A lot of times, it was great having a male best friend. He never borrowed her clothes and accidentally ruined them. Never lusted after the same hot guy. But there were also times, like right now, when Ward lacked the sensitivity, the awareness of an emotionally charged moment. So Casey ignored him. “Dawn, why don’t you want to go meet your Mystery Man?”
She busied herself stabbing a toothpick through an olive and a cherry tomato, then driving it into the middle of the sandwich. “You’re going through a break-up. The first one that’s really taken you out at the knees.”
As if Casey needed the heads-up. “No need to recap. I know exactly how lousy I feel.”
Another slow, methodical building of the garnish. In fact, she made a third one and reached over to add it to Ward’s other half sandwich. Clearly olives were easier for Dawn to talk to than her stepdaughter. “I can’t be gallivanting off anytime soon. It would be insensitive, given your situation. I want to be there for you. To hold your hand and let you cry on my shoulder.”
“Well, I won’t be crying over Zane again anytime soon unless someone takes off my leg with a chainsaw. It was painful, horrible stuff.”
From the ceramic jar full of spoons and whisks, Dawn whipped out a fancy kitchen gadget that curled a long, thin string from a carrot. “Fine. I’ll leave the three-pack of tissue boxes I bought today at home.” She arced the carrot curl across Casey’s sandwich so that combined with the olives, it made a smiley face. It was an old trick to turn around a bad day. All those years ago, when Dawn first brought her to Seneca Lake, they’d come straight here, to Cosgroves. And Dawn had made her a grilled cheese sandwich with a smiley face. It was one of Casey’s favorite memories. “But you need us to circle around and support you in your time of need.”
The lack of eye contact, and the sandwich construction taking three times as long as usual, all screamed stall tactics. As did the obvious grammar slip-up. Casey snatched her plate before the older woman could try to embellish the wide rim with a daisy chain of parsley. “You said need twice.”
“Well, your need is very strong.” She grabbed a sponge to wipe up the single crumb that had escaped the boundaries of the cutting board.
Casey took the sponge-free hand and squeezed. “I think my supposed need is a very handy excuse for you not to go meet this guy. And I refuse to let you capitalize on my pain like that.”
“Acacia Blossom Hobbes, I would never!”
Ward whipped his head to the side so fast Casey heard the bones in his neck crack. “Your middle name is Blossom? Man, you are a bottomless mine of secrets, aren’t you?”
“Your middle name is going to be dirt if you don’t stop interrupting.”
“I’m scared,” Dawn said in a soft, hollow voice. “Our exchanges in the journal have brought me such joy. Such solace. I don’t want to lose that.”
“You won’t.”
“I might. It could go very wrong. What if he doesn’t like me? Thinks I’m too old?”
Ward gave a jerky pat to Dawn’s hand. “You’re not old. You’re vibrant and beautiful. Any man would be lucky to share a pillow with you.”
Awww. That interruption she could forgive Ward.
“What if I don’t like him? What if he didn’t vote for me in the last election? And oh, it’s horribly shallow of me, but what if he’s got ear hair?”
This would be a million times easier if Casey could just break her promise and spill the truth to Dawn right now. It would put all her fears to rest. Just knowing would stop this spiral of insecurity and doubt.
Oh, God. A realization bomb exploded in Casey’s head. This must be how Zane felt. When he had all the facts about something. He must get full of the knowing and be certain that at least one person would be made happier or safer or better if he shared that knowledge. Zane must’ve tried to explain it at least a half-dozen times to her. But now that she was living through it herself, Casey finally got it. Understood why he wanted to share her story with the world. No, it wasn’t about wanting. Zane was sure it would be good for the world to know her story. Did that make her selfish for wanting to keep it to herself? Geez. She’d have to let that question marinate in her brain for a while. Sometimes it paid to be selfish, for the right reasons.
