Lie to Me (17 page)

“You’re all talk,” I say, and push him toward the kitchen.

Marcus stops, gives me the one-eyebrow raise. “Oh really?”

And now this feels dangerous again. Already. I put my hands on my hips, covering up how I have to put all that weight on one leg, and narrow my eyes.

“Then where’s your super special proof, Marcus?”

The air changes. Sparks between us. Jesus. I’ve done it. I’ve brought up serious stuff. I think I’ve been avoiding it, even though I said I was going to ask him all these questions, just because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I’m still not. Like, really, really not. But he said he had proof that he never stopped thinking about me, that he never stopped caring. Of course I want to see it.

“That’s fair,” Marcus says. He looks at me seriously, imploringly. For all the world an honest guy trying to make good. I have to remind myself…what? Not to believe whatever he says next? Then why do I want to?

He says, “The guy who has the files that I need to prove to you what I’ve been doing the past five years was out in California on another job. He said he’d be back in town this week with all the files. He won’t send that kind of thing over email, says it compromises him. He’s kind of old school.”

Wait. What the hell?

“What files? What are you talking about?”

Marcus frowns. “This is why I didn’t bring it up. Think of it as a partial record of my activities and interests for the past five years.”

“‘Think of it as?’ So then what is it really?”

Marcus stares at me. Silently.

“Were you checking up on me?” I ask. “Like, spying on me? And you have a record of this?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I say softly.

I’m not even mad. I suppose eventually I’ll be mad. Maybe if I saw what he’d actually done, I’d be mad. But right now I’m mostly just marveling at how incredibly weird it is that Marcus would have disappeared from my life  like I didn’t matter at all, and yet all this time he’s had someone checking up on me.

Marcus runs a hand through his black hair, turning it into a disheveled, sexy mess, and looks at me with those mesmerizing, earnest eyes.

“I don’t know,” he says simply. “When it comes to you, everything is just… You’re what’s wrong with me, Lo. Simple as that.”

“Marcus, I don’t even know what to say to that.”

“There’s no reason you should. It’s pretty weird.”

I just stare at him for another moment. And this is where the fact that we know each other so well comes in. Because I watch him, and I can see everything he’s feeling on his face, as if he was narrating it to me himself. I can see it in his body language, the way he leans against the doorframe, the way it looks like invisible rope is the only thing holding him back, like he wants to be where I am, close to me. He’s in pain. This is what it looks like when Marcus Roma feels pain because he thinks I’m feeling pain.

I am just totally dumbfounded.

And I have to sit down, because of this freaking ankle.

“You ok?” he says, rushing forward while I hobble back to the couch, muttering under my breath.

“Just resting it,” I say.

He stands there, silently. And then all of a sudden Marcus is down on his knees in front of me, and I’m trapped. Even if my ankle was healed, I don’t think I could move. Just looking at him, looking at those eyes, that face—no woman could tear herself away. Even one who really, really should.

“Lo.”

“Marcus, please don’t.”

That closeness, that dangerous closeness, the way he’s almost touching me right now, the way I know he can look into my face and see what I’m feeling, too—I can’t do that right now. Because the feelings I’ve been fighting are coming up to the surface. The fact that I never got over him, the fact that I still love with him, the fact that I can’t look at him without wanting and hurting at the same time…he’ll know it all.

And if he knows it, I might have to admit it. I might have to deal with it.

Am I ready for that?

What if the answer is that I still need him? That no matter what, I will never get over him? That I will have to feel this way forever? What if I finally allow myself to ask the question, and that’s the answer?

I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. He looks into me—into me—and I know he sees it. I know he feels it. I’m on the cusp of breaking, of overflowing completely with five years’ worth of emotion, when the doorbell rings.

Thank fucking God.

Well, that’s my first reaction. My second reaction is, “Who the hell is that?”

Because it’s raining outside, still. I mean, the weather is terrible. No one in their right mind would be out right now.

Unless it was an emergency.

