Betrayals (Cainsville Book 4) (18 page)

“Cheating?”

“I was going to say sleight of hand.”

“Same thing.”

“Allegedly.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m not going to wager. We will, however, need cards. Do you have a deck?”

“No, but I can acquire one far more easily than I can acquire a television.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. I bet one of your neighbors has a lovely big-screen TV you could lift faster than you could go out and buy a deck of cards.”

His eyes glinted. “I thought you weren’t wagering tonight.”

I laughed. “Tempting, but we’d better stick to cards.”

“Then make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back shortly.”

T
hat
night, I dreamed that Gabriel found us something fun to do together. And it wasn’t cards.

I woke from the dream, stretching in bed, pillows against me, face buried in them, inhaling the smell of him, drowsy and happy and—

Oh, shit.

I jumped up, pushing the pillow away and gasping for breath, struggling to clear the images from my mind because … Shit, shit,
shit.

It was one thing to stay overnight at a guy’s house. It was another to sleep in his bed. And it was another still when you could smell him in that bed, as if he was lying right beside you.

Shit, shit,
shit
.

I flicked on the bedside light. I still picked up the faint scent of him, tugging along the image of Gabriel himself, in bed and—He’d wanted to change the sheets earlier, but I’d said not to bother. Insisted on it, actually. Maybe because I didn’t
want
those sheets changed. I’d remembered other nights, the faint smell of him coming through the fresh pillowcase.

I had to change the sheets. At least that should keep me from having any unwelcome dreams. But doing that in the middle of the
night? At best, it would suggest my head injury might be serious. At worst, it would be downright rude, implying the sheets stunk.

I glanced at the bedside table. Gabriel had picked up ginger ale because that’s what I’d had in the hospital. I splashed the sheet with sticky soda.

Off with the soiled sheets. Now to find a new set.

A peek in the bedroom closet showed clothing. The en suite bathroom didn’t have a closet. I’d seen one in the main bath, so I tiptoed through the living room and inside, closing the door all but a crack before turning on the light.

I opened the bathroom closet. Toiletries. Towels. A folded duvet cover, which suggested there were sheets in here somewhere. The shelves ran deep, and I tugged out the duvet cover and what looked like unused pillow shams—yeah, really couldn’t imagine Gabriel using pillow shams. There was something behind them. A box. I peeked in and …

It looked like cans. I pulled one out. I didn’t stop to consider whether I should—it was cans, not hidden client files.

I was holding a can of beef stew.

I reached into the box and felt around. More cans. Okay, well, that wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was none of my business. I backed out and …

And Gabriel was standing right there. Still dressed from the day before, in trousers and a half-buttoned shirt.

“Hey, sorry,” I said. “I spilled pop on the sheets and was looking for clean ones and—”

I lifted my hands in a shrug and realized I was still holding the stew. He looked at it. He looked at me. I put the can back so fast it clanged against the others, and I shoved the duvet and shams back in.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry. I wasn’t snooping. That’s why I didn’t close the door and … And I guess I should have
asked, but I didn’t want to wake you, and I figured this was the obvious place, and I saw the duvet and there was something behind it and …”

And I’m babbling. Desperately babbling in hopes you’ll get that look off your face.

Except it wasn’t a look. That was the problem. His face was blank, and that emptiness wasn’t a lack of emotion or reaction—it was a ten-foot-thick wall of ice.

I closed the closet door. “If you can just direct me to the sheets. Or get them. Right, that’s better. You get them, and I’ll put them on, and you can go back to bed. I’m sorry for disturbing you. Really sorry—”

He turned and walked out. I hesitated. Then I followed him into the bedroom. He was opening the dresser’s bottom drawer and removing sheets.

I forced a strained laugh. “I would never have looked there. Thanks. I really didn’t want to be looking at all. I just thought I’d check the bathroom closet and then I’d have given up.” I had my hands out for the sheets, but he walked past me and started unfolding them on the bed.

“I can do that,” I said.

No response.

I picked up the discarded sheets. “Where can I put these? You send it out, right? Is there someplace …”

He started making the bed. I folded the soiled sheets as well as I could, babbling the whole time.

