The Last Breath

by Kimberly Belle

  “Why not? Dean practically confessed. Once word of that gets out, you won’t be the murderer’s daughter anymore. Things’ll go back to the way they were for you here before Ella Mae was killed.”

  I look at him like he’s crazy. “You weren’t here during the trial, so you don’t know. You didn’t hear what people said, didn’t see the way they looked at me. My best friends, my teammates, my teachers. People who treated me like family suddenly wanted nothing to do with me, acted like I was the one holding the saran wrap when I was more fucking traumatized by Ella Mae’s death than anyone!” By now, my voice has risen to an alarming decibel, but I shove even more power behind it. “I will never forgive them for what they put me through, and things can never, ever go back to the way they were for me here.”

  “So Lexi was right? When your dad dies, we do, too?”

  “No!” At the thought of no more Jake, a ball of nausea mushrooms in my belly. “No, of course not.”

  He shifts Lexi in his arms, and I know his biceps must be burning. “What, then?”

  “I...I don’t know.” I open my mouth to say more, but what is there to say? My sister is right. I won’t stick. No matter how much I don’t want to lose Jake, I’m on the first plane out of the country as soon as Dad’s in the ground.

  Jake nods, once, and his expression turns to stone. “Then neither do I.” Before I can respond, he swings back to face the door, then curses. “You’re going to have to get my keys.”

  “Oh,” I say, turning to head back down the stairs. “Are they in your office?”

  “No. They’re in my front pocket.”

  Before tonight, I would’ve slid my lips in a sultry smile and said something like “Are those keys in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” or “You know you don’t have to work this hard to get me in your pants.”

  Instead, I say, “Which one?”

  “The right one.” Jake grunts and lifts Lexi higher, shifting her torso farther up his chest. “And hurry up, will you? I can’t feel my arms.”

  I climb the last few treads and reach into his front pocket. Lexi’s head flops back and her mouth falls open, and she gives a loud snort. My fingers make contact with his keys, but not before they accidentally make contact with something else.

  Jake sucks in a breath, and his voice becomes strained. “Careful down there.”

  “Good God.” Lexi chooses that moment to come to. “Would y’all please get a room?”

  27

  JAKE DEPOSITS LEXI carefully onto his bed and shucks his boots, dropping them on the balcony to air out until he can clean them later. Music and voices from downstairs rattle the floor and walls, and I picture the town’s greatest scandalmongers posting a play-by-play of tonight’s action on Facebook and Twitter. I fire off a quick heads-up text to Cal, who’s going to be livid at my sister’s Great Reveal, and one to Fannie to let her know I’m spending the night with Lexi and that I’ll keep my phone on in case she needs me.

  Jake breezes by, and I follow in his fumes down the hallway. “Jake, wait.”

  He stops, but he doesn’t look like he plans to stay stopped for long. He tosses a glance at his watch and points his body toward the door, anxious to escape.

  “She can sleep it off here. I won’t be back up for another few hours, and then I’ll take the couch. Lock the door on your way out.”

  I step closer, trying not to dwell on the fact that Jake suggested I leave, while my sister sleeps in his bed. “Don’t go yet. I feel like we haven’t finished—”

  Jake cuts me off with a swift shake of his head. “I can’t do this now. I’ve got at least fifty customers downstairs, and I don’t know how much longer before they trash the place and run out on their bills. If I hurry, maybe I can prevent Lexi’s performance from trending on Twitter.”

  “Oh.” Right now I don’t care about his bar or the stupid internet. The hard edge is still in his tone, slicing into my skin, my stomach, my heart. “Okay. Do you want me to come with?”

  “Not a good idea.” He turns back to the door, reaching for the knob without a kiss, without even a goodbye.

  “Wake me up when you’re back.”

  He turns long enough to make a gesture somewhere between a nod and a shrug, and then disappears down the stairs at a half jog. A knife twists in the pit of my belly. Jake’s running, and it’s away from me.

