by Lila Ashe
No way. It was a ridiculous, dumb, childish dare. Who would bid on it? But Caz was wrong. The bidding was fast and furious, and for a moment, it hung at five hundred dollars for Caz to sit on Bonnie’s lap, which was entirely out of the question. Sure, Bonnie was strong, her arm muscles as defined as her bike-riding legs. But he’d crush her. The pause went on too long. Lexie was raising her hand to call it, when Caz heard a voice say, “Six hundred dollars to Bonnie.”
It was his own voice doing the talking.
A delighted sound rose from the crowd, half laughter, half ooohs.
Lexie said, “Well! Didn’t see that coming! Anyone want to bid against Caz Lloyd, who’d like to donate six hundred smackers to have Bonnie sit on his lap?”
An electric silence. Bonnie’s lips twitched as if she might say something, but then she looked down at her hands.
“Going once, twice, sold to the man in the suspenders on the stage!”
Caz felt something lurch in his chest, something with hooves that was moving too fast. He was about to get run over by a stagecoach with short blond hair and the sweetest eyes in the west, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.
But he sure wanted it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Bonnie could do this.
She could totally do this.
Looking out at the audience, she said, “Can someone get me a tequila shot? Maybe two?” Laughter rang. She looked down at her uniform. “Oh, wait. Crap, no alcohol for me. Fine, let’s get this over with.”
Over with. As if she’d ever wanted anything more than to sit in his lap. That was exactly the problem. Her whole body craved it, to the point of ridiculousness. She wanted to touch him even if they were in front of the whole dang town.
And that was dangerous.
Beyond dangerous. It felt suicidal.
But she stood. She faced the audience, her thumbs tucked under the front metal buckles of her suspenders. She gave them a cheeky snap and then sat on Caz’s knee. The room showed its approval with another roar of laughter. Caz’s face stayed deadpan, which made them laugh harder, but his expression wasn’t quite still. Bonnie could feel the tension in his thigh muscles, an electric tautness that set her own nerves alight. And just there, at the corner of his mouth, she could see a small twitch, almost a tic.
So he wasn’t in total control. Thank goodness it wasn’t just her.
Lexie said, “All right, round two! This one is for the Truth. Here, Chief, now that you’re off the stage, would you mind drawing a blue card for me?”
Chief Barger’s mustache lifted in approval. He still looked a little pale, Bonnie noticed. The chief did well under pressure—no one better. But the political arena wasn’t his favorite area, and he looked abjectly grateful not to be on the stage anymore. If Bonnie could pry her awareness away from how Caz’s muscles felt under the backs of her legs, she would empathize with him.
Lexie took the card from the chief and laughed. “Oooh, this is a good one, too!”
Bonnie met Caz’s eyes for the first time since they got on stage. Instead of finding the commiseration she’d been hoping she might find, she instead felt his hand go to the small of her back, where no one could see. His blue eyes darkened, and she couldn’t read anything in their depths. She took a quick, indrawn breath at his touch and prayed she held it together.
Lexie said into the microphone, “The question is: What is the main thing that attracts you to the opposite sex? Do I hear a hundred for Bonnie to answer this one?”
The bidding flew upward—apparently the fact that she was sitting on Caz’s lap was enough to titillate the easily-stirred (and rather liquored-up) crowd. Terry Dunlap, who owned the boat yard, finally yelled, “Five hundred, and they both have to answer!”
A satisfied silence followed, and heads nodded in the room.
Lexie said, “Sold to Terry! Who’s first? Bonnie? Tell us truthfully, from your precarious position on that handsome firefighter’s lap, what attracts you to a man?”
“His shoe size,” said Bonnie as vampily as she could, dropping an eyelid in an exaggerated wink.
Over laugher, Lexie said, “Well, judging by the size of those shoes your feet are dangling above, you’re doing just fine at this exact moment, ain’tcha? Moving on to Caz now. How about you? What draws you to the fairer sex?”
