One task at a time.
She pulled her comforter tight and fluffed the pillows. Another drop of sweat rolled down her arm. There was no way she’d be able to stay upstairs through the entire baseball game.
She’d have to go . . . somewhere. But where? She had no friends. Everything she used to do was off-limits to her now, and things with Asher were . . . well, she didn’t know what they were, but she certainly wasn’t going to find out while she was under Cooper’s scrutiny. Katie sat on the freshly made bed, her shoulders sagging. She was trapped. Trapped in a house-sized sauna with a man who knew all her secrets.
Agatha jumped into her lap and purred, rubbing her side against the front of Katie’s tank top. It was as if the cat knew Katie didn’t like her and made a point to deposit as much fur on her clothing as possible.
She pushed the cat to the floor and brushed a hand down the front of her shirt.
“At least I’m not the only one you’re too good for now.” Cooper strolled into the room and lifted a hand to the vent above her bed, checking the airflow. “Nice and cool. You’re welcome.”
She continued to pick off cat hair. “Thank you. Now go.”
He sat next to her, the mattress dipping under his weight as his thigh brushed against hers. She scooted over until there was space between them again.
“I found this in my dresser the other day and thought you might want it.” With one quick motion, Cooper pulled a scratched old keychain from his pocket. It was the one her father had given her the day he brought her Toyota home, and for a fraction of a second she remembered that not every memory she shared with Cooper was a bad one.
He watched as she ran a finger along the bright pink word KATIEBUG that was etched next to the image of a grinning caterpillar.
“I’m sorry I was so harsh the other day,” he said.
She tucked the keepsake into her fist. “Harsh? You threatened me.” Typical Cooper. His apologizes never came with true remorse.
“Because you insulted me.”
“Only after you cornered me and demanded we talk.”
His voice rose. “I wouldn’t have to demand if you’d stop avoiding me.”
And there they were again. One second of peace followed by days of unrest. Better she just rip the Band-Aid off now, even though part of her didn’t want to know. She’d enjoyed the cocooned bliss she’d been living in.
“Did you tell Laila what happened?”
“No. You were right. I was bluffing.” An old affection sprang up in his voice but died out again as quickly as it had appeared. “Besides, I see no reason to hurt her more than you already have.”
Katie laced and unlaced her fingers several times. Maybe this exchange was good. They’d get it all out. Have closure. She shifted to face him. “Well, you’re here. And I know you well enough to know that’s where you’ll stay until I talk to you. So?” She lifted her hand, giving him permission to start the conversation he’d been demanding.
The room went silent, and Katie immediately wondered if she’d made a mistake. She’d given in. Cleared a path. With someone like Cooper, that was a slippery slope.
“Do I have a kid?”
She studied his face to make sure he was serious and not just toying with her in a new way. “You thought I was pregnant?”
“That was one of the rumors: I knocked you up, and you left town to take care of the problem.”
For a few seconds she couldn’t speak. “And you believed them?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I knew you wanted to hurt me.”
“Enough to hide a kid from you?” The only thing Cooper had ever truly wanted was to be a father. To have a real home. To create the kind of stability they never seemed to be able to achieve together.
His eyes narrowed, his mouth a tight line. “Don’t act so holy, Firecracker. You know it was bad that night. It’s not insane that I’d consider the possibility.”
He was right. It had been horrible. The stuff they’d snorted—it was all wrong. Made them both crazy. Katie swallowed. “I was never pregnant.”
He exhaled, not with relief but with what seemed to be disappointment. “Yeah, I guess I knew that. Besides, your dad pretty much told me those rumors were a load of crap.”
At least someone didn’t think the worst of her, although the truth wasn’t a whole lot prettier.
She walked to the dresser and started sorting through the stacks of papers she’d already categorized. Finding the ring would make it right. It would end the shame. End the sickness lodged in her gut.
Katie felt him before she heard him. His body stood centimeters from her back in overbearing closeness; his breath lingered on her neck. He flattened one hand on the dresser and the other on the wall in front of her, caging her in. “We were a family. Me, you, Laila, Chad. Everything fell apart when you disappeared.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, wishing the memories of that weekend away. “It fell apart long before I left.”
“Fine. So we were a dysfunctional family. Who cares?” He dropped his hand from the wall and shifted so they were face-to-face. “You don’t just walk. You don’t just take off. And you especially don’t get to come back afterward and act like none of us exist.”
The tug-of-war between them was as real as ever. The simmering resentment, yet also a desperation that drove them back together time and time again. Only this time, she refused to play the game. “You asked your questions. I answered them. Now you can go do whatever it is you do these days.”
His hand smacked the dresser with a bang loud enough to make her jump. “Enough! I’m done with this cat-and-mouse game you keep playing. You blew up my life when you walked out.”
She didn’t hesitate. She knew that tone. Knew the violence in his eyes. She’d been on the other side of a boyfriend’s closed fist too many times not to know when to flee. Though Cooper had never actually hit her, he’d come close that night, and she knew all too well that years of bitterness could ruin a person.
She made it to the stairs before he caught up with her. He jerked her to him, and her arm ached under his tight grip. His fingers were pressing hard enough to not only stop her descent but also make a point.
