“You ever been in love?” she said suddenly.
“Whoa.” She couldn’t tell whether she’d shocked him or impressed him with that question.
She half expected his head to start swiveling for the exits.
“C’mon. Don’t be a chicken. Consider it an essay question. You keep saying words—names, and places and so forth—but it doesn’t tell me much about what you actually think.”
Franco laid his hands on the tablecloth. She suspected she was making him uncomfortable but that he didn’t precisely hate it. “They don’t like us to think in Hollywood,” he joked.
“I asked you that because sometimes if you startle people they’ll say the truth before they get around to . . .”
“Obfuscating?”
“Why, yes. Excellent word for an actor, Hollywood.”
“Good old-fashioned psychology. That tactic. Obfuscating.”
“Is it?”
So, he either didn’t know how to answer the question she’d asked. Or he didn’t want to.
Eli never would have dodged that question. Even if it scared him. He was a thinker. He liked a challenge. And he didn’t play games.
Mostly she knew that if she asked the question, he would try to answer it.
Thing was . . . she’d never have the courage to outright ask him. Because his answer to that question was the only one that mattered.
She wondered if Bethany had given him his birthday present yet.
It was so strange to sit here, suffering because he was on a date, while at the same time hoping he was doing okay with the small talk and wasn’t uncomfortable because she knew how he sometimes suffered over stuff like that.
“I know you have,” Franco said after a moment. He sounded hesitant. Faintly resentful, but a little curious, too.
“I’ve what?” she said, almost forgetting the thread for the moment.
“Been in love.”
She was startled. “How do you know?”
“I actually listened to your songs.”
“Ah.”
Now, that was a smart and insightful thing to say. It disarmed her and shut her up.
“Don’t need to be in love to enjoy having sex,” Franco pointed out, quite accurately, after a moment of her being quiet.
“True enough.”
“I’m really good at it.” But he was teasing.
“All the practice, I bet, with all those pretty things.”
The corner of his mouth quirked, and he shrugged a shoulder. “Good way to get your mind off something or . . . someone,” he expounded. “Sex.”
“Like the fact that J.T. won an Emmy before you did?”
He gave a short, pained laugh. “Ah, look. Our entrees are here.”
Chapter 16
Franco had dropped her off at about nine p.m., kissed her chastely (on the cheek she turned to him as if she was some kind of nun, which might mark the first occasion Mrs. Binkley, who was peering through her curtains, had seen a Greenleaf chastely kiss anyone, let alone in a Porsche), and he told her to meet him at nine in the morning at Cafe Cinnabar on Friday if she wanted to go to Wyatt Congdon’s Napa Estate that weekend.
And to pack light.
The implication being that clothes would be pretty superfluous.
And that the weekend would be anything other than chaste.
She hadn’t told anyone she’d gone out with Franco. She particularly hadn’t wanted to get her mom’s hope up about Glory being snatched up by a movie star just like Britt Langley.
She mulled over the notion of Kismet the next day during the morning shift as she delivered wrong orders to the wrong tables 50 percent of the time, probably because the decision she faced occupied about 50 percent of her brain. Things certainly seemed to be going her way (if not Giorgio’s, or her bosses’ ways, at least not today) with the success of The Baby Owls concert and the two hundred bucks and her burgeoning Facebook page and the famous actor waving Wyatt Congdon and his estate at her. Estate. What on earth made something an “estate?” Was there a castle? She should look that up.
But she’d always imagined that Kismet would feel more like, say, The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” sounded. Destined and seductive and easy and right, as though a path was just unfurling a bit at a time right in front of her.
Instead a sense of tense anticipation remained. Of something unfinished.
She found herself wondering about Eli’s Kismet.
And what he’d done when he’d opened that birthday gift from Bethany. If he’d shown her gratitude, third-date style.
She pocketed her tips, grateful that her customers had bothered to leave them, and headed home from work on foot, welcoming the steep, sinewy walk up Main Street, the greetings from various animals (Peace and Love the cat, and Hamburger, Lloyd Sunnergren’s big hairy dog), and the waves through windows, and even as she loved it she knew she could leave it behind in a heartbeat in order to be who she was.
And she headed out on that familiar route, up the hill, up and up, across the pasture, through the fence, past the tree—
She leaped backward and clapped her hand over her heart.
Eli was leaning against the pasture rail. Still as a tree.
In jeans and an old pale blue t-shirt.
She couldn’t get a word out for quite a few seconds.
He didn’t say a thing. The sun struck what looked like silver sparks from his eyes.
“Jesus, Eli, you nearly scared the life out of me.”
He didn’t answer her. Just studied her thoughtfully.
And then he moved. Subtly.
Time seemed to elongate strangely as he moved toward her. Slow, measured, stalking steps. Someone, perhaps, preparing for battle.
And then she saw what was in his hand.
Her heartbeat kicked up a notch.
Yep. Bethany had given him the present.
He stopped about three feet in front of her. Looked at her, as if for the first, maybe the last, time.
“What is this, Glory?” His voice was strange. Taut and abstracted. The question sounded less like a question than a warning.
