He gives me a strange look. “Are you okay?”
“Sure, I’m fine.”
He gets to his feet. “I was bracing myself for a classic Darcy zinger. How did you manage to resist?” He holds a hand down and pulls me up so easily I momentarily leave the ground.
I sigh. Another of life’s pleasures is over. “I officially retire. For obvious reasons.”
I climb a couple of steps to be closer to his eye level. Patty is still tootling around in the garden. “Hurry it up,” I tell her, hugging my arms around my waist. “I’m getting cold.”
“What’s that?” Tom’s noticed the reddened mark on my wrist. He can always sniff out danger.
“Just a reaction to my new perfume.”
Tom reaches for my arm but stops when an inch separates our skin. He opens his hand over the mark and measures it. He’s pissed. Outraged. Mouth open from the sheer audacity. I’m surprised the sky doesn’t unfurl into black thunderclouds, crackling with lightning. “Who did it?”
“Don’t fuss.” I wrap my forearm behind my back and put more marshmallows into my mouth. Through the white sugar foam I say, “Looks worse than it is.” What a horrible sentence.
“Who did it?” He repeats it, his eyes supernatural orange. He looks back at the street. He’s going to hunt that black car down. He’s going to tear out Vince’s throat.
How does no one else ever notice this beast inside him?
“No, not that guy. Another fucking idiot at work. He knows to not do it again.”
I’ve already got my follow-up retort locked and loaded: I can take care of myself. He knows it. We stare like we hate each other.
I can feel the energy in him shimmering. He’s got thoughts and opinions, but he’s swallowing them, and they taste awful. He’s probably thinking about what he’d do to anyone who put a mark on Megan. He’d lick up blood.
“If he needs reminding, let me know,” he manages at last. He’s twisting away from me now, putting distance between us. This is something he doesn’t like about me. My dark, messy lifestyle scares the shit out of him.
I’m struggling with my temper too, for a different reason. I wouldn’t mind betting Megan’s too simple to realize what she has. She’s at home embalming herself, bleaching her cuticles and lubricating her follicles or whatever it is that well-groomed women do. She’s an aesthetician after all, and no one can trust a slovenly beauty therapist. I bet she’s staring at her own face in the mirror.
Meanwhile, her fiancé is like an apple pie on a windowsill, and this world is full of sugar addicts like me. It’s her goddamn carelessness that has always gotten me.
If he were mine … I can’t let myself think it.
My jaw aches from not blurting everything out. “Let’s go in.”
Valeska shakes the snow from his fur. I shake the snow from mine. He holds up an ancient key ring. “Check it out.”
“Well, that’s a blast from the past.”
It’s a key ring given to Tom by Loretta when we were kids; it’s Garfield, wearing earphones, with Odie next to him, mouth open in a bark. Printed is: SILENCE IS GOLDEN!That was Loretta’s nickname for Tom: Golden. I was Sweetness, and Jamie was Salty.
Nicknames were everywhere, growing up. Prince, Princess. My dad’s special name for Tom that made him go red and pleased: Tiger. Maybe Dad did know what we brought in that night.
“I love that you have a key,” I say without thought, like a creep. “This would be a collector’s item, probably.” I use his Garfield key to unlock the door, and he scrapes his thumbnail into the empty screw holes where my BARRETT WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY brass plaque used to be. He’s probably thinking about how I’ll never shoot his wedding. “Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry.” But also, I’m not.
I push the door open with my knee. He’s looking now at the remaining plaque that reads MAISON DE DESTIN, hung by Loretta to set the mood for her tarot clients. Ooh. Something about destiny. Fancy. He’s wistful as he uses his thumb to check if it’s screwed tight.
“I miss her so much,” he tells me, and we are sad and silent until Patty does her jackhammer run through our legs, sneezing and huffing. Thank you, little animal.
I click on the nearest lamp, and the first thing we see is my underwear. Above the fireplace, there’s a row of fancy black bras hanging up to dry on the old nails that once held our Christmas stockings.
“Well,” Tom says after a beat. “That would give Santa a stroke.”
I laugh and throw my keys onto the coffee table. “I wasn’t expecting company.” The echo of Vince’s car reverberates through the room like another lie. Patty sets off with single-minded determination down the hall.
“If you pee inside, you are getting in trouble,” Tom says to her departing form.
I unhook the bras and toss them on the armchair. “Christ, what a night. I’m glad you’re here.” I pull out the wine bottle and use the hem of my top to work on the screw-top lid.
He holds out a hand. It would be easy-peasy for him. “Here, I’ll do it.”
“I’m perfectly capable.” I step around him into the dark kitchen. If I’m not firm with him, he slips and starts trying to do everything for me. Princess Mode. “Do you want some? Or do good boys like you need to get into bed?”
Eyebrows down. “Good boys like me get up at five A.M.”
“Bad girls like me go to bed at six A.M.” I grin at his despairing head shake. He reaches for the light switch on the wall, but I stop him. “You’ll get a zap.”
“Seriously? Have you been zapped?” Aghast, he looks at my chest. It contains the one thing he cannot fix.
“No, because I learned from Jamie’s mistake.” I can’t help grinning. Holy fuck! Ow! Darce, stop laughing! That hurt!
“Smiling at the thought of your brother being electrocuted.” Tom doesn’t want to be amused but he can’t help it. “Such a bad girl.”
“I’m the worst.” I use a wooden spoon to flip the switch. “Okay, so it’s looking bad in here.”
I watch him scan the room from top to bottom: the water-stained ceiling, the bubbling wallpaper, the floorboards that bounce under his feet. I’ve been used to it, but now I see the full extent of the room’s shabbiness.
“Can you tell me what your fight with Jamie was about? I’ve heard his side. But I want to hear yours.” He turns away, his eyes following the line of a crack in the wall. Behind his back, I drink my entire glass of wine soundlessly. When he turns around, I’m holding a second full glass. The perfect crime.
“What can I say? My temper got the better of me.” I sip daintily.
“Okay,” Tom half laughs as he turns on the kitchen tap. It splutters and sprays him, and when he turns it off, we hear a loud dripping. He finds the sink bucket in the cabinet underneath. “Aw, jeez.”
His phone chimes, and he looks at the screen, a smile on the edge of his mouth. He texts back, probably something like, It’s okay, I arrived safe. Miss you, Megs.
A hot feeling grabs me by the throat. I want to take his phone and flush it all the way to the sewage plant. I drink a mouthful of wine and it helps a bit.
“So, the day I made Jamie very mad. Where do I start? We had been driving each other insane. Living in bedrooms next door to each other was easy when we were kids and we had you in a bunk bed to mediate.”
But with no buffer, we were agitating and arguing. Jamie wanted us to move to the city. I wanted to stay. I couldn’t buy him out. It was a tug-of-war argument that I couldn’t win, because like Mom said, Loretta wanted us to tart up the cottage and split the money. Think of it as a little nest egg, Mom said, patting my heart.
I told her that I didn’t want a nest egg. The way I’d earned it was too much for me to bear. Mom was gentle. I’m sorry, Princess. I know what she meant to you. This is her way of showing what you meant to her.
“So there was a knock on the door one Saturday morning. Jamie was out jogging. It was early and I was very … tired.”
His eyes move to my glass.