“Like tomorrow might not be so awful with you in it.” He pushes me onto my back and rolls on top, planting a row of kisses from my ear to my breastbone. “Tell me you’ll be in it.”
At first I can’t respond around the sudden lump in my throat, and then it’s because his hand is on the move. It leaves a trail of chill bumps as it wanders up my side, brushing over my ribs, the side of a breast, my collarbone. I gasp as his mouth dips lower, then lower again. My fingers slide into his thick hair, guiding him, and the rough scrape of his beard lights a path down my skin, now hot with lust and need.
“Abigail.” Just one word, my name, but it comes out sounding the way sex with him feels. Demanding. Intense. Just the right amount of rough. His teeth nip the skin just above my hip bone, by my belly button, lower still. “Tell me you’ll be in it.”
“Definitely,” I say, right before I arch up to meet him halfway.
* * *
Gabe sleeps the way he lives, with power and presence. His big body sprawls across my mattress, eating it up with his size and weight, commanding the middle of the bed and most of the covers. At some point near dawn, I wake up cold and shivering at the edge of the mattress. Gently, trying not to wake him, I scoot nearer, pull the comforter back my way. I’m almost completely underneath when Gabe stirs. He rolls into me, gathers me up, wraps the comforter around us like a cocoon, and I settle back in.
I’m drifting off when he whispers into my hair, “I think you should do it.”
I pull back to look at him. His eyes are still at half-mast, but he’s clearly awake. The slack is gone from his cheeks, and his expression is alert. “Do what?”
“Call Mom and tell her yes. Tell her you’ll help her write Zach’s story.”
I don’t say anything for a good minute. This is the place where I’m supposed to say no. Where my head is supposed to shake and my tongue push out some excuse. Where, instead of letting the lines between personal and professional loop around and turn topsy-turvy, I’m supposed to draw one in the sand.
“Why?” I say instead, even though I think I already know the answer. For all the reasons his mother asked me in the first place, Chelsea and my father and how both of them will make me more careful with my words. For finding Ricky, for calling Graciela, for giving the memo to Victoria, for blowing their allegations against the army wide-open. For make-out sessions on couches and whispered midnight phone calls. I expect any or all of those answers.
But that’s not what Gabe gives me.
“Because you’re the only one who I want to share him with.” He picks up a lock of my hair and twists it around a finger, his expression open and sincere. “You’re the only one I trust to do his story justice.”
I was already hovering on the ledge. Gabe’s beautiful words just tipped me over.
* * *
I awake the next morning still tucked into Gabe’s chest. I lift my head and look at the man asleep on the pillow beside me. Gabe’s cheeks are flushed, his thick hair rumpled, one arm thrown above his head in deep REM abandon. Early-morning sunlight catches in the scruff on his cheeks, casting his face in shadows and angles, and happiness balloons inside me, warm and full.
With a kiss to his pec, I slip out of bed, plucking a T-shirt and jeans from the chair in the corner on my way out of the room. I pull them on just outside the door, brush my teeth and wash my face in the tiny guest bathroom, and head downstairs.
Content curation is like erecting a lightning rod and then sitting back and waiting for the storm. While Gabe and I were upstairs...well, not sleeping, exactly, my curation software was getting zapped from every corner of the world wide web, pulling out the relevant content, categorizing it and spitting it into my inbox.
While my computer sorts through the jumble, plucking the best stories from the hundreds of emails like ripe cherries, I dig my old iPhone out of a drawer, restore all my contacts from iTunes and reactivate it with my carrier. I know I’ve got it up and running when Floyd’s name lights up my screen.
“I thought you forgot about me,” I say, half joking, half not. I remember Floyd as being much faster with these types of assignments, which means either he’s really busy, or Maria is turning out to be more complicated than I thought.
