Lie to Me

by Chloe Cox

  He puts me down right in front of the door and holds me up so I can balance on one leg. We look like we’re about to compete in a three-legged race, except my face is also sweaty and red from the panic attack, and Marcus…Marcus still looks like a god.

  The doorbell rings again. Whoever it is can see us. I take a deep breath and open the door.

  “Maria!” I say, and practically try to drag her inside. She’s wrapped up in a flimsy coat with a scarf around her head, all just to go next door. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “No, no, nothing’s wrong,” she’s saying, slowly unwrapping herself from all those wet layers. She seems off, like there’s something not quite right, but then she sees Marcus. I have never seen anyone’s face light up like hers does.

  “Marcus!” she screams, and grabs Marcus by his cheeks.

  By his cheeks.

  This might all be worth it for this single visual.

  Maria is fussing over him like crazy, practically flapping her arms, and I realize it was kind of mean not to tell her he was back. I know she used to talk to him about me, that she used to ask him how I was doing, if I needed anything. She trusted him to know. She trusted him to take care of me.

  Hurts to think about. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell her.

  I start to hop back to the living room, and Marcus immediately disentangles himself from Maria, giving her a kiss on the cheek as he does. In the next second he’s by my side, insisting on holding me up again. I would brush him off, but he knows my balance is terrible and I probably would fall over.

  “Madre de dios,” Maria says. “What did you do?”

  “We went running,” I say. “I twisted it.”

  “She’ll be ok,” Marcus says, helping me onto the couch. “Just a mild sprain. I’m taking care of her.”

  Maria beams.

  There is literally nothing she’d love in the world more than to see Marcus and me together again. Maria was probably the only other person heartbroken when he left.

  She watches Marcus set me down, and I have literally never seen her happier.

  “I’m gonna go make something to eat,” Marcus says, looking between us. He seems to have figured out that Maria came here to tell me something.

  And then Maria herself seems to remember.

  And oh shit, whatever it is, it’s not good. I have never, ever seen Maria Ruiz look nervous. Or…guilty?

  What the hell?

  “Maria,” I say, and she silences me before I can even get going. She just shakes her head really quickly, looking down at her hands, her fingers pinching little knots in her dress. She looks miserable.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. I’m genuinely worried now. The panic is coming back. “What happened?

  “I’m so sorry, Lo,” she says, and looks up. Her eyes are red. She’s crying.

  “Maria, please, tell me,” I say, hearing the tension in my own voice, like I’m trying to choke back the panic, the stress, everything.

  Maria takes my hand, rubbing her thumb across it too quickly, too hard. “They made such a good offer,” she says. “I couldn’t say no anymore.”

  “What?”

  But of course I know what she means.

  She sold her house to the developers. Alex Wolfe got to her.

  “It means no more loans for college for John,” Maria says quietly. “It means I can go to Texas, see my mother. It means I don’t have to worry about retirement.”

  And this, right here, is where I feel both completely betrayed and at the same time realize that I am completely selfish.

  Of course taking a million-dollar payoff will change Maria’s life. Of course it will help her. John won’t have to be in crippling debt when he gets out of med school, and that is huge. Maria won’t have to work until she’s doubled over in pain. Her life will be unequivocally better.

  I know this. I would have known it before if I’d bothered to think about anyone other than Dill and myself. So why does it feel like the bottom of my world just fell out? Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Like no matter what I do, everything will fall away? That I’ll lose everything?

  I hate myself for this. I hate myself even more when I see how upset Maria is, when I remember that she’s actually been crying because she didn’t want to disappoint me for making a decision that will improve her life.

  I force myself to smile at her, and it’s a good thing I hug her, because I cannot keep that smile up for long.

  “It’s ok,” I say. “Please don’t be upset. I’m happy for you.”

  I squeeze her fiercely, because I love her. And because I love her, I can’t let her see how broken up I really am. Even though it’s horribly selfish, I can’t control the way I feel.

  Man, this isn’t even top of the list of things that would be easier if I could control my feelings.

  “It’s ok,” I say again, and I don’t know if it’s more for her or for me. Just when I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up, Marcus comes to the rescue, like he somehow always does.

  “What’re you two up to?” he says, coming in with a bottle of wine. Maria turns around to look at him, but Marcus looks at me. He sees my face and he knows something’s wrong. “Hey, Lo, how’s your ankle?” he says.

  He’s already walking toward me, easy and confident in jeans and a t-shirt, his athleticism apparent in the slightest movement. He cocks his head at me, looking at me like he just needs me to play along.

  Then he kneels down, takes my ankle gingerly in hand, and looks up at me.

  “Be honest,” he says, looking me in the eye. “You in pain?”

  I can’t even talk. I just nod. I feel like a terrible person, but I need Maria to leave. I can’t hide how I feel from her and Marcus at the same time, I can’t keep this up, I don’t have the energy. I feel like I’m about to break.

  “Maria,” he says, “You think you could come back tomorrow?”

  Maria jumps up, fluttering about, I think because now she thinks she might have been interrupting something. Whatever. It works. Marcus shows her out, smiling and laughing and promising to take good care of me, and in just a few minutes she’s gone, and I’m free to lose my shit.

