“What came over you?” she finished for me. “By the looks of it, half a bottle of Scotch. But,” and here she lowered her eyes, “I guess I deserved that.”
“No,” I said firmly, but not very firmly because now that I’d settled into the pillow, I’d realized the room was spinning around me. “You didn’t deserve anything of the sort. I feel so ashamed of myself right now, and I don’t deserve you even being here. You should go.”
“I’m not going,” she said with the same firmness I hadn’t been able to muster. “You are going to take a nap and I’m going to read a book, and when you wake up, I have a way for you to make it up to me. Okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered, not sure if I deserved a chance to make it up to her or not. But also I wanted her to know why I’d been such an ass, why I’d acted like such a phenomenal bastard. It was that stupid human desire to justify one’s actions, as if I could erase the wrong of it all if only she saw my reasons.
As someone who heard people’s wrongdoings and the reasons for said wrongdoings on a professional basis, I should’ve known better. But I was desperate for her not to hate my guts, and yes, maybe there was a tiny part of me that also wanted to shift the blame, because let’s face it, she’d spent the night with Sterling and then showed up in her day-after state, and how the fuck was I supposed to react?
“I know that you were with him last night,” I blurted and then held my breath, terrified that she’d confirm it and even more terrified that she’d try to deny it.
But she didn’t really do either. Instead, she sighed and drew the blanket up to my chest. “I know you know,” she said. “Sterling told me that he sent that picture.”
And then she looked away. “I fucking hate him so much.”
That heartened me a bit. Maybe last night had been sex-free after all. Maybe this wasn’t all an elaborate prelude to her telling me that she was leaving for Sterling.
“I didn’t screw him, Tyler,” she said, noticing my look.
And I believed her. Maybe it was the clear, open way she said it. Maybe it was her eyes, wide and innocent. Or maybe it was something more ephemeral than that, some spiritual connection that knew her words to be true.
Either way, I chose to believe that she was telling me the truth.
She took a deep breath. “We’ll talk more when you wake up. But I didn’t—nothing happened. I didn’t touch him…he didn’t touch me.” She found my hand and squeezed it, and that squeeze was the axis on which the room drunkenly tilted. “I only want you, Father Bell.”
CHAPTER 20
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
The voice pierced through the smoky, smudgy veil of heavy sleep, sound waves and nerve receptors working together to rouse my brain, to coax me awake and back into the world of the sober living.
My brain wasn’t having it. I rolled over, but rather than finding one of my ancient, flattened pillows, my face found bare flesh. Bare thighs. I wrapped an arm around them in an automatic gesture, burying my face in the smooth, sweet-smelling skin.
Fingers twined through my hair. “It’s time to wake up.”
It was the thighs more than the request, but I finally managed to force my eyes open, and once I did, I regretted it.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “I feel like shit.”
“Because of the booze or because of the way you acted?”
I kept my face against Poppy’s thigh. “Both,” I mumbled.
“That’s what I thought. Well, time to feel better. I’ve laid out some clothes for you on the bed.”
The thighs moved away, which made me sad. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up, stretching her arms as if she’d been in the same position for a long time, but she wasn’t naked any longer, she was wearing a short tunic belted at the waist and gladiator sandals.
“You left,” I accused.
She nodded. “I couldn’t go where we’re going in one of your undershirts and I certainly wasn’t going to go in my dirty clothes. I was only gone for a few minutes, I promise.”
I sat up slowly and took the water and Advil she offered. “Now get dressed,” she said. “We have a date.”
Thirty minutes later and we were pulling on the interstate in the Fiat. I was wearing dark jeans and a soft pullover sweater Sean had given me last Christmas in his continuing quest to improve my closet. It was a casual outfit—despite the sweater’s ridiculous price tag—and I wondered why we were driving down to the city if not to go to someplace dressy and expensive.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Poppy didn’t answer at first, checking her mirrors and craning her neck as she water-bugged through the dense Saturday night traffic. I decided not to push her, even though the curiosity was killing me, as well as the faint, nervous worry that someone would see us out together.