“Never, hon. But Maria’s doing a damn good job of covering her tracks. Looks like she’s stashed her cash somewhere safe, and whoever’s been paying her hasn’t made a peep. Until they file a complaint or she gets mugged on her way to the bank, that cash is pretty much invisible.”
Well, hell. Just as I feared. Cash transactions are pretty much impossible to trace unless you mark the money or see the exchange, and since I can’t do the first, that means I’d have to have put a tail on Maria, which I didn’t. Disappointment lands with an elevator-like thud in my belly.
I flip through my mental Rolodex, thinking about people I haven’t thought of in years, considering which one will do the best job for the least amount of money now that I no longer have a budget to cover research expenses.
“Okay, well, thanks for trying, Floyd. I appreciate—”
“Hey, give a guy some credit,” he interrupts. “I don’t ever call a client empty-handed, and...”
He’s still talking when another call beeps through, and I pull my cell away from my ear to check the caller ID. The number on the screen sends a string of firecrackers popping up my spine, and I cut Floyd off mid-sentence.
“I’ll call you right back,” I say, then, without waiting for his reply, press the button, heart thundering, to take the next call. “Abigail Wolff speaking.”
“Hi, Abigail. This is Graciela Hernandez returning your call.” Her voice is high and lyrical and tinged with a Southern accent, just like the one on her voice mail message, and the familiarity of it picks up my pulse. “Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I hardly ever check my home machine. Nobody ever calls that number but telemarketers.”
I wipe a suddenly sweaty palm across my jeans. “No problem at all. I’m just so glad you called me back.”
“Yes, well...” She pauses to clear her throat. “You said your fiancé knew my Ricky?”
“Yes. At least I think so. I was hoping you could maybe help me figure out the connection.”
“You mentioned something about a letter.”
“Yes,” I say, drawing out the word, buying time while my brain churns out the fabricated half-truth I told Graciela. The problem with half-truths, I’m discovering, is that they are also half-lies. So now I have to come up with a letter, which means first, I have to come up with a reason to stall. “I have a letter, but, um, I’d really rather not read it to you over the phone. Could we maybe plan a time to meet? I’d be happy to come to you.”
“Oh. That would be fine, I guess.” I hear a shuffling like the flipping of pages in a day planner. “When were you thinking?”
“Anytime.” As soon as I say it, though, I feel the warm rush of Members Only man’s breath hot on my neck. If he knows we know about Ricky, then whomever he’s working for does, too. Gabe and I have lost too much time already. “As soon as possible, actually. What does your schedule look like?”
Graciela tells me her job as a hospital nurse gives her a somewhat erratic day in the best of times, but starting tomorrow, she’s putting in extra hours and will be working back-to-back night shifts all through next week. I check my watch and do the math, rounding up and planning in a little extra time for leeway.
“What about today?” I jump out of my chair and hurry to the stairs, but when I see my reflection in the hallway mirror, my hair wild and tangled, Gabe’s beard burn on my chin, I tack on an extra hour. “I could be there by dinnertime.”
Graciela agrees, and after a few more minutes discussing logistics, we hang up. I race up the stairs and into my bedroom, where Gabe is still passed out. “Gabe.” I shake his foot. “Wake up.”
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He does, and the slow, sexy grin that spreads up his face when he sees me standing at the foot of the bed makes my entire body tingle. “Why aren’t you naked?”
I shake off the unexpected rush, file it away for a later contemplation. “Because we have a date with Graciela.”
He jolts to a sit on the mattress, his expression suddenly and deadly serious. “Which way’s your shower?”
We shower and dress in twenty minutes flat. While I dry my hair, Gabe borrows my car for a quick trip home for a fresh change of clothes and his toothbrush. I wait for him downstairs, tossing my laptop, notebook, tape recorder and the contents of my purse into a tote bag, filling two travel mugs with coffee. Three staccato beeps of my car horn announce his return, and the two of us steer my car as fast as its little Prius engine will allow to Portsmouth.
“We have a teeny tiny problem,” I tell him once I’ve merged onto 395.
