Authors: Kat Attalla
“To win, right?”
“To capture your opponent’s king,” he corrected, holding up the carved wooden piece.
As he leaned forward to return the king to the board, she ducked under his out-stretched arm and snuggled against him. Her hand roamed freely over his broad chest, distracting his train of thought.
After a long pause, he drew a ragged breath and added, “Any piece can be sacrificed to protect the king.”
“Even the queen?”
“Especially the queen.”
“That figures,” she said with a laugh. “The reason you like chess is because it’s a feudalistic, sexist war game.”
“No. Because it’s so much likes life. You have to calculate every possibility before moving any piece.”
Lilly yawned. “Sounds boring.”
“If you don’t you will lose your king.”
“Isn’t that why we fought the Revolutionary War?”
Jack frowned. “Are you going to take this seriously?”
Because he seemed so determined to teach her, she reluctantly nodded.
He explained each piece and their movements around the board. She gazed up at him, pretending to be hung on his every word. Although one morning was not enough time to understand all the intricacies, he mesmerized her with his pure passion for the game. While he described the endless calculations that figured into every single move, she discovered just how closely chess paralleled his life.
Even yesterday, she sensed him fighting a losing battle with his conscience over making love with her. She smiled. Well, the first time, anyway. She could claim that, at least once, she had managed to checkmate him.
“Must you grin like that?”
“Like what?” she asked innocently.
* * * *
Jack slid his arm across her waist and lifted her into his lap. Apparently, he had been rambling a little too long, and Lilly’s mind had started to wander to more exciting matters. “Like you’re remembering something sexy.”
“And if I am? Does that bother you?” she purred.
His lips grazed her ear lobe as he whispered, “You know it does.”
“Actually, I don’t know.” She paused thoughtfully, and her contented smile faded. “I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling. You never talk about yourself.”
Jack dreaded this new turn the conversation had taken. He shrugged his shoulders casually, hoping to avoid the “let’s talk” phase of the morning after. “My life is an open book.”
“Written in a foreign language.”
“Well, when the movie rights are purchased, I’ll be sure they include subtitles.”
She jabbed him in the ribs, not amused by his flippant answer.
“Lilly?”
“Forget it, Jack,” she sniped as she pushed out of his arms. “I’ve already seen the movie version of your life and I didn’t like
The Lone Ranger
the first time around.”
He caught her wrist before she could spring to her feet and escape. “What just happened, Lilly? I thought we were having fun.”
“You were having fun,” she said sadly. “I was trying to have a relationship.” She glanced down at his fingers cuffing her wrist. “Let go.”
He dropped her hand and let her walk outside because he wasn’t able to deny her charge. When it came to discussing himself, he had kept her at arm’s length. To tell Lilly about his past, he would have to deal with the truths he’d been avoiding the past ten years.
Why did she care?
The obvious answer hit him with the force of a locomotive. She was in love with him. The very idea stunned him. Damn. How had he let things go this far? Of the few things that scared him shitless, love ranked number one.
He’d always viewed love as a noose. Like an outlaw, he’d spent most of his adult life trying not to get hung. What had Lilly called him? The Lone Ranger? Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.
* * * *
Lilly jogged into the wooded area beyond a broken fence. Without thought to her destination or direction, she walked away from the cabin. She kept a brisk pace uphill until the mountainous terrain left her gasping for air. When she reached a plateau, she sat down to rest at the bank of a small stream. Feeling hot, both physically and mentally, she kicked off her sneakers and dangled her feet in the cold water.
A clear blue sky met the gray outline of distant mountains. Just below, a hundred hues of green dotted the landscape that seemed to roll on for miles. She laid back into the soft grass. The gentle babble of the brook lowered her blood pressure, and the cool water lowered her heated anger.
What right did she have to be angry with Jack, anyway? He’d never lied or given her reason to believe he wanted a permanent relationship. In fact, he’d clearly spelled out the opposite. She couldn’t blame him if she naïvely credited him with emotions he didn’t possess.
Admitting the truth didn’t lessen the sharp pain stabbing at her heart. Of all the dumb things she’d done in her life, falling in love with Jack topped the list. She closed her eyes and expelled a deep sigh. She knew she should return to the house, but the warm sun and soothing sound of the brook conspired to keep her a bit longer. Before she could work up the energy to hike back, she needed a short rest. Just five minutes, she told herself as she closed her weary eyes.
What seemed like only seconds later, one of nature’s pesky little insects decided she’d had enough rest and landed on her nose. The ticklish sensation persisted, so she waved her hand across her face. Just another summer day, complete with annoying flies, she thought as she swatted away the pest now walking along her bare leg.
Her hand made contact with a solid mass of muscle. She gasped and struggled to sit up. The silhouette of a tall figure towered over her. Beams of light filtered from behind, like a scene from some eerie Hitchcock movie. She opened her mouth to scream but noting came out.
“Lilly?”
She heard the voice, but recognition took a few terrifying seconds. Tremors ran through her body. She shifted her position and rubbed her eyes. “Jack. You scared me,” she croaked.
He brushed a blade of grass across the tip of her nose. She glared at the offending object that had dared disrupt her nap and then pushed it away with a disgruntled hiss.
“You’ve been gone an hour. I was beginning to worry about you.”
An hour? She must have been more tired than she’d realized. She raked her hair away from her face with an unsteady hand. It took her a few moments to get her bearings.
She glanced out over the scenic valley below her. Now fully awake and her heart rate almost back to normal, she remembered their earlier disagreement and the way she stormed out of the cabin. She rested her chin on the top her knees and stared at the stream.
