Overnight

by EC Sheedy

  “Your coat?”

  He helped her out of it, ignored its dampness and laid it on the back of a leather chair.

  “Drink?” Julius said, glancing at his watch.

  That watch-glance curdled her spirit. I should go… “Yes.”

  “What’s your pleasure?”

  Now there was a leading question. “How about Scotch neat. Six fingers.”

  He lifted a brow. “You sure.”

  “No. I haven’t been sure of anything since you left on Monday.” And there it was, her opening salvo. Too needy by half. But she didn’t care, because if the constant aching emptiness in her stomach for the past few days was an indication, she damn well was needy.

  He lowered his gaze. “Deanne, don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Make a fool of myself? Make you uncomfortable? Or both?”

  He walked to the bar a few steps away, went behind it. “Maybe you don’t want a drink, but I sure as hell do.”

  “Wine. White. Whatever.”

  He plunked a bottle on the bar’s gleaming surface. “No. I think the Scotch.” He poured for both of them, nothing close to six fingers—for her more like a pinky—came around the bar front and handed her a glass. She sat on one of the high stools; he took another. Their knees touched, and oddly it was her who shifted to avoid contact.

  He sipped his Scotch; she gulped hers, gasping at the burn, the instant eye-watering. When she got her breath, she set her empty glass back on the bar.

  Julius took another sip of Scotch and eyed her over the rim of his glass. “I’m glad you came,” he said, the wariness in his eyes making her suspect politeness rather than truth. “But your timing’s brutal. I’ve got a limo due to take me to Sea-Tac any minute.”

  “I know. Your leaving is why I came. Why I—”

  Julius held up a hand, palm out, got up from the stool and took a few steps away. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to preempt you.”

  “Preempt away, but I’m going to have my say, Julius.”

  He nodded. “What I did. Leaving you like that. It was—”

  “Cruel and cowardly?” He wasn’t the only preemptor in the room.

  His eyebrows shot up—the corners of his mouth followed, forming what she’d come to think of as the Julius smile, half mirth, half caution. “You’ve been overdosing on truth serum again, haven’t you?” He scratched a brow, looked down. “But yes, I guess it was some of both.”

  She waited.

  “But it was also fair and final.”

  She didn’t like his using the word final, but she’d girded what loins she had for exactly this eventuality. Stepping to the edge of a precipitous emotional cliff, she leaped, and said, “Because of what happened to your family.”

  In the act of lifting his glass to his lips, he froze. His eyes went ice-pellet cold. “That’s over the line, Deanne.”

  “No, what happened to your family is the line.” Deanne got off the stool, and went to stand in front of him. “Everything in your life is before or after that line. That terrible day.”

  “I don’t know where you’re heading with this, but I’d suggest an off-ramp. Now.”

  “After your family died, you bummed around Europe for years, then you joined the army. After that you came back here and—”

  His expression was glacial. “You said you checked out my art collecting. You didn’t say anything about checking on me.”

  “At the time, I didn’t. But your rush from my house—my bed—a few days ago got me…reinvested in what makes Julius Zern tick. And what makes him run. So I checked again, deeper this time.” She lifted her chin, ever so slightly defensive. “So sue me.”

  “I might.” He finally took that drink he’d tried for moments before. “Would it do anything to stop your amateur psychoanalyzing?”

  Ouch. “No.”

  “Then have at it.” This time his glance at his watch held the grim fervor of a drowning man seeking the air beyond the ocean’s surface.

  She could use a little air herself. She started to pace. “After the army you came back here and got serious. You picked up your parents’ lives.” She shook her head for clarity. “No. You assumed their lives. Worked nonstop. Your father was a sharp, canny businessman—and a good one. He’d built a fortune—not just in one business, but in many. When you came back, you grabbed all his reins. Spent ten years protecting and growing what your father built.”

  “Last I checked, making money wasn’t a crime.”