Caz didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t need the microphone for amplification. “Honesty.”
The room’s laughter fizzled. Caz’s face was still, his voice cool. Bonnie wanted to stand, but the round wasn’t over yet.
Lexie looked flummoxed. “Okay, well, I can bet you that’s not what my boyfriend Coin would have said, but…”
“I thought this was Truth or Dare.” Caz’s voice projected to the back.
“It is.”
“Then I want to hear the truth from Bonnie Maddern.”
There wasn’t a sound in the huge room, not even the rustle of a shoe on the concrete floor.
Bonnie’s fingers flexed and she curled them tightly. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“My shoe size isn’t why you’re attracted to me.” His voice was still loud.
A delighted gasp rose in the audience and Bonnie could almost feel them leaning forward. She didn’t dare look over where her mother and father were sitting. “Caz,” she hissed.
“It’s not a big deal. It’s not like it’s against policy, and neither of us are married. What made you kiss me in the first place?”
Another titillated buzz came from the audience.
“You kissed me first!” It wasn’t true—another thing that wasn’t true. That first kiss at Bud’s Bar had been completely mutual—agreed to and acted upon together by both of them at the very same instant, she knew it.
Caz raised his eyebrows and stayed perfectly still, but he lowered his voice so that only she could hear him. “Okay, then. Why did you kiss me back?”
Bonnie’s voice quieted, too. “I don’t know.” She wasn’t sure if it was the truth, but she knew one thing—she didn’t want to discuss it there in front of God and everyone.
His low voice teased, prodded. “Come on, Mad. ’Fess up. Why did you kiss me?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Fine,” he said, leaning back, away from her, pointing at the crowd watching with greedy eyes. He raised his voice again. “Tell them why you kissed me.”
Her mother sat openmouthed. Lexie covered her mouth with the rest of the stack of cards, her eyes dancing.
“You are infuriating,” Bonnie said, steaming.
“That’s why you kissed me?”
“And you’re pompous and rude and you have no idea how to get along with anyone unless they’re bleeding or seizing.”
“So what you’re saying is you’re drawn to my bedside manner?” He nodded and smiled into the room. “I can see that.”
More laughter. Caz had them in his pocket, and it was enraging. He went on, “As I remember it, we made out like teenagers after you touched my lips, wiping away mustard that wasn’t actually there. You just said it was.” He leaned back, putting a fraction of space between them, and looked her square in the eye.
Something icy slipped down Bonnie’s spine, right along the pathway that had just been so heated. She scrambled off his lap, almost tripping as she pushed away from him. He grabbed her arm to steady her and she hated that she had to touch him. When she was upright, she jerked herself away from him. No, no, the only answer to this kind of attack was to leave the stage, to stop talking to him entirely. Not only was he wrong, but he was completely out of line. “Can we finish this outside, please?”
He still looked easy in his skin, as if he didn’t mind the stares. “I’m okay with hashing it out here.”
“Well, I’m not.” Bonnie stalked past the front tables, wading into the audience. The faster she got through the room, the faster she’d be able to suck in a breath, to grab the anger and hurt and force it into a shape she understood. The closest door was on the sou
th wall, thankfully, so she didn’t have to pass her mother’s table. If she had, she probably would have just crawled under the tablecloth and clung to her mother’s ankle like a three-year-old.
She heard Caz’s footsteps following her. One of the homeless Pete’s stage whispered, “I don’t get it, man.” Other than that, the room was perfectly silent.
The heavy metal door crashed open as Bonnie hit it with all her weight. Outside, the rain had slowed to a fine mist, and a thin moon struggled to shine through the eucalyptus trees.
“What the hell was that?” Bonnie felt attacked, and more than that, she felt humiliated. “You shouldn’t have…”
“You lie in almost everything you do.” Caz went on, his voice almost relaxed in its confidence. “You lie to your coworkers when you wake up, when you’re that special kind of grumpy.”
