Cally obeys and watches in mute fascination as the girls fill our plates with food and our glasses with wine.
“Enjoy,” Drew says, placing a silver bell on the table. “And please ring this if you need anything. We’ll be in the family room with our movie.”
“Unless you call us, you’ll have plenty of privacy,” Gabby says with a nod.
With that, both girls leave the room.
Cally runs her finger over the condensation on her wine glass. “Strawberry wine,” she says with a baffled shake of her head.
“Drew said it’s your favorite.”
She smiles at me and takes a sip. “She’s right.”
“Not much changes.”
She stiffens. “Everything changes.”
I don’t want to argue. Not tonight. So I change the subject. “Are the girls looking forward to sleeping in their new beds?”
“They are, and Dad’s ready to have them back. He misses them. I think they miss him too. He’s planned this big trip to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, and Drew isn’t even complaining about it.” She smiles. “Did I tell you Dad got another job?”
“Really? That’s great.”
“Apparently his obsession with everything spiritual is finally paying off. He got a guest-lecturing gig up at The Center. It doesn’t pay a ton, but it will help a lot until he can get adjunct work at the college next semester. That plus the part-time research gig and I’m finally feeling semi-confident in his ability to support the girls.”
Her phone rings and she slips it from her pocket and looks at the screen. Something flashes across her face. Worry? Anxiety? “Do you mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead.”
She steps into the hall to take the call, but I can still hear her side of the conversation.
“Hello?… I’m glad.… I miss you too…. I know…. No, I can’t talk about this right now. I’m in a meeting…. I promise…. You too.”
She avoids my eyes when she slips back into her seat.
“Brandon?” I ask.
She stops her fork halfway to her mouth and lowers it before speaking. “Yes.”
I won’t bother pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping. “You miss him.”
“It’s…complicated.” She shakes her head. “How do you know about us anyway? What did he tell you when he was at the gallery?”
I take a long drink of my wine before answering. She has no idea I came to Vegas looking for her after she dumped me. “He’s the one you left me for,” I say carefully.
Her brow furrows. “I didn’t leave you for another man. I— Wait. Why would you even think that? What did he tell you?”
“I came to Vegas seven years ago. That summer? I came and I tracked you down and your neighbor told me you were at some fancy restaurant, so I took a cab and sure enough…there you were. You were in this fancy dress drinking wine and sitting with this rich older guy. It was Brandon.”
“You came to Vegas?”
“My girlfriend fell off the face of the earth,” I say softly. “I wasn’t okay at letting that text message be the last words between us.”
“I had no idea you came.”
“Brandon was the one you were talking about yesterday. The one who told you how to dress, what to think—” I lower my voice. “—how to fuck.”
She pushes her food around her plate and avoids my eyes.
“Everything changed after he showed up.”
“Brandon’s visit was just a reminder that my life isn’t as simple at it was when I lived here as a teenager.”
“You don’t have to be with someone like that. You deserve better.”
“Please. Let’s not do this?”
I take a breath and make myself ask the question I’ve been pushing from my mind. “Do you still love him?”
She lifts her head and her eyes connect with mine. “If I did, would you still insist I be yours?”
“No.” My chest aches and I can’t understand her question in the context of the desperation that’s written all over her face. “If you loved him, if he was the one you wanted….” I swallow. “I want you to be mine. I’m won’t lie about that. But you can’t belong to someone you don’t give yourself to.”
Her jaw goes slack and her eyes soften. “It says a lot that you believe that, William Bailey.”
We take our meal in silence for the next few minutes, though in truth neither of us is eating much. When I can’t stand it anymore, I reach across the table and take her fingers in my hand, squeezing. We finish our meal and take the dishes to the kitchen before finding the girls in the family room.
“So are you madly in love and going to have babies yet?” Drew asks from the couch, her tone bored.
Cally picks up a pillow and knocks Drew softly on the head with it. “Twerp. Get your things. We need to get going.”
Someone honks out front and Drew and Gabby jump to their feet and grab their bags. “That’s Dad!” Drew calls, running toward the front door. “You two behave.”
Then the slam of the front door echoes through the house, and we’re alone.
“I shouldn’t stay,” she whispers, looking at her shoes.
“Just for a drink,” I promise. There’s too much we’ve left unsaid tonight. “I hate to see a fine bottle of screw-top wine go to waste.”
