Be Careful What You Wish For (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

THAT NIGHT (THE next morning, actually), we lay in bed, Kage holding me close.  I was absentmindedly swirling my index finger across his chest, and my mind wandered back to earlier that day when Steph had been telling us we were outsiders.

“
Kage?”

“Hmm?”

He was sleepy.  I could tell by the lazy tone of his voice.  “Oh, never mind.”

His chest rose as he drew in a deep breath, moving my head with it. 
“No, what?”  He stirred a little, as though trying to wake himself up.

I inhaled.  “Did that bother you this morning?”

“What bother me?”

“When
Steph was calling you a cheater…calling me a homewrecker.”

His voice was low, and I knew the only way my only roommate who was home would know what he was saying would be if she’d crawled under the bed. 
“Nah.  Why would I give a shit what some book smart person thinks about me?”  I didn’t say anything, just kept swirling that finger over his nipple.  He moved a little.  “It bothered you, didn’t it?”

As much as I’d wanted to say it hadn’t, that would have been a damn lie.
  “Yeah.”

“You
wanna talk about it?”

“No.  Not that anyway.  I mean…I believe you when you say your marriage was already over.  I’ve accepted that.  I’m okay with it.  But it got me to thinking about growing up.”

“You had it rough.”

“Yeah.”
  I didn’t know how much I wanted to tell Kage.  I trusted him, yes, but my past life I wanted to stay in the past.  I’d run from it into a new life that I was comfortable in, and I didn’t want to allow those feelings about who I’d been or where I’d come from to drown me again.

“You want to talk about it?”

I kissed his chest just under the nipple.  “I don’t know.  I just…”  Why not tell him a little?  “I was gonna be a freshman in high school, right?  And high school’s like a new start, you know?  Lots of new people, new faces, new teachers.  You have a second chance and you can start over.  I embraced that chance.  So I pursued a dream.  I wanted to try out for the cheer team.  The cheerleaders at our high school were a big deal, you know?  All the kids looked up to them, envied them, worshipped them, and they seemed to have so much fun.  So we had two days of working with the old cheer team to get ready for tryouts, right?  And I tried so hard.  I wanted it so badly, because I just knew if Jessie from the trailer park could get onto the cheer squad, kids would forget that she was Jessie from the trailer park.  She would become Jessie from the cheer team, you know?”

I swallowed.  I had never told a soul this before, and I hadn’t realized that deep down it still hurt. 
“But, unlike the other girls trying out—the girls whose parents actually had money—I’d never been in gymnastics or had dance lessons.  I’d never had any kind of athletic training that would allow me to do the things these other girls were doing.  I had a dream but no qualifications.  I couldn’t do the splits.  I couldn’t perform a coordinated cartwheel to save my soul.  I didn’t have any qualities a good cheerleader would have.

“Oh, the judges were nice enough.  They were.  They let me down easily.  But it hurt.  It really hurt.  Worse than not making the team was having all those other girls know that I hadn’t
belonged there in the first place.  Their knowing snide looks, their nasty little comments I couldn’t hear.  So when we started school that fall, I had the additional shame of failure.  Yeah, it died down after a while, but it was in the back of my mind.”  I felt Kage’s hand run down the side of my head, smoothing my hair.  “I suppose shit like that has made me stronger, you know, but being called an outsider just kind of dredges that stuff up.”

“You know that shit doesn’t matter anymore, right?”

I shifted my body and looked up at him.  “Yeah, I know.”

“None of it matters. 
Especially now.”  I nodded.  “It’s you and me, Jessica.  None of them matter.”

I took a deep breath.  “You’re right.  When I got here to Pueblo and started going to school, it changed my life.  I never looked back.  But just something about the way she asked…got me to thinking.”

“Let it go, baby.”

I nodded again and my finger resumed its swirling motion.  “What about you,
Kage?  From everything you’ve ever told me, your life sucked.  I had a cake walk compared to you, but you’d never know it from the way you act.”