Here’s the thing: I am still a little nervous around police officers. Anyone official, really, anyone in a uniform, especially if they’re coming to my door unexpectedly. Like if they have news? It’s never going to be good news. It’s a pretty reliable way to put me on a hair trigger for a panic attack.

I mean, it’s understandable.

And I’ve been thinking about Dill. And this is the first time he’s away from me since I got him back, and I haven’t talked to him, and the only reason I haven’t been out of my mind worrying about him is that Marcus has been making me crazy instead.

So my third reaction is to panic.

I push myself off the couch with all the force I can muster, needing to get to the door and see who’s got something so important to tell me, and Marcus is there. He’s holding me up, studying my face.

I fall back as soon as my ankle touches the ground, wincing.

“Just because you can walk doesn’t mean you should,” he says. And before I can yell at him, because, goddammit, I need to know who’s at the door right now, Marcus picks me up—again—and starts to carry me to the door.

“This is ridiculous,” I say, even as I’m starting to hyperventilate. It feels like a genuine panic attack coming on. It can’t just be the doorbell. It has to be all the stress from the past few days, all the unresolved tension with Marcus, making my threshold lower.

“Dill is fine,” Marcus says calmly. “They wouldn’t come to your house if something had happened. They would call. Dill is fine. This is nothing. Probably just a neighbor whose power went out. Lo, look at me,” he says.

We’re just a few feet from the door, but he’s looking at me with those calm, soothing eyes, and he’s saying my name again. He’s telling me the one thing anyone could tell me to get me to calm down right now, and it’s working.

He is exactly what I need right now.

Why does it have to be him?

“Lo,” he says again. “It’s ok. Dill is fine.”

“Ok,” I say, feeling my heart rate slow down while my lungs start to work again. “Ok, you’re right. Ok.”

He puts me down right in front of the door and holds me up so I can balance on one leg. We look like we’re about to compete in a three-legged race, except my face is also sweaty and red from the panic attack, and Marcus…Marcus still looks like a god.

The doorbell rings again. Whoever it is can see us. I take a deep breath and open the door.

“Maria!” I say, and practically try to drag her inside. She’s wrapped up in a flimsy coat with a scarf around her head, all just to go next door. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong,” she’s saying, slowly unwrapping herself from all those wet layers. She seems off, like there’s something not quite right, but then she sees Marcus. I have never seen anyone’s face light up like hers does.

“Marcus!” she screams, and grabs Marcus by his cheeks.

By his cheeks.

This might all be worth it for this single visual.

Maria is fussing over him like crazy, practically flapping her arms, and I realize it was kind of mean not to tell her he was back. I know she used to talk to him about me, that she used to ask him how I was doing, if I needed anything. She trusted him to know. She trusted him to take care of me.

Hurts to think about. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell her.

I start to hop back to the living room, and Marcus immediately disentangles himself from Maria, giving her a kiss on the cheek as he does. In the next second he’s by my side, insisting on holding me up again. I would brush him off, but he knows my balance is terrible and I probably would fall over.

“
Madre de dios
,” Maria says. “What did you do?”

“We went running,” I say. “I twisted it.”

“She’ll be ok,” Marcus says, helping me onto the couch. “Just a mild sprain. I’m taking care of her.”

Maria beams.

There is literally nothing she’d love in the world more than to see Marcus and me together again. Maria was probably the only other person heartbroken when he left.

She watches Marcus set me down, and I have literally never seen her happier.

“I’m gonna go make something to eat,” Marcus says, looking between us. He seems to have figured out that Maria came here to tell me something.

And then Maria herself seems to remember.

And oh shit, whatever it is, it’s not good. I have never, ever seen Maria Ruiz look nervous. Or…guilty?

What the hell?

“Maria,” I say, and she silences me before I can even get going. She just shakes her head really quickly, looking down at her hands, her fingers pinching little knots in her dress. She looks miserable.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. I’m genuinely worried now. The panic is coming back. “What happened?

“I’m so sorry, Lo,” she says, and looks up. Her eyes are red. She’s crying.

