Or maybe that wasn’t Russell.
“I’m…” She lifted her arm and let it fall. She’d thought going for a swim would help. It hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Dad. We’re not going.”
Russell’s blue eyes were too shrewd. “Why not? Don’t tell me you had a fight with Blake. How? He was on the boat until almost two, and then he took off to Spokane to get his folks. Which means if you had a fight, you did it on the phone, while the man was driving. You don’t fight on the phone where you can’t see the other person and they can’t see you, and you sure don’t do it in the car. All that does is mess you up. If you’re going to have a fight with him, do it face to face.”
“I didn’t… we didn’t have a fight. I just… I found out some things. And I can’t go.”
“Uh-huh. What things?”
She tightened her towel more securely around her middle. “Not now. I have to take a shower. I can’t tell you now. I can’t…” Her chin was wobbling, and in another minute, she was going to be crying. She needed to be alone when that happened.
“What, so you’re going to run away? Not even going to face it?”
“Dad, I…” She was too close. “If I tell you, I’m going to cry.”
“So cry. So what? Think I’ll care?”
She tried to breathe her way through it. “I heard some things. He… he doesn’t love me. He’s got a whole other… plan. It’s not me.”
“Bullshit.”
“He does. He wants to marry…” The sob ripped through her. “Somebody else. And he’s been… talking about me. I’m just… I’m just for… He told him I was…”
She couldn’t go on. The tears had come for real. Her chest was heaving, hurting in a way that was worse than drowning, and she couldn’t hide them. She had her hands over her face. “I can’t… It hurts too much.”
Russell’s arms were around her, and that was worse. All the tears she’d held back, the pain she’d kept at bay so she could finish Blake’s house, so she could be done and get out—there was no keeping it at a distance anymore. It was here, and it was swamping her. All her stupidity. All her foolish hope. All her exposed heart.
She was lurching into the corner of the room, because she couldn’t stand Russell to see. Pressing herself into the corner like it could hide her, like she could dissolve. Bella was right there, her muzzle pressed into Dakota’s knee, and all that did was make her cry harder.
Russell was still there, too. She wished he’d leave, and she wished he’d stay. He was patting her clumsily on the back, saying, “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.”
“No,” she got out. “It isn’t. I’m never going to… I’m never…”
“Yes,” Russell said. “Listen to me.” He turned her around, but she kept her hands over her face. She couldn’t stand him to see her like this.
Russell said, “You’re never what? You’re never going to shake it? Sure you are. You’ve shaken it all so far. So you broke up. So what?”
“I haven’t. You don’t know. I haven’t. It’s the same. It’s just the same. I’m always going to be…” Her chest worked to bring the word up, but when she did, it was a whisper. “Trash.”
Russell reared back. “Like hell you are. Like hell. If he says you’re trash, he’s trash.”
“I can’t shake it, Dad. I can’t. And it hurts too much. I need to… I need to take a shower.” She had to keep going. She couldn’t let Blake win. She couldn’t let him beat her down. Not again. Not this time.
“You take a shower,” Russ said. “And then you talk to him. You don’t let yourself go down without a fight. I said not to fight on the phone, and I meant that. So you tell him face to face. You show him what he did. You tell him he was wrong. You give him a chance to tell you, too.”
“I already know.”
“You think you know. You love him, right?”
She was going to break into a thousand pieces. She was going to shatter.
Russell didn’t wait for an answer. “If you do, you give it a shot. And if you were right… you tell him what he did. You tell him he’s a piece of shit. You let him know. You go take care of your business, and if you go down, you take him with you. You go down swinging.”
The phone rang right about the time Blake was getting ready to make the call.
“Hey, baby,” he said. “Are you on your way? I just realized I owe Russell about ten dinners by now. My dad’s cooking this one, which means it’ll actually be decent.”
“I need to talk to you.”
The words hung there, and he’d stopped with his hand on one of the sliding doors to the deck. “Sure. What is it? Something wrong?”