  She ignored him. “And the art collecting? Your mother’s passion. Her life. You filled her shoes—high heeled though they might be—and made yourself into one of the most respected and eclectic collectors on the West Coast.” She paused, couldn’t help but soften her tone. “You’ve honored them, Julius. They would be so proud of you. You picked up where they…were forced to leave off and done everything they would have done had they lived, but—” She stopped, the pounding of her heart hammering in her ears.

  “But.” He echoed the word like a dare, his body still, his expression somewhere between angry and bleak.

  “But you’ve lived their lives at the expense of your own.”

  “What about Amanda? Have you got me playing with her Barbie dolls in the dark of night?”

  “No…Amanda was a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old girl. She didn’t have a life you could understand.” She bit her lip. “But she loved music…and you’ve funded more than twenty music scholarships. And you founded Guardian, Inc., a security firm that specializes in protecting families and children. Something you don’t have to do, but choose to do.”

  “Are you done?” Still hard. Still unyielding.

  She shook her head. “Not only have you never married, you’ve never been engaged, never lived with a woman, and from what I can find out, a three-month relationship is your max.” In uncertain territory now, she glanced at him, had to ask, “Why, Julius? Because you’re seeing the end of a relationship before you even start? Because you’re afraid someone you…care about will get hurt, like your family?”

  His laugh was harsh. “Good try, Dr. Freud, but the truth is much simpler. Why settle for one woman when a hundred will do? It’s the standard bastard’s code of ethics. You should do your homework more thoroughly.”

  “Julius…” She closed her eyes for a moment, gathered the final threads of her thoughts.

  The gate buzzer sounded, announcing the arrival of the limo; the sound roared into the room like a flashing-red police cruiser.

  “If you’re done…” He set his glass down on the nearest table, headed to the library door and opened it. The dismissal unmistakable.

  Deanne gathered her coat from the back of the chair and draped it over her arm. It was still damp. “One more thing. The most important one. I’m probably not the first woman in your life to…not want you to go. And I don’t know how many might have tempted you to stay. But I might be the first one to ever call you on why you didn’t.”

  “The others were too smart for that.”

  Another ouch. “Or they didn’t know enough about you to see that you were too busy living other people’s lives to live your own. That you held yourself back because you were afraid you might feel something again…get hurt again.”

  “I have a limo waiting.”

  She ignored him, and the black hole she was in serious danger of falling into. “I came here tonight to ask you to take a chance. Not let what happened on that awful day stop you from…finding someone in the future—”

  He turned on her, his mouth curling. “That someone being you, I presume.”

  Shrugging into her coat, her stomach settled into an aching knot, and she searched for the right words. “Honestly? Yes. I hoped we might see where what we…shared would take us.”

  “What we shared was sex, damn good sex. If I’d wanted more than that, I’d have let you know. Put you into the three-month club maybe.” The lines in his face hardened as if by force of will. “But I don’t want more. Not then. Not now. Not ever.” H
e stood, pillar straight, beside the open door, his expression, all taut lines and shadows, a map to nowhere. “If you knew as much about me as you think you do, you’d know that.”

  Not trusting herself to speak, nauseous and hurting as if hit by battering ram, she concentrated on doing up a button on her coat, blinking back to what she knew would be a deluge of tears when she was alone and the dam truly burst.

  The gate buzzer sounded again, no less intrusively as the first time, and she walked to the door, determined to get there while her legs still worked.

  At the door, she stopped, looked up at him—into his marble-cold eyes—and found the barest of smiles. “I’m not sorry I tried, you know. I believed you were worth it. That we were worth it.” She touched his face. “And, unlike you, I don’t believe the kind of evil that took your family is likely to ever strike again.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Kurt Minton had friends in his house. Well, not friends exactly. No way were Wheeler, Dev, Towman and Gutter friends. More like shitheads. But at least they were warm-blooded company, a change from the bits-and-bytes types he hung out with online. He felt a little excited, a little sharp in the chest—and piss-your-pants scared just looking at them.