“I guess you know my weaknesses. Meet me on the patio?”
I grab the wine and head out to find Cally looking at the stars.
“I should have known you’d be looking at your stars.”
She gives me a sad smile. “It’s really beautiful. I guess I’d missed it more than I realized.”
“You still wishing on stars?” I settle into the chair beside her and hand her a glass of wine.
“Thanks.” She takes the glass but doesn’t drink. “Not in a long time.”
“Why not?”
“Kid stuff, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Cally I used to know.”
She eyes me wearily. “I’m not the Cally you used to know.”
My jaw tightens. “You’re not the only one who’s changed. You’re not the only one who’s had to make shit decisions.”
“Says the man who just up and bought us a house of new furniture.” She crosses her arms then shakes her head, looking away.
I’m instantly pissed. “Money doesn’t make everything easy. I know you always thought it did, but you have no idea what it was like to grow up without my parents, no idea how much I would trade to have known what it was like to have them there.”
“But it helps,” she says softly. “Having money means you didn’t have to make as many ‘shit decisions’ as I did. And my parents? They might have been alive, but—” She shoots up out of her chair. “Dammit, I don’t want to do this.”
I catch up to her at the French doors and press my hand against the glass before she can open them. Frustration ticks in my jaw. Fear of losing her churns my stomach. I’m sick of everything being left unsaid between us and too scared of the answers to demand the truth. “You don’t want to do what?”
She turns to face me, leaving her body between me and the door, my hands blocking her in on either side. “I don’t want to play the who-had-the-worst-childhood game.”
“That’s not what I was doing. You just shut me down every time the past comes up, like I’m incapable of understanding what your life was like after you left.”
She scoffs. “Like you’re an open book about yours?”
“Try me.”
“You and Maggie were together.” It’s not a question.
“Briefly.” I don’t want to go there. Not with Cally. But if this is the conversation she needs to have in order to open up to me, so be it.
“She still cares about you. She’s worried I’m going to hurt you. Again.”
“I’m a big boy. I don’t need Maggie looking out for me.”
“But she does.” Her hand slowly rises to touch my face, and I stay perfectly still, resisting the urge to turn a kiss into her palm. Resisting the urge to kiss her until we have both forgotten this conversation and are thinking only of each other’s bodies. “And then you married her sister Krystal.”
She caught up fast. But what do I expect? This is New Hope. There are no secrets here. If anything, I should be surprised she had to come all the way back to New Hope for the grapevine to deliver the news. “Krystal and I were never officially married.” Not that we didn’t get way too f**king close for comfort. Stupid on my part. “It seemed like the right decision at the time, but it didn’t work out, and that was for the best.”
“But they’re all so protective of you. You’re not the bad guy to them.”
“I screwed up. They’ve forgiven me.”
Her eyes dip to my mouth before lifting to connect with mine. “Which part was the screw up?”
I ball my hands into fists, resisting the urge to touch her. “All of it. Both of them.”
“Yeah, you’re an open book, alright.”
“Jesus? Is that what you want? You want to know where I f**ked up? You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Is that it? What are you so desperate to hide from me?”
“We all have parts of ourselves we don’t want anyone to see.”
I drag a hand through my hair and turn away from her. Because she’s right. And I can’t look her in the eyes while I confess my life’s biggest failure. “After I went to college, Maggie…she needed me.”
“The poor little rich girl needed you? I’m sure she did.”
“It’s not mine to tell, Cally, but I can tell you I f**ked up. She came to me, she needed help, and I put her back on a bus and sent her home.”
“You weren’t responsible for her. A college student, you were barely more than a kid yourself.”
And I was hung up on a girl who dumped me for a rich as**ole at least fifteen years older than me. I hang my head. “It doesn’t matter. She was terrified, and I sent her right back into the fray.”
“What fray?” She shakes her head. “I don’t understand what could have been so bad. The maid didn’t clean her room well enough? Not enough boys falling at her feet?”
She’s trying to pick a fight, but I won’t take the bait. “Exactly. You don’t understand. You aren’t the only one who’s had to make shit decisions, and neither am I. When I realized what I’d inadvertently done, I couldn’t forgive myself. I was obsessed with protecting her, and when I came back home from grad school, that obsession turned into something else.”
“You fell in love with her.”
I shrug. “I loved her. That doesn’t mean it was a healthy love.”