The resort, he thought, and his blood went cold. He asked, “Did something else happen to you? Something bad?” He should have warned her. He should have told her already.
“I need to talk to you,” she said again. “Come meet me at City Beach.”
“What? Baby, my folks are here. Dinner’s almost ready. Come on over and tell me here.”
“I’ll be at City Beach in five minutes.” She sounded like a robot. Cold. Dull. Nothing at all like his warm, passionate Dakota. “I’ll be leaving there in fifteen if you haven’t showed up. Your house is finished. And don’t call me ‘baby.’”
“Dakota? What? What happened?”
It took him a good ten seconds to realize he was talking to a dead phone. He stared at it. His finger hovered over the button to call her back, but he didn’t.
He went back into the kitchen and said, “Sorry, guys. Something’s happened. I have to go see Dakota.”
His mother’s head went up. She’d been sitting at the breakfast bar with her wine, but now, she set the glass down. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to find out. Don’t wait on me for dinner.”
She was standing near the water.
The clothes she had on weren’t anything close to “dinner with the new boyfriend’s parents,” either. She was wearing the sage-green embroidered top she’d worn the first time she’d come to his house, a pair of short cream-colored shorts, and flat sandals, and her hair was wet and twisted up into a clip. That was a very bad sign.
He got closer and saw that she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she had her glasses on. That was a worse sign, but the look on her face was the clincher.
“Dakota.” He caught the baby on the way out of his mouth. “What’s wrong?”
“Let’s see.” Her voice shook on the words with what looked way too much like fury. “That you told your teammate to come to your house so I could make porno art for him, since that’s what I do? That you made me think you cared about me and then told everybody else that I wasn’t…” She took a breath and went on fast. “That I wasn’t good enough? That I wasn’t the kind of woman you wanted to marry? That I was just for fucking. That you want to share me. With your teammate.”
“What?” He shook his head like that would help. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” She came closer, then, and shoved a flat hand into his chest. “I was there, Blake. I heard what you said. Did you send him on purpose? Maybe you were sorry you’d asked me to meet your parents. Maybe you realized you’d be embarrassed, because I’m not—what was it? A classy woman with her own money and a big-time job? Well, no. I’m not. I’m a house painter whose stepdad is an alcoholic who can’t keep up with his mortgage. My parents weren’t married, and my mom slept around and had two kids by two different guys, and then she dumped us. My father’s back in prison again, and he’ll probably be there most of his life, and it doesn’t matter, because I don’t know the guy. I’ve got no DNA anybody would ever want. I’ve got tattoos, I’ve got too many piercings, and I didn’t go to college. I’ve got nothing that means anything at all in your world. But I’ll tell you something. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t deserve this. Just because two guys thought I was trash, just because I’ve been violated and hurt, just because I shared that with you, that doesn’t give you the right to
do it again. That doesn’t mean I’m there for every man to share and fuck and throw away and talk about and treat like trash. I never signed up for that. I’m a person. I have feelings. All you had to do was leave me alone. If I’m trash… “ Her voice wobbled, and there were tears in her eyes, and he couldn’t stand it. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? Why? Why did you have to make me feel like trash again? What did I do to you?”
He’d been trying to break in since she’d started, but she’d kept going. Now, he said, “Dakota. Baby. No. No, I didn’t.”
He’d thought it had hurt when he’d seen her on that hospital bed, and it had. But that day, he’d known she was getting better, that she would come out of it. Now, though, she was shrunk in a way she hadn’t been then, and he couldn’t stand it. “I didn’t say that,” he went on desperately. “I wouldn’t have said that. Never. That’s not how I feel. Tell me what happened, and I’ll make it right.”
It hit him, then. “Eric. I sent him to the house. What did he say? What did he tell you? What did he do?” He was going to kill him. He was going to flat murder him.