  I fetch a glass of water from the kitchen and make my way to the bedroom, where moonlight filters through the sheer curtains and casts a pale glow over Lexi’s form on the far end of the bed. She’s kicked off her shoes and her eyes are now open, staring unblinking up at the ceiling.

  I’m suddenly furious at her—for embarrassing me and Jake, for throwing up on his floor, for slicing into our relationship with talk of what we don’t discuss. I don’t know whether to hand her the water, or throw it in her face.

  And then she sits up and reaches for the glass with a shaky hand. “Thanks.”

  I watch her drink the liquid down then make a disgusted face as it hits her empty belly. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

  “It’s entirely possible.” She edges the glass onto the nightstand and flops back onto the pillow. “I feel like shit.”

  “Serves you right for that fiasco downstairs. Thanks a lot for including me and Jake in that, by the way. He’s really pissed.”

  “I’m sure he is. Especially after the way you pretty much agreed with every word I said.”

  “I just...I don’t... What? I didn’t agree with anything.”

  She rolls onto her side, and her bleary eyes focus on me in the dark. “How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time? He’s not mad at me for saying you’re leaving. He’s mad at you for not denying it.”

  Her words sting, but only because I know she’s right. “Then he’s the one who changed the rules, not me.”

  “So it’s true? You really are leaving?”

  “Of course I’m leaving.” I huff and cross my arms, frustration pushing at my skin. “Jake knows this. He always knew.”

  “Maybe at first he did, but by the looks of his face downstairs, I think he was hoping you’d changed your mind.”

  I shake my head, sink onto the mattress. “I haven’t.”

  “Silly rabbit. That man is crazy about you, and you don’t have any idea how remarkable that is. Jake doesn’t date. He doesn’t let anyone in. He doesn’t bring anyone up here, into his home and his bed, ever. And believe me, there’s not a woman in town who hasn’t tried. Myself included.”

  “Really?” I rear my head back, look at her down a crinkled nose. “You like Jake?”

  “No, but after all those nights I spent parked on one of his bar stools, flirting my fine ass to high heaven, the least he could’ve done was shove his tongue down my throat.” She smiles to let me know she’s at least partly kidding. “But my point is, are you really just going to walk away from the man you love without a fight?”

  I fall backward onto the pillow. Even after all these years, how can my sister still peg me so perfectly? How can she still sense the one thing I’m unwilling to admit even to myself?

  Because for days I’ve been telling myself the bubbling in my chest whenever Jake reaches for me isn’t love. I tell myself it’s relief to be away from the sick and dying, or a pleasurable distraction from the escalating protests on my front lawn, or simply a case of old-fashioned horniness. I tell myself I’m not in love with him, I just love the way he helps me to forget my guilt and anger and heartbreak for little bits of time.

  And also, I love him. I’ve tried not to, struggled to keep my stomach from tightening and my heart from quickening whenever he’s around, but I can’t. I am in love with a man who will never leave where I can’t stay, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  Lexi sees my distress. She pushes a cu
rl off my cheek, tucks it behind an ear. “Aw, sweetie. I’d give you advice, but good Lord, that would be like the traumatized leading the traumatized, wouldn’t it?”

  I laugh, but her face goes blurry on the other side of my tears.

  “And besides, I’m biased. I want you to stay here forever.”

  “I can’t stay.” Three words, and their truth sinks sharp teeth into my heart. “I’m not strong enough.”

  Lexi smiles. “This from the sister who parachutes into the eye of the storm for a living.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re the strong ones, you and Bo. You didn’t take off with your tail between your legs like I did.”

  “Yeah, well, the jury’s still out on which of our methods is better. Bo has the emotional depth of one of his petri dishes, and need I remind you? I just puked in public. We’re not exactly the picture of mental health.”

  My heart twists at the look of resigned martyrdom on her face, and I suddenly know why Lexi stayed all these years. She stayed because, as much as she despises being defined as the daughter of the murderer, attention is attention, even if it involves humiliation and vomit.