Just going to put these here, right over here, and did I mention how sorry I am for snooping, except I wasn’t really snooping, because I’d never do that.

“I’m going to take the sofa,” I said. “I’m so sorry about this. I guess the sheets weren’t that wet. I should have just left them.”

He picked up a pillow and changed the case.

“I
am
sorry,” I said. “You know I don’t pry. I
hope
you know that. I’ll … I’ll be on the sofa, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

I got halfway to the door. Then, “Wait.”

I turned. He had his back to me, kneeling in front of the bedside table, and I thought I’d misheard, but I paused anyway. He reached under the top shelf of the table. There was a ripping sound. He folded a length of duct tape and set it on the table. Then he turned with a gun in his hand.

I started in surprise. Yes, I suppose having a pissed-off guy pull out a gun was cause for shock. But the surprise was simply seeing him with a weapon.

He set the gun on the bed. Then he reached between the mattress and box spring, pulled out a knife, and put it beside the gun. Money came next, taped under the bed, an envelope of hundreds, which he dumped onto the sheet. He walked to the closet, dug into the back, and took out a case of Coke.

When he walked wordlessly past me and out the door, I looked at those things on the bed, that odd collection of items he’d kept stashed away. The gun I understood, for home security. Gun plus a knife? Options. The money made sense. The case of Coke, though? I stared at that and I thought of the stew in the bathroom closet and then …

Then I understood.

As he walked back in, carrying the carton of stew, I said, “Oh.”

He stopped short, still no expression but his jaw tensing as he said, “Oh?”

I opened my mouth to say that I got it, that I understood. Then I realized how presumptuous that sounded. And how much worse this could get if I was wrong, and it seemed I was trying to analyze him.

So instead I said, “When I was in first grade, my teacher went on mat leave and we had a substitute for two months.”

That got a lifting of the brows and an expression that could best be summed up as
Huh?
I moved to the bed and lowered myself beside the weapons and money.

“She was a real bitch,” I said. “She’d retired a few years before. I’m guessing she needed extra cash and resented that, so she took it out on the kids. She had this rule that you couldn’t use the bathroom except at recess and lunch. I didn’t think much about it until one day I had to go bad. Really bad. My stomach started cramping and, well, I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say I had an accident. Then I had to sit there while it seeped … Yep, skipping the details. The point is that by the time I could get up, everyone knew exactly what had happened. For weeks, they called me a baby. One of the boys brought me a diaper and …” I stopped and looked over at him. “As childhood traumas go, I know that’s really lame. Compared to—Well, compared to most kids. But I had a damned near perfect childhood. Other kids liked me well enough, and I’d never been picked on, and for me this
was
traumatic. All I could think was that the whole thing could have been avoided if I’d had clean underwear in my backpack.”

His brows lifted again.

“Yes, I know. That makes no sense. Clean underwear wouldn’t have fixed anything. But it was like … it was like I needed to feel I could control the situation. To make sure that it never happened again. Which I could do by keeping clean underwear in my backpack. I don’t even want to admit how many years I did that. It was about feeling that, if I had those, I’d never have to endure a trauma like that again. I was prepared.”

I looked at the weapons and food and money, and I winced. “And that is the worst analogy ever. I’m sorry. I was trying … I wanted … Obviously, me and my clean underwear story isn’t anything close to …” I pressed my palms to my eyes and got up. “I’m sorry. I’m tired and babbling. I just wanted …”

“To tell me you understood.”

“Which I don’t, obviously. I can’t, and to even pretend I can is presumptuous.”

He shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It is, and I’m sorry. Whatever reason you have for keeping this around is your business, and if you want to explain, then I’m happy to listen, but I won’t analyze and pretend I get it.”

“Tell me what you think it is,” he said.

“I don’t want to—”

“If you’re wrong, that’s fine.” He looked at me. “But I don’t believe you are.”

