Heart Like Mine (5 page)

I couldn’t speak. If I did, I might have cried, and that would just have given her another thing to mock.

“Hey, Whitney,” Bree said, stepping in to save me. “Maybe you should go make yourself useful and throw up your lunch. If you hurry, maybe your ass won’t need its own zip code.”

Hearing this, Whitney’s normally pretty, unblemished face
briefly twisted into an ugly sneer, but she kept her eyes on me. “You should think about trying out for the dance team,” she said. “Maybe Mrs. McClain will feel sorry for you as an
underprivileged
student and let you join.”

Her gaggle of friends tittered at this, my eyes blurred, and Bree grabbed me by the arm. “C’mon. Let’s get to class.”

Leaving Whitney and her friends behind us, I let Bree lead me past the few remaining lockers before Mr. Tanner’s room, swallowing hard to make sure any remnants of my tears were gone. “Thanks,” I said as we slid into our seats next to each other.

Bree smiled, then pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “She’s a total bitch, so don’t listen to her, all right?”

I nodded but still felt the sting of Whitney’s words itching beneath my skin. It wasn’t like we were poor; my parents paid for some of our tuition, just not all of it. The one thing my mom and dad still agreed on was Max and me getting the best education we could, and Seattle Academy was the best.

“You’re not
going
to try out for dance team, are you?” Bree asked.

I shook my head and gave her a closed-lipped smile. My mom loved to dance—she’d been a cheerleader in high school, and it would have made her happy if I did try out, but I knew that getting on the team would mean I’d be away from the house more and Max would have to deal with Mama on his own. He was too young to handle one of her crying sessions when I wasn’t there. Even if I’d wanted to join, it just wasn’t an option.

I took a couple of deep breaths, the tension in my body relaxing just enough to let me pay attention when Mr. Tanner told us to settle down and began his lecture on women’s suffrage. He had only been talking for about twenty minutes when the black phone on his desk rang. He nodded as he listened, thanked
whoever had called, and hung up. Only the front office used that phone, so I wondered who had done something bad enough to interrupt class.

“Ava?” Mr. Tanner said, and my belly immediately flip-flopped. “You need to get your things from your locker and head to the office, okay?”

I sighed. “Is it Max?”
That little monster. Mama’s going to be pissed if he got in trouble.

Mr. Tanner pressed his lips together and gave his head a quick shake. Bree shot me a questioning look, and I shrugged slightly, then closed up my folder. Every eye in the room was on me, and I felt my face getting warm again. A few whispers started, but Mr. Tanner shushed them. I slowly put on my jacket and took careful, deliberate steps toward the front of the room. I stopped in front of Mr. Tanner’s desk, searching his face for some kind of clue, but there was nothing there. “Is everything all right?” I asked him, and he held my gaze for a moment before dropping it to the floor.

“You just need to go to the office,” he repeated, so I walked out the door and made my way alone down the long, quiet hall.

It was Monday afternoon, and before Kelli left the house to pick the kids up from school, Victor called and asked her to stop by the Loft. “I need to talk with you about something,” he said. “It won’t take long. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, tops.”

She knew she wasn’t going to like whatever it was he had to tell her. They’d been divorced for several years, but she still recognized the edge in his voice. The first time she’d heard him use it she was nineteen and working as a waitress in the restaurant he managed, eavesdropping as he fired the busboy who’d been caught taking one of Kelli’s substantial tips off a table.

“Thanks,” she said to Victor later, after he’d escorted the terminated employee out the front door. “I feel kind of bad for him.” She understood what it was to need money; she shared a tiny two-bedroom apartment with four other girls and was still having a hard time making rent. But she wouldn’t steal. She already had enough to feel guilty about—adding theft to the list might have sent her over the edge.