  But the Rogersville grapevine is long and hardy, and by now gossip of Dean and Ella Mae will have galloped as far as the county lines. I don’t know what that means for the quality of Lexi’s attention, but as far as quantity goes, I have a feeling it’s about to explode.

  Which is why she needs to know the whole story. I roll onto my side, facing her. “Can we please talk about Dad now?”

  She closes her eyes for a long moment, and then nods.

  So I tell her. I begin with the morning Jake jiggled loose my memory and keep going from there, landing on a detailed account of each of my subsequent conversations with Dad and Cal and Jeffrey. I tell her Dad knew about an affair but not who it was with, and that Cal had tried to deny any knowledge of both. I tell her I’m waiting on word from Jeffrey, and his visit with Dean’s ex-wife. The rest I want her to hear firsthand, so I wriggle the phone from my back pocket, pull up the recording from earlier this morning and push Play.

  At the first nasal twang of Dean’s slurred voice—Who da fuckah you?—Lexi’s face goes as still and hard as steel. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink. I’m not certain she even breathes. She just lies there, staring with wide, dry eyes at my iPhone until I reach the part where Dean passes out, and I punch Stop.

  Lexi is the first to speak. “That man’s crazier than a loon, and he was completely sauced. Why would you believe a word he says?”

  “Because he was sleeping with Ella Mae. I remember. I know. And if he was sleeping with her, then not only did he have reason to lie about what he did or didn’t see the night she was murdered, he also had motive. What if he found out about the baby and was angry it was Dad’s? What if Dean was a jealous lover who was trying to cover his own tracks?”

  She shakes her head, tight and dismissive. “That’s an awful big stretch.”

  “Maybe, but didn’t you hear him? He said he’s sorry, and he didn’t mean to do it.”

  “But do what? He didn’t mean to sleep with the neighbor’s wife, cheat on his own, run over Ella Mae’s black-eyed Susans with his car? Take your pick. It could be anything.”

  “How about he didn’t mean to kill her?”

  “Dean didn’t kill her.” She says the words in slow motion, and I know what her next ones will be from the hatred I see in her eyes. “Dad killed her.”

  But hatred can be a horrific weight, dragging you down to cold, murky depths, or it can be an anchor, holding you steady in a storm. For Lexi, it’s been both. Letting go of hers for Dad will be freeing and terrifying at the same time, and it won’t be easy.

  “And—” Lexi points a finger at the ceiling “—there was no baby. Ella Mae wasn’t pregnant when she died.”

  “Anymore. Ella Mae wasn’t pregnant anymore. Maybe she got an abortion, or miscarried.”

  Lexi chomps on her lips and considers the possibilities.

  “Don’t you see, Lex? The affair with Dean creates reasonable doubt.”

  “Exactly, doubt. Reasonable doubt is still doubt.”

  “It’s okay to have doubt. But what I’m trying to tell you is no jury member would have convicted Dad if they’d known about Dean. And no daughter would have, either.”

  She makes a face like I just slapped her. All these years, my sister has been so convinced of Dad’s guilt, she’s been like an angry Baptist preacher, spewing hellfire and damnation from her pulpit to anybody who would listen. Now I’ve given her doubt, and it crawls over every inch of her expression.

  “I’m not saying I’ve changed my mind or think he might be innocent, but what if? What if all this time, I spent all my energy wishing him dead for something somebody else might have done? How would he ever be able to forgive me?”

  “He already has, Lex. He doesn’t want to die without you and Bo and me by his side.”

  Moonlight illuminates her eyes, wide with fear and guilt. “I don’t think I can face him.”

  I connect with her reluctance, because I felt it, too. The house, our father, the memories are all so painful. But I also know she doesn’t have much more time.

  “We’ll go together. We’ll face him together. First thing tomorrow morning.” I hold up a hand between us, pinky finger extended. “You and me.”