He smiled. 
“Nah.  You’re no different in that regard.”

“Oh, I really am.  You have such an optimistic way of looking at things.  You seem to look on the bright side no matter what.  It makes me realize things aren’t so bad.”

“They’re not, are they?”  He sat up, his arm still around me.  “The one thing I learned a long time ago—no one can ever take who you are away from you.  Oh, and no matter how shitty things look tonight, they always, always look better in the morning.”  I shook my head.  Yeah, my guy was the one who could find the silver lining in all that fucking gray.  “You just have to sleep it off.”

I kissed his chest again.  “Just one of the many things I’ve grown to love about you.”

“I want you to see that too, Jess.  I do.”

“How do you do it,
Kage?  I do great with goals.  If I have something I’m focusing on, something I want, I’m driven, and I’ll stop at nothing to get it.  But I can’t say that it’s brought me happiness.  I don’t think I can say I’ve ever been happy.”

“Never?”

I took a deep breath.  “How do you do it?”

“There’s always something.”  He was quiet for a few moments, gathering his thoughts.  My finger did its thing—swirl, swirl, swirl—while he concentrated.
  “I was still in foster care when I was in high school.  No one wants to adopt an older kid, especially one who’s had documented emotional problems and some issues with violent behavior.  So I was shuffled from one home to the next, and they’d get rid of me when they saw the baggage I was carrying.  There was one guy—I think he cared, but he still had no clue how to deal with me.  I stayed with him and his wife the longest.  She was hardly ever around, but he tried.  Maybe they were in it for the money.  I don’t know.

“Anyway…so I met this cheerleader.”  I raised my eyebrows and looked up at him. 
“Yeah.  We didn’t seem so different.  She was a little tease too.  I hadn’t been around the block much, and she took me for a hell of a ride.

“We started dating the beginning of my junior year.  We’d break up when she got pissed at me and get back together when she decided she wanted me again.  One of those times, she even went out with another guy for a couple of weeks.  But she had this hold over me.  I was a real sucker, and she knew how to work me.”

He was quiet for a while, so I asked, “Fay?”

It had been obvious, but I wanted the confirmation. 
“Yeah.  So, midway through our senior year, she tells me she’s pregnant.”  He’d told me part of this before, but I could tell he needed to talk about it more.  “I ask if she’s sure the baby’s mine, and she slaps me, crying, accusing me of being an insensitive asshole…which, I suppose, I was.  I don’t know.  And I grappled with it for a while.  I finally talked to the old guy, my foster dad, and he told me I had to do the right thing, the noble thing.  I had to be a dad to my kid, had to man up.  He took me to get my GED and then I got a job.  I didn’t get the job at the mill then.  No, I had shitty little jobs, but I tried.  Anyway, it was during that time that I asked Fay to marry me, and she said yeah.  I moved in with her family.  Well…her mom and brother.  Her mom was—
is
—in a wheelchair.  And her little brother…he was a tiny guy at the time.  Her dad was on his deathbed.

“Anyway, Jess, it would have been so easy for me to run or to curse
my fate, but I held onto the promise of that baby at first.  I was so mad when it first happened, feeling trapped, feeling cornered, but then I thought maybe I could be a dad to that kid, the dad I’d always wanted.

“I
think I you it took me a long while to discover she wasn’t pregnant.  When I finally asked, she said she lost the baby.  It doesn’t matter now, and it didn’t then, because by then I thought I loved Fay and I’d grown to love Flynt, and I saw that he needed a father figure worse than I ever had.  I knew I could be someone he needed.”  He took another deep breath.  “God, I love that kid.  And I stayed for lots longer than I ever would have wanted to because of that love.  I know he has his problems, but he’s a good kid.

“And that’s what I mean, Jess.  It would have been so easy so many times for me to just throw in the towel, to say
fuck it
and give up or refuse to accept responsibility.  But if she was pregnant?  Well, I’d had something to do with it.  And after she wasn’t, I thought maybe the universe had sent me to Flynt, you know—maybe this kid needed me.  How could I say no?”