Breaking her promise to Joel was not an option. So Casey was left with playing dirty. Yanking at Dawn’s heart strings. “We do things together, right? You said that to get me to brush my teeth with you when I was three. It was how you got me past my fear and up on the horse for riding lessons. Last night, I did what you asked. I embraced love, wholeheartedly. I opened myself up and took a leap. So that means it’s your turn now. If for no other reason, that’s why you have to go to the mailbox Sunday night. Because I can’t be the only brave one.” There. That oughtta do it.
A long, wet raspberry sounded from Ward’s lips. “You’re not brave.”
“Didn’t I warn you about not butting in? We’re having a moment here.”
He threw his napkin down and pushed his plate to the back of the counter. “Sorry, but you don’t get to play the brave martyr card. Not for just being real with a guy you claimed to love.”
How could he think that? Casey didn’t expect Ward to pick sides. She wouldn’t forbid him from staying friends with Zane. But he ought to, at the very least, be sympathetic for what she was going through. “Ah, I lost my boyfriend, and very likely my privacy, in one fell swoop of a confession. One that I could’ve kept under my hat for the rest of my life, by the way. That was brave. A little bold, too.”
“Please. It took you ten years to muster up the courage to tell me your big hairy secret.” Ward held up a finger and cocked his head to the side. “Oh, wait, you didn’t actually have the cojones to tell me anything. My finding out was an accident. Whereas all it took Zane to pry it out of you was one good screw. When we played Spin The Bottle under the bleachers junior year, if I’d copped a feel, would you have told me then?”
“God, Ward, no. That’s harsh. And rude.”
“And true.”
Even though the bell on the front door would ring if a customer entered, Casey leaned over and dropped her voice. “I risked everything giving Zane my identity. He could be tweeting it out to the world right now. By the time we wake up tomorrow, there could be a hundred news vans parked out there.”
Ward leaned back and spread his arms wide, palms up. “So what?”
“So they could try to interview you, me, Dawn. They could stake out our houses and follow us around town. They could badger us relentlessly.” She looked at Dawn to help her out with at least a head nod, but Dawn was deep into constructing her own sandwich. Or strategically staying out of the blast zone while Casey and Ward fought it out.
“So what?” he repeated. “We’ll swat at them like the dung heap dwellers they are. Given time, something else will happen to someone else and they’ll clear out. Could be a week, could be a month. It’ll suck and be annoying, but you know what it damn sure won’t be? The end of the world.”
Casey had understood why Zane had needed explaining on this point last night. She did not, however, at all understand why her best friend required a point by point drill down. “I don’t want to relive all that. I don’t want to think about how sick Dad got. How he ignored me. How he stole me away from my life. How he stole almost two whole years of my life. I want to forget all of it.”
“Let’s face facts: you’re never going to forget it. But you can move past it.”
“I. Have.” Casey gave each word extra clarity on the enunciation. Because she didn’t need Ward thinking she was still that broken shell of a little girl. Therapy had helped. The cushion of time. But the biggest help in moving on had been the utter normalcy and bone-deep bond with Ella, Piper and Ward.
“Really? You locked those memories in a box, but then hid in there with them.” He tapped an index finger on the sid
e of her head, just above where her braid began.
“I’m still hiding because Dawn could go to jail.”
“Nope. You can’t hide behind her anymore. Dawn was brave when she opened herself up by bringing the marathon here. She knew it was risky. Knew it might lead to being recognized. So even though nobody’s caught it yet, that cat is out of the bag.”
And, in Casey’s mind, Dawn never should’ve agreed to it. But that was water under the bridge. “She did that to save the town. I don’t have as dire a reason.”
“Sure you do. What about saving yourself? Treating men like disposable straws hasn’t made you happy. Zane made you happy. It was obvious to all of us. He’s the right one for you.”
Casey pushed off of her stool. She needed the extra room to thrust her hands out to the side. “He’s the worst possible one for me. Zane is the embodiment of the very man I’ve been hiding from for all these years.”
“Carl Jung said, ‘You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.’”