“If you cared, I could forgive you for how selfish you’ve been. If you wanted to fix things, I could forgive you for the destruction you left behind. I could even forgive you for Chad if you showed an ounce of remorse. But I won’t accept this lie that you’ve moved on. You don’t get to start over while the rest of us are still bleeding.”
“I don’t need your forgiveness or want it.” She tried to pull her arm away, but his fingers only tightened.
“Yeah, but you need my silence, don’t you? ’Cause if I told, there’d be no one willing to forgive you. Not even in that fancy church you seem bent on attending.”
Her cheeks burned and she lowered her head. She hated him. Hated him in that moment almost as much as she had that night.
CHAPTER 18
His body crammed under his deck, Asher wrestled with the final hose connection. He’d wanted the propane for the grill to stay out of sight, but he should have considered the enormous pain it’d be to change the tanks.
With a final twist of his wrench, he shimmied out of the crawl space. His hair was drenched. Sweat droplets rolled down his cheek and dripped from his chin. His T-shirt was all but ruined. But the grill was installed and functional, which meant frozen dinners were a thing of the past. It also meant that the task he’d used to distract himself all weekend was complete.
Katie hadn’t even acknowledged him at church. Not a wave. No eye contact. Nothing. He grabbed a towel, wiped his face and neck, and threw it back on the lawn chair. He wanted to talk to her. To apologize once again for behaving so badly.
Suddenly the faint smell of pot roast permeated the air, and he lifted his gaze. Katie stood on the deck, a covered plate in hand.
He’d never been one to freeze up in uncomfortable situations or fumble over words, but he was already so twisted
up inside, he could barely get his tongue to move.
“Hi.” She said it as if she’d been standing there a while, just waiting for him to notice. She shifted her weight to her left foot and lifted the plastic in her hand. “I thought you might be hungry.” Her hair was pulled high on her head, and she wore a green tank top that exposed her bare arms. She wore no makeup, but Katie didn’t need any. Her face was unique and exotic and far too interesting to cover up.
“You brought me food?” He fastened a thumb in the pocket of his jeans and tried his best not to look as guilty as he felt.
“Are you hungry?”
His stomach growled as if in response. It was almost six, and lunch was a distant memory. “I’m always hungry.”
She smiled. “Good. I needed an excuse to come over, and this seemed to be the obvious choice.”
They stood there, both of them tense and fidgety. Katie finally stepped forward and passed him the container. It was an expensive one with multiple food slots and a thin plastic cover to keep in the heat. Through the transparent lid, he saw a mound of meat, potatoes, and carrots.
“Fancy,” Asher said, lifting the lid. He was used to paper plates and aluminum foil. After multiple trips back to retrieve her dinnerware, his mom had quickly switched to disposable containers.
“Keep it. We have, like, three hundred at the house. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t begin to tell you. But if there is ever an apocalypse, you can be sure that the Stones have enough food-storage containers to feed the town.”
Her words came out quickly. She was babbling, which she seemed to do when she was nervous or anxious. He sat, hoping that would calm her down. Or maybe it was to calm himself down. Either would be good.
Katie handed him a package of plastic utensils, which even included a moist towelette for his hands, and then took the chair next to him. She played with the strings on her shorts and tapped her foot.
All their actions were familiar—normal, even—but a thin layer of awkwardness coated every movement. They’d crossed a line, and jumping back over it seemed impossible, especially since he still felt an urge to pick up right where they left off.
“This is tasty,” he said after two agonizing bites. The food was good, but in such a stressful situation, the meat landed like a rock at the bottom of his stomach.
Katie sighed and bolted to her feet. “Okay, this is weird. And I can’t have you being weird to me.” She shook her hands out as if she were trying to bring feeling back into them. “We’re friends. Good friends, I thought, and I don’t have any others right now. All I have are people in my life who don’t understand me or who resent me or are out to prove I’m a fraud.” She paced back and forth. “We had a moment. So what? We’re two adults. It was dark. Those things happen. I know you don’t think of me . . .” She paused. “Like that. I mean, I’m totally not your type at all. So there’s no need—”
“Katie.”
She stopped her outburst.
“Sit down.”
She did as she was told and Asher took two more bites of his dinner, enjoying it much more now that she’d blasted away all the pretense with one long, awkward explanation. He chuckled. “I’d forgotten how straightforward you are.”
She stretched her hands high above her head, her relieved sigh audible. “I will add that to my long list of vices.”
“It’s not a vice.” He tightened his grip on the plastic fork. “In fact, if I’d been less of a coward, I would have been the one to bring you dinner.”
“Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been edible, so I think we both win.”
There was a smile in her voice. A small one, but it was there. Katie had a habit of ambushing him, and for some reason he respected her for it. So many people had been tiptoeing around him since the breakup. Letting him hide and brood all alone. He liked that she wasn’t one of them. “I’m sorry about last night. I haven’t been this close to someone in a long time, and I never should have put us in that situation.”