“Don’t,” Victor said, briefly putting his hand on her shoulder. Kelli’s skin tingled and her stomach wiggled. His gray eyes lit up as he grinned at her and she smiled in response. He’d taken a chance on hiring her, considering she didn’t have any fine-dining restaurant experience. She didn’t know anything about pairing
wines with food or what it meant to “eighty-six” an item from the menu when it ran out. Much to the entire kitchen staff’s amusement, the first time she’d told the other servers that they were out of salmon for the rest of the night she’d accidentally announced that the fish had been “sixty-nined.”

But when Victor interviewed her, she’d batted her eyelashes and pushed out her chest, methods she’d learned were effective in almost every situation for getting what she wanted from men, and it had worked. She could tell Victor was attracted to her, so she played that to her advantage, campaigning for the coveted high-volume weekend shifts and then the best tables in the restaurant—the ones by the window with a view of the city. At first, she flirted with him only to be granted those perks, but after a couple of weeks, she realized she was attracted to him, too. He was twenty-five, good-looking, and kind. He joked around with the employees—he almost made working fun—but he also didn’t let them slack off. He’d worked on the line in the kitchen before being promoted to manager just a few months before she moved to Seattle, and she soon learned that he held aspirations of opening his own restaurant.

“I think I might need someone to help me get it started,” he told her one night after the restaurant had closed. Everyone else had gone home and they sat together at a small table, a candle flickering between them. She was counting her tips right along with the number of times he smiled at her. “Can you think of anyone who might be interested?”

“Maybe,” she said with a slow, suggestive curve of her mouth. She knew how to play this game. She knew how to draw him in and then how to pull back just enough to make him want her a little more. It was a subtle dance, one that came as easily to her as breath. She didn’t enjoy using this technique to get what
she needed—it made her feel whorish, as her parents had once accused her of being. But with Victor, it was different. She
wanted
him to want her. She liked his sense of humor and how hard he worked at his job. She liked that when he talked to her, he looked her straight in the eyes instead of at her chest. She had a chance to re-create herself here—to leave what had happened in California behind. She could morph into whatever Victor needed her to be, as long as she could find a way to make him love her.

He held her gaze then, the glow from the candle making his gray eyes sparkle. “Do you need a ride home?” he asked, and Kelli dropped her chin down a notch, looking up at him from beneath her long lashes before telling him yes. She knew what this meant. She knew he wanted to sleep with her, and despite her resolve not to get involved with a man for a long, long time, she felt the familiar pull of attraction in her pelvis, and she let him take her hand and lead her to his car.

“I have roommates,” she said quietly after he had started the engine. “Should we go to your place instead?”

He turned to look at her. “What for?”

Oh god.
Kelli blushed and dropped her eyes to her lap. “Nothing. No reason. Sorry.” She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid, thinking he’d be interested in someone like her. She hadn’t even graduated from high school. She couldn’t. Not after what happened. She’d missed the last half of her freshman year, and when she finally came home the next fall, she was a mess—unable to get out of bed, reluctant to shower or eat more than the bare minimum to avoid starvation. Her parents eventually agreed to let her get her GED through the local community college instead of returning to the school where everyone knew her, but she couldn’t help feeling that this wasn’t the same as having an actual diploma.

Victor reached over and put his hand on top of hers. “Hey.
Don’t be sorry. I like you. But I’m your boss, you know? There are rules I need to follow. I have to be careful.”

Relieved, Kelli met his gaze and gave him another smile. “I can be careful.”

“I’m sure you can,” Victor said with a short laugh. “How about I take you on a real date this week? If we feel like it might go somewhere, I can tell the HR rep for the restaurant and just see how things go.”

Kelli nodded, pressing her lips together. The fact that he wasn’t going to try to sleep with her right away made her like him even more. He was responsible. So mature. He made her feel safe. As they got to know each other over the next couple of months, she began to believe she’d finally found someone who might accept her for exactly who she was. Someone who’d take care of her.