“I’m sorry about before,” she mumbled. “Your life is none of my business.”
* * * *
“It’s only natural that you would be curious—” Jack cut off his sentence. How noble of him to forgive her when he was at fault. He knew her better than he knew himself. She wouldn’t have slept with him unless she was in love with him. “Look, Lilly. I’m not very good at talking.”
“Oh, you’re good at talking, Jack,” she said bitterly. “You talk about me, you talk at me and sometimes you talk for me. But you never talk to me. Not about things that matter.”
“What makes you think my past, and the people in it, matter?”
She shook her head sadly. “Because they’re a part of who you are. I’m not asking for promises, Jack, but I’d like to share more than your bed. In the past week you’ve told me almost nothing about yourself. Your silence hurts.”
He hadn’t intentionally shut her out. She wanted answers to questions he’d never asked himself before. After all, why should he bother to deal with his feelings when his work provided him with the perfect opportunity to avoid them? “Do you really want to hear what a disappointment I am to my family?”
“No. I want to hear why you think you are a disappointment to them.”
“Okay. But remember, you asked for this.” He sat down by an oak tree and patted the ground next to him. She slid over and rested her head on his shoulder. “Should I start with the twenty-five room house in a Boston suburb with a full-time staff of fifteen? It wasn’t much but we called it home.”
Her body tensed angrily. “If you are going to tell me fairy tales, Jack, don’t bother.”
“I’m not. My brother and I grew up spoiled rotten. And I stress
rotten
. Anything we wanted, we got.”
“You sound rather hostile for someone who had it all,” she said.
“I am. Do you have any idea what it is to appreciate nothing? To answer for nothing? If I landed in trouble, my father bailed me out. Only, I discovered that all the money in the world can’t get rid of guilt.”
“What do you have to feel guilty about?”
She turned her baby blue eyes toward him, and for a long moment he debated about answering. Lilly, such a dreamer at heart, had created a myth about him that simply wasn’t true. Far from being some romantic hero, he was nothing more than a man who had done more than his fair share of screwing up.
“On my seventeenth birthday, my parents gave me a car. Not just any car. A sleek, black Corvette. Hot stuff for a teenager.”
“I’ll say. I got a new pair shoes and dinner of my choice on my birthday,” she said without a trace of envy.
“But you got your parents’ time and attention, didn’t you? I partied with friends on my birthday. You know. Show off the car, toss back a few beers.” He closed his eyes to gather his thoughts, but the sounds of screeching brakes and twisting metal still haunted him.
“And?” she prompted.
“There’s an old saying about God taking care of fools and drunks. Either category would have applied to me that night. Unfortunately, nobody looks after the accident victims of those fools and drunks. I watched the police use the Jaws of Life to pry a woman from her car while I walked away without a scratch. Not even a ticket. My father saw to that. The official police report hadn’t even listed me as being at fault for the accident.”
“Did the woman die?” She sucked in a sharp, audible breath. Her hands flew to her mouth as if she couldn’t believe she had asked the question.
So, his admission bothered her. He saw her struggling for something to say, but even Lilly, the eternal optimist, couldn’t find a silver lining to that dark cloud. “No, she didn’t die, but she was hurt pretty bad. I kept waiting for one of my parents to come give me the big talk. Tell me the error of my ways, maybe even punish me for my stupid and destructive behavior. Finally, at the end of the week, my father called me into his study. I was ready. I fully deserved anything I had coming.”
“And, did he give it to you?”
He nodded his head in a bitter affirmation. “Oh, sure. He gave it to me all right. The keys to a brand new car to replace the one I had totaled.”
The look of shock on Lilly’s face mirrored the very feelings he remembered from that day. He had asked his father about the woman in the hospital and was told everything had been taken care of. As if he had gotten a parking ticket instead of nearly killing another person.
One innocent pawn had been sacrificed for the win. Only, it wasn’t a game anymore.
“The following morning, I sold the car and gave the money to the family of the woman I had hit. The day she was released from the hospital, I enlisted in the Army. My mother thought I was crazy and tried to stop me because I was underage, but my father let me go.”
Memories of that morning sent a cold chill along his spine. His parents had believed that a car, an inanimate object, was worth more to him than a human life. And worse, they believed it themselves. If he hadn’t left their house, he would have become just like them. He had run, as far and as fast as he could. And fifteen years later, he was still running.
“You never went back to visit?” she asked.
“A few times, but it was never the same. My mother hated me for leaving, and my father resented my visits. Right up until the day he died, my old man had never been able to look me in the eye. I was a constant embarrassment to my family.”
“Or a painful reminder of what they were,” she added solemnly. “It might be different now, Jack. You’ve all grown in fifteen years.”
“Have we?” he wondered aloud. Adults didn’t run from their mistakes, they faced them. Was his break-all-the-rules lifestyle any different than his family’s, or had he merely convinced himself that he worked towards a more noble goal? “I’m not quite the man you imagined, am I?”
* * * *
Lilly bowed her head and fidgeted with the lace on her sneaker rather than hold his intense gaze. Apparently, her answer was very important to him. Was he seeking forgiveness or blame? Neither one was hers to give.
“I didn’t imagine you, Jack. And I never thought you would come without faults. If you’re expecting me to say that what you did was all right, then I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it was incredibly stupid.” She slipped out from under his arm, rose, and started to walk away. Suddenly, she turned back and met his puzzled stare. “But, if you think that changes the way I feel about you, then you’re incredibly dense.”