Rough and Tumble (20 page)

“At what point,” Sofia said, putting down her own chopsticks, “does unnecessary fear become I-told-you-so reality?”

“When it's too late.”

They shared a long look. Arden's gaze seemed bluer than ever, as if she'd started out this trip making one set of mistakes and ended it with those mistakes compounded. As if she was willing to do anything to make up for the fall of spastic dominos she'd put into motion by getting into that dang game at the Rough & Tumble.

Arden spoke. “Do you think she's still near that ghost town?”

“Rhyolite?” The longer the phone stayed silent, the more nauseated Sofia got. “Cash has a fast car. He could've sped anywhere with her by now.”

“If he decided to do something bad with her and . . .” Arden huffed out a tense sigh. “Do you think Cash is that bad of a guy? Seriously?”

Sofia held back. Could you ever really know anyone? Even now, sitting here with Arden, there was that layer of slight hurt from not knowing the truth about her gambling problems. The same went for Molly and this decision she'd made to go with Cash.

“I don't think I know much of anything about anybody,” Sofia said.

Arden took the clue, drawing into herself. Every time Sofia had started a conversation about the gambling, she'd clammed up.

Finally, she gave Sofia a hangdog look. “I suppose everyone hides a part of themselves at some point. But that doesn't mean they're bad.”

The Japanese pop music playing from the speakers buffered them, but Sofia couldn't take the avoidance anymore. She reached into her purse and grabbed her keys, signaling to the waiter for the check.

“We'll talk about it in the car on the way to Rhyolite,” she said.

“But we don't even know if she's there!”

“I'm not about to sit around and do nothing!”

Arden looked out the window once again, as if she didn't want to overreact—or get into a car with Sofia for a long trip. But then she grabbed the phones, slipping out of the booth after Sofia, never meeting her gaze the whole time.

Bit by bit during the sex, Cash had started to break.

The first piece had snapped off at the sight of Molly's skin, tempting and perfect. Another piece had twisted away after she'd refused to play his spanking game, which would've kept the sex emotionless, empty. But the final break had happened when she'd walked away from him.

All along, she'd been the one to champion this trip, and he'd only been here for the ride. But after hearing her actually say that it was ending, Cash had crashed. His chest had crumbled in on itself, and now he realized that
he
was the one who didn't want this to come to a screeching halt.

As he held her, his face pressed against her stomach, all the emotion he'd covered up, like a hood over an engine that was firing on all cylinders, ran out of control.

He still hadn't gotten her out of his system.

Her voice shook. “How can you say I'll be glad this is ending when—?”

“Quiet, Molly. Just be quiet.” He meant it—she'd be relieved to be rid of him. Women like her weren't meant for the Cash Campbells of the world anyway.

Then, like she wanted to change his mind, she stroked his neck, making him close his eyes, peaceful for once. It was all so . . . well, a woman would've called it “intimate,” with Molly lowering herself to his bare lap without any panties, both of them still sweaty and buzzing from a sexual afterburn.

When she spoke, her lips brushed his cheek. “Are you as lonely as I think you are?”

The truth hurt. But so did all the lies he kept telling himself about how he'd been okay without any sort of companionship.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you are, too.”

“I know. And that's why we get along so well.”

Two different worlds, one bedroom. Nothing seemed to matter in here right now, in a bubble where he didn't have to put on any acts, even though that's exactly what he'd been doing earlier.

“You already know that I've been alone for a while,” he said. “My so-called parents ditched me at the starting line. I got put in different foster homes after that.”

“Because you were difficult?”

Her touch was a balm to him, and when she turned her head to look into his eyes then kiss him softly, his heart came to life.
Shit.

She leaned her forehead to his, and he was so swamped by the foreign emotion in his gut that he went on without thinking about it.

“‘Difficult' is a good way of saying it.” Maybe he should write that word on his own skin someday.
Difficult
would probably even end up on his gravestone. “I wasn't easy to take care of, acted out a lot, never trusted much of anyone or expected anything of them.”

She kissed him again, and he closed his eyes, losing himself in her.

She whispered against him. “That's a hard way to live, never letting anyone get close to you.”

He went on alert at her tone. She sounded the same way whenever she talked about Mr. Darcy or walked around a ghost town wondering who would've lived in this or that decrepit house. Molly the romantic.