That was it. 
Kage had my heart and my soul for eternity.  I got closer to his face and stroked his cheek.  “That…that’s what I want you to teach me.”

His smile was gentle, creeping just slightly into his eyes.  “Stay with me, Jess, and I’ll show you the sun.”

I knew in my heart that it was true…but he’d had my heart already anyway.  The sun?  That was just an added bonus.

Chapter Twenty-six

SO I MADE it to the end of the semester, not with excellent grades as I should have, but with above average ones, and now that my love life was better than it had ever been, above average scores in grad school were good enough for me.

It was an ongoing process, but on an almost daily basis,
Kage showed me new ways of looking at the world.  His outlook was amazing, and I relished sharing that vision.

So I really wasn’t expecting the doubts to return again.  They wouldn’t h
ave if things had continued the way they’d been.  But that’s my stinking life for you.  I should have known to not relax, to not let myself get happy, because it seemed as though whenever I let my guard down and thought for just a moment that I might actually deserve a little happiness, that was when the other shoe dropped.

And damn.  Did
it drop hard.

It started just with niggling little doubts.  You know…why wasn’t
Kage calling or texting right back like he used to?  He’d tell me he was busy—work, practice with the guys, whatever.  It’s not like I found lipstick on his neck or heard him whispering sweet nothings on his phone to someone else.  It was just a feeling.

That feeling
was compounded by what I found when I went out to Mark’s place to visit on a Saturday.  The guys sometimes practiced on Saturday, and so Kage and I usually got together after I was done working, but, on a whim, I’d asked for that night off the week before.  I needed some time off just for the hell of it, and I wanted to spend that time with my man.

I was driving to Pueblo West, all smiles.  I had the radio cranked and the windows down to deal with the blazing heat of early June.  The station was playing some Devour the Day as I got closer to Mark’s house, and I turned down the radio since it was a nice neighborhood and I wasn’t speeding down the highway anymore.  A slight breeze was blowing, but the sun was already relentless, and it was only the speed of my car helping me keep my cool.  I knew Mark’s house was air conditioned, though, so relief would be immediate…although I was fairly certain
Kage would escalate my temperature again in no time flat.

Kage’s
truck was there.  Good.  I fetched the bag out of the passenger seat, the one that had a bottle of red wine with matching red lingerie.  I wanted to let my man know how important he was to me, and I wanted him to know he was special.  We might have to wait till later that evening, because I didn’t want to cramp Mark’s style, but I planned to show Kage a great time.

Everything seemed normal as I walked toward the front of the house.  If they’d had any kind of band practice, it was over by now, because I didn’t see any signs of Diesel or Jason, so things were quiet.
  I couldn’t see Mark’s truck either, but it might have been in the garage.

I rang the doorbell and then I waited. 
And waited.  And waited.  I glanced over at Kage’s truck again.  Well, I thought, maybe he and Mark had gone somewhere together.  That was what I got for trying to surprise him instead of letting him know I was coming over.  I decided to ring the bell one more time, just to make sure he wasn’t there, and then I’d text him and probably get in my car and head back to my apartment till I heard from him.

But then I h
eard the turn of the doorknob.  I smiled when I saw Kage open the door, my gorgeous guy looking fine as usual—a bit of a shadow on his face, because he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, but that made him look all the more yummy as far as I was concerned.  And good thing, because I had plans for him that afternoon.

“Hi, Jess.  What a nice surprise.”  He took me in his arms and kissed me, and I couldn’t wait to tell him what I had in the bag dangling off my arm.
  I heard music playing, coming from the stereo in the living room, and it took me a moment to realize it was Young Guns.

