Happy Ever After
Page 67

He’d needed to be with her, just be there, with her, in that ordered space she created where somehow everything just made sense.
Needing something—someone—that was jumping off a building without a safety harness. He’d learned the hard way he was better off taking care of himself, dealing with himself and what was his. Period.
Except he’d started thinking of her as his. He’d already told her bits and pieces of things he’d never told anyone else, and didn’t much see the point in thinking about.
So . . .
Better he’d pissed her off, he decided. Better she’d tossed him out. They’d both take a couple of breaths, simmer down. Reevaluate.
He checked the modifications, moving from the front end to the rear.
And over the music of the Foo Fighters he heard the distinctive sound of high heels on concrete.
He only had to angle his head, and there she was, wearing one of her sexy business suits, that arresting face unframed, a bag the size of a Buick on her shoulder.
“The door wasn’t locked.”
“No.” He pulled the rag out of his back pocket to wipe his hands.
She shouldn’t be here, he thought.The place smelled of oil and engine and sweat. And so, he imagined, did he.
“I thought you had a thing tonight.”
“I did. It’s finished.” She gave him that cool-eyed stare.“But we’re not, so would you mind turning that down?”
“I’ve got to get the wheels and tires on this thing.”
“Fine. I’ll wait.”
She would, he concluded. She was good at that.
So he figured the Foo Fighters would have to learn to fly without him. He put down his tools, shut down the iPod, then opened the cooler he’d put on the bench beside it. He took out one of the two beers he’d packed. “Want one?”
“No.”
He opened it, took a long pull while he eyed her.“Something on your mind, Legs?”
“Quite a bit, actually. I heard about the accident, about those three girls.Why didn’t you tell me about it last night?”
“I didn’t want to talk about it.” The image—shattered glass, blood, blackened metal on a rain-slicked road—flashed back into his mind. “Still don’t.”
“You’d rather let it eat at you.”
“It’s not eating at me.”
“I think, I really think, that’s the first lie you’ve told me.”
It infuriated him, unreasonably, that she was right.
“I know what’s going on inside my gut, Parker. And talking about it doesn’t change squat. It doesn’t make those girls any less dead, or keep the couple in the other car from a f**king world of hurt. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.”
The heat he spewed did nothing to ruffle her cool.
“If I really believed you were that fatalistic and callous, I’d feel sorry for you. But I don’t.You came to me last night because you were upset, but you couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me why. Maybe getting mad at me helped, maybe you could displace the upset with anger. But I don’t deserve that, Malcolm, and neither do you.”
Chalk up another in the She’s Right column.The score, Brown: 2; Kavanaugh: 0, just pissed him off.“I shouldn’t have come by last night when I was in a crappy mood.You want an apology? I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you know me at all, Malcolm?”
“Christ.” He muttered it and took another swig of the beer he didn’t really have the taste for.
“And don’t take that dismissive male attitude with me.”
“I am a male,” he shot back, pleased he’d scraped away a layer of that calm, revved to scrape away more.“I have a male attitude.”
“Then you can stuff this in your attitude. If I’m with you, I’m with you when you’re doing flips and handsprings, and I’m with you when you’re in a crappy mood.”
“Yeah?” Something choked him, twisted in throat, in gut. “Couldn’t prove that by last night.”
“You didn’t give me—”
“What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ don’t you get? And how the hell does this get turned around into being about you and me? Three kids are dead, and if they were lucky, they died fast. But it wouldn’t have been fast enough. Five, ten seconds of knowing what’s coming is forever. That and never getting to grow up, never getting to push the rewind button and say ‘let me do that different this time’ is a hell of a price for some girl who barely had her license a year and two of her friends to pay for being stupid.”
She didn’t jolt when the bottle he heaved smashed against the wall, but let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hum of sympathy. “I nearly did that same thing last night after you left. Then I thought what good would it do, and I’d just have to clean it up. Did it help?” she wondered.
“God, you’re a piece of work. Not everything has a neat, practical answer. Everything doesn’t always add the f**k up. If it did, three girls wouldn’t be dead because they were driving too damn fast and texting friends.”
Her heart hurt at the waste of it all. “Is that what happened? How do you know?”
“I know people.” Damn it, he thought, and shoved at his hair as he struggled to box in the rage that had blindsided him. “Listen, they’re keeping that under wraps until they finish the investigation.”
“I won’t say anything. Mrs. Grady knows the driver’s mother, and it’s hit her pretty hard. Maybe listening to her, making her tea, holding her hand didn’t help all that much. Maybe it wasn’t a neat, practical answer, and maybe it doesn’t all add the f**k up. But I had to do something. When someone I care about is hurting or upset or just sad, I have to do something.”
“Whether they want you to or not.”
“Yes, I suppose so.To my mind, reaching out, reaching for one another doesn’t make what happened to those girls less of a tragedy, or make anyone less heartsick for them and their families. But point taken.You don’t want me to listen.You don’t want me to hold your hand. So that makes the need to do those things about me, not you.”
She took a long breath, and he heard the unsteadiness of it. That, more than anything she’d said or done, cut at him.