  They were all bigger than him, but then pretty much everybody was. Wheeler and Gutter were both gym rats, already six feet or more. Dev and Towman weren’t much shorter. In comparison his own mushy five feet seven inches didn’t feel like much. Man, he wished he had Towman’s biceps…

  They’d brought beer and weed and were into both, the four of them all spread around his Dad’s den watching the big screen. Anybody looking in would think it was a regular boring Friday night. But it turned out Wheeler wanted an audience. The plan was they were all going to watch Wheeler…have sex with Deanne. Rape her…he was going to rape her and video her while he did. The sharpness in his chest amped up. Now a dozen iced needles. His stomach cramped.

  They’d all brought black ski masks; Wheeler’s had a white skull on his. The only guy moving in the room was Dev, and all he was doing was fiddling with the video camera. No one was talking much though, and that made the air heavy and tight.

  Kurt held a beer in his hand, but he wasn’t drinking it, not because he didn’t like beer, but because he was afraid to dump anything on a stomach that already felt inside out.

  “Hey, asswipe. You keep pigs in this place or what?” Wheeler did that laugh thing he did, kind of a sneer crossed with a choke. “You oughta clean up around here.” He swigged down some beer; his black eyes were flat, like always. It was like they only had one setting—hard watch. Made you feel he was looking at you even if he wasn’t. Between that flat look of his and those weird lip curls he did—the kind where you lift your upper lip to show your teeth—he looked like a mean dog prepped for the fighting pit.

  Kurt stood in the den doorway, the beer swinging from his left hand, knives carving up his lungs. He didn’t answer the housekeeping comment, just shrugged.

  “Seeing that you’re standing there doing nothing, asshole. Get me another one of these babies.” Wheeler lifted his beer can.

  “Me too,” Dev piped. Towman and Gutter nodded.

  Kurt, glad for any chance to get out of their faces, said, “Sure.” But before he could scuttle for the kitchen, the house phone rang. He knew it was Deanne and hesitated to pick up. Didn’t want things to…start.

  Wheeler jerked his chin at the phone, his order clear: pick up.

  Kurt picked up. “Hey,” he said, feeling his stomach harden and twist in on itself.

  Turning away from the four sets of eyes trained on him, Kurt tried to make his ears work, get what she was saying. She sounded kind of tired, but she wasn’t backing out; she just wanted him to come earlier, so it wouldn’t be a late night.

  “Yeah. Okay. No problem. A half hour.” He hung up the phone, swallowed the medicine ball in his throat and looked at Wheeler—who’d come to stand in his face—and nodded.

  Wheeler did a lip curl and looked around the room. “Peckers up, boys. The good times are about to roll. A good fuck for one and all and—” he looked at Dev and the camera, “—a payday right along with it.”

  Kurt’s mouth fell open and his vision went dark. “What do you mean…‘one and all’? You’re not sayin’—”

  Wheeler set his hard eyes on Kurt’s wavering ones. “I’m sayin’ whatever the fuck I feel like saying.”

  “You said just…that only you were going to—”

  Wheeler punched him, hard, straight into the gut. A blast of lung air swooshed out, and his eyes shut off. But when he started to crumple to his knees, Gutter laughed and held him up from behind.

  Wheeler clapped a hand on his shoulder, his thumb biting deep into the soft flesh below his clavicle. When Kurt winced, he increased the pressure, forcing him to hunker into his hand. “You got a problem with me sharing pussy with my buddies here?”

  “No. No, I got no problem. No problem.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Wheeler said, letting go of his shoulder. “Christ, you’re a loser. No fucking wonder your mama left you.” He spit, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Now get that dumb fat ass of yours down there and give the nice lady her coma pill.”

  “Why…” The question popped out, a kind of deathbed what-the-fuck question he had to ask. Or a death wish. “Why you all doing this?’

