The Truth About Him (Everything I Left Unsaid #2)

by M. O'Keefe

  “Leonardo, he was like the head turtle and he had swords. Max had a God complex at a young age. Mom almost didn’t let him get the swords because they were stupid expensive, but she could never say no to Max. Anyway, when we went out to trick-or-treat we ran into my friend Joey Gibson, who was dressed up like Donatello with the bow staff and the purple mask, and his dad had made his shell costume and it kept falling apart, and he came with us and then we ran into some other kid we didn’t know who was dressed up like Raphael and he came with us. So, before we knew it we were trick-or-treating as all of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

  “And it was totally by accident?”

  “Couldn’t have gone better if we tried.” I slid my omelet onto my plate and then cranked off the burner on the stove. “Wait, do you even know who the Ninja Turtles are?”

  She shot me some serious side-eye. “I wasn’t totally isolated; we did have a TV.”

  “Did you get to trick-or-treat?”

  She smiled, twirling cheese around the tines of her fork. “Smith took me for a few years.”

  My mouth was full of eggs, so I just lifted my eyebrows.

  “I think I was five when he first took me. He found some errand for us to run in town, and then when we got there he pulled out a cheap plastic princess costume from under his seat and we hit a few neighborhoods.”

  “What did you do with the candy?”

  “Ate most of it on the way home.” She smiled down at her eggs, revealing that the happy memory had sharp edges that hurt. “He made me give him all the Snickers. He told me it was a bribe to keep quiet.”

  “We can find him, you know,” I told her, wanting to give her that.

  “How?” She glanced up and her blue eyes were damp. Not crying. Not exactly.

  “Private investigators. Terrence works with one all the time. You said he was in Wyoming, right? With a sister. We can find him.”

  She pulled that bottom lip under her teeth, chewing on it. I looked back down at my eggs, because the sight of her doing that made my blood churn and it seemed totally inappropriate to get a hard-on while she was near tears talking about the man who was a father to her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded, tears gone, nothing but smiles again, and I felt like I had pulled down the stars for her. And I fucking loved this feeling. It was better than racing. Better than making money. Better than anything I’d experienced in my life.

  I used the side of my fork to cut more of my omelet.

  “You didn’t tell me what happened last night,” she said. “At The Velvet Touch? With Max.”

  “Not much to say, really. We just…talked.” I took a deep breath. “I thanked him for taking me to Miguel and Margaret after jail.”

  “Really?”

  “He saved my life, in a way. I mean…”

  “I get it,” she said. I smiled at her. Of course she did. Somehow, she knew all the hard things. The things that kept me separate from the rest of the world only bound us together.

  But I didn’t know how to say Max was going to die. Sooner or later, he would end up somewhere riddled with bullet holes, bleeding out all alone.

  Those were hard words to say, no matter how distant Max was.

  And that I’d made him go back. Forced him back into that fate.

  For her, for me. For us.

  Guilt was an awful burn in my throat. It made me restless. Twitchy.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I lied. We ate in silence for a few minutes, the scrape of our forks against the plates grating. The silence got thicker, and I realized I wasn’t the only one keeping my mouth shut about something. I could feel the weight of something she wasn’t saying.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” She got back to her eggs like she was starving.

  “Bullshit, nothing. You have something to say, say it.”

  “I’m just…How do you forgive your brother but not your dad?”

  “Because it’s not the same thing.”

  Again with her careful silence.

  “What!” I snapped.

  “Stop yelling at me!” she cried.

  “Then say what’s on your mind!”

  “I’m not going to talk about anything if you yell at me.”

  “Fine,” I said and stood up. “Then we won’t talk.”

  I’d hurt her. If I’d reached across the table and smacked her I couldn’t have hurt her more. And I hated it. I hated it as much as I was powerless to stop it. My dishes clattered into the sink.

  All that anger I felt a minute ago was made worse by shame.

  “I told you I don’t know how to do this.”

  Still she was silent, sitting there, watching me. The fucking trailer was too small all of a sudden, and everywhere I looked, all I saw were the ways I could hurt her. And inevitably would.

  I was a fucking Daniels. We didn’t love, we crashed. We destroyed. We burned everything in fire.

  This is a mistake. You and me, we’re a mistake.

  I almost said it. It would have been a relief to say it. To bow out of this thing we had between us. This thing that required pieces of me I didn’t have or know how to use.

  But she just sat there, watching me. Like she knew what I was thinking.

  Growing up, I watched my parents on a constant cycle: vicious fight, someone leaves, then comes back, weeping and reeking of alcohol; they make up, only to do it all again.

  It was exhausting, that cycle. It was bullshit. And I hated it.

  This is how you stay, I told myself. One hard moment at a time.

  I took a deep breath and then another.

  I could apologize, but I’d given her too many apologies lately. It was time, maybe, to show her. To be different. To stop giving her reasons for the apologies.

  “I’m going to work on your car today.” I ran water over the frying pan and it sizzled, releasing smoke in the air.