“Maria, please, tell me,” I say, hearing the tension in my own voice, like I’m trying to choke back the panic, the stress, everything.

Maria takes my hand, rubbing her thumb across it too quickly, too hard. “They made such a good offer,” she says. “I couldn’t say no anymore.”

“What?”

But of course I know what she means.

She sold her house to the developers. Alex Wolfe got to her.

“It means no more loans for college for John,” Maria says quietly. “It means I can go to Texas, see my mother. It means I don’t have to worry about retirement.”

And this, right here, is where I feel both completely betrayed and at the same time realize that I am completely selfish.

Of course taking a million-dollar payoff will change Maria’s life. Of course it will help her. John won’t have to be in crippling debt when he gets out of med school, and that is huge. Maria won’t have to work until she’s doubled over in pain. Her life will be unequivocally better.

I know this. I would have known it before if I’d bothered to think about anyone other than Dill and myself. So why does it feel like the bottom of my world just fell out? Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Like no matter what I do, everything will fall away? That I’ll lose everything?

I hate myself for this. I hate myself even more when I see how upset Maria is, when I remember that she’s actually been crying because she didn’t want to disappoint me for making a decision that will improve her life.

I force myself to smile at her, and it’s a good thing I hug her, because I cannot keep that smile up for long.

“It’s ok,” I say. “Please don’t be upset. I’m happy for you.”

I squeeze her fiercely, because I love her. And because I love her, I can’t let her see how broken up I really am. Even though it’s horribly selfish, I can’t control the way I feel.

Man, this isn’t even top of the list of things that would be easier if I could control my feelings.

“It’s ok,” I say again, and I don’t know if it’s more for her or for me. Just when I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up, Marcus comes to the rescue, like he somehow always does.

“What’re you two up to?” he says, coming in with a bottle of wine. Maria turns around to look at him, but Marcus looks at me. He sees my face and he knows something’s wrong. “Hey, Lo, how’s your ankle?” he says.

He’s already walking toward me, easy and confident in jeans and a t-shirt, his athleticism apparent in the slightest movement. He cocks his head at me, looking at me like he just needs me to play along.

Then he kneels down, takes my ankle gingerly in hand, and looks up at me.

“Be honest,” he says, looking me in the eye. “You in pain?”

I can’t even talk. I just nod. I feel like a terrible person, but I need Maria to leave. I can’t hide how I feel from her and Marcus at the same time, I can’t keep this up, I don’t have the energy. I feel like I’m about to break.

“Maria,” he says, “You think you could come back tomorrow?”

Maria jumps up, fluttering about, I think because now she thinks she might have been interrupting something. Whatever. It works. Marcus shows her out, smiling and laughing and promising to take good care of me, and in just a few minutes she’s gone, and I’m free to lose my shit.

Except that I don’t.

At least not in the way I expect to.

It does all come crashing down. Whatever walls and defenses I have left after living with Marcus—living with Marcus—for three days are just overrun in a flood of emotion, all of it swirling together, just one big muddy torrent of feels. Screw my ankle; I have to move around with this kind of thing happening inside me. I push myself up and manage to hobble into the kitchen, the pain not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I stare at all the stuff Marcus has taken out for dinner and another wave hits me, because holy crap, this is absurd.

I haul myself up and kind of just sit there on the table and grip the edge of it, holding on while the wave rushes through me the way I learned to years ago. I’m also waiting to see what rises to the surface, to see how that incoherent mix of emotion clarifies.

When it does, the man who’s the cause of all of this is standing right in front of me, the hard planes of his chest visible through that shirt, the intelligence of his eyes telling me I won’t be able to hide any longer.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask him blankly.

Marcus’s face is serious, too, like he knows this is big.

“What’s wrong?” he says, moving toward me. “What happened?”

“Marcus, I really need an answer right now,” I say. “Why are you doing this?”

I force myself to look up at him now that he’s only inches away from me, and I know it registers on my face when he touches my wrist. Just the slightest touch, the pads of his fingers on my wrist, and it shudders through me.