“Then Krystal?”
“Krystal picked up the pieces when Maggie left me. She loved me and she wanted all the same things I wanted. She made me forget that I’d lost Maggie.”
“And Krystal? Did you love her?”
“Of course I did. I wouldn’t have put a ring on her finger if I didn’t.”
“But Maggie had just left you. You poor thing, so broken-hearted you only needed two-point-five seconds to fall for her sister. Was it that easy for you to get over me too?” I turn, and she’s thrown her hand over her mouth. Regret pulling at her features. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Because you already know the answer.”
“I’m not so different than Maggie,” she whispers. “You always wanted to save me. To fix me and my broken family. Hell, look at us now. You’re just coming to the rescue again.”
“I can help and I want to. What’s wrong with that?”
“I want more.”
She can have more. She can have anything. Everything. “Then it’s yours.”
She tilts her chin, looking up at her stars again. “I don’t want to be rescued. Been there. Done that. Lived with the self-loathing.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“I want a man who’s just as saved by my love as I am by his.” She lifts her shoulders. “Someday. But I don’t need it. All I need now is to help my sisters and get by.”
“I’m sick of you dancing around your past.”
I don’t really expect her to reveal anything, so I’m surprised when she speaks. “Mom’s love affair with Vicodin became an obsession. She was too stoned to even give twenty-dollar hand jobs anymore.”
I flinch. “Cally….”
“We got food stamps, but she’d sell them for drugs. A hundred dollars that was supposed to buy my sisters and me dinner became a handful of precious pills for her.” Her eyes fill and she looks away from me. “Within a month of moving to Vegas, I got a job, two jobs, but it was never enough. And then I’d talk to you, and you were planning for college and picking out the car your grandmother was going to buy you for a graduation gift. You lived in a completely different universe than me, and I couldn’t handle it.”
I take her shoulders and turn her to look at me. “I wish you would have told me. I could have helped. I could have—”
“What?” She laughs. A cold, hollow sound that doesn’t hold an ounce of humor. She pushes at my chest, and I back up and drop my arms. “What would you have been able to do? Send money? And then keep sending money? An eighteen-year-old boy responsible for supporting a family of four? Mom would have had your trust fund cleaned out before you even finished college.”
“Enjoy,” Drew says, placing a silver bell on the table. “And please ring this if you need anything. We’ll be in the family room with our movie.”
“Unless you call us, you’ll have plenty of privacy,” Gabby says with a nod.
With that, both girls leave the room.
Cally runs her finger over the condensation on her wine glass. “Strawberry wine,” she says with a baffled shake of her head.
“Drew said it’s your favorite.”
She smiles at me and takes a sip. “She’s right.”
“Not much changes.”
She stiffens. “Everything changes.”
I don’t want to argue. Not tonight. So I change the subject. “Are the girls looking forward to sleeping in their new beds?”
“They are, and Dad’s ready to have them back. He misses them. I think they miss him too. He’s planned this big trip to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, and Drew isn’t even complaining about it.” She smiles. “Did I tell you Dad got another job?”
“Really? That’s great.”
“Apparently his obsession with everything spiritual is finally paying off. He got a guest-lecturing gig up at The Center. It doesn’t pay a ton, but it will help a lot until he can get adjunct work at the college next semester. That plus the part-time research gig and I’m finally feeling semi-confident in his ability to support the girls.”
Her phone rings and she slips it from her pocket and looks at the screen. Something flashes across her face. Worry? Anxiety? “Do you mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead.”
She steps into the hall to take the call, but I can still hear her side of the conversation.
“Hello?… I’m glad.… I miss you too…. I know…. No, I can’t talk about this right now. I’m in a meeting…. I promise…. You too.”
She avoids my eyes when she slips back into her seat.
“Brandon?” I ask.
She stops her fork halfway to her mouth and lowers it before speaking. “Yes.”
I won’t bother pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping. “You miss him.”
“It’s…complicated.” She shakes her head. “How do you know about us anyway? What did he tell you when he was at the gallery?”
I take a long drink of my wine before answering. She has no idea I came to Vegas looking for her after she dumped me. “He’s the one you left me for,” I say carefully.
Her brow furrows. “I didn’t leave you for another man. I— Wait. Why would you even think that? What did he tell you?”
