by Serena Bell
“Tied up, huh?”
Lily blushed and nodded.
“Did you hear hardware stores had a crazy run on rope and duct tape after Fifty Shades came out? Not that I’d know anything about that.” She grinned at her sister.
Tears of gratitude swam behind Lily’s eyes, and she had to turn away, drying the highball glasses, so Sierra wouldn’t see. “It’s not just an experiment for me.” If you were in for a penny, you were in for a pound.
To her surprise, Sierra merely nodded. “Okay.”
That was it. No third degree, no suggestions that Lily might want to “talk to someone about this.” Just Okay.
It occurred to Lily, suddenly, that she was. Okay. Better than okay. Happy.
This wasn’t supposed to have happened. Not here, not now, not this way.
“So Kincaid was into it, too.”
Lily nodded, and blushed a little, remembering just how into it.
“And you were into it. So what’s the problem?”
For a moment she’d almost forgotten there was a problem, that she’d called her sister in a state of near panic. “Tucker just offered me a job in Chicago.”
“Ohhh. Okay. So—yeah. That makes sense. Don’t go.” Sierra reached out and clutched her sister’s arm, then dropped it and laughed. “Damn, I didn’t just say that. Pretend I didn’t say that. You do what you need to do.”
“Don’t go? Do you mean that?”
“Of course! What’d you think? I love having you here. The kids love having you here. We’d be ecstatic if you stayed.”
God, she adored her sister. Her big mouth and her open heart and the fact that she’d never once asked Lily how much longer she was going to be occupying her basement.
There were so many good reasons to want to stay in Tierney Bay, she was realizing.
But there were things she had to do. “I have to take this job.”
“Explain this have to to me.” Sierra knocked an olive off a garnish stick and into her drink, then ate another asparagus spear.
“I’m waiting tables and tending bar. I spent more than fifty thousand dollars of Dad’s money to go to cooking school, and I’m doing something I could have done without any school at all.”
Sierra pointed an asparagus spear at Lily. “First of all. It’s not Dad’s money. It’s our money. And you and Mom and I talked about how to spend it, and we decided to send you to cooking school. There were no strings attached to that. We didn’t say, ‘Go to cooking school and then you damn well better get a job in a kitchen or we’ll resent you like hell.’ ”
Lily frowned. “You could have gone to school, if I hadn’t taken all the money.”
“Believe it or not, I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I love working for Dr. D, and I love being a mom, and I don’t sit around messing with ‘what ifs.’ And I don’t want you to, either. If you love this guy—”
“I didn’t say that.” Lily ducked her head.
Sierra gave her a stern look.
Lily concentrated on a spot on the lip of a wineglass. “I don’t even know if he’d want me to stay.”
“Well, there’s your first problem. Have you tried asking him? For that matter, have you tried asking him if he’d like to go to Chicago with you?”
“He told me from the very beginning he wasn’t ‘relationship material,’ ” Lily said, crooking her fingers into air quotes. And I kept getting in deeper with him anyway.
“And what did you say when he told you that?”
“I said I wasn’t relationship material either,” Lily admitted.
“Is that true?” Sierra raised her eyebrows.
“It was true at the time. Maybe not…anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because my feelings have changed.”
“I rest my case,” Sierra said triumphantly. “People’s feelings change.”
“If you ever did go back to school, would you consider law?”
Sierra laughed. “I’m just saying that you don’t know how he feels unless you ask him.”
“What if—?” But Lily couldn’t quite say it out loud.
“What if what? What if he laughs in your face?”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
Lily knew he wouldn’t, because as little time as she’d known him, and despite the strange circumstances under which their bond had been formed, she knew him. She knew that he would hear her out and take her seriously. He’d make her feel like he was in this thing with her, even if in the end they decided together that “this thing” couldn’t last forever.
“He would never do that.”
“But you’re not in love with him,” Sierra said quietly.
“I—”
“Sierra!” said a voice behind them.
Sierra turned. “Oh, hey, Dr. D! Lily, this is my boss, Jeannie. Jeannie, my sister.”
A round, beaming middle-aged woman slid onto the bar stool next to Sierra. She looked more like the tooth fairy than a dentist.
“What can I get you?” Lily asked.
“Something that’ll rot my teeth,” Jeannie said. “I’ve had a helluva week.” She turned to Sierra. “I had to refer Mrs. K for periodontal grafting.”
“Aw. That’s a bummer.”
“I know. Thought I was going to be able to keep it from going that way. So what are you ladies up to?”
“The usual. Getting drunk so we can go tip cows.”
Lily mixed a Peach on the Beach for Jeannie and set it in front of the older woman. Down the bar, a regular hailed her in search of his whiskey. “I’ll be right back,” she told Sierra and Jeannie.
When she came back, she could see right away from the expression on Sierra’s face that something had changed, and not for the better.
Sierra put her palm down on the bar’s glossy surface. “Don’t be mad.”
“I’ll try not to. What did you do?”
“I asked Jeannie about Kincaid.” Sierra’s tone was dark, serious, and the look on Jeannie’s face matched.