  Except that I don’t.

  At least not in the way I expect to.

  It does all come crashing down. Whatever walls and defenses I have left after living with Marcus—living with Marcus—for three days are just overrun in a flood of emotion, all of it swirling together, just one big muddy torrent of feels. Screw my ankle; I have to move around with this kind of thing happening inside me. I push myself up and manage to hobble into the kitchen, the pain not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I stare at all the stuff Marcus has taken out for dinner and another wave hits me, because holy crap, this is absurd.

  I haul myself up and kind of just sit there on the table and grip the edge of it, holding on while the wave rushes through me the way I learned to years ago. I’m also waiting to see what rises to the surface, to see how that incoherent mix of emotion clarifies.

  When it does, the man who’s the cause of all of this is standing right in front of me, the hard planes of his chest visible through that shirt, the intelligence of his eyes telling me I won’t be able to hide any longer.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask him blankly.

  Marcus’s face is serious, too, like he knows this is big.

  “What’s wrong?” he says, moving toward me. “What happened?”

  “Marcus, I really need an answer right now,” I say. “Why are you doing this?”

  I force myself to look up at him now that he’s only inches away from me, and I know it registers on my face when he touches my wrist. Just the slightest touch, the pads of his fingers on my wrist, and it shudders through me.

  I feel totally out of control, except when he touches me. Then I’m under his control.

  “Because I want to make it up to you,” he says softly.

  I grip the table harder and will myself not to cry. “So this
is all about you?” I ask. “Because you just don’t want to feel guilty anymore? You’ll just come back here, hang around for a while, and then bam, no more guilt for fucking up my life?”

  Marcus’s expression changes. His jaw clenches, his eyes burn. “I will never stop feeling guilty,” he says.

  The world stops. I’m aware of nothing except how close he is, and where he touches me.

  “Good,” I finally say. “You can’t make it up to me. Do you know what you did to me? Do you have any idea what it was like for me, when you left like that?”

  Marcus moves even closer, his legs coming between mine, pushing me farther up on the table. His hands circling around my wrists, moving up my arms. One hand, finally, underneath my chin, tilting it up to him. Giving me nowhere to run or hide, nothing to do but finally face this.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  I didn’t expect him to say that.

  I open my mouth to speak, but no words will come. I don’t know how to tell him, to tell anyone, what it was like. How bad I felt. How it was one of my greatest fears, the one I never told him about, all those times he asked me what I wanted most in the world, and I told him I wanted Dill, because that’s what I was scared of losing most. But the other person I was terrified of losing was Marcus, because he was the person that gave me faith in the world again, and I never, ever told him that.

  I thought he knew.

  He must have known. My parents were taken, my only family didn’t want me, my brother was taken, but Marcus was there. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t, and it had all been a lie.

  And even those words don’t tell it. I don’t know how to tell this story. I don’t know how to show him what it did to me. How he broke me. What happened to me, in that bar, because of how broken I was.

  He’s looking at me, expecting me to say something, and instead my heart is breaking all over again.

  “It hurts too much, Marcus,” I manage. “It hurt too much then. I can’t…”

  Marcus leans his forehead against mine, his hands, his amazing hands, coming around to my back, holding me up.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “You were all I had left,” I whisper. “And then you slept with me, after everything we went through, you were finally mine, and…you were everything to me. Everything. And then you left.”

  “I wasn’t everything,” he says, his voice rough, raw. “You needed Dill.”

  I feel something new boil up inside me and I put my hands on his chest and push him back so he has to look me in the eye for this.

  “No,” I say. “You do not get to talk about him. You don’t get to talk about Dill and me, not anymore.”

  And then I break. I just start to cry in anger, and I’m hitting him on his chest, his arms. I’m not speaking coherently, just yelling at him, letting it all come out. He doesn’t fight me. He just takes it, immoveable, not even reacting except for his face, which looks as close to tears as I’ve ever seen it. And when I start to lose steam, Marcus puts his arms around me and holds me while I cry, while the last of that rage and grief leaves my body in great, shuddering breaths.

  When I’m finally breathing normally, resting against his chest, feeling his heartbeat in my bones and hating myself for taking comfort in it, he speaks.

  “I loved you then, I love you now, and I did what I thought was best,” he says fiercely. “And I would never hurt you deliberately, Lo, not ever.”

  I want to believe him so badly, and it confuses the shit out of me. Because that wasn’t an explanation at all, and yet I want to accept it. Am I thinking clearly? Is this just because of this physical attraction? Is it because I’m afraid I’ll never be over him?

  I don’t think a broken woman can make good decisions. I don’t think I can make good decisions until I know whether I can get over him. It will always be about the place where I hurt, the place where he broke me, and not about what’s best for me or for Dill.

  I have to know. I have to know if this delirium is physical, if I can get it out of my system, finally exorcise the ghost of Marcus Roma from my life and just move the fuck on.

  Or maybe the truth is that I can’t fight it anymore.

  Maybe him holding me like this, so close to him…maybe it’s just my body overriding my brain.

  I don’t even fucking care.

