Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (42 page)

Allie abruptly yanked the door open.

She wore a baseball cap and pajamas, with oversized rabbit slippers on her feet. Sunglasses covered half her face and completely hid her expression. She rubbed her hand over her lips, smearing them into a gruesome shape.

“No, don’t talk yet,” she said. “I’m trying to decide on my line. Like, do you think ‘Well, well, well’ is good, or do I need to say something more caustic than that to the guy who ripped out my sister’s heart and stomped on it just—” She looked at her bare wrist. “—twenty-six hours ago?”

Ben decided it was a rhetorical question. “Is she here?”

“She might be.”

“How much does she hate me?”

“I think she would cut your balls off with the kitchen shears if she could manage it.”

Ben winced. He’d expected that, but it hadn’t prevented him from hoping for a softer reception than he deserved. “You, too, huh?”

Allie shrugged. “I’m in a more forgiving frame of mind, since I’ve recently treated people I loved abominably, myself.”

It dawned on him that Allie wasn’t supposed to be here in her pajamas. She was supposed to be on her honeymoon. While he was still processing that, she said, “How about one of the things you do for me is not ask?”

“I can do that. Listen—”

“Allie?” Nancy’s voice came from the kitchen. “Is someone at the door? Your waffle is getting cold!”

“Just a second!” Allie called back. She turned her attention back to Ben. “We’re having breakfast for lunch. In the middle of the afternoon. It’s a hangover tradition.”

“Can I please talk to May?”

Allie put her hands on her hips. Her eyebrows lifted above the frames of the sunglasses. “She told you she loved you.”

“I know.”

“In a public bathroom.”

“Yes.”

“And then you
drove away
.”

He straightened to his full height and tried to look confident. “I’m prepared to do anything to get your sister back, but—”

“But?
But?
”

“—but unless she’s sent you out here as her delegate, I’d rather not have you in the middle of it.”

Allie took off her sunglasses. Her eyes looked small, the skin around them puffy, and the light made her squint.

“Do you love her?” she asked.

“That’s not really—”

Allie flapped her hand, cutting him off. “I know, I know. None of my business, between you and May, et cetera. But I’m the one who cried with her yesterday, and I’m the one who danced with her for two hours straight.”

“Danced?”

“We had the reception.”

“But not the wedding?”

“Didn’t we just establish that you weren’t going to ask?”

“Sorry.”

She sighed. “I called off the wedding. We had the party anyway. Dad spent most of the night grumbling with his brothers about how much money I’d thrown down the drain. Mom progressed from speechless to ‘I’ll have a small cocktail’ to quite thoroughly lit in the space of about an hour, all while playing perfect hostess and
smiling
at everyone.

“Matt showed up with six of his college buddies, already half-toasted, told me we would always be friends, and then did the Electric Slide with May’s friend Beth, who, last time I checked, was doing her damndest to pick him up. I had to stop looking because even the thought
of it makes me want to cry, so all I’m going to say, moving
along
, is that May looked like a seriously hot piece of ass and danced to all the songs and flirted with
everybody
until around two in the morning.”

Allie paused to breathe. She put her hands on her hips. “At which point she cornered me and made me go outside with her so she could cry and tell me every single thing that happened between you guys, some of which I’d rather not know, so
do me a favor
and convince me that she’s not making a huge mistake trusting you.”

Another deep breath.

“Because I need to know that something good is going to come out of all this shit before I let you in the house.”

Ben sunk his hands into his back pockets, unsure how to respond. Allie wasn’t the person he wanted to declare himself to.

But then, in the kitchen, May laughed—that loud, impolite braying noise he’d first heard nine days ago.

That laugh. That woman. All he wanted.

Then it was easy. “I love your sister.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s radiant.”

Allie assessed him for a moment, head tilted, hair fluffing all over her shoulders.

“Come on back.” She stepped aside and extended one arm toward the kitchen with a flourish. “I recommend the waffles with peanut butter, syrup, and Hershey’s. They’re crazy-delicious.”