“Um . . . It . . . it looks like an old forty-five record.” Her voice a little gravelly.
He took another step toward her. “But what is it?”
She took a step backward.
Putting the tree behind her. Which might have been unwise. Because that gave her nowhere else to go. And it might have been their castle and their fort when they were younger, but it sure wasn’t going to help her now.
“It’s a record. Eli, I’m not sure what you—”
“What. Does it. Mean?” He laid those words down like bricks. The tone suggested she had until the count of three to tell him.
She’d only half understood before why she’d told Bethany to buy him that record. She had a hunch that it would be like a little grenade thrown into their date. That it would tear his walls down.
But she was suddenly scared to death of what she’d done. Because she hadn’t considered that by tearing his walls down, hers would come down, too, and it was going to hurt like a motherfucker, and now she was panicking.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Eli. It’s a rec—”
And the words rushed out of him.
“My seventeenth birthday. You were wearing a denim skirt and a white top with little flowers on it, and you’d made a barrette out of three old guitar picks and you’d clipped it right here.” He pointed to his temple. “The sun was just going down, and your hair was lit from behind, and it almost looked like you were wearing a sort of . . . of . . . crown of coals.”
His words were almost breathless, shaped in ache and fury. Like he’d held them in forever.
She was stunned. “Eli . . .”
“You sang this song.” He held it up, accusingly, like it was something she’d stolen. “This song. ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do.’ In front of a bunch of kids who were older than you. You sang the hell out of my favorite song in the world. A
nd it was the funniest, most beautiful, bravest, most badass thing and it was almost more than I could do to listen to it, because I wanted to, like, wear that song. I stood there thinking . . . does she know? Does she know she’s turning her real self inside out for the world to see? Does she know how amazing she is? I almost wanted to cover you up, because it was so raw and so you, and I know how deep it goes when you feel things, Glory, and I never want anyone to hurt you, then or now. So I stood there thinking all of this. And it turned me inside out, too. I was almost . . . angry. Because back then, I liked to think I was tough and nothing could shake me, but it turns out your voice finds all those sore, scared places inside me and reminds me that I’m only human after all. That all I’ve done is hidden them, even from myself. But you managed to make even those things, the things that hurt, beautiful. And I . . .”
He stopped abruptly. His breath was coming in a raw rush now.
Her heart was jackhammering. She was awestruck. And thrilled. And terrified. Because she knew she was in the presence of a profound beginning or a bad ending. Maybe both.
“And then I . . .” he tried again.
He caught himself.
He didn’t seem to want to commit to finishing that sentence.
She was motionless.
A breeze whipped a strand of her hair across her face and she left it. She wanted those words, those beautiful, terrifying words, possibly the most words she’d ever heard him say in a row, maybe, to ring by themselves.
She’d set this in motion. And all at once she wasn’t certain she had the courage to see it through, even though she liked to think of herself as a badass.
“So stop lying, Glory. Just . . . stop it.” He sounded end-of-his-rope weary. His voice cracked and maddened. “I know you must have told Bethany to buy this for me when she asked for suggestions. I think you know what this means to me. I think I know what it means to you. And I think I know why you did it. But I need you to tell me.”
Birds sang a lovely liquid melody as they stood there, feet apart, and she didn’t say a word.
They both just breathed. She wasn’t sure what to say. She was, in fact, afraid to tell him the truth. She wanted to say something lyrical, something mature.
Instead out came the thing that had tortured her.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“NO I DIDN’T SLEEP WITH HER.”
Her hair nearly blew back with the force of his emotion. He sounded both tortured and amused and blackly furious.
He swept a hand back over his own head. Forgetting his hair was too short for that gesture to be satisfying anymore.
And their eyes locked.
“I was going to,” he added cruelly, evenly. “I wanted to. I wanted to want to.”
He went silent again.
They were still a peculiar distance apart. As if they were both open flames.
“What about Francone? You sleep with him? I bet he shouts his own name when he comes.”
She flinched. Despite herself, she kind of liked to hear Eli talk dirty.
She’d revealed her hand. It was her turn to demand answers. “Why are you such a jerk about him, Eli? I’ve never seen you like this. Everybody speeds sometimes. He’s a perfectly nice guy who happens to have a glamorous job. A perfectly nice, absolutely gorgeous guy with endless supplies of money who actually asked me to go to Napa with him to meet Wyatt Congdon.”
His head jerked back as if she’d shoved a torch into his face.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she repeated slowly. “That Wyatt ‘King’ Congdon.”
Eli was white about the mouth. He knew exactly who Wyatt Congdon was. Glory had mentioned him once or twice or a hundred times over the decades.
“I’m a jerk about him,” he said slowly, almost abstractedly as if he could hardly believe he needed to explain it, “because I think you think you might decide he’s good enough for you. Just because of who he is. And that’s a guy who would never be able to appreciate how rare you are in a million years. Or how to be there. No matter what he says. He doesn’t know how. It’s . . . just not how he’s made. But if that’s who you want to be . . .”
A million conflicting emotions knotted her throat.
“You sure it’s not because you think he can give me something you can’t, Eli?” she said softly.