  “I’m going to mow the other half of the field.” She stood with her plate and set it in the sink, too. Her body brushed mine. Her soft skin, her feathery hair. I grabbed onto her before she slipped by, having just narrowly stopped myself from pushing her away.

  “Does it get easier?” I asked her, my face in her neck so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes.

  She kissed my neck. My ear. The scars there. “I don’t know,” she said. Her quiet honesty was so humbling. “I think so. I hope so.”

  Ah, that word. Maybe she didn’t know, but hope was a tricky fucking beast, and she should know better than to say its name or else it would turn on us.

  We kissed, slow and sweet. And I pulled her in closer, flush suddenly with survivor’s adrenaline, because we’d just barely dodged a bullet of my own making. I shifted her back, stepping toward the bedroom, thinking of having something else for breakfast, when there was a quick, hard knock at the door.

  Annie pulled back and I groaned. “Ignore it,” I told her, still trying to get her into bed. But she pulled away from me, smacking at my hands that clung to her hips.

  “Stop it,” she whispered through her delicious, delicious smile.

  She opened the door and it was Tiffany there, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her tee shirt tucked into a pair of khaki shorts. She looked so young. Like a camp counselor.

  “Hey,” Annie said, stepping down into the fresh morning air. Leaving me in the shadows of the trailer, with the ghosts of our fight. “What’s up?”

  “I…uh…I actually came to talk to Dylan,” she said, and Annie glanced back at me over her shoulder.

  I came down the small steps, too, and the three of us stood in an awkward triangle.

  “I’m ready,” Tiffany said. “To meet Margaret and this Blake guy. The kids…” She cleared her throat, and I recognized all too well the sounds that accompanied a person swallowing her pride. “I haven’t told them. But I keep thinking that if they’re good people like you say they are, then my kids would be better f
or knowing them. For having them in their lives.”

  “That’s true,” Annie said.

  “But I’m not doing this for money,” Tiffany said. “Or charity or for their pity. And they can’t just come whenever, you know. I need a date and a time. And maybe we don’t even meet here, you know. We’ll meet in town. Just them and me.”

  “Understood,” I said. But Blake would not. Blake did things on his terms. Not anyone else’s.

  “Okay…so.” She was wringing her hands, and Annie stepped forward and put a hand over hers. “What happens next?”

  “I’ll call them today,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Annie said. “You’ll see.”

  Tiffany was convinced and she smiled.

  I did not.

  —

  Annie left to go mow the other side of the field, and I grabbed my phone and walked over to where Annie’s car was parked.

  Stock car racing was an endurance sport. It was an extended act of adjustment. Adjustments to the track. To the car. To other drivers. It required a driver to be constantly connected, constantly aware. Vigilant in the assessment of feedback.

  But it was also about anticipation. About being able to see the future, in a way.

  And this thing with Tiffany, with Blake…the future I saw, it wasn’t easy.

  It had real crash-and-burn potential.

  The hood was up on Annie’s car, which meant Pops was around somewhere, his hands covered in black motor grease.

  How do you forgive your brother but not your dad?

  The question was innocent enough. Even logical.

  But nothing I felt about it was logical. It was all gut reaction and old bitterness.

  Feelings that had been broken and left unset, to wither and die.

  There was a list of parts the car needed, written in Pops’s barely legible scrawl on the front bumper, held in place by a socket wrench.

  I grabbed the list and called the garage, pacing away from the car, putting off the far more important call to Blake and Margaret. Because I was all kinds of chickenshit.

  “989 Engines.” It was Rebecca, our receptionist.

  “Hey, Becs.”

  “Dylan?”

  “Yeah, I have a—”

  “Hold just a second—Blake wants to talk to you.”

  “No, Becs—”

  “Well, holy shit, look who is lifting his head.” It was Blake and he was not happy.

  “Blake, what the hell are you doing there?”

  “All the shit you aren’t.”

  More feedback, more debris kicked up on my windshield. “Can I talk to one of the guys? I need a few parts down here.”

  “The Beamer broke down?”

  “No, it’s Annie’s car.”

  “Why don’t you just get her a new one?”

  “She’s got this thing called pride, Blake.”

  “How inconvenient. Give me the list.”

  “You want to take my shopping list?” I laughed. Talk about beneath Blake’s pay grade.

  “I want to get you back here as soon as possible,” he said. “So we can get back to work.”

  I rattled off the twenty items. Spark plugs, timing belt. New windshield wipers. Headlights. Brake light cover. Oil. All new filters…

  “Got it; I’ll get one of the guys to bring this down later. And I need a concrete date from you, Dylan, when you’re coming back.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “I can’t run a fucking business like this.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. I am. But…there’s something else I gotta tell you.”

  Somewhere in the campground a kid started crying. “Shit,” Blake said. “I don’t like that tone. Spit it out.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Did you know that Phil is married?”

  “What? Phil isn’t married.”

  “He is. To a girl named Tiffany.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “She’s been living with him here at the trailer park.”