When Ben went into the kitchen, he found May’s father at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. Her mother stood by the stove, poking at a frying pan full of bacon while a closed waffle iron steamed on the counter next to a bowl of batter. May had positioned herself between the table and the counter in what Ben thought of as his macaroni salad spot. She was smiling at something her mother must have said and holding a very familiar cleaver.

He’d left his knives here.

Amazing. He hadn’t even missed them.

When she saw him, her smile dropped at the same time the cleaver rose.

“Careful,” he said without thinking. “That’s sharp.”

“But if I attacked you with it, I could become notorious,” May returned. “ ‘First The Forking, then The Cleavering. Who will she emasculate next?’ ”

The cutting board in front of her contained half a bar of baking chocolate and a pile of chunks. “That’s the wrong knife for chocolate.”

And this is the wrong way to try to make up with the woman whose heart you cleavered yesterday, asshole
.

“Touchy about our knives, are we?”

Ah. That explained what she was doing with it. Abusing his knives—a small “fuck you” at absent Ben. Was it sick that it pleased him she would even bother?

“Are you making cookies?” he guessed.

“Chocolate-crinkle chocolate chunk cookies. They have pretzels,” she said. “Hangover special.”

May looked like she’d come through last night’s debauchery better than Allie, but just barely. She wore her hair in a sloppy ponytail, an oversized pink T-shirt advertising her participation in a charity walk—or possibly Einarsson’s participation, given how far the shirt hung down her thighs—and red pajama pants with little white hearts all over them. She had dark circles under her eyes.

“I like your pants,” he said.

“Thank you. They’re my sad-panda pants.”

“For when some dickhead screws her over and then dumps her without an explanation,” Allie chimed in.

“Allie,” Nancy said chidingly. “Language.”

Nancy looked like she always did. Big hair, sweatshirt with necklace, dress pants.

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Hi, Mrs. Fredericks,” he ventured. “Mr. Fredericks.”

May’s father grunted.

Nancy said, “We didn’t expect to see you again.”

“I owe you an apology,” he told her. “I’m sorry I was so rude to you before I left. I’m not sure if anybody told you this yet, but I don’t work for Dan’s agent. That was a lie. I don’t know Dan at all. I’ve never been antique shopping with May, either.”

“I’ll admit, I had some doubts about that.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Sorry. I actually am a beekeeper, though. For what that’s worth.”

“That part would’ve been tough to fake,” Allie said.

“So how did you—that is, how did you come to be driving May back from New York?”

“I’d spent most of the week with her.” He glanced at May, unsure what she’d told her mother and what she wanted him to say. The truth? Some part of it?

She went back to chopping chocolate.

You’re on your own, buddy
.

“I met her the day after the—uh, after she and Dan broke up. She needed someone to help her out, and I gave her a place to stay. It’s kind of a long story.”

May’s father had lowered his newspaper while Ben was speaking. “How about you tell us the short version?”

Ben cast his eyes at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to bowdlerize the story on the fly without being actively dishonest.

He settled for “I’m in love with your daughter.”

The knife clattered when it hit the cutting board, then fell to the floor, landing an inch from May’s foot.

“Oh Christ—” he said. At the same time, Allie said, “Mom, the bacon’s starting to smell done,” and May said, “You’re what?”

“Can I pick that up?” The knife really was wicked sharp, and if May stepped on it—actually, he couldn’t even think about that. He dropped to his knees and crawled past her, took the knife by the handle, and crawled back to his former position.

“You’re what?” May had moved. She stood directly above him, arms crossed, whip-mouth activated.

Ben sat back on his heels, short of breath from crawling. “In love with you.”

First there was a long pause. Then everyone started talking at once.

Nancy: “—understand what this is all about. Is he saying that after you had that incident with Dan, somehow you met Ben? And
stayed
with him? I’m not—”

Allie: “—tell them the part about how you got robbed, because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense how you were—”

Bill: “—women really need my help with this? Because—”

Ben started talking, too, tuning out all the other voices and May’s father’s slow passage
around the table, in order to focus on May. “I’m sorry I left,” he said. “I botched that, but I think I needed to, actually, because it was seeing my father that made me realize—”

May held up her hand, palm out, and said, “Whoa.”