Bonnie was so angry her throat felt tight. She wasn’t sure she could manage to speak, but the words came out: “What are you talking about?”
“That’s how you start your days. With untruth. You chirp your good mornings like a bluebird but all you want to do is stab the firefighter between you and the coffee pot. Your face is all wrinkled and your hair sticks straight up and you’re trying to pretend your natural morning look is happy but it’s not. You’d rather scowl till you’ve put away your second cup and nothing helps but that.”
That was, infuriatingly, true. Just as she had when she was a child, Bonnie hated mornings with a purple passion but she faked her way through them at work. Lying in bed until ten and then taking a long bike ride was pretty much her idea of heaven on a day off. “But—”
“And when you have to drive the ambulance, instead of acting disappointed, which you are, you get all fake-chipper.”
“I do not.”
“You do.” What was that lurking at the back of Caz’s eyes? He continued, “You have this whole passive-aggressive cheerfulness thing that you drag over your head like you’re hiding under a blanket. That whistle.”
“What about it?”
Caz leaned against the wall of the building and pursed his lips, giving a low, slow whistle that echoed into the parking lot. “You whistle constantly. Like if you don’t, you’re going to say something you might regret.”
Bonnie put her hands on her hips. Screw the fact that practically the whole town and her parents had watched their little exchange—she was too upset to care as much now as she knew she would later. “Anything else?”
“You lie to Valentine when you tell him you like his cooking.”
Well, that was true. No one liked the nights when Valentine cooked, but they were on a rotation. And he was so inordinately proud of the food he made. If anyone else in the house had made crunchy rice, they would have laughed him right out of the station, but Valentine was so earnest about it, so excited every time he put the big spoons into his sweet-potato-oatmeal or gluten-free macaroni casserole, that Bonnie didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was always a secret pizza delivery to the patio door every night he cooked.
“That’s not fair. Who doesn’t lie to him?” It was just a fact—a white lie was preferable to the truth sometimes. Why didn’t Caz get that? He preferred to hurt people?
Bonnie turned her back on Caz and took a step away, toward where her bike was locked. She patted her pocket to make sure she had her house keys. It didn’t matter that her raincoat was inside. She’d had enough humiliation for one night.
His voice followed her, strong and clear. “You lied at my house.”
Her whole body stiffened.
“Bonnie.” If a sound could physically wrap around her, his voice was the thing that could do it. She turned slowly. The rest of the world dropped away. There were just the two of them under the still-wet night sky. “At my house. You lied. Why?”
“About my virginity? I was teasing you, Caz.”
“Not that. Do you really think I’m still mad about that? That was a stupid joke. It was nothing.”
Confusion filled her body, her very bones. “Then…”
“You told my father he would be fine.”
“Oh, Caz. I just—” She broke off. Her heart clattered as if she were in atrial fibrillation, rattling and thumping wildly in her chest. The thought raced through her mind that maybe that was where the technical shorthand had come from. Atrial fib. Afib. A fib. “It’s just—”
“No just. If you’d only…” Caz paused and tugged on his ear so hard it looked like he wanted to pull it right off his head. “If you’d only been…honest with him. That would have been something. But you lied. To him.”
Bonnie opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“I can’t forgive you for that.”
The truth hit Bonnie with force. “That’s not it.”
“Excuse me?” Caz drew himself to his full height, and if she’d been a different woman, Bonnie might have felt cowed.
But she wasn’t. She was the woman her grandmother had been proud of. “That’s not what you’re mad about. You liked that I said what I did to him. You liked that I made him feel better. I know you did.” Bonnie was the woman her mother loved. She might not be good with emotion, and she was starting to admit perhaps that was something she should work on. (She’d cried on her mother’s shoulder! Wasn’t that enough of a start?) But she was great at her job-she knew that—and part of her job meant making people who felt terrible feel less scared. Sometimes that meant a half-truth.
