, Meglet.”
“All the same.”
“Tell you what. I’ll just take a little snooze in your chair, then when I wake up, I’ll tell Mom we had a stellar heart-to-heart. It’s all top secret, blah, blah, blah, but the bottom line is, you’ll be fine. That way Mom won’t be too upset about her poor baby girl to make her famous corn bread stuffing for Thursday.”
“It all comes down to stuffing for you?”
Bennett gave a little moan at the thought. “The promise of that stuffing kept me going this fall, I’ll have you know.”
They sat in the bedroom in silence for several minutes, and when Bennett’s breathing lengthened, Meg was sure her brother had done exactly what he said he’d do and was asleep. She leaned back herself and stared at the ceiling, at the orange peel texture and the matching handprints that she had put beside the light fixture when she jumped on the bed after eating Doritos. Her mother had been furious about the greasy marks, but Meg loved the five-pointed stars of her small hands. They were her own constellation; iridescent symbols poised to hear her nighttime wishes.
“So?” Bennett’s voice startled her so much she jumped.
“I thought you were asleep!”
“Come on.” Bennett opened one eye and frowned at her. “You’re not gullible, Meg. Don’t pretend like you are. It’s unbecoming.”
His comment was deflating somehow. “I don’t feel like myself these days,” she admitted. And though he didn’t prompt her in any way, Meg found herself wanting to say things to him. “I’m confused.”
“Obviously.”
She wanted him to ask, to ease the words out of her with careful questions and subtle nudges, but he closed his eyes again and said no more. Meg took it upon herself to continue. “I’m confused about Jess.”<
br />
“You’re a kid. What’s there to be confused about? Break up with him.”
“I don’t know if it’s as simple as that.”
Bennett sat up straight, glowered at her stupidity for a moment, then rearranged himself on the chair, legs over the wide arms and lower back cushioned by the pillow that had formerly bolstered his messy bed head. “Of course it’s as simple as that. You’re what, sixteen?”
“Seventeen. Just. Thanks for remembering my birthday, by the way.”
“No problem. Anyway, as I was saying, it’s easy. You’re a kid.”
Meg made a warning sound in the back of her throat. “Stop calling me a kid.”
“Sorry. Habit.”
“Break it or get out of my room.”
Though Meg wasn’t schooled in the finer points of her brother’s evolving character, for a split second she thought she could see something soften in his gaze. “Why isn’t it easy?” he asked.
“You’re taking a psych class, aren’t you?” Meg countered, narrowing her eyes at him with an almost palpable skepticism.
“I am! I tried empathy there. Did it work?”
“No.”
He snapped his fingers in mock disappointment, then consulted his watch and moved to stand. “I think Mom will buy that we’ve had a meaningful heart-to-heart. It’s been long enough, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure.”
“It’s been real, little sis.”
She watched him go, but when his hand was on the doorknob and he was a heartbeat away from slipping out, Meg blurted: “Dylan and I . . .” She didn’t finish, but Bennett stopped.
“You slept with him?” he asked without turning around.
“No,” Meg whispered, shocked. “No, of course not. Nothing like that.”
“At least you’re not entirely stupid,” Bennett sighed, and turned to lean against the back of the door and survey her. “But something happened, and this is why you’re confused about Jess.”
“Yeah.”
“A little love triangle.”
“Look, Jess is like family. I don’t want to hurt him.”
“That’s not a reason to stay with someone. Besides, if there’s something going on between you and Dylan—”
“There’s not,” Meg interrupted. “Nothing is going on between us at all.”
Bennett stretched, bored of their circuitous conversation. He could almost brush his fingers against the ceiling, and rising to his toes, he tried. “Whatever,” he said, his head tilted up. “Do whatever you want. But just between you and me, Jess’s a good guy. It’s Dylan I’d worry about if I were you.”
Bennett’s unexpected candor startled Meg, but it didn’t help her unravel the mystery of her heart and what she wanted. In some ways, it only confused her more. She tried to write it off as the clinging remnants of sibling rivalry, but something about Bennett’s words sunk deep. In the end, she found herself no more or less prepared to meet Jess when he came home from college for his first real break.
Meg knew that Jess would be pulling into town around suppertime, and though she didn’t wait by the window for the first hint of his arrival, she was painfully aware of each sound, each trace of irregularity in the descending dusk outside. Cars drove by intermittently, neighbors put out their recycling bins for the waste department pickup in the morning, and mothers called their kids out of the cold for supper, baths, and bed. But no one pulled into the cul-de-sac until the Painters were putting a light meal on the table.
Looking up from the loaf of bread that she was slicing, Linda caught the tilt of her daughter’s head and glimpsed the unmistakable glow of headlights through the drawn shades. “He’s home?” she questioned carefully.
It seemed to Meg that her mother was trying to gauge her reaction. “If that’s him,” she said. She didn’t know if she should appear nonchalant, even uninterested, or if her mother expected a girlish squeal and a race to the front door. Either way, she feared the slight tremor in her voice gave away the tempest of emotions that fought for precedence inside her. All at once she was furious with herself. What was she afraid of? “I’m guessing he’ll go home for supper and then come over here later,” Meg supposed aloud, and she was thankful that this time her voice was steady.