“I came to Vegas seven years ago. That summer? I came and I tracked you down and your neighbor told me you were at some fancy restaurant, so I took a cab and sure enough…there you were. You were in this fancy dress drinking wine and sitting with this rich older guy. It was Brandon.”
“You came to Vegas?”
“My girlfriend fell off the face of the earth,” I say softly. “I wasn’t okay at letting that text message be the last words between us.”
“I had no idea you came.”
“Brandon was the one you were talking about yesterday. The one who told you how to dress, what to think—” I lower my voice. “—how to fuck.”
She pushes her food around her plate and avoids my eyes.
“Everything changed after he showed up.”
“Brandon’s visit was just a reminder that my life isn’t as simple at it was when I lived here as a teenager.”
“You don’t have to be with someone like that. You deserve better.”
“Please. Let’s not do this?”
I take a breath and make myself ask the question I’ve been pushing from my mind. “Do you still love him?”
She lifts her head and her eyes connect with mine. “If I did, would you still insist I be yours?”
“No.” My chest aches and I can’t understand her question in the context of the desperation that’s written all over her face. “If you loved him, if he was the one you wanted….” I swallow. “I want you to be mine. I’m won’t lie about that. But you can’t belong to someone you don’t give yourself to.”
Her jaw goes slack and her eyes soften. “It says a lot that you believe that, William Bailey.”
We take our meal in silence for the next few minutes, though in truth neither of us is eating much. When I can’t stand it anymore, I reach across the table and take her fingers in my hand, squeezing. We finish our meal and take the dishes to the kitchen before finding the girls in the family room.
“So are you madly in love and going to have babies yet?” Drew asks from the couch, her tone bored.
Cally picks up a pillow and knocks Drew softly on the head with it. “Twerp. Get your things. We need to get going.”
Someone honks out front and Drew and Gabby jump to their feet and grab their bags. “That’s Dad!” Drew calls, running toward the front door. “You two behave.”
Then the slam of the front door echoes through the house, and we’re alone.
“I shouldn’t stay,” she whispers, looking at her shoes.
“Just for a drink,” I promise. There’s too much we’ve left unsaid tonight. “I hate to see a fine bottle of screw-top wine go to waste.”
“I guess you know my weaknesses. Meet me on the patio?”
I grab the wine and head out to find Cally looking at the stars.
“I should have known you’d be looking at your stars.”
She gives me a sad smile. “It’s really beautiful. I guess I’d missed it more than I realized.”
“You still wishing on stars?” I settle into the chair beside her and hand her a glass of wine.
“Thanks.” She takes the glass but doesn’t drink. “Not in a long time.”
“Why not?”
“Kid stuff, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Cally I used to know.”
She eyes me wearily. “I’m not the Cally you used to know.”
My jaw tightens. “You’re not the only one who’s changed. You’re not the only one who’s had to make shit decisions.”
“Says the man who just up and bought us a house of new furniture.” She crosses her arms then shakes her head, looking away.
I’m instantly pissed. “Money doesn’t make everything easy. I know you always thought it did, but you have no idea what it was like to grow up without my parents, no idea how much I would trade to have known what it was like to have them there.”
“But it helps,” she says softly. “Having money means you didn’t have to make as many ‘shit decisions’ as I did. And my parents? They might have been alive, but—” She shoots up out of her chair. “Dammit, I don’t want to do this.”
I catch up to her at the French doors and press my hand against the glass before she can open them. Frustration ticks in my jaw. Fear of losing her churns my stomach. I’m sick of everything being left unsaid between us and too scared of the answers to demand the truth. “You don’t want to do what?”
She turns to face me, leaving her body between me and the door, my hands blocking her in on either side. “I don’t want to play the who-had-the-worst-childhood game.”
“That’s not what I was doing. You just shut me down every time the past comes up, like I’m incapable of understanding what your life was like after you left.”
She scoffs. “Like you’re an open book about yours?”
“Try me.”
“You and Maggie were together.” It’s not a question.
“Briefly.” I don’t want to go there. Not with Cally. But if this is the conversation she needs to have in order to open up to me, so be it.
“She still cares about you. She’s worried I’m going to hurt you. Again.”
“I’m a big boy. I don’t need Maggie looking out for me.”
“But she does.” Her hand slowly rises to touch my face, and I stay perfectly still, resisting the urge to turn a kiss into her palm. Resisting the urge to kiss her until we have both forgotten this conversation and are thinking only of each other’s bodies. “And then you married her sister Krystal.”