Even now, in some ways, even though they were divorced, he still did. He let her stay in the house his mother had left him so Kelli wouldn’t have a house payment and the kids wouldn’t have to move. He made sure she got her job back at the restaurant where they’d first met. He paid his child support on time and she never had to worry about the kids’ tuition, either. He took care of the scholarship applications. She’d been the one who told him to leave, but she hadn’t really believed that he would. By the time she realized her mistake, it was too late. She couldn’t find a way to get him to come back. She tried to seduce him, once, after he’d moved out. She’d left Max and Ava with Diane and gone to his new house wearing only a black bra and panties beneath her trench coat, like one of the daring characters she read about in her favorite romance novels.

“Kelli,” he’d said, clearly surprised to see her when he opened the front door. “Are the kids okay? Why didn’t you call me?”

“The kids are fine,” she said. “They’re with Diane.”

His expression went flat. “Then what’s going on? Why are you here?”

She put her hands against his chest and gave him a playful push. “To see you, silly,” she said. “I thought we could talk.”

Victor sighed. “We don’t
need
to talk.”

“Are you sure?” Kelli said, quickly untying her coat and flashing him right there on the front porch. She held her breath, waiting for him to take her in his arms, for everything that had gone wrong to be righted.

But he only stared at her, the pity in his eyes too much for her to bear. “Kelli,” he began, but she stopped him by closing her coat and shaking her head.

“No, it’s fine. I get it.” Something went hard inside her then, and shattered. “You’ve turned into him, you know. Leaving your family like this.”

Victor tilted his head toward his shoulder. “Into who?”

“Your father.” She spun around and raced down the front steps before he could respond, knowing that she had just delivered what had to be the fatal blow to their marriage. After her saying that to him, there was no way he’d ever return to them. She drove home crying, mortified that she’d believed sex would so easily win him back. What an idiot she was. And in the end, she lost him, just like she’d lost so many other things.

All she had left were her children, whom she adored above everything else. She felt as though they were the only evidence that she was a successful person—they were both smart, were kind, and carried an innate sense of self-worth Kelli had never possessed. She hoped that how she’d mothered them had something to do with this. She wasn’t perfect as a parent by any means, but she knew she treated them better than her parents
had treated her. No matter what they did, they knew how much she loved them.

She pulled into the parking lot of the Loft, checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, and practiced her smile. Not too big—she didn’t want to look desperate. But she wanted Victor to see the girl he fell in love with, the girl he took for long walks around Green Lake, the girl whom, when the single blue line doubled in the restaurant bathroom, he’d gotten down on one knee in front of and asked to marry him. She was only twenty—too young to get married, too young to become a mother—but she felt as though in meeting Victor, the universe was giving her a second chance. The chance to live the right kind of life, be the right kind of person. Victor’s own father had left him with his mother when Victor was only five years old; Kelli knew that having a family, being a good father, was the most important thing to him. He would be the father he’d never had. She’d been convinced he would never leave her. But she was naïve to have thought that creating a new life would erase the sins from her past. She was stupid to believe she could outrun the pain.

She wondered what it was Victor wanted to talk with her about today and if he would be distracted by the purple smudges beneath her eyes. The pills she took to sleep worked only sporadically—she found herself needing to take more and more. They hadn’t worked at all last night. She’d paced the house like a wildcat, mewling silently as she ruminated on the gaping holes in her life. Mostly, the empty place where a happy marriage should have been. The place where Victor used to stand.

A sharp rap on her window yanked her out of her thoughts and sent her pulse racing. She whipped her head around and saw Spencer, Victor’s best friend and head chef, standing next to the car with a gentle smile on his face. She grabbed her purse and opened the car door to greet him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Just wanted to say hello. It’s been a while.” He placed a beefy hand on her back and gave it an awkward pat. Kelli found it sad how friends seemed to get divvied up after a divorce, like a couple’s book or CD collection. When they were married, she and Victor weren’t terribly social—he was always too busy working for them to spend much time with other couples—but when they separated, she realized just how many of her personal connections were through his restaurant. She had Diane, who’d befriended her after Ava was born, and a few acquaintances at her own job, but it was Victor who kept custody of everyone else, including Spencer.