She lifted a salad bowl from the counter and carried it into the dining room at the back of the house as if everything was perfectly normal, as if her heart wasn’t trying furiously to beat out of the confines of her chest. It was doubtful that Linda bought her deception, but at least Meg had an hour or so before she had to face Jess. Maybe she could pull herself together by then.
But her hour of reprieve turned out to be less than a minute. Meg heard a quick volley of knocks on the front door, a characteristic staccato of familiarity, followed by the anxious click of a handle being turned and the sound of Jess’s voice as he called into the house, “Anybody home? Can I still do this?”
There was a marked pause in the air, a feeling that the entire house was holding its breath in anticipation of the next words that would be spoken. Meg tried to conjure up something to say, something that was neither cold nor too welcoming, neither false nor startlingly accurate. But Linda was the first to speak, and the warmth of her tone as she stepped out of the kitchen and into the foyer hit just the note that Meg had feared.
“Jess Langbroek. Of course you can still do that. You’ve been doing it since you were five years old. You’re family,” Linda said warmly. “You belong here.”
Meg listened to her mother and her boyfriend with the reassurance of the kitchen between them and knew that Dylan was right. Jess—or a boy just like him—did belong in her home. Great family, stable background, promising future. Things had been simple between her and Jess because they followed a fixed pattern, provided a framework that she hadn’t even known she was working within.
And yet, she didn’t love him.
What could she possibly say to him? In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered if she had rehearsed a script for weeks in anticipation of his arrival. Her mind was blank, her heart so frozen, she was sure she could feel the ice in her chest crack and splinter with each muffled beat. She set the salad bowl on the table and took a deep breath, tugging on the edges of her sweater to straighten it.
“She’s setting the table,” Meg heard her mother say. Then there were footfalls and laughter about bits of hurried conversation that she couldn’t make out. And before she could expend a moment’s worry about how he would respond when he saw her, Jess was standing in the archway between the kitchen and dining room.
He materialized out of a three-month absence taller, broader, older. If her eyes weren’t failing her, his hair was darker, and his eyes, too. It seemed to Meg that wisdom had imparted a deepening of more than just his mind. There was a hopeful half smile on his face, as if he was returning to a place full of memories and rich with a life that he looked back on with fondness and expectation. It seemed to her that he longed to find everything as simple and unchanged as he remembered, even though he was not the same man. Meg stood rooted to the ground as she watched him emerge from what felt like the ancient past, and wondered if she was everything that he had waited for.
Jess’s gaze took her in slowly, from the crown of her ponytailed head to the unpainted toenails of her bare feet. She felt self-conscious, exposed beneath the daring search of his inscrutable blue eyes. She found herself looking at the floor, at the faded white cotton of his mismatched socks as he approached. He had taken off his shoes at the door and something about the closeness of that act, the permanence—I’m here to stay—made her heart catch in her throat.
When their toes touched, Jess slid into her in a deliberate reproduction of the night of their first kiss, wrapping his arms around her with such gentleness that Meg felt herself melting into his embrace against her will. The ice that had been her petrified heart fell one drop at a time and seemed to pool around their sweetly mismatched feet and rise until Meg wondered if she could drown in her own invisible tear
s. But Jess didn’t appear to notice her hesitation as he pulled her tight against his chest, and instead of pressing her head against him, he let his own forehead sink to rest on her shoulder. It was an act of unaccountable surrender.
“Oh,” he exhaled against her collarbone. “I’ve missed that. I’ve missed you.”
Meg felt herself tighten around him, her arms cinching around his neck as if she could never be convinced again to let him go. Her fingers spread into his hair, pulling his head down against her and holding it there with a ferocity she hadn’t realized she felt. Her chest was empty and hollow, cavernous in its need for air that could never hope to fill the gaping space. She opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again and whispered against his ear: “I’m so sorry.”
19
LUCAS
The afternoon passed quickly for Lucas—too quickly, because although he couldn’t help but worry unendingly about what awaited him at home, he was dying to know more about Michael Kane Designs.
It seemed to him that the entire three-pronged predicament of the Woman, the ring, and Angela was nothing more than a misunderstanding, a kindness gone wrong. He had extended his hand in empathy, a touch of commiseration that, while admittedly tinged with an almost desperate need to know what had happened and why, had spiraled out of control. And now that his touch had become a lifeline, it could not be retracted. For better or worse, he was, body and soul, a part of this thing.
But while he was electrified by Angela’s discovery about the unique design of the ring, he was uneasy about Jenna’s inevitable reaction. He tried to speculate how she would feel. Betrayed that he hadn’t told her what he had done? Angry that he had dared to do something so foolhardy and illegal? Hurt that he had shared his trespass with Angela, a virtual stranger to him and someone he didn’t like all that much, instead of her? Probably all of the above and more. Jenna had always surprised him with her unpredictable reactions.