Lily closed her eyes, willing the world not to tilt.
Jeannie leaned across the counter, face sympathetic. “What’s going on between you and Kincaid?”
Lily tried to take a deep breath, but something had snagged in her chest. “Long story. The upshot of which is, ‘Not sure.’ ”
“But you’re—you’re seeing him? You’re with him?”
Lily nodded. A swirling panic was gathering in her belly at Jeannie’s tone, at Jeannie’s expression, at the sadness in Sierra’s eyes.
“And you—you don’t know about him.”
She said know about him in a particular way, the way people whispered the word cancer, and Lily’s hands went cold. She’d remember this moment forever, she was pretty sure, the couple at Table 5 leaning toward each other to kiss, Jeannie’s face stern and worried at the same time, the rattle of pots from the kitchen, a sound she followed like a thread no matter what else was going on.
Lily shook her head.
Jeannie closed her eyes.
“Oh, hon.”
—
“I’m gonna tell her,” Kincaid said.
“I think you have to,” Grant said. “I’m frankly shocked you didn’t tell her sooner.”
The two men sat on the seawall where the stairs led down from Tierney Bay to the beach. The sky overhead was brilliant, dizzying, with stars. They had picked up takeout at the diner—Lily wasn’t there; Kincaid had looked, his heart picking up speed at the thought of just seeing her—and carried it down to the seawall.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Grant unscrewed the top of a bottle of sparkling water and took a long swig.
Kincaid bit into his hamburger. Not one of Lily’s. He didn’t want to make a lame excuse for himself, and all the excuses were lame. He should have told her, should have told her so many times over. “It—it happened so fast.”
Lame, but the truth. The goddamned truth. One day it hadn’t seemed important that she know, and now he was sitting her
e with a secret that had grown into an impossibly big lie.
“What ‘happened so fast?’ You don’t have to tell me all the gory details, but at least give me the gist.”
“We hooked up. I know, I know,” Kincaid said, in response to Grant’s expression of deep disapproval. “I should have told her before. I should have told her after. I should have told her the next time it happened. I should have been strong enough to resist temptation in the first place. I’m an asshole.” It wasn’t just a cold litany of his sins. He felt like an asshole. If he could start over—
But he couldn’t start over.
“Not an asshole,” Grant said mildly. “But that girl—she trusts you. It’s all over her face.”
That made Kincaid’s stomach hurt, but it also flooded him with warmth. Lily trusted him.
And he’d rewarded her by hiding his worst self from her.
He set his hamburger down. He felt like he’d been shaken, his heart and lungs rattling around in the cage of his chest, and it was hard not to clutch the spot to keep everything together. “It kept happening.”
“What kept happening?”
“Lily kept happening.” He could see it, feel it, all—the alley, his bed, the beach, her room, last night. A barrage of images, swamping him. “I didn’t mean for it to go this far. In the beginning I told myself it was just scratching an itch, and then—it was like bodysurfing; that’s the only thing I can think of to describe it. I’d get back on my feet and then the next thing I knew I was flat again—”
“Literally,” Grant said dryly. “My heart is aching for you. That must have been just terrible, not being able to speak to the girl because you were too busy getting laid.”
Kincaid couldn’t laugh. He was too full of regret.
Grant was right, of course. Harsh, but right. He’d let fear and shame and greed gag him, and she’d have every right to hate him for it.
He couldn’t start over. He could only do the right thing now. And he was starting to glimpse what the right thing was, how profoundly Lily had changed what mattered to him.
“I’m going to tell her. And I just want to know, can I tell her everything?”
Because he wanted to pour his shame and fear into her the way she’d poured hers into him. To deliver himself to her, in all his twisted, broken glory, so she could shine her light into his dusty corners.
Grant nodded. “If you’re sure about her.”
“I’m so fucking sure about her, Grant. Here’s how sure I am: I’m going to drop the will. I’m going to let Arnie keep the property.”
Grant’s eyes went gratifyingly wide. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Why?”
“Because the only way to get that will now is to confront Arnie, and I can’t risk going back to prison over it. I can’t risk rocking the boat, not when—”
Not when I love her so much.
Not if it would mean not seeing her. Not being with her.
Kincaid had been on the verge of this realization for days, and then the laptop had turned up and he’d discovered it had been wiped clean. And when he’d been flayed and broken, she’d given herself to him so completely—take it out on me—that she’d somehow put him back together again.
Kincaid had thought he was alone in the world after Nan died.
He’d thought Nan’s house and land were all that was left of home.
He’d thought Arnie Sinclair had taken everything that mattered from him.
And then he’d met Lily, and it had turned out that he wasn’t alone. He had people, because he had her. She was family. She was home.
He wouldn’t, couldn’t, put that in danger. He’d lost too much already.
Grant’s eyes were surprisingly soft. The older man reached out and touched Kincaid’s arm. “I’m glad,” he said. “Whoever she is, I’m glad she’s made you see sense. Your grandmother wouldn’t have wanted you to sacrifice any more for her—you know that, right?”
