The Truth About Air & Water (Truth in Lies #2) (26 page)

Sam’s pushing at my hand. I almost spill the hot chocolate.

“Sorry.” He smiles. “Stop it. Just drink it. Let it go.”

I sip at it tentatively at first, then taste the peppermint Schnapps and the hint of Kahlua and look at him somewhat quizzically.

“It’s almost midnight,” Sam says with guy authority. “I need a drink, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I need.”

“I do.” He gets this smug look and then drinks his own hot chocolate concoction. “First, I feed you. Then, you sit for a while
thinking
.” He smiles wide. “And then, you talk. And
then
, we’ll see where it goes from
there
.”

“I’m ready for
there
.”

“No. You think you’re ready for
there
, but you’re so far from
there
that it’s as if we’re coming at each other from separate universes.”

“How cosmic,” I say irritably.

He raises an eyebrow and begins to study my face rather intently for signs.

Of what?
Wreckage? Brokenness.

A special brand of craziness?

That
we will need to discuss.
Later.

I catch my lip between my teeth to stop it from trembling. I’m nervous all at once because this seduction isn’t going at all the way I imagined it would go which stirs up equal parts of madness and fury. I force a smile. “The thing is I just want to get lost for a while. I don’t want to talk about
it
. What’s the point? It doesn’t help. Nothing does.
I know this.”

“See just
talk
, Tally,” he says quietly. “That’s all. Just talk it all out.”

Now, I sit silent.

I am not a talker. He may as well learn that right now.

“Okay. I’ll start.” He sets down the mug and steeples his fingers together as if he’s praying or contemplating deep thought. “Allaire and I. We were never right for each other. She was incapable of deep feelings and always vying for control. At first, I thought it was because she was older than me. Four years,” he says and then hesitates. “I’m thirty-one by the way. You?”

“Twenty-two but way past forty.” He nods and then gets this faint bemused smile. I decide it’s because he’s gotten me to answer. “Clever,” I say drawing the number one in the air indicating he’s scored a point.

He gets this little smile but it disappears as he continues. “So with Allaire, after a while, I began to realize it was just the way she was. She wasn’t going to change and our relationship would always be this kind of twisted cat and mouse game. One of us had the power, the other didn’t, but that was always changing.” He shrugs with nonchalance. “I guess it worked. We each got what we wanted out of it to a certain degree.”

“Which
was
?” I shouldn’t care, but I am way past curious. Here’s this knight in shining armor with this older woman, and she ruled him. I don’t pretend to understand the dynamics of their relationship, but for some inexplicable reason I want to.

“It was easier.” The way he answers seems like it costs him a great deal as if he’s had to exchange a brief encounter with pain for this admission alone. He gets this funny grimace and sighs big running his hands through his hair. For a few seconds, he seems to lose his train of thought and gets this dazed expression. The sadness taints his features for a time and then disappears again.

Empathy for him bursts forth. Unexpected.

“It was easier,” I say softly. “You see I completely get that. Not with Linc, but with others…we don’t have to talk about any of this,” I say airily sweeping my hand through air while he watches me do it.

“No, we don’t, but we should. Guns on the table, right?” He settles further back in his chair directly across from me. “She had an older sister. Lise was her name. She came to visit Allaire a few times, especially after Cara was here, more after that, and I foolishly thought maybe…just maybe, we could take it all to a different level because she had a family she obviously cared about.” He pauses for a long moment. “So I asked her.
I proposed.
I thought that was what she wanted. I thought somewhere in that dark soul of hers, she wanted the same things I did.” He frowns and then tries to laugh but it comes out sounding hollow and soulful at the same time. “She threw the ring in my face
literally
, and moved out ten days later to God knows where, without really saying good-bye. She gave me those envelopes for you, a few instructions, and basically left me, knowing I’d figure it all out one day.”

His words and complete openness about Allaire Tremblay and their complex relationship surprise me. I’m not sure what to say to all he’s revealed so I start with the last thing.

“Why would she do something like that? Leave you and hide Cara away from me intentionally like that?” I pull up my knees and tuck my head into them without meeting his eyes.

“I scared her because I wanted more. You scared her because you wanted more. I missed all the signs. She talked about your visit for weeks after. She was uneasy. She saw how good you would be with Cara and it scared the hell out of her that she might lose that little girl to you one day. So she gave up everything, including me, for a secret life with Cara away from all of us.”

“What if I’m just like her? All hell bent on a career that makes you commit at a soul level? What if I have a dark soul like that too?”

“You don’t. You’re not like her.” He stops talking and then looks back at me intently. “She wasn’t a bad person, Tally. She just couldn’t let go. You know what I mean,” he says sounding somewhat unsure as to how explain it all. “She was happy. We were happy. Allaire just had a tendency to protect whatever she felt was hers, rightfully or not. I asked her about you once—about the adoption of Cara. She told me she manipulated you far too much in gaining the rights to Cara. You were young and scared, she wanted a child, and you needed a way out at the time. Geez, you were
eighteen
. She took advantage of you. She felt bad about it—the way it went down. I don’t think she meant to be evil or even behave so badly in the end. She was just being Allaire; and, in the end, that proved to be too much even for her.”

“She left you.”

“Yes. I scared the hell out of her about getting married.” He gets this twisted smile.

“Scared you too, I bet.”

He dips his head and won’t look at me. “She definitely caused me to want things I’ve never wanted before. Monogamy. Commitment. Marriage.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes. Like you love Lincoln Presley. She was my water.”