“You know what he said. He said what you said.” Dakota had her arms wrapped around herself now, like she was holding herself together. “If you forgot what that was, he can tell you. He remembers it all.”
Blake was in two spots at once. He was aching, because Dakota was hurting. And he was mad, and getting madder. “Really? Really? Everything I’ve said, everything we’ve done, and you’re going to believe one barely literate redneck left tackle who has to get extra tutoring to remember which one’s his locker, never mind the playbook? How about what I deserve? Don’t I deserve a little more faith than that? Come sit down and tell me. Right the hell now.”
He didn’t wait for her answer. He had her hand in his and was marching her across the sand, over the grass, up to the picnic table. He sat her down on the bench and said, “Now. Tell me.”
She did. When she spelled out Eric’s request, Blake’s mouth opened, then shut again. He had no words. And when she told him about the marriage plan, about the sharing… he lost it.
“No,” he said. “Hell, no. That isn’t what I said. Well, it is—the marriage plan—but not now. Not lately.”
Dakota put a hand up to her head and rubbed. “All right,” she said, sounding so tired. “You tell me. Tell me what I ought to have heard.”
“First—all right, I said you made sexy glass, because it’s true. I meant my shell and my flower. I told him to look at it. Maybe I should’ve realized that Eric’s about as subtle as a garbage truck and twice as dumb, but go figure, I didn’t. He never said anything to me about sexual positions. What kind of moron would even think of that? I can’t believe it. He’s a cretin. I’m going to…” He cut himself off, because that wasn’t what was important. “And the other stuff? I don’t mind sharing? I sure as hell do mind sharing. I don’t share. I told you. We’re exclusive.”
“Except when you’re not.”
“No. And all right, maybe before, when I was younger, I wasn’t as… discriminating. But I never hurt anyone. I never humiliated anyone. Maybe I slept with some women who were looking to have sex with a quarterback, and maybe they were looking to have sex with somebody else, too. Maybe I did a whole lot of stupid things, in fact. But I’m not doing them now.”
This wasn’t working. He shook his head in frustration. “That isn’t what matters either. Damn. I’m trying… I can’t think how to say this. That isn’t what you mean to me. It’s not about sex. Not just about it. It’s that you got hurt, and I can’t stand it. Because I love you.”
The word was out there, and he took the blow straight to the gut. Dakota looked just as stunned, then seemed to shake herself and said, “Except that I’m not right for you. It doesn’t change that I’m not all those things you want.”
“No,” he said, and saw her flinch again. “You’re not. Because I was stupid. I thought I could make some kind of list, and I’d find the right woman that way. I thought I was being smart, and I wasn’t being smart at all. When my knee went out, though…” He couldn’t look at her, not for a minute. “I wanted it to be different. I kinda went down the rabbit hole for a while. And then I came out, and by the time I did, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I knew that everything had changed, that I needed to be a different guy, that I needed to have a new life, but I couldn’t think how. That was part of the new life. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that except to say that I was dumb, but maybe I’m not as dumb now.”
“Are you still looking?” Her eyes were steady on his, her face at its most regal, its most severe. Dakota, strong. Dakota looking reality in the face. “If you are, Blake—come on. Tell me. I can’t stand to be lied to. I can’t stand to be made a fool of. Respect me enough to tell me the truth.”
“The truth is that I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what ‘perfect’ looks like, except maybe I do, because it’s you. You’re nothing like what I thought I needed, and you’re everything I’ve wanted. And I don’t know what that means, except that I know I can’t let it go. And as soon as we finish here, I’m going to go kick Eric Halvorsen’s ugly ass, except maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should kick my own.”
“Oh.” She swallowed hard. “If you mean that, could you say it again? Because, Blake… it hurt so bad.”
“Oh, baby,” he said helplessly. He watched a single tear spill over and make its slow path down her cheek, and it sliced him to the heart. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He took her off the bench and into his arms. “I’ll say it again. I screwed up. I’m so sorry. And I love you.”