Kincaid had cried when his parents died, more than once. He had cried, just once, when Nan died. So he knew the welling sensation in his chest that presaged tears. He felt it now, but he pushed it back. “Maybe,” he said. “I still hate the bastard. I still blame him for her death. But justice isn’t perfect, right? If justice were perfect, the cops would have carried him off nine years ago for beating her, and I wouldn’t have done what I did.”
“Do you feel like justice failed you?” Grant asked quietly.
Kincaid thought about it for a long time. In prison, he had, sometimes. Often. When there were so many men around him who had committed acts of violence for no reason at all, who had hit or cut or fired guns or raped women or children. For long stretches he hadn’t seen how the law could treat those men’s crimes the same as his.
But over time he’d come to see that whatever Arnie Sinclair had done hadn’t justified what he’d done in return. He’d been pushed to a terrible kind of desperation, but that didn’t give him permission to become what he had despised.
And that was the thing. He had already let Arnie Sinclair take his self-control, his grandmother, and his sense of self. It was time to stop.
“I deserved what I got,” Kincaid said quietly. “I wanted Arnie Sinclair to get what he deserved, too. But I’ll learn to live with the fact that he didn’t if it means getting to be with Lily.”
Grant nodded. “I’m glad. Lily seems like a nice girl. Not that you need me to approve.”
But Kincaid realized that in a way, he did. Everyone else was dead and gone, but Grant was here, and had always been here, standing by Kincaid whether he approved of his actions or not. Like family.
He’d sounded, a moment ago, just like Kincaid imagined a father might.
Maybe Kincaid wasn’t so alone in the world, after all.
“She’s…”
Kincaid found himself unexpectedly speechless. He took a deep breath, stared out at the vast Pacific and then up at the cloudless sky. There were some marvelous things in heaven and earth, that was for sure.
“I feel like the world made her for me,” he said.
Grant just sighed.
Kincaid crumbled the wrapper from his hamburger, stuck it in the paper take-out bag, and stood. “And now, if you’ll excuse me—I have a fuckload of explaining to do.”
Chapter 16
He waited behind Lefty’s for Lily. She’d moved her car to the parking lot from where they’d left it parked earlier, and he leaned on it now, just as he had the night they’d walked on the beach.
When she came out, her head was down, like a whipped dog’s. Defeat sat on her shoulders.
He stepped away from the car. The motion caught her eye and she looked up.
The other night, when she’d realized it was him, her face had split into a smile, and when he’d asked her if she’d wanted to walk on the beach, it had been like watching the sun come out.
Now it was like watching it slip behind the clouds. Her face closed, as tight as a suburban door in the face of missionaries.
Something in his chest shuttered, too.
And yet he realized he wasn’t completely surprised. He’d partly expected this. He deserved it. For waiting so damn long to tell her. For being the sort of man who had something so big and ugly to tell. For the bigness and ugliness of what he’d done.
He deserved that look on her face, but he didn’t want it. He wanted the sun back.
“Lil. Come for a walk with me.”
Because they weren’t going to sort this out, whatever it was, in the parking lot of Lefty’s. They needed space and time, the whipping of the wind to absorb unkind words and big feelings.
“I’d better not.” She crossed her arms, shutting him out further, and stepped around him to her car, pulling her keys from her pocket.
“What’s going on?”
Even though he knew. Someone had told her. It had always been only a matter of time.
She tried to slam the car door but he caught it before it could close
, one of his fingers taking the brunt of the blow. He ignored the throbbing pain, pried the door open, and knelt. “Lil.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Please, Lil.”
“You were in prison. You stabbed a man.”
She made the words so dirty and ugly—the rawest of truths—that he flinched.
“When were you going to tell me? When were you fucking going to tell me? You weren’t, were you? You were just going to keep tying me up and holding me down and getting off on it, and then you were going to let me go back to Chicago because that was a convenient end to things and you’d never have to face up.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“I was starting to care. I was starting to really goddamn care about you.”
“Me, too, Lil. I care. God—” He took a deep breath and forced himself past the swirl, the cacophony, in his chest. “I care so much.”
“But not enough to let me in. Not enough to tell me who you were. Not enough to take this seriously as a relationship.”
The look on her face broke his heart. It was so like the look she’d worn when she told him the story about what Fallon had done to her. It wasn’t rage or fear, it was shame.
“Please let me tell you now.”
She half turned away from him, looking out the windshield toward a row of trees. “It doesn’t matter what you tell me, Kincaid. What matters is your capacity for violence, and given what we were doing together, you can’t possibly argue it wasn’t relevant. What if the situation were different? What if I were your sister and I were sleeping with a guy who had a history of violent crime, and he’d hidden that information? You’d tell your sister to run screaming in the other direction. Geez, even if he hadn’t hidden that information, you’d tell her to run screaming in the other direction.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I would.”
Something got still in her face, and into that silence and stillness and possibility, he threw his last hope, that it was somehow not too late for the truth.
“She was everything I had in the world,” he said.
Lily was quiet. Listening.