  “Well, that I figure is her problem. I told you, Dylan, Mom and me, we washed our hands of Phil. There’s nothing we can do for that guy until he decides he wants help.”

  “Phil has three kids.”

  The silence on the other end of the phone was complete. And loud.

  “Blake?”

  “Three kids?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Two girls and a boy. All real young.”

  “And this wife of his—”

  “Tiffany.”

  “Right. Tiffany. She’s the mom?”

  “They’ve been married for, like, five years.” I heard him suck in a quick breath. “And I just kicked him off the property for some shit he pulled with Annie, and Tiffany stayed here. Decided not to go with him.”

  “She and the kids are still in that trailer park?”

  “Yeah.”

  Blake swore long and loud. “My mom is going to lose her mind,” he said.

  “That’s why I’m coming to you first.”

  “So, what does this woman want? Money?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Right,” Blake sneered.

  “I’m serious, man. She’s not like Phil.”

  “She only married the guy.”

  “She wants to meet you and your mom, away from the park. Without the kids. She’s got a lot of pride.”

  “Well, she’s not meeting Mom at all until I check this woman out. I’ll bring down the parts. See you in a few hours.”

  Damn, Dylan thought, putting the phone in his pocket. The day really had started off so well.

  ANNIE

  The truth was Annie’s happy place was on top of a riding lawn mower. And not just because the faint vibrations of the motor made certain key parts of her anatomy tingle, but because all the thoughts in her head quieted down for a few minutes. And it was just her and the sun and the bright blue sky above her.

  And Dylan. Dylan in her heart. And in these quiet thoughts.

  It had been a precarious moment in her trailer. She’d seen him rearing up, ready to smash what they had, and she sat there, knowing she couldn’t convince him if he was not able to convince himself that they could work.

  But then he’d controlled those impulses and that moment, that brutal restraint on his part, it said more to her about how he felt than any words he might say.

  In her life, Annie had never felt very lucky. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed in luck, actually. But the combination of last night and this morning made her feel like she’d won some kind of lottery.

  She got insane sex, more pleasure than she knew existed. She got dark and depraved and tender and wild, and then in the morning she got an omelet and Halloween stories. And a man who fought his worst instincts to stay with her. A man who was trying harder every day.

  If that wasn’t lucky, she didn’t know what was.

  But is it love? some voice in her wondered. Is it enough?

  She made her wide left turn at the top of the field, close to the tree line, and came around, lining up with the straight shorn edge of the line she’d already mowed.

  And nearly ran into a man.

  ANNIE

  She yelped and took her foot off the pedal, the mower lurching to a stop. She was thrown against the steering wheel and then back against the seat by the shift in momentum.

  “Holy shit!” she cried, her hand against her pounding heart. “You scared me!”

  The guy wore jeans, faded and perfectly worn to his lanky body. He had on a plaid shirt and over that a leather vest. There were patches on the front of it, over his chest on either side.

  His hair was long and black, tied back at his neck, and a trimmed beard covered the bottom half of his face, dark glasses covered the top half.

  She realized she’d seen him once before, that night at the strip club—he’d been part of the group of men coming out when she’d been going in.

  And then in a crystallized, ice-cold
moment, she knew who he was.

  Annie turned off the engine. “Max,” she said, into the sudden quiet.

  “You must be Annie.” He was totally unreadable behind the glasses and the beard.

  His mouth was the same as Dylan’s. Those pillowing lips with the up-curled edges. The perpetual smirk.

  “Are you looking for Dylan? Or Ben?” She said the names in part to see if he would react. Dylan, at the mention of Max’s name, or his father’s, boarded up tight. He stiffened and shut down.

  Max did none of that. It was as if the names meant nothing to him.

  His impassive face started to make her nervous.

  She swung her leg over the side of the mower. “I’ll take you to them.”

  “I’m looking for you,” he said, stepping toward her, and she was now caught between the mower and his body.

  He’s not going to hurt you, she told herself, but her body wasn’t convinced. Her heart rate kicked up. Her palms were instantly sweaty.

  “Me?” If she’d wanted to sound tough, she just totally failed.

  “I’d like to get to know the woman who managed to pull my brother away from his garage. Brought him down into the real world.” His smile had a hint of charm that in any other situation might be effective, but right now it just felt threatening. “What’s so special about you, I wonder?”

  He took off his glasses and his eyes walked over her body, leaving footprints and dirt across the bare skin revealed by her tee shirt and shorts.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Looks like you got tuned up recently.” He gestured to the slowly fading black eye. “My brother do that?”

  “No. Never,” she said.

  “Never,” he laughed. “You don’t know him very well, do you?”

  “Better than you,” she snapped.

  “No one knows my brother better than me.” His eyes were cold and mean. “Because I am part of the fucked-up mold that made him. And I know that he’s got pretty screwed-up instincts when it comes to women. It’s not his fault; our mom didn’t do him any favors.”

  Max was so close she could feel the heat from his body against her bare legs and she fought the urge to cower away. It was what he wanted. To scare her. And she was not going to give him the satisfaction.