  “Because we can, you dumb fuck. And because, thanks to you, there ain’t no one to stop us.”

  Deanne hung up the phone. God, how she’d wanted to cancel this movie night with Kurt, but what was the point? The movie would be a distraction, delay what she knew would be a miserable night in a cold bed. Plus, Kurt didn’t need another adult letting him down.

  Being let down sucked. Fresh from a firsthand experience, she knew the feeling.

  When she clicked off the phone, the silence in her small house swelled big enough to fill a grand mausoleum. She rubbed her arms, went to her back door and stepped onto her covered porch—the whole ten-step journey done on autopilot. Outside, she stared into the wet blustery night. The trees sighed and complained at the wind huffing at their evergreen limbs, ruffling their sensitive fir.

  Her lips quivered, and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t stop her chin from quivering along with it.

  The rain mist chilled and moistened Deanne’s crumbling mask.

  Tears, held since leaving Julius’s library, made their way down her cheeks.

  She brushed at them, angry, frustrated and…rebuffed. Her attempt to engage the aloof Julius Zern had failed on all fronts. The evening had not gone well. She brushed at her cheeks again, sniffled and smiled at her own understatement.

  Not gone well… But she’d tried. She cared about Julius, and she’d hoped for more. She’d gone to his house to get more—or at least to understand what went wrong—and she’d come up empty on both counts.

  She ferreted around her psyche looking for regrets—found none. She’d taken her shot, and she had nothing to be sorry for. Julius had locked himself into living alone by making a decision during the rawest and most painful time in his life. And now he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—get past it.

  And while every muscle, every tendon, every heartstring, in her body hurt for him, wished for him…wanted him, it didn’t matter.

  She’d tried. And now she had to let him go.

  Why did that concept sound so smart wrapped in words, and so calamitous to her spirit wrapped in feelings?

  Whatever the reason, it would have to wait for that cold, empty bed she’d be in later tonight—because she spotted Kurt on his way down the dark, rain-slicked hill.

  Samba, attending her ever-hungry brood, started to bark.

  Heavy traffic churned on both the east and west lanes on Seattle’s I-5. Everybody in a hurry, going and coming, the lights of their cars, trucks, vans and semis slicing through the evening rain, their tires sloshing through pockets of water and hurling it against the vehicles beside them.

  Julius, one
hand on the armrest, his chin resting on his open palm, studied the passing landmarks; he’d gone by them a thousand times on his way to Sea-Tac: a series of industrial buildings, the occasional gas station and old houses on the hillside.

  In two minutes they’d be at the exit leading away from the airport, one that would take him to Deanne.

  All he had to do was lean forward and tell the driver to take the exit, turn the car around and head northeast instead of southwest. He needed to apologize, grovel at her feet for being such an unmitigated bastard.

  And start something I can’t finish.

  The limo shot past the exit, and Julius slouched deeper into the backseat.

  They were fifteen minutes from Sea-Tac—thirty-five minutes from Deanne…

  He listened to the whine and splash of the tires on the wet concrete. Every rotation taking him farther away. Now forty minutes from Deanne…fifty minutes. A lifetime.

  He rubbed his forehead. Torrents of rain channeled down the windshield, the wipers, smacking back and forth at high speed, barely keeping up—their sound a mad metronome ticking away the minutes, hours…the fucking years he’d spent living alone and the years yet to come. And in the background Deanne’s accusations.

  “…too busy living other people’s lives to live your own…Afraid you might feel something again…get hurt again.”

  No way. She was wrong. It had nothing to do with being scared.

  Years ago, he’d made a clearheaded, logical decision about how he wanted to live his life. Fear didn’t factor in. Fear drove people to hire Guardian, Inc., because they were terrified of losing someone they loved. Choosing to avoid the entanglements that led to such fear didn’t make him some kind of emotional cripple; it made him smart.