He looks over, his eyes shaded under a John Deere baseball cap like the ones hanging from a rack by the Handyman register. “My beard’s not long enough?”
“No.” By now Gabe has moved beyond scruff into something bordering on Zach Galifianakis territory. “I can’t remember what I told Graciela my fiancé’s name was.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He turns in his seat to face me. “You’re shitting me, right?”
I glance at him as I surge past an 18-wheeler. “You were standing right there when I said it. Don’t you remember what it was?”
“It was your story, not mine. I figured it was some old boyfriend or something.”
“Oh. Well, then. Let’s see.” I cock my head to the side and pretend to think. “Brooks? Justin? Scott? Dylan? Aiden? Shaun? Trey?”
He gives me an incredulous look. “Seriously?”
I roll my eyes at the same time I reach for his thigh. “Of course not. Loosen up.”
“Sorry.” He sucks in a deep breath and blows it out. “Well, it must have been somebody you know, and pretty well, by the way you just threw it out there.”
“David,” I say, suddenly remembering.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“David runs the rowing program,” I explain, even though Gabe hasn’t asked. “Makes sense. I’d just spent the entire morning on the boat, and his was the first male name that popped into my head.”
My cell phone chirps, and my mom’s name slides onto the screen. I suspect she’s calling to talk about my fight with Dad, and for some reason I don’t have time to analyze, I would really rather this conversation not be broadcast over the car speakers. I attach my headphones to my cell, pop one in my ear and pick up the call.
Mom and I spend a few moments chitchatting and covering the basics—Betsy and Mike, everyone’s health, neighborhood gossip—and then she gets down to the reason for her call. “Do you have time to meet me for lunch tomorrow?”
I do the math. Even if we spend only an hour with Graciela, it will be past midnight by the time we make it back to DC. And though I’m currently jacked up on adrenaline and anticipation, I suspect by then I will be ready to crash, especially after the few hours of sleep I got last night. I steal a glance at Gabe, staring out the side window at the roadside scenery whipping by, obviously trying to give me some privacy. “Um, tomorrow’s not so great for me. How about later in the week?”
“Please, dear. I have something very important to talk to you about. We could do tea or coffee if that works better for you, or I could swing by your house. I can come by anytime.”
I fall silent, thinking. Though I don’t know what she intends to tell me, I suspect it will be somewhere in the neighborhood of a scolding for confronting Dad about the memo or for sending it over to Victoria, which I’m certain he very well knows I did. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out her connection to the story.
So if it’s a scolding I am to get, I would much prefer to get it in public, where Mom is far less likely to release the full extent of her fury.
“Fine,” I concede. “But just a quick lunch, okay? I’m way behind at work.”
“Wonderful! I’ll make the reservation. How about that cute little bistro on the corner of King and Fayette? Is one o’clock okay?”
I confirm the time and place, and before she can launch into a new topic, I tell her I have to go.
“Sorry,” I say, glancing at Gabe. “My mother.”
He doesn’t turn his head. “I got that.”
“I’m having lunch with her tomorrow.”
“I got that, too.”
I pause, casting a series of glances in his direction. “Everything okay?”
“Sorry.” He blows out an endless sigh. “Just nervous.”
“It’s okay.” I look over with a reassuring smile. “It’ll be okay.”
He reaches for my hand, lacing his fingers through mine, and presses a kiss on my knuckles.
As we near Richmond, Gabe and I fabricate a story for Graciela. Gabe is my brother, a falsehood which is both laughable and disgusting at the same time, and is lending me moral support in my quest to keep my fictional fiancé’s memory alive. David, we decide, was good friends with Zach and fought alongside him on the day that he died. David was devastated by Zach’s death and corresponded with me at length about it. In one of the many letters he wrote, he mentioned another friend by the name of Ricky Hernandez.
Once we have our story straight, I reach into the backseat, pull a pad of paper and a pen from my bag, hand both to Gabe and start dictating.