And knowing what to say when didn’t mean she didn’t know the truth. Caz was upset she hadn’t told him how she felt about him. That’s what this was about.
She went on, “I know what you want me to say. You have that black-and-white way of looking at the world, and mine is messy, all purples and pinks and greens.”
Caz’s eyes were a lake of blue ice.
Bonnie went on. “There’s a truth to everything, and then there are shades. Your father will be fine because that’s the truth. If he dies right this moment, while we’re here, he’ll be fine. I believe that. Besides.” She dug her fingers into her palms and said the next words slowly. “I didn’t tell him he was going to be okay for his sake. I said that for you. Half the things we say at deathbeds are for the living, not the dying.”
“He’s not—” The sound was ripped from Caz’s throat, low and painful.
“He is. You know he is. If you don’t admit that, then you’re the one lying.” Bonnie knew she’d crossed a line, but it was too late to mark boundaries. “He won’t make it much longer.”
“He’s strong. He’s—”
Bonnie put her hand to her stomach, almost able to feel the knots beneath her fingers. “If you believe that, then you’d think it was just fine I told him he was going to be okay. He was strong. He’s not now. Now is the time you have to give your strength to him.”
Caz’s face went dark. “You’re out of line.”
“Me? You left your cabin, your old job, everything you cared about to take care of him, but you’ve done it with resentment and bitterness at leaving your old life behind. You think that’s really what he would have wanted? You think he appreciates that? Your job is to filter the world around him. To make him feel cared for. And you’re failing at it.”
“He has no idea what’s going on around him.”
“But you do.” Bonnie didn’t know where she found the air to say the next words. “Take care of your father, Caz. Show him you care, that you believe in his strength. That’s the only truth that matters.”
It wasn’t, not to her. The truth that mattered to her was that her heart was breaking, but she could deal with that later, alone, in her bed, under the covers. She’d stay there for the next ten years or so. She might even cry. The whole time.
Caz’s face was bleak, as if she’d taken away something he’d worked his whole life for.
Bonnie stayed still. She had no courage left.
Caz said, “Truth or Dare, right?”
She nodded.
“Truth, then,” said Caz. “
Are you in love with me, Maddern?”
The only answer was yes. It sang in her veins. Yes, yes, yes.
But she said, “I don’t know.” She stood in front of him as the mist turned back into a fine drizzle, her uniform doing nothing to protect her from the naked feeling of her skin beneath the fabric. “Are you in love with me?”
He looked right into her eyes. “No,” he said.
Caz went back in the door, into the app bay, leaving her alone in the dim moonlight, dashing away the unforgivable tears from her cheeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was a lie.
It was the worst lie of all.
That said, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—take it back. She’d said she didn’t know how she felt about him. So him saying he didn’t love her…well, maybe if he worked really hard at it, if he made it a full-time job, someday he could make it true.
“Come on, Dad.” Caz carefully propped his father up on the pillows. “Can you stay put just for a little while? Just settle in. That’s right. Just like that.” He’d sent Joyce to bed—she’d looked exhausted when he’d gotten back to the ranch.
“You sure?” she’d asked. Her face had been pale. “It’s a bad night.”
“I’m sure. I’ll stay with him.”
“Caswell, we need to talk about—”
“No, thank you,” he’d said. As if he were declining dessert. No, thank you, he would not talk about moving his father to a facility where they’d stick him in a bed and strap him down until he died, alone, unknown and unloved. No, thanks. Not today. Or ever.
“But—”
“Good night, Joyce.” Caz had kissed her on the cheek, surprising himself. “Thank you for being here.”
“Of course.” She’d gone pink and smiled. “Of course.”
Now, hours later, Tony Lloyd was only beginning to settle down. For the first time all night, he seemed to listen when Caz soothed him.
“That’s it, Dad. Just close your eyes.”
Tony’s eyes closed. “Story.”
Caz jumped. “What?”