He flinched. That was a bull’s-eye. He recovered pretty quickly.
“What’s that, Glory? A communicable disease?”
“You’d have to get laid to get one of those in the first place,” she shot back.
Damned if Eli didn’t smile faintly. Crap! She’d forgotten he was the law, after all, and good at getting confessions. She’d also just as good as admitted she hadn’t slept with Franco Francone. He’d probably led her right into that confession.
No one had ever known her like he had.
They didn’t talk for a moment. The first initial burst of fury was spent.
And all the while a bird sang its fool head off.
“Okay,” he said. Quietly. With great finality. As if he’d finally run this mess through the powerfully efficient filters of his mind. “I think we’re talking about two things. So let’s talk about them. Let’s finally fucking talk about it. You start.”
She was supposed to be the eloquent one. But suddenly tears flooded her eyes. And the first words out of her mouth were “I hate you.”
He gave a short humorless laugh. “That’s one way to start.”
Her furious tears blurred him and she swiped them away violently and sniffed. But they kept coming.
He didn’t move. He gave her nothing. He just waited.
And waited.
For the dam to break. Because he knew it was about to.
And then it did. And the words were a furious, raw torrent that nearly shredded her throat.
“It was Jonah, Eli. Jonah. I saw his face when he realized what was about to happen to him. When he saw that it was you. And then when he got up and tried to talk to you . . . you were his friend, his best friend, and he never could hide his feelings, you know? You fucking tackled him, because you know how to do that so well, tackled him hard. And then sort of grabbed him and flipped him around like he was nothing. And yanked his arms behind him and I could see that it hurt him and you clamped the cuffs on him. Like he was some animal. Like he was just some scum. Like you’d never hung out in the driveway with both of your heads under the hood of your Fiero, or played Horse on the playground until the sun went down and our moms had to holler themselves hoarse over and over at us to come home, or laid out on the rocks in the sun after we swam and talked about how much we hated ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ and how we all wanted at least three kids. He can’t have any of that stuff now. You marched him out of there like he was a fucking trophy.”
Eli was white now. “I cuffed him because he is a criminal.” His voice was hoarse and furious.
“He was your best friend.”
“EXACTLY!”
He bellowed it. She was surprised his frustrated anguish didn’t dislodge the squirrels from the trees and send them crashing down.
She didn’t flinch.
She did blink.
It occurred to her she’d never seen Eli this angry. And that maybe she should be worried.
But she was falling apart, messily, endlessly, recklessly. She couldn’t seem to care. Her voice was a broken thing. “It’s just . . . I love him, Eli. And my family is all I’ve got, Eli.”
He closed his eyes and his head went back. He shook his head slowly in an agony of disbelief.
“Glory . . . sweetheart . . . that’s not true. Good God, you idiot . . . That’s never been true.”
He startled her by hooking his forefingers into her belt loops and pulling her flush against his body. As if he wanted to literally impress something upon her. As if he could transfer all his strength and certainty to her. His mouth was inches from hers.
“Listen to me. What Jonah did? He might as well have said straight to my face, ‘El
i, I think your whole life is a joke. Your father’s death. Everything you stand for and live for. A joke.’ He knew how I felt about my dad. He knew how hard I worked to be what I am now. He knew what I gave up to do it. But he decided to get involved with that meth ring anyway, Glory. He spit right on everything I am. Call it desperate, call it lazy, call it Jonah. I guess I still love him like a brother, but you just don’t do that to people you love. And you know what I can’t forgive him for? He did it to you, too. He did it to you. It’s okay for you to be furious at me, Glory, because maybe I deserve some of that. But he did it to you. And that . . . that about killed me.”
He’d ripped away one layer of defense, and she saw it: he was right. And now that she was holding on to Eli, or he was holding on to her, it finally seemed safe to turn and look head-on into that dark drop that had been dogging her for ages now. But it wasn’t as dark anymore. Eli had gone and blasted the light right into it.
And she knew what to call all those emotions writhing together there: staggering hurt. Fury. Shame. Betrayal. Grief. All of a big, black, entangled, pulsing piece. And it wasn’t just for herself or her family or Jonah, who had unthinkably betrayed her. But for Eli. Who’d been forced to break his own heart and hers by arresting his best friend.
It was just so much easier to blame Eli. To put her burdens on the strongest person she knew because he could bear it, even as he was bearing it now. To avoid her own pain by avoiding him.
“Oh, Eli. I know he did. I’m sorry. I know. I do know.”
He closed his eyes briefly and nodded, as if this was everything he’d so long wanted to hear. She could feel some of his tension leave his body. But he wasn’t done.
“And you want to know what still sometimes keeps me up at night, Glory? You’re right. I humiliated him. I did want to humiliate him. I wanted to shame him but good. I was so furious and hurt, there were nights it sometimes felt I couldn’t live with what I’d done. But he did what he did, and my job is what it is. And I would do it again. My whole world came down, too. I wanted him to feel every moment of shame for that.”
She just let the tears fall. Eli blurred in her vision.
They were so close she could feel his every breath swaying against her chest.
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