Water.

It’s as if he’s pointed a gun at my heart and fired. I get up in one swift motion and move to the furthest part of the room away from him while my breath whips away from me like an unexpected wind gust. I hear the rasping and it takes a few seconds to realize it’s coming from me.

Sam is here.

He strokes each side of my face, smooths back strands of my hair, and tells me to breathe.

“Tally, take in some air. Just breathe. Focus on me. Look at me, Tally. Open your eyes. That’s right. See? You’re okay. Just concentrate on breathing in and out. See? Okay. Again. Breathe in again, just like that.”

I recover.

His coaching helps.

Eventually, I become aware of his arms draped across my shoulders in this platonic embrace. His discernible strength seeps into me.

I look up at him then and concentrate on the faint lines in his fine face that sun and nature have extolled upon him now visible when I am up close like this. His eyes are this amazing glacial blue with flecks of gold. His eyes. You could look into them every day and experience this glimpse of true wonder. His golden hair is a little long and in need of a scissors. He has this faint white scar across one brow and another on the left side of his face as if someone has taken a thin white pencil and drawn on him.
How lucky were they?

He is a gold rush.

A mountain stream, cool and fresh and colorful.

He is ice and snow.

He is sun and rain.

He’s got the look of Thor going on and it takes every bit of my willpower to avoid tracing his lips with my own because he is a god.

And I am attracted to those.

Shit.

“You okay?” Sam drops his arms to his sides and steps back from me. The warmth disappears with him. I shiver. He takes my hand and leads me back to the sofa. “How many of those have you had?”

I miss the clinical part of him in asking me this. “A couple times a month. Twice on Sunday.”

“How many for
real
?”

“A couple of times a month. Sometimes more when I’m stressed out. I’ve had them for years. Since Holly…” I bite my lip because I’ve said too much, and now he’s looking at me like I’m a rare bacteria strain he’s discovered under a microscope.

“Holly?”

“She was my twin. We were seventeen. She died in a car accident on Valentine’s Day. It’ll be five years in February. So yes,
years
, I’ve had them for years at least five, maybe more.” I become notably defiant.

I have this down.

Defiance and defensiveness.

I’m an expert at wielding these two things for just about any situation.

Bring it.

“Who knows about these attacks?”

Now, I’m getting uncomfortable but feel compelled to answer for some unknowable reason. “
He
used to know. Marla. That’s it. No one else knows.”

“Are you being treated?”

“Like with a psychiatrist or something? No. Why? You think…I’m crazy?” My question is laced with disappointment as to where he’s taking this
.

“No one is crazy just because they suffer with panic attacks from trauma. But you can’t handle them on your own forever. So what else? Tell me. You have triggers, obviously. What else triggers you? Sets you off, so you can’t breathe where you begin to panic, like what just happened?”

“You want the list?” I stall, and he’s looking at me more intently now. There is no way he’s going to let me off the hook on this. I run my tongue along my lips thinking about how to answer while he openly watches me.
But why should I? Why does he need to know?
So I ask him. “Why do you need to know all of this? What do you care?”

He nods with understanding like a doctor would and then slips my hand into his. It takes another full minute to realize he’s taking my pulse. “I used to be a medic in Special Forces. Covert ops. Saw it all the time. There are triggers. You have some. Tell me what they are.”

“Special Forces. Like hot-shot soldier stuff?” I smile, intrigued.

He gives me this stern look. “You can make this as hard or easy as you like. You choose. I’ll listen. Tell me what your triggers are.”

I start out slow. “I’ve always had fears—losing, failing, falling. I’m a dancer. Falling was the worst for a long time. Next up came failing. The part. The show. The director. I got serious about ballet when I was eight.
Eight years old.
I didn’t like losing parts, missing steps, falling, or failing. Those were my fears and they just got bigger over the years. Harder to overcome. And then, Holly died. We were seventeen. And the big three seemed to metamorphose into this never-ending, ever present fear of loss. So yes, there’s this big gaping hole inside of me that I try to avoid feeling at all costs, but sometimes it engulfs all of me no matter what I do.”

I take an unsteady breath and look over at him. He waits patiently with a gaze that implores me to finish.

“I was driving. I suppose I live with that guilt too.” I nod slowly and start over. “I was driving. It was raining. A black SUV clipped my car on the 101 on Valentine’s Day. Almost five years ago. I barely got out of the car in time. Somehow I did, but Holly didn’t. There was a fire, and then an explosion on the freeway in the middle of the 101 on Valentine’s Day, and I was driving. My identical twin sister died. You do the math.” I wince in admitting to it all.

My breath gets shallow all over again. I start to wheeze while Sam still holds onto my wrist and must feel my rapidly rising pulse for a second time.

“Breathe. Just breathe. Keep your eyes open. Look at me, Tally. Just concentrate on taking in air, in and out. You can do this.”

It takes a few minutes, but I recover again just like before. I’m less afraid and simply amazed by what he’s taught me to do in the last fifteen minutes when an attack comes on.

“Tell me the rest,” he says gently.

“Linc was there. At the accident. I didn’t know or remember that until much later.” I look intently at Sam, who nods encouraging me. “And he was my air, and he used to tell me…I was his water. So my triggers would seem to be the rain, the 101, Valentine’s Day, black SUVs, sometimes just riding in a car, let alone driving one, the mention of Holly, air, or water and just this overwhelming guilt that I lived and she didn’t. The good twin dies; the bad one lives. How is that fair to any of us?”