She caught up fast. But what do I expect? This is New Hope. There are no secrets here. If anything, I should be surprised she had to come all the way back to New Hope for the grapevine to deliver the news. “Krystal and I were never officially married.” Not that we didn’t get way too f**king close for comfort. Stupid on my part. “It seemed like the right decision at the time, but it didn’t work out, and that was for the best.”
“But they’re all so protective of you. You’re not the bad guy to them.”
“I screwed up. They’ve forgiven me.”
Her eyes dip to my mouth before lifting to connect with mine. “Which part was the screw up?”
I ball my hands into fists, resisting the urge to touch her. “All of it. Both of them.”
“Yeah, you’re an open book, alright.”
“Jesus? Is that what you want? You want to know where I f**ked up? You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Is that it? What are you so desperate to hide from me?”
“We all have parts of ourselves we don’t want anyone to see.”
I drag a hand through my hair and turn away from her. Because she’s right. And I can’t look her in the eyes while I confess my life’s biggest failure. “After I went to college, Maggie…she needed me.”
“The poor little rich girl needed you? I’m sure she did.”
“It’s not mine to tell, Cally, but I can tell you I f**ked up. She came to me, she needed help, and I put her back on a bus and sent her home.”
“You weren’t responsible for her. A college student, you were barely more than a kid yourself.”
And I was hung up on a girl who dumped me for a rich as**ole at least fifteen years older than me. I hang my head. “It doesn’t matter. She was terrified, and I sent her right back into the fray.”
“What fray?” She shakes her head. “I don’t understand what could have been so bad. The maid didn’t clean her room well enough? Not enough boys falling at her feet?”
She’s trying to pick a fight, but I won’t take the bait. “Exactly. You don’t understand. You aren’t the only one who’s had to make shit decisions, and neither am I. When I realized what I’d inadvertently done, I couldn’t forgive myself. I was obsessed with protecting her, and when I came back home from grad school, that obsession turned into something else.”
“You fell in love with her.”
I shrug. “I loved her. That doesn’t mean it was a healthy love.”
“Then Krystal?”
“Krystal picked up the pieces when Maggie left me. She loved me and she wanted all the same things I wanted. She made me forget that I’d lost Maggie.”
“And Krystal? Did you love her?”
“Of course I did. I wouldn’t have put a ring on her finger if I didn’t.”
“But Maggie had just left you. You poor thing, so broken-hearted you only needed two-point-five seconds to fall for her sister. Was it that easy for you to get over me too?” I turn, and she’s thrown her hand over her mouth. Regret pulling at her features. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Because you already know the answer.”
“I’m not so different than Maggie,” she whispers. “You always wanted to save me. To fix me and my broken family. Hell, look at us now. You’re just coming to the rescue again.”
“I can help and I want to. What’s wrong with that?”
“I want more.”
She can have more. She can have anything. Everything. “Then it’s yours.”
She tilts her chin, looking up at her stars again. “I don’t want to be rescued. Been there. Done that. Lived with the self-loathing.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“I want a man who’s just as saved by my love as I am by his.” She lifts her shoulders. “Someday. But I don’t need it. All I need now is to help my sisters and get by.”
“I’m sick of you dancing around your past.”
I don’t really expect her to reveal anything, so I’m surprised when she speaks. “Mom’s love affair with Vicodin became an obsession. She was too stoned to even give twenty-dollar hand jobs anymore.”
I flinch. “Cally….”
“We got food stamps, but she’d sell them for drugs. A hundred dollars that was supposed to buy my sisters and me dinner became a handful of precious pills for her.” Her eyes fill and she looks away from me. “Within a month of moving to Vegas, I got a job, two jobs, but it was never enough. And then I’d talk to you, and you were planning for college and picking out the car your grandmother was going to buy you for a graduation gift. You lived in a completely different universe than me, and I couldn’t handle it.”
I take her shoulders and turn her to look at me. “I wish you would have told me. I could have helped. I could have—”
“What?” She laughs. A cold, hollow sound that doesn’t hold an ounce of humor. She pushes at my chest, and I back up and drop my arms. “What would you have been able to do? Send money? And then keep sending money? An eighteen-year-old boy responsible for supporting a family of four? Mom would have had your trust fund cleaned out before you even finished college.”