As
Kage released my lips and I could feel him start to lead me inside, I looked toward the living room and the source of the music, but I happened to see into the hallway.  There I saw someone familiar.  It was the girl—the
groupie
, for lack of a better word—who had come home with Mark after the concert a while back.  I recognized her, not from her light brown hair or gigantic breasts, but from the sleeve tattoos that covered her arms and the septum piercing adorning the bottom of her nose.  I felt a little confused at first, because I was painfully aware that Mark was not there.  In spite of the still heat around me, I felt a coldness wash over my bones as my brain registered what I saw.  The woman stood there in a black bra and panties…and nothing else.  No, that wasn’t true.  She was also wearing black high heels.  I’m sure my eyes grew wide as I put two and two together.  I didn’t stop and wonder how they thought they’d get away with it, unless Mark was already tired of her. I didn’t think anything.  It was all emotion—pure, raw hurt.  Betrayal doesn’t even begin to describe what was going through my mind.  There was no thought, just pain, and I had to get away.

I looked from the woman—I couldn’t even remember her name—to
Kage, and I was proud of the way my face had frozen.  I knew I had turned ice cold, so I wouldn’t become a blubbery, weepy, pathetic mess.  Or, at least, that was how I envisioned my response in my mind.  I managed to shut something off, temporarily, of course, and I was grateful that my brain was able to do that.  I was working on autopilot at that point.

I took in his eyes, and I couldn’t read him.  I had no idea what he was thinking.  It didn’t matter, though, because I had to get out of there.
  I couldn’t deal with how I was feeling.  It was too raw, too real, too in my face, and it was a hell of a slap.  I took a slow, deep breath and grabbed the handles of the bag in my left hand and slid it off my other arm.  I held it out to him until he took it with his hand, and then I backed away two steps and turned.  I began walking down the path toward my car—not too fast, not too slow, but with a determination that would hold those tears behind a dam until I was safely far away.

See, where I come from, tears are a sign of weakness.  Yeah, I sometimes cry when I get angry too.  It’s those raw, powerful,
big emotions having no way of staying contained inside the bottle civilized society expects.  It doesn’t matter what brings on those tears, though, and from my neck of the woods, tears mean frailty, and you’ll be eaten alive if anyone sees them.  I had the frozen expression glued to my face, and it would serve me well until I found a safe place to let it all out.  I just had to get the fuck out of there fast before those emotions blew.

Kage
said, “Jessica?”  I heard the woman say something, and then Kage said, “Holly, what the hell?”  I kept walking and made it to my car.  I was completely emotionless by that point, shut off and grateful for it.  I heard him again.  “Jessica!”  But I was opening my door by that point, ready and needing to get in and run.

When I was seated in the car, though, he had caught up and his hands were on the door.  The window was rolled down and he bent over to see my face.  “Jess, what you saw back there, it’s not what you think.
”

Part of me wanted to fight for him, wanted to beg him to explain to me what was going on, but the rest of me knew deep down.  Fay had been right, and I had been such a sucker. 
Kage was such a wonderful guy, or so I’d thought, that I must have been blind to what she’d seen.  A sinking sensation floated in my chest, and I knew I was going down.  I had to get out of there.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, refusing to look at him.  Instead, I looked straight ahead, through the windshield.  I was afraid that, if I blinked, the tears would take control.

I started the car and shifted into
drive
, and I could sense that he had so much more to say, but he was smart and let me go.

Once on the main drag, I let the tears fall…and I decided to wallow until I felt better.  So that meant I wouldn’t accept phone calls or texts from
Kage for a while, definitely not that night.  I needed to get past that raw feeling.  Kage, of all people, would know I would need a good night’s sleep.

* * *

The next morning, I bothered to look at my phone.  There were a couple of texts, just asking me to call him when I was ready.  His one voice mail had come right after I’d left.  He’d said, “Jessie…God, I know exactly what that looked like, but I want you to know nothing happened between me and Holly.  I hope you know that.  It’s not what it looked like.  I want to talk to you when you’re ready.  Please call.”

He sounded so sad, so pained, but I knew it was nothing compared to how I felt.
  Still…we did need to talk, whether it was for me to tell him to fuck off and die or for me to decide what I could live with.