There were days she really regretted giving Ward that quote-a-day calendar. He couldn’t remember that she preferred barbecue sauce on her fries, but suddenly he could whip out these amazingly pertinent and equally annoying quotes. “Zane doesn’t respect my point of view. He’s chosen his wants over mine.”
Ward stood and eased his keys out of his pocket. “Way I see it, the guy’s doing his job. Following his passion. Those are things worth respecting. You? You’re just trying to avoid being pestered for a couple of weeks. You really think that gives you the moral high ground?”
* * *
Still gripping the tissue box, Zane turned around to lean against the just-closed door of his office. Then he rubbed the back of his forearm across his tired eyes. Wished that motion would erase the last half hour of his life. The meeting with Diggle had been excruciating. If he ever got sued again—
He let out a short, harsh laugh. There was a sentence that back as a doctoral candidate he’d never envisioned applying to his future self. Of course, he’d also never envisioned running out of a basement in Iceland from a handful of grown men dressed as leopards. Maybe his next, next book should be a textbook for aspirants to his particular field: What to Expect If You Devote Your Life to the Study of Cults, aka A Lot of Crazy Shit Happens in the Name of Religion.
But if he did ever get sued again, he’d do things differently. This way-too-late-in-the-game appointment with Diggle had been more painful than yesterday’s hangover. And exhausting. And Zane still had to write up what had gone down and email it off to his lawyer. Not to mention spending every single second actively trying not to think about Casey. Which had so far proven impossible. Of course, it hadn’t quite been forty-eight hours since she walked away with his heart. Maybe, like most things in life, not thinking about her would get easier with practice.
A knock on the door startled him. Swung him around fast, but not fast enough to keep a pocket of air between his nose and the opening door. Zane raised his free hand to his face as he took a step to the side to prevent any more damage.
In his doorway, flowing golden hair backlit and haloed by the overhead fluorescents like the angel she was, stood Casey. In her uniform, just like the night they met. It shouldn’t be sexy at all. But Zane knew what lay beneath the rayon shirt. Knew just how far up her tan line extended beneath the shorts. The knowledge drove him crazy. How was he supposed to practice not thinking about her when she taunted him with everything he could no longer have, in person?
“I didn’t know if I should just...oh my God,” she exclaimed. “Did that guy who just left beat you up? Should I call for Security? What about your black belt? How’d he manage to get the drop on you?”
“Stop. You’re going a hundred miles a minute and none of it makes sense. Nobody beat me up.”
Casey pointed to the tissue box. “Looks like you’ve been crying. And you’re holding your nose.”
She had the first part of being a good sociologist—observation—down cold. What Casey lacked was the quantitative deduction skills. “Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve got this thing about the teacher not crying at school. At least, not during office hours.”
“Seriously, are you okay?”
Pride had Zane stiffening his spine to stand his full six feet, two inches. “I’m fine.” He pulled out a tissue, dabbed it under his nose to check for blood, and then wadded it up and sunk it into his wastebasket in what surely counted as a three-point shot from this far. “I was retrieving the tissues from where my weepy, distraught previous visitor dropped them. As for my nose, that’s on you.” Zane angled a look at the door, then back to Casey.
“Oh. Ohhhh,” she drew out as the sequence of events played back in her mind. “Sorry.”
Ah. So she did know how to apologize. That pissed him off. As did her sudden appearance right in the middle of his not not thinking about her. Zane tossed the tissue box onto a file cabinet right by the door. One of these days he’d get around to seeing what was in there. They’d given him an office in the anthropology and archeology department, so there could be skeleton fragments or a stegosaurus horn rattling around in the bottom. If he was lucky. “Why are you here, Casey?”
She rocked from her heels to her toes, then back again. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Why should he? Just to torture himself with her scent? To freshen the images of her that had kept him tossing and turning for the past two nights? “That depends on how you answer my first question.”