But she shouldn't be romanticizing anything about him, and as he sat there getting his guts together, knowing that all these emotions would soon pass, he searched for a way to mentally push her out of his life. And he knew what would do it—the last thing he'd ever thought he'd use on her.

The truth. The reality. It seemed like she hadn't learned anything from the strip club or the bars. She was still a tourist in his world.

He girded himself; she'd asked for answers, and now she'd get them.

“There was . . . one person.”

A wide space seemed to come between them for a second, but it closed up as Molly waited for him.

“I was still a kid when I met her,” he said, his voice already hardening, getting back to normal. “Nineteen years old and as dumb as shit, but she was one of those older girls, already twenty-one, and she held some kind of sway over me.”

Long dark hair, big brown eyes . . . Johanna.

He laughed without any humor. “I should've known that any woman you meet at the tables, knee-deep in losses at a casino, isn't going to be girlfriend of the year. But, at first, she . . .”

“Was magic,” Molly said.

See—still romanticizing.
“At first she was.”

He swallowed, but Molly was stroking back his hair again.

Don't let her get to you
. “As I said, I was young. And I was floored by her, especially since she called me out on having a fake ID, then offered to buy me a drink. She seemed so . . . worldly, so together. But it wasn't until I got to know her better that I found out she was a recovering drug addict and was just holding on by a thread. By then, I'd started to care.” Another cutting laugh that he couldn't stop. “The first time I ever let myself do that, and it had to be Johanna.”

Molly's hand stilled at the sound of the name. Maybe she didn't like to hear it. Hell,
he
had spent a long time not saying it, only thinking the name again recently, after Molly had stirred everything up inside him that'd been dormant.

When she went back to stroking him, he somehow felt safe. So right, just for this moment in time.

“I finally had someone,” he said, “and she had me. But she wasn't a strong person. Everything looked okay on the surface—she worked as a secretary for a family friend who was helping her recover, she went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and I kept her away from those casinos and the bars as much as I could. Around her, I cut out all my vices. But when we'd go out to the movies or the most innocent places, she'd get into . . . situations.”

“Like what?”

“Provoking fights with other women and sometimes men, then crying about it afterward. I only thought she was wild and exciting, a free spirit, but when it kept happening, I knew something else was going on. At first, I thought she only wanted the attention, but it was more than that.”

“Was she . . . ?”

“Touched in the head? Probably, but she would never get help for
that
. She told everyone she was sober and healthy, but one night, I caught her popping pills in the bathroom. She said they were for some pain she was having from an old injury, and I shouldn't have believed her. Because she did it again. I took those pills and flushed them down her toilet, but she called me ‘just a kid who doesn't know shit.' What did I know about failing in life? How could I have had enough experience to feel what it was like to be on a treadmill that never went anywhere?”

“She'd been using for a while?” Molly asked.

He stared straight ahead, forcing his voice to be emotionless, even though it was cracking him in two.

“Yeah, and I was too dumb to admit it. She told me to get lost, that I didn't mean anything to her anyway. At first, I fought to stay with her, but she shut me out, moved away, and I had no idea where she went.”

He could tell by the way Molly relaxed a little in his arms that she thought this was the end of the story: kid gets his heart broken, then carries the bitterness with him throughout life after learning early on that love sucks.

He wished that was it.

“I guess you could say I carried a torch for her,” he said. “But I moved on.”

Molly snuggled into him, tucking her face into his neck.

He breathed her in, but he didn't hold her too tight. “That is until one night, about a year later. I was tooling around Nevada, looking for a game, and she called me, stoned out of her mind. She told me that she needed me.”

Molly had tensed up again, but it was too late to stop.

“I'd been torn up by her already, and I wasn't about to climb on that roller coaster again. So I told her to get to an NA meeting wherever she was. She hung up on me, and I thought that was the end of it.”

“It wasn't?”

“No.” He went cold. “Looking back, I should've taken her more seriously, because soon after, I heard that she overdosed and died.”

Molly froze, but slowly, so slowly, she sat up, looking at him.

He didn't let her see into him. No one would ever be able to do that.

He kept his voice level. “I always wondered if she killed herself because of me, if I was the last straw. But I came out of the experience knowing something for certain—I couldn't depend on anyone else because they always disappoint you. They kill you inside.” He raised a finger. “She was my kind of people, Molly.
She's
my reality.”