I took a deep breath and turned to the items on the bed. “Weapons, money, food, drink … It’s survival stuff. Like what people stash away in case of a natural disaster or a nuclear bomb or, hell, a zombie apocalypse. It makes them feel the same way I did, carrying around clean underwear. Like they’re in control and prepared. Except you aren’t worried about the end of the world. For you, it really is about survival. You lived for years where all this”—I waved at the items—“was a matter of life and death, and I’m sure there were times when you didn’t have it, not nearly enough of it, and now you do and …”

I took another deep breath. “It’s like my underwear times a hundred, because, let’s face it, my childhood trauma isn’t exactly traumatic. Yours—” I swallowed, biting back any observation that might make him uncomfortable. “I don’t know how you did it, Gabriel. I don’t know how you got from there to here”—I motioned at the room—“because I can’t even fathom what it takes to accomplish that, and if having a case of Coke and a gun under your bed helps you feel like you’ll never end up there again, then it’s a small, small thing, because if it was me, I’d need a whole lot more than an envelope of money to give me what I needed to put my past behind me and move forward.”

He nodded and said, “Yes.” That’s all he said.
Yes.
Then he picked up the case of stew and returned to the bathroom. When he came back with a roll of duct tape, I helped return the rest to where it went, and he didn’t try to stop me. Didn’t say a word, either, but that horrible, dead silence from earlier had passed, and this was …

I won’t say it was comfortable. I could feel his lingering discomfort, pulling the room down, the mood somber. But it was relaxed enough for us to get everything back in place. Then I said, “Do you have ice cream?”

He looked over.

“I’m going to guess that’s a no,” I said. “And also, ‘Why the hell are you asking about ice cream at four in the morning?’”

I won’t say he smiled—or even that his lips moved—but his eyes warmed.

“That day with the underwear fiasco,” I said, “my dad took me out for ice cream. I kind of feel like ice cream.”

Totally untrue. I hadn’t told my parents about the “great underwear incident” until a week later, when my dad finally convinced me to confess what was wrong. He’d gone to the school first. Then he took me to Six Flags, knowing the speed and thrill of the rides was the best thing to clear my mind and get me back on my feet. But I wanted to help Gabriel find his balance, and ice cream seemed a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

“I know there’s a twenty-four-hour shop down the road,” I said. “Can we walk over?”

“I believe I can do better than ice cream from a convenience shop,” he said, the faintest smile breaking through.

“At four in the morning?”

“Let’s see.”

G
abriel
did not know where to find an open ice-cream parlor at 4 a.m. He did, however, know where to find allnight restaurants, not surprising given the hours he kept. One of those was a takeout diner. I got a milkshake. Gabriel said, “The same,” and when the waitress asked which flavor, he frowned at the list, as if annoyed that options existed. “Whatever she had,” settled the matter efficiently.

We went to sit, only to notice a couple of men watching us and whispering. That was less common these days—I’m getting to be old news—but normally, when it happened, Gabriel ignored it. Tonight, the look he gave the men suggested that if they said a word, he’d have a few to say back.

“How about outside?” I said. “There’s a park a few doors down, and it’s not too cold.”

We sat in the park until the first hint of sun touched the horizon. It wasn’t exactly a warm night, and the milkshakes didn’t make it any warmer, but once we got talking, neither of us seemed to notice. We talked about the lamiae case and Aunika Madole—hashing it out because that’s what we did, talked and bounced ideas around and segued along any path vaguely related to the topic at hand.

When I slurped the melted last of my shake, he said, “Good?”

I nodded.

“Even if it wasn’t ice cream like your father got you?”

“He … didn’t actually get me ice cream. Not that time.”

“I know.”

I laughed softly. “I’m that bad a liar?”

“No, you’re a decent liar. Not on my level, of course, but perfectly adequate. I could not, however, imagine you telling your father that story and him resolving it by taking you for ice cream. At least, not until he’d resolved the core issue. He went to the school, I presume.”

“Got the substitute teacher fired.”

“Good.”

“I feel a little bad about that.”

“No, you don’t.”

I smiled. “Okay, you’re right. I don’t.” I took his empty cup and stood. “How was the milkshake?”