She traced a circle on her kneecap with her fingertip. “I’m a big girl. Besides, I knew you were in an emotional funnel cloud and . . . well, it takes two.” She looked right at him for a second and then back at her knee. “I think I saw Jillian today. In church. Blue dress? Had a beefy escort?”
His muscles tightened, and he willed them to relax. “Yep. That was her.” He’d seen her too, but thankfully not until the end of service.
“She’s pretty.”
“I guess.” He couldn’t see her that way anymore. He still heard her cries and accusations. Still felt the sting of her viciousness.
Katie lounged back in the cloth chair and examined the trail of clouds in the sky. “You can talk about her, you know. It doesn’t bother me.”
It was an invitation he’d been given many times. His parents. His best friends. His old youth pastor. They had surrounded him in love as the lies floated around, but he’d been too ashamed to ever talk through what really happened between him and Jillian before the split.
“It’s not my finest moment,” he admitted.
“Well, don’t let that stop you. I’ve had a million of those.”
For some reason, her words snapped the zip-tie that had been holding his secret. She’d just given him permission to be flawed.
He returned the cover over his half-eaten plate and set it on the ground. “Jillian and I dated for almost a year. After about seven months . . . I don’t know, I began to wonder if she was right for me. Being around her was becoming work, and I was starting to relish times when we’d be apart.” It was so much deeper than just realizing they weren’t compatible. It was also the recognition that life with Jillian would include everything he hated about life as a pastor’s kid. She’d wanted the image more than the real person.
“But you stayed with her?”
“I did. And not for the right reasons.” He wouldn’t mention that Jillian had stripped naked in his living room right after his proclamation that they were drifting apart. Or how, after resisting temptation for twenty-five years, he’d finally given in, even knowing that doing so wouldn’t fix things. “We’d become physical, and then it felt wrong to walk away.”
She sighed like she completely understood. “Sex only complicates a broken relationship. How bad did it get?”
He quietly mulled over his response. Things had improved at first. He and Jillian had this new, wonderful thing to distract them from all the red flags in their relationship. But it hadn’t lasted. After a few months, they were ten times worse off than they’d been before. “We fought a lot. She was pressing for a bigger commitment, but I couldn’t seem to follow through any time I looked at rings. After I began to pull away, she upped her game. Manipulation, guilt, tears. Every tactic in her arsenal, but I felt this suffocating pressure against my windpipe every time I thought about marrying her, so it all just made me retreat further. I don’t know. Maybe I am the scum her parents accused me of being.”
“You’re not scum. Relationships come and go. I’ve seen very few that last a lifetime.”
Asher knew she was trying to make him feel better, but she hadn’t been raised the way he had. She hadn’t been taught from a very early age to respect the sanctity of marriage. To treat everyone she dated like someone’s future spouse.
He ran a hand through his hair. “The breakup was monumental. I asked for some time to get my head in order. She gave me a week and then started attacking me. Privately at first, and then very publicly. She told her dad that we’d been intimate, and he went ballistic. Called the elders together, called my dad. I’d been serving as the media director for years. Even through college, when I did it all remotely. Jillian’s father demanded I step down.”
Katie lightly laid her fingers on his. “I’m sorry.”
The words scraped against his open wound. He was the one who was sorry. And ashamed and humiliated. He’d made a mistake, and it’d been practically plastered on a billboard at the church.
“It still blows my mind. We
were consenting adults, but it felt like I was a sixteen-year-old getting reprimanded by her daddy. It wasn’t their place. It wasn’t their business. Yet somehow my personal life had become a topic for discussion among the deacons. He even had the audacity to call me a predator.” The words shot out of his mouth with a disdain he could taste. “If it had been anyone else, they would have handled things differently.”
“You mean, if you weren’t the pastor’s kid.”
“Exactly.”
She drew her hand back to her lap. “Not that it justifies Jillian’s behavior or her dad’s, but women tend to put a lot of weight on that first sexual relationship. I imagine it’s worse when you’re actually taught to consider it special.”
Asher rolled his eyes. That assumption was at the core of why he’d spent most of the past year angry and bitter. “Yeah, I’d buy that, except Jillian wasn’t the virgin. I was. And I spent a month fighting her off before I finally caved. Ironically, she left out that little detail when she told her father.” He risked a glance at her face when she didn’t say anything. Her eyes were blank, unreadable, the guarded Katie back and in extra armor this time. “That was too much information, wasn’t it?”
“No, not at all. It just surprised me.” She seemed to choke on the words, and he realized the blank stare wasn’t a shield after all. It was shock. “I just assumed it was the other way around.”
“You and half the church.” The old, familiar rage pressed against his rib cage. “The sad thing is, if I were anybody else, half this town would have congratulated me for finally becoming a man.” His boiling emotion got the better of him, and he jolted from his chair.
“But you aren’t like other men, Asher. You’re better. And frankly, I don’t know why that expectation bothers you.”
He spun around, his arms waving, his heart pounding. “Because it’s an impossible standard.”
“At least you had one.” Her voice held an unsettling intensity. Even seated, she owned the moment, her biting tone more powerful than his frustrated rant. “My first experience was at fourteen with a boy who never bothered to ask me out again.”
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