  He feels it, too, I can tell. Like a rising tide, something building in both of us, between us. Like on my seventeenth birthday, when I knew he really felt it for the first time. I feel my blood rushing inside me, the pressure that’s been threatening me since I first saw him again pounding a demanding rhythm in my core, telling me to just go, just stop thinking, just do it.

  “Lo,” he rumbles.

  “Fuck me,” I say.

  Marcus stops. His arms tighten around me and then they move, they uncoil, his hands sliding down to my waist. I breathe in when he touches me there and my abs flutter, and that stops him again. I hear his intake of breath. He pulls his head away from mine and looks down at me.

  “Not like this,” he says. He’s almost pleading.

  “Screw you, Marcus. I know you want me.” I look down, finally, to see how hard he is beneath those jeans. God, so big. “We both know it. Pretending it’s not…pretending this isn’t happening isn’t doing me any good. I don’t care what it’s doing to you, I care what it’s doing to me. Believe me,” I say, gripping hold of his shirt, “when I say that I don’t think I owe you anything. But I am tired of being scared. I am tired of being scared that I’ll lose what I have left of my ability to love, I’m tired of being scared that I’ll lose my job, I’m tired of being scared…”

  I stop here, have to gather myself, force myself to continue.

  “I’m tired of being scared that I’ll lose Dill,” I say. “And, most of all, I am tired of being scared that I will never be over you.”

  I am so angry I can barely see, and I want him so badly it actually, physically hurts. Like the absence of him inside me aches.

  I’m pulling at his shirt now, twisting it, and Marcus’s fingers are digging into my waist, pushing under the waistband of my shorts, almost like they have a mind of their own. They must, because Marcus himself is rock solid and rigid, his body riddled with tension, his muscles working with restraint.

  “Lo,” he whispers, shaking his head.

  “I don’t want to have to think about this anymore,” I say. “Please just help me to feel something else. Please.”

  His thumb sweeps along the inside of my waistband, coming around the front, dipping low so that I shudder, even while the muscles in his shoulders pop and it looks like he’s struggling.

  I want to scream.

  I do.

  I rip at his shirt; I go for the buttons on his jeans. I say, “I don’t want to be scared of being broken forever because you fucking broke me…”

  I think he’s about to snap and finally take me when his hands move, lightning fast, and grab mine, pinning them to the table. Marcus is breathing heavy, his whole body hard and alive and pulsing between my legs as I sit on this stupid table, and when he looks at me, it’s with a fierce hunger.

  “Not until you tell the truth,” he says. “Not until you say why.”

  I know exactly what he means. He can still see through me.

  “Because I hate that it’s you that does this to me,” I say. “Why does it have to be you? I hate that it’s you that makes me feel this. I hate you, Marcus, because I…”

  Because I love him. But I can’t say it.

  He’s leaning into me now, his head close to mine. He’s smelling me. I can feel his lips move along my jaw, my ear, my neck…

  “Please don’t make me say the rest,” I say. “You already know the truth, you bastard.”

  One hand moves to the back of my head, the other to my hip, and I can already feel the complete control he has over my body. Like he’s just deciding. Feeling it out, the way he does.

  I hate him so much for making me love him.

  “M
arcus, I need you to—”

  He doesn’t let me finish. With a growl, he threads his fingers through my hair and pulls my head back, his face hovering just above mine. For a beat his eyes pierce mine and I see what I feel echoed there: a wild need, a fierce, burning fever, the desperation of needing someone you can’t have.

  And then when it happens, it happens all at once: his mouth crushing mine, his hand pushing into my shorts, beneath my underwear, his fingers sliding between my wet folds, and then his hand gripping me there. He stops for a moment, as though just wanting to establish ownership, and his tongue parts my lips savagely. I moan into his mouth and grapple at his shoulders, trying to get him to move, to just do it already, because I feel like I might burst, but he’s the one in control, and that drives me even higher. His other hand tightens its grip on my hair, and he takes what he wants, kissing me deeply until I yield to it, until I’m not thinking about anything at all.

  My lips start to tingle, and it spreads downward. I move my hips against his hand and whimper, feeling how wet I am against him. I need him inside me, and he knows it. Slowly, too slowly—God, horribly slowly—he slips one finger inside me, drawing back to look at my face while he does it. I curl around him, biting my lip, my fingers digging into his shoulders.

  “Please,” I say again.

  His face is dark, so dark, so hungry. This is all new even if it’s not, even if my body responds to his as though we’ve always known each other like this. I remember what is was like the first time he was inside me, when he was so gentle and I was so nervous.

  But now there’s no gentleness, only hunger. I’m not scared of this. He’s not scared of hurting me. He’s only taking what he wants, and I’m giving him what I need him to take.

  So he moves that finger inside me, and the younger me remembers what it was like the first time he made me come like this, looking into my eyes, all soft tenderness and not knowing how it would end, what would happen after, how it would feel. And now, today, looking into those green eyes and feeling him start to find the rhythm, my own hips guiding him, I know that tender man is under there, just like he was before, and I don’t want that. I can’t. I can’t remember what it’s like to let him love me, to trust him to love me, because I will fall apart.