  She watches me for an eternity, body stiff, eyes unblinking. Finally she relaxes, and I can see how much it costs her. A tear rolls down her perfect nose, drips onto the pillow, but she curls her pinky around mine. “You and me.”

  I smile, and we lie there for the longest time, until the moon disappears behind a cloud, until the voices from downstairs fade away one by one, until our eyelids grow thick and heavy. Finally, I give in, let them fall shut.

  “No offense,” Lexi whispers, pulling me back from the edges of sleep, “but this wasn’t exactly how I imagined my first time in Jake Foster’s bed.”

  I give her finger a squeeze, let myself start to drift once again, holding on for the words I know are still coming.

  “It’s so much better.”

  28

  IT’S QUARTER TO four by the time I awake, a good two hours since Roadkill’s last call, and other than Lexi’s light snoring on the pillow next to me, the building is quiet. The house is dark.

  And there’s no sign of Jake.

  Careful not to wake my sister, I slip out of bed and down the hall. At the doorway to the living room I pause to take in Jake, bare-chested and asleep on the couch, an old blanket tangled around his legs. His hair is mussed and sticking up on one side, and one of his arms is thrown above his head in abandon. Something about his expression—recklessly unreserved and so beautifully male—steals my breath, and my heart does an unexpected backflip. Without meaning to, without even being awake to do so, Jake Foster just dealt me a sucker punch.

  I can’t stay, yet I so don’t want to leave this man.

  He awakens, his eyes find mine, and heat surges in me from somewhere deep, from some place I’ve not felt heat before. I shimmy out of last night’s jeans and T-shirt, dropping them with a whispered thud onto the floor on my way across the room. Jake doesn’t move. At the couch, I trace a light finger down the inside of his forearm, following a vein from his elbow across his skin to his hand. When I get to his wrist, his fingers twine through mine.

  “You said you’d wake me up,” I whisper.

  “I wasn’t in the mood to talk.”

  “That’s okay.” I give his hand a squeeze and release it, reaching behind my back for the hook of my bra. “I’m not in the mood to talk, either.”

  Jake doesn’t drop his gaze, not even when I push the straps from my shoulders, first the left, then the right, and my bra falls to the floor. The entire time, he keeps his eyes on mine, and I love him even more for it.r />
  He lifts a corner of the blanket. “Come here.”

  I slide in and he pulls me to his chest, all warm skin and hair and muscle. His fingers skitter down my spine, featherlight but searing my skin like tiny licks of fire. He pauses at the top of my ass, pulling me tighter against his naked body, and then hooks a finger under my panties and slides them down my legs. My heart pounds out an anxious rhythm. A hopeful rhythm.

  “Jake. What are we—” I gasp as he slips one finger inside me. “What are we doing?”

  Another finger teases its way in. “If I have to tell you that, then I don’t think I’m doing it right.”

  “Not that.” I reach for his wrist, and his fingers still. “I meant, what are we doing? Why is this so difficult?”

  Jake watches me steadily. “I thought you said you didn’t want to talk.”

  “I want to fix this. Whatever happened to us tonight. I want to fix us.”

  His hand moves up my thigh and settles on my hip, and he heaves a sigh. “Look, I’m sorry for the way I reacted earlier. I know I’m only a distraction for you while—”

  “No! No, you’re not a distraction at all. Well, maybe at first you were, but lately...” I snake my arm around his neck, twist my fingers through the hair at his nape. “You’re more.”

  “I’m more?”

  I nod. “A whole lot more.”

  “Good, but what I was going to say is that I’ll take it. I’ll pull all-nighters and play hooky from work and drive you all over Appalachia anytime you need a distraction, because that means I get to spend time with you.”

  His last few words, especially those, light me up from inside. I don’t answer. I can’t speak.

  “I knew what I was getting myself into when we first started up, and I let myself fall for you anyway. But I’m a big boy, and I’ll be fine. When it comes time for you to leave—” he smiles, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen “—then I’ll just have to let you go.”

  His words, the tenderness in his voice, twist in my chest. “But I don’t want you to let me go.”