“I brought you some stuff.” Bending her knees, Casey picked up a paper grocery bag and handed it over. “That’s the fleece you left at my house, and the—”
He cut her off with a flick of his wrist. The last thing Zane wanted was an inventory list of what he’d left behind because he’d been damn sure they had so many shared nights ahead of them. “Thanks.”
“Now can I come in?”
“What’s the point?” She’d walked away. Slammed shut that door of opportunity between them. No matter how difficult, Zane would be an adult and abide by her decision. He had things to say to her. Many things, as it turned out. Things that she’d probably be happy to hear. But those could be communicated via email, which would be far less difficult than staring at the gold flecks in her green irises.
“I brought you something else.”
“What?” he snapped.
Casey squatted all the way to the ground this time to scoop something up. A cardboard box big enough to hold a microwave filled her arms. “This.”
A smart man, one with, oh, a couple of doctorates, would have learned from the mistakes of the past forty-eight hours and not succumbed to curiosity. But Zane had no idea what could be in the box. Sleeping while missing Casey like a lopped-off limb was intolerable. Sleeping tonight while wondering what was in the box would be completely impossible.
He waved an arm at the desk in grudging invitation. “Put it down over there.” Zane walked around behind it to shut his laptop and stow it in his briefcase. He dropped into the creaky wooden desk chair on rollers and waited. Crossed his arms and waited in silence some more. Knew he was being a dick. But shoving attitude at her was the only way to keep from begging her to reconsider, to come back to him. And like Zane had told Joel, he didn’t beg. Wouldn’t beg.
“Gray showed me some of your books. He’s really a fan.”
“I know.”
In the habitual gesture he adored, Casey pulled a braid over her shoulder and played with the end of it. “Anyway, I noticed they all have a section of pictures. Photographs of the cult members, and what their living conditions were like, drawings, notes.”
“I was a sucker for slide shows back in elementary school. Lecture a kid about a bug and you’ll put him to sleep. But show a kid a picture of a hairy, scary bug, and you’ve got his attention. So yeah, I always throw in a few pages of visual a
ids.”
A wan smile lifted the corners of her lips. “That’s what’s in here.”
“Bugs?”
“Visual aids. For your book. On the Sunshine Seekers.”
“I don’t understand.”
Casey opened the flaps and dug into the box. “Dawn’s private investigator, the one who found me, took lots of pictures of where and how the Sunshine Seekers lived. Our campsite, our yurts, the kids huddling on the ground too hungry and bored to even play.”
A faded manila envelope with Investigation of Greenspring, Acacia typed at the top corner dropped onto his blotter.
“Dawn kept them all, in case they’d be helpful in a custody case to prove how bad conditions were. There are pictures from the hospital too, when I first was admitted.” A stack of black and white glossies, as big as head shots, showing a dirt-streaked younger, skin-and-bones version of Casey, with her hair snarled practically into dreads.
“Good stuff, too.” Casey fanned out a handful of color pictures. “Photos of my dad carrying me into the ocean as a toddler. The three of us in front of a Christmas tree. It’s all for you. I thought they’d be useful for a before and after sort of approach.”
“Approach to what?”
“Your book.”
Sure, love hurt. But irony fucking stung. “There is no book. Not anymore. I killed it.” Zane pointed to the trashcan full of long strips that looked like confetti. “See that? I shredded the contract.” Just because he’d been in a foul mood. He’d also done the thoroughly professional, respectable thing of emailing everyone involved and succinctly explained that there would not now, nor ever would be, a book written by him on the Sunshine Seekers.
She gaped at him. Then planted her hands on the desk and leaned over it until they were practically eye to eye. “But I want you to write the book.”
It all sounded too good to be true. As much as Zane’s fingers itched to sort through the goodies on his desk, he didn’t for a second think Casey really meant for him to have them. It was too much, too abrupt a reversal. He stood, desperate to get even a few more inches distance from her. “I’m sorry—since the fuck when?”
All for You Page 31