When Molly continued to stare at him, he thought that, finally, she was getting it—no matter how cozy they were, this wouldn't go anywhere.

So why didn't that feel as freeing as it should've?

***

Now Molly understood why Cash always seemed to be looking for something that he wasn't finding in all the places he went. No wonder he was such a loner, although it sounded as if he'd been that from early on, before Johanna.

But couldn't he see that Molly wasn't anything like her? Yes, she had an addict in her life, too, but Arden's gambling wasn't something that could directly kill. Couldn't Cash understand that people could be good, no matter who he'd grown up with or associated with now?

She cupped his face in her hands, a face she would never forget. A face she wanted to see again and again, no matter who he was or what he'd been through.

“Not every woman is a Johanna,” she said. “Especially . . .”

She was about to say “me,” but then she realized that wasn't true. These past few days had turned her into an undependable terror. She hadn't even contacted her best friends since this morning because she'd been so under Cash's spell.

His smile was weighed down by what she thought was anguish. Was he thinking that
he
was the one who'd made her undependable? Had he molded her into the only kind of woman he could deal with in the aftermath of Johanna—the kind who spent a night with him and never asked for anything more?

He touched her cheek, and she actually believed that this was it—he was going to tell her that she was different from all the rest of those women. She was Molly P. Preston, and she'd persuaded him to change his life.

But then he lowered his hand and smacked her on the ass, removing her from his lap and standing her on her feet as he got to his.

Numb, she could only watch him as he put himself back together, then got dressed again.

“So that's it?” she asked.

“I didn't tell you that story for my health.”

Bewildered, she narrowed her eyes. “Then what was the point? To tell me that you don't ever want to get out of this life?”

His shoulders slumped, as if she had no chance of understanding.

Couldn't he see what was possible?

“You think you can save me?” he asked in a low voice. “Is that it, Molly?”

He was . . . mocking her. Not in an obvious way, but there was pity in his tone, as if he thought she was too naïve to live.

“I . . .” she started.

He shook his head, going for the door. When he spoke, he didn't look at her.

“I'm going to get us some dinner. They've got a fast-food freezer and a microwave in the gift shop. Any requests?”

How could he ignore everything that'd been said? “Cash . . .”

Then he was out the door, leaving her in an anesthetic limbo.

Had she imagined all of it? Hadn't they been
this close
to finding something between them . . . ?

She buried her face in her hands. There hadn't been anything, couldn't have been, and she'd been a damned fool for thinking it.

Shame and embarrassment attacked her at the same time, and something snapped inside Molly—she ripped off the rest of the dress he'd bought her, jamming it into the nearest trash can. Rising anger—which was usually such an orderly process for her—blinded her.

He'd shown her what he wanted from a woman, and she'd been too stupid to see it. Did he want her to be just like the rest of the ones he threw away? Well, she could be. She could give him what he wanted. Fuck him.

Fuck
her
for getting her own hopes up and smashing them.

Molly had never known she could act like this, and she gave into the resentment—at him, but mostly at herself. She swiped the plastic shopping bag full of health and beauty aids off the floor and brought it into the bathroom, flicking on the light so she could look at herself in the mirror above the sink.

It wasn't low enough for her to see the words he'd written on her, like
bad girl
and
fuck
.

But she felt every one of them.

***

Cash brought back a tray of microwaved burritos and some cold bottles of beer and water from the motel office and unlocked the motel room door, expecting to find Molly taking a shower so she could scour off the pen ink he'd written on her in preparation for their trip to her home.

Marks that'd been amusing during this adventure but didn't have any place with them now that he'd set the record straight.

At the thought of her rejected expression, his chest clenched. But he'd only done what was necessary. Already he felt better, knowing there were just six hours of road ahead of them before they were officially finished.

But the soreness in his chest stayed as he opened the room door.

It got even worse when he saw Molly on the bed, waiting for him, the sheets and covers kicked down to the edge, her body without a stitch of clothing. She was wearing more than she'd been this afternoon, though—more words in places that wouldn't be hidden by sundresses or T-shirts. Capital letters on her skin, bold and jarring.

SLUT
on one arm.

WHORE
on a leg.

USED
on her chest.

And, on her face, she'd drawn a different kind of screw-you art: a coat of red lipstick so thick that she looked painted and definitely used. Mascara and eyeliner and even a jaded come-hither expression that reminded him of . . .