“—she mean you were
robbed
? Like by a mugger? I warned you about those men, May, but neither of you ever listens to me, you only—”

“—not a regular mugger, Mom, he was a
specific
mugger. Remember how we were getting all those phone calls from sleazy—”

“—let you all handle this, and if you need me I’ll be down in the—”

“—a lot of damage that I can’t gloss over, but that doesn’t mean—”

“EVERYBODY SHUT UP,” May said.

Everybody did. Nancy looked a little shell-shocked, whereas Allie had gotten some color back in her face. May’s father paused with one foot into the living room.

“I’m moving to New York,” she said.

Then the smoke alarm went off.

It took a few minutes to get everything sorted out. May pushed her mom out of the kitchen into a seat at the table, where her dad had resumed his customary chair. Allie shoved the bacon away from the burner and turned off the stove. Ben, being the tallest, reached up to unscrew the smoke alarm and pull the battery out.

His reaching exposed a slice of bare skin right above the waistband of his jeans, and May had to admit to herself, she loved that particular slice of skin. And the battered hand that wrapped around the smoke alarm—she loved that, too.

And that he had come back for her.

She didn’t love much else about the man at the moment, though. He had a previously undiscovered talent for creating chaos in her family.

She poured her mother a cup of coffee, added the usual gigantic dollop of vanilla-hazelnut creamer, and delivered it to the table. Then, with a fork, she extracted the overcooked waffle from the waffle maker and poured in fresh batter.

“Ben, you want some orange juice?” she asked.

His response was an inarticulate half syllable, from which she surmised that he didn’t know whether he wanted orange juice or not. She poured him a glass and shoved it into his hand.

“Allie, go sit down,” she said. “And take off your sunglasses. Your head can’t possibly hurt more than mine does.”

“But you’re stronger,” Allie said feebly.

“I’ll fortify you with a fresh waffle.”

Allie slumped into a chair and dropped her sunglasses on the table. Ben leaned against the wall by the fridge and watched as May put on a second pot of coffee, pulled the finished waffle from the maker, spread it with peanut butter, and drizzled maple and chocolate syrup on top. She handed it to Allie.

“You are my
favorite
.”

“You should have seen the French toast Ben made me at his apartment.”

“He makes French toast?”

“With sautéed apples. And he whipped the cream by hand.”

Allie made an
oooh
mouth at Ben. “I’m impressed.”

“May?” her father said.

“Yeah. Okay.” She crossed her arms. “Honestly, I don’t know how this all got so complicated. Dan proposed. I attacked him with a fork and broke up with him. I left his place to go to the airport, and this guy who I thought was a security guard stole my purse. I couldn’t fly home, so I went to a bar in Greenwich Village that has a big following of Packers fans. I thought I might meet some kindly Packers person from Wisconsin who could help me out, and I did. I met Ben.”

Ben raised an eyebrow at that, which almost made her smile, except she was still mad at him.

But he
was
kindly, even if he didn’t think so. Even if he’d caused her pain, he’d given her so much joy, too. And she hadn’t exactly been Little Miss Perfect. She’d been an idiot and a coward, and it was lucky he’d come back so she wasn’t forced to track him down in New York and campaign for another chance.

He seemed to think he was the one who needed to do the campaigning. Maybe they could both cut the campaign phase short.

“After a few hours of mutual suspicious circling, plus dinner, he invited me to stay on his couch, and I took him up on it. The next morning, I tried to fly home a second time, but the airline wouldn’t let me check in without ID. I went back to Ben. He asked me if I wanted to hang out with him for a few days, and I knew you guys were all at the cabin—I didn’t realize Dan was there—so I said yes. Because I wanted to hide, and because … because I liked him.”

She uncrossed her arms and leaned against the counter, momentarily distracted by Mom and Allie’s matching expressions of avidity and her father’s completely blank, stoic facade.

“He liked her, too,” Ben said.

It did something to her, hearing that—something that felt like a tiny little pebble of weight lifting off her heart.