Finally she said, “Someplace I’ve wanted to take you for a while. But first: yesterday. We need to talk about yesterday.”
Yes, we did, but now that I knew she hadn’t slept with Sterling, I half wanted to avoid the painful dialogue altogether. This last day and a half had shoved us roughly past the pretending phase, past the place where we could just imagine the world outside as an irrelevant storm beating ineffectively at our window, and I hated it. Because beyond that place were all the decisions and discussions that would slowly break my life apart, one piece at a time.
“So, Sterling came to my house yesterday,” she said. “After he saw you.”
She knew about that?
As if reading my mind, she followed up with, “Sterling loves to brag about his conquests. Business, romantic, vengeful, any kind of victory. I think he thought I’d be impressed that he’s so thoroughly boxed us in with the photographic evidence of our relationship.”
God. He’s such a tool.
“You have to understand, I knew he’d come here eventually, and I knew that I would tell him I didn’t want to be with him. But I also knew that he wouldn’t accept anything less than a full, face-to-face rejection, and also I felt like I at least owed him dinner, a chance to talk everything over. I mean, we dated for years….”
“Years that he cheated on you,” I muttered.
She looked over at me. The look wasn’t entirely pleasant. “Anyway,” she continued, her voice edged with agitation, “I agreed to drive down to the city and get dinner with him. We ended up talking so late that I fell asleep in his hotel room.”
I didn’t like that detail.
I didn’t like that detail at all.
“But like I said,” she said, “nothing happened. I dozed on his couch until morning and then his driver brought me back home. To you.”
“So he knows now that you’re done with him? He’s leaving?”
She hesitated. “Yes?”
“Is that a question? Are you saying you don’t know for sure?”
Her eyes stayed on the road. “When I left this morning, he said he understood my decision completely. He said he didn’t want me to be with him unwillingly—that it mattered to him how I felt. And so he’d be stepping back.”
I thought of the man I’d met yesterday, of those icy blue eyes and that calculating voice. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who’d step back. He did, however, seem like the kind of man who would lie about stepping back.
“So the pictures he’s taken of us…he went to all that effort to set up a potential blackmailing scheme and he’s just going to give that up?”
She bit her lip, checking over her shoulder and changing lanes again. I liked the way she drove—fast, capable, with a flavor of aggression that never actually translated into anything unsafe. “I don’t know,” she said a bit helplessly. “He seemed so determined and so yeah—it’s hard to imagine him going to all that effort just to leave, but I also don’t think he’d lie about it either.”
“I do,” I said under my breath.
She heard. “Look, Sterling is not a saint, but it’s not fair to demonize him just because he is my ex. Yes, he did bad things, but it’s not like he’s a psychopath. He’s just a spoiled boy who’s never had anyone say no to him. And I honestly don’t think he’ll do anything with those pictures.”
Is she defending him?It felt like she was defending him, and that pissed me off a little.
“Did he offer to return the files to you? Or even to delete them?”
“What? No. But—”
“Then I don’t think he’s planning on going anywhere,” I said, keeping my gaze on the window, where the dusk-covered fields were slowly turning into the sprawl of the city. “He said what he knew you wanted to hear, but this isn’t over, Poppy. It won’t be over for him until he gets what he wants. Which is you.”
Her hand slid over mine, and for a minute, I petulantly thought about ignoring it, about not lacing my fingers through hers, whether to hurt her or to show my disagreement, I wasn’t sure.
God, I was being such a tool.
When I grabbed her hand, I grabbed it tight. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just—it’s like this trident pointed right at my heart. That I might lose you or lose my job—or both.”
“You’re not losing me,” she insisted, glancing over. “And you won’t lose your job. Unless you want to.”
I rested my head against the cool glass of the window. And there it was…the choice. Black and white, night and day, one or the other. Poppy or God.
“Millie knows,” I said out of nowhere.
I felt her hand tense in mine, and there it was again, that weird anger, because why would Millie—awesome, dependable Millie—be more worrisome than Sterling? But I took a breath and then eased it out. I refused to let this latest cascade of events drive a wedge between us.
I wouldn’t allow it.