21
“My fiancé was stationed in Kabul until late last year.” I smooth my sweater, cross my hands in my lap and try to look a very tiny, very pregnant Graciela in the eyes as I say the tale Gabe and I rehearsed to perfection in the car. “From what I understand from his letters, that’s where he met Ricky.”
On the hard-backed chair across from me, Graciela gives me a could-be shrug. “Ricky was there for Intergon. He was a contractor, but he was in close contact with the troops.” She’s dressed up for our get-together, in a floral dress and low heels, pale blue eye shadow and a strand of pearls, and the notion that she’s made an effort for us to come over and lie to her face presses down hard on my chest.
Why did she have to be pregnant? Lying to the sister of a dead man is hard enough, but lying to his pregnant sister...excruciating.
Next to me on the plaid squishy couch, Gabe ducks his head so most of his face is hidden behind the bill of his ball cap. Still, those stubborn Armstrong genes push up through the thick scruff. So much so that Graciela’s eyes widened just slightly when we walked through her door, though I can’t be sure if it was from recognition or admiration—he isn’t the type of man a woman easily overlooks, not even a married, pregnant one. Now she tilts her head and squints at him, and I’m suddenly positive she knows.
“Did he ever mention David?” I ask, pulling her focus back onto me. “David Shepherd, but some of his friends called him Dave.”
Graciela takes a moment to remember. “I don’t think so. But it’s been so long, you know.”
“I do know.” I pull the letter from my bag and pass it across the coffee table to her. “Perhaps this will help.”
I give her a few moments to read the letter, the text of which I know by heart. After the mundane bit about the heat and the sand and the greasy food, and just before the paragraph in which Dave extols how much he worships and misses me, are the following ten sentences:
Yesterday was the hardest I laughed since the time you accidentally tripped that waiter with the tray full of desserts, remember that? Ricky, that’s one of the guys here, got his hands on one of those inflatable dolls. You know the type? Big boobs, bigger mouth. Yeah, that one. Anyway, he somehow figured out a way to inflate that thing by remote (the dude is brilliant like that) and hid it in Zach’s hooch. A few of us, including our comm
anding officer, were hanging out in there last night when all of a sudden, the lights go out and stripper music starts blaring. Zach throws open the door and there she is, in her full naked glory, lying on his bed. We found Ricky rolling around on the ground just outside. I thought I was going to bust a rib.
Not knowing Ricky, Gabe and I had a long, extended discussion about whether or not a practical joke involving a blowup sex toy would be a good idea. What if Graciela, or Ricky for that matter, was a total prude? But Gabe insisted that practical jokes are a frequent and welcome distraction for overseas soldiers, and he would certainly know better than I. In fact, the blowup girl incident really did happen to Zach just as my fictional fiancé described in the letter, except the jokester was a soldier named James.
But as I sit here, watching the corners of Graciela’s mouth for any sign of reaction, positive or negative, I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of including such a racy joke. What if Ricky’s lifelong dream was to be a priest? It’s a possibility we hadn’t considered.
And then Graciela drops the letter to her lap and smiles, her eyes shining. “That is just like Ricky. He was always playing practical jokes, on everyone.”
Relief hits me like a Valium to the jugular, and my shoulders descend from where they’d been hovering, up by my ears.
“Did he ever mention Dave or Zach or any of the other soldiers?” I sit up straight and pause, swallowing. This is where things could get hairy, so I choose my words carefully. “The Zach in the letter was Zach Armstrong. You may have heard of him. The actor who was killed right around the time Ricky was.”
Recognition illuminates Graciela’s face. “He talked about Zach all the time. Ricky was devastated when he was killed. He said he saw it happen.”
I notice Gabe’s thigh muscle clench through the denim, but otherwise, he doesn’t move.
“That must have been horrible,” I tell her.
The Ones We Trust Page 16