It took a long moment. And then her arms came around him, her head was resting on his shoulder, and he was holding her tight. Holding her hard. Holding her like he’d never let her go.
Dakota cried some, and Blake didn’t seem to care. He just held on.
Finally, she pulled back, tried her best to clean up her face, and said, “I don’t… let people see me cry. I never…”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. You don’t let down your guard. Do you know what it means to me that you’ll do it with me?”
“Well, no.”
“It means everything, that’s what. And what’ll mean even more is if you’ll hustle up and pick up Russell and come for dinner and meet my folks.”
“You’d take me like this to meet your parents? You’re crazy.”
“Sure I would.” He had his phone out and was texting. “If they’ve eaten already, they can sit with us. They won’t care, and neither will I. And if this is a test, I pass, because you’re beautiful.”
“Blake.” She had to laugh now. “I am not beautiful. I’ve been crying. I’m wearing my glasses and no makeup, and my hair’s still wet. Nothing about me is beautiful.”
He sighed. “Now, see, honey, this is where you need to defer to the master again. Everything about you is beautiful, and I guarantee my parents will think so too.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Yeah. Right. Because they know how to judge. Just like me.”
That was why, fifteen minutes later, she and Russell were climbing out of the pickup in Blake’s driveway. With Bella, because Blake had insisted on that, too. And Blake was standing in the driveway waiting for them.
Dakota had contemplated taking ten minutes to get at least acceptable. Of course she had. But in the end, she’d done as Blake said and come as she was. She couldn’t even have said why. Maybe because she knew their dinner was late already, and maybe because she needed to show them—and him—her unvarnished truth, and know for sure whether that was good enough.
Blake didn’t seem too concerned. He said, “Hey, baby,” kissed her again, then shook Russell’s hand and said, “Thanks for coming. Thanks for bringing my girl.”
Russell looked at him without a smile, and Blake met that hard gaze. “Dakota said she changed her mind,” Russ said at last. “She can always change it back. She deserves a man’s best.”
“Yep,” Blake said. “She
does. I already told her so. And when I make a mistake, I fix it, and I don’t make it again.”
Russell nodded. “That’s all right, then.” He hitched up his pants. “Let’s go.”
Blake’s parents weren’t so scary, either. His mom—Margaret—went straight to her knees after she’d said hello to Russell and Dakota, started patting her thigh, and within ten seconds, had Bella on her back getting a belly rub.
“There she goes,” Blake’s father, Elliot, said. He was a tall, slightly stooped man with a shock of white hair, glasses, and a downright courtly manner. “Dogs and children love Margaret. On the other hand, most everybody else does, too. It’s all in the nonverbals.”
“Not everybody,” his round little wife said with a laugh, standing up and dusting off her hands. “You know better, Elliot.”
“Well, yeah,” Blake said. “Crazy people.”
“Stop talking about me and come eat,” Margaret said. “I’m so glad we got you here after all. I’ve been dying to meet both of you. Blake’s told us so much about you.”
Soon enough, Dakota forgot her lack of makeup and her less-than-suitable dress. Blake’s parents had that effect. His mother’s rapid-fire delivery, her lightning changes of subject, combined with his father’s slow, dry interjections.
“Real good food, Margaret,” Russ said at one point, taking another bite of apple cider chicken and mashed potatoes with crispy interjections of sautéed Brussels sprouts. “I’m more along the beans-and-franks-line, so this is a real treat.”
“Oh, that isn’t me,” she said with a laugh. “Elliot cooks. I burn.”
“Could be true,” Elliot said. “It started out of pure desperation. Early on there, I’d think I was getting dinner. Then Miss Margaret here would get a phone call, and I’d be faced with something purely terrible. My Lord, the things she burned. And then Blake came along and took all that feeding. Somebody had to do it, or it wasn’t going to happen.”
Silver-Tongued Devil (Portland Devils Book 1) Page 33