Yeah, pathetic.
  I was just like my mom.  Kage, the guy who felt like the one person in this universe who could complete me, was turning out to be just like all the assholes my mom had managed to find, and here I was deciding if I could handle being cheated on.  Did I love him and need him enough to allow him to abuse me in that fashion?

It turned out that, the more I considered it, the answer was no.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t be my mother.  I valued myself too much to allow someone to use me that way.  No, I didn’t have a large enough ego to believe I was
the be all, end all, but I
did
love myself and knew I was worth more than that.  So, after the last tear fell and I’d weighed the possibilities, I called Kage and told him I’d meet him, and he said he’d be over in a while.

When he walked into my apartment, he looked like a wreck.  I could tell he hadn’t slept much (of course, I hadn’t either) and he looked so sad.  I’d never seen that look on his face when he was talking about leaving Fay.  Maybe that was evidence in my favor.

No…I couldn’t allow myself to be swayed by his face.  I needed to be logical and listen to what he had to say.  His face was pure emotion and it would be a bad idea for me to judge him on emotion alone.  I had to be cold and separate myself from the feelings.  It would be the only way I could survive.

And I was hurting too.

So I held the door open, stepping aside for him to enter.  Lindsey was gone as she usually was late Sunday morning, and Steph had just left for the library, so we had the place to ourselves.  I was grateful, because we would have had to go to my bedroom for a private conversation otherwise, and I wasn’t ready to be there with him.  There were too many memories there.

I invited him into the kitchen and poured us both a cup of coffee before sitting down.  God, his face was going to destroy my resolve.  I had to find a way to shield myself.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

I sat down at the table next to him.  He looked like he wanted to wrap his arms around me, but I was doing my best to send out the psychic equivalent of a puffed up porcupine.  I knew how I was.  I could be too forgiving at times, especially with loved ones, and a hug might be all it would take for me to pretend it had never happened.  I couldn’t do that.  I had to protect myself.

“Jess,” he said, and I looked him in the eye. 
“I know you think you know what was going on yesterday.”  I blinked but said nothing.  I didn’t want to give anything away.  “Am I wrong?”  I shrugged.  “Holly was half naked.  I know if it was me—if I was in your shoes—that I’d be suspicious.”  He took a deep breath, leaving his coffee untouched.  “All I can do is tell you what happened and then leave it up to you.”  I nodded but remained silent.

He closed his eyes, inhaling, and then opened them to look at me.  “She and Mark got in a huge argument after band practice.  I don’t even know what they were fighting about.
  Hell, they haven’t even been together long enough for that kind of bullshit, but they were—nasty fight too.  So he stormed off to go to the bar.  That left me alone with her.  I just figured she’d leave.  Instead, she started hitting on me.  I told her she was only doing it because she was upset with Mark, but she wouldn’t stop.  She started taking her clothes off—you saw that.  When you rang the doorbell, I was relieved that someone was there, because I figured she’d put her clothes back on and go.  But when I answered the door, she knew it was you and wanted to make you miserable too.

“I swear, Jessica, I wasn’t doing anything.  I would never do that to you.  I know what it looked like, but I don’t want anyone other than you.  You are it for me, and I would never betray your trust.”
  He took another deep breath, his eyes searching mine.  “I understand why you’re uneasy about the whole thing.  I get it.  But…I just hope you can find it in yourself to trust me, to know that I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Oh, God.  I wanted to believe him.  Every fiber of my being wanted to believe, but that niggling doubt gnawed at me.  My mind kept reminding me that I was Holly just a few short months ago, throwing myself at this man, tempting him to cheat, and so what should I expect?  If he hadn’t been able to resist me, what made me think he could resist another woman, admittedly hotter than I, who was making it next to impossible?

And, come to think of it, Kage had seemed like an impossible mountain to surmount at first, but it really hadn’t been all that difficult to seduce him.  I could see that now, looking back on it.

But I looked at him and felt that undeniable pull, that part of me that felt like he was a missing part of me, and I knew I couldn’t turn my back on him.