The Truth About Air & Water (Truth in Lies #2) (44 page)

Then, she stalks off with her clothes, announcing to her newest fans—the entire Grizzlies ball club—she’s going to change.

And I just stare after her without saying anything.

My next mistake.

There will be others.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Your Body Is A Wonderland -LINC

“She’s in there. She told me to tell you she’s fine, and she will be out when she is good and ready,” Brandy says to me and then looks anxiously at Hillman as if he can miraculously fix any of this.

It’s been more than a half-hour since Tally disappeared. The entire bar misses her.

“Is she crying?” I ask softly.

“I’m not supposed to say.” The blonde nods yes.

“Geez,” I say. “All right I’m going in.” I’ve just gotten the words out of my mouth when Tally appears before us in the doorway. She lists to one side, but she’s looking extremely hot in this sexy, Neo-goth look. Her eyes are a little red—the only dead giveaway that she’s been crying at all or done one too many tequila shots.

Brandy looks taken aback at Tally’s fast recovery. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” She asks.

Tally nods at Brandy and doesn’t say anything. She looks at me. She’s dressed all in black. Jeans. A black T-shirt. Shoes that are so high they could be used as a weapon. There’s a black ribbon in her hair that seems to serve some special purpose. All I can do is stare at her with my mouth open.

She was beautiful before in the white dress but now all-black ensemble, and the fierce look in her eyes takes her to a whole new level. One part of me is busy saying, ‘go for it’, but there’s this other part lecturing me.
Stop. Take a good look at her. What do you see?
That part seems to know the wrong move with Tally will fuck this up but good if I haven’t already.

“Can we talk?” I ask like a prayer.

“Oh yes,” she says throwing her head back with this harsh laugh. Then she stops and zeroes in on my face. “But our darkest hour approaches. Mine anyway,” she says. The torment in her eyes is unmistakable. I look down in search of words and discover she carrying the wedding dress over one arm. She follows my gaze. “French silk. Tulle. Catherine Deane’s design all the way from London,” she recites and then smiles like she holds the last secret in the world. “Come on, Prez. I’ve got one more thing to show you, but we have to go outside for this one. And then we’ll
talk
. You and I will
finally
talk
.”

She actually smiles. It’s wide and beautiful and benevolent. I’m riveted by it. Still staring. Still stunned when I realize she’s already walked off down the hallway. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast. She’s about thirty feet ahead of us before I realize she’s dead serious about going outside.

O’Riley’s front doors fly open and she slips past the people coming into the bar while she is clearly headed out.

Meanwhile, a cool breeze assails the three of us—Hillman, Brandy, and me—as we hit the street just outside the club in search of Tally. We round the corner of the building preparing to fan out and start looking for her when all three of us seem to spot her at the same time. She stands at the far end of the parking lot about a hundred feet away from us.

Her dress glows all white. She holds it out in front of her and seems to admire one last time. Then she throws it up in the air and we all watch it billow out like a full sail suddenly let go into the wind and watch it float down and land on a top of a pile of trash stacked into a nice tidy pile like a bonfire all ready to go.

It’s only then I notice the bottle in her hand. She uncorks it and soon she’s pouring it all over the dress and trash pile. “Who sold her the bottle?” I ask.

“She ordered it when she first came in and said to put it on your tab,” Brandy says. “That you like scotch and it had to be scotch.”

I know this scene. She told me this one.

I break out in a dead run toward Tally. “No. No. Tally. No. Don’t do it. Don’t!” My feeble attempt to save the dress evaporates when I’m only about halfway across the parking lot. Powerless all at once, I watch as the dress catches fire with the lighter Tally holds to it.

It’s about that time, I register the pavement’s uneven, and in the next second I fall hard to the concrete.

It’s not a baseball field.
That’s my first thought.

My head throbs with fresh pain.
That’s my second.

I’m fucked.
That’s my third.

The hiss of burning silk and paper has me turning my head in time to watch the entire trash pile catch fire as orange and blue flames rage upward and obliterate the fine material of Tally’s dress. It only takes about sixty seconds to watch it turn to all flame. Tally steps back and dazedly watches the fire get bigger. Even my precarious side view of her face shows it looking grim and tragic. I can feel her pain all the way over here. It feels like our whole past together was just ignited and went up in those flames right along with the dress. I moan, roll over onto my back, and look up at the black sky filled with stars in a moment of wonder laced with pure dread.
What the hell just happened?

Then, Tally comes into view. “Are you okay?” She asks, leaning down on both thighs, trying to catch her breath. Somehow, I take solace that she must have run all the way over to me.
There’s that.

“Running to save me?” Of course, I’m immediately feeling sorry for myself. My words come out all wrong. My head really hurts now, worse than ever the entire night. All at once, I’m impatient with the constant headaches that plague me, the memory loss, the LA thing, being sent down, this mess that is my life and in the next three seconds I take it all out on her. “Why the
fuck
did you do that?”

“Why the
fuck
do you care?”

I run my hand across the left side of my face checking for damage. My hand comes away sticky and wet. “Perfect.”

“You’re bleeding. It’s bad.” She impatiently extends her hand and helps me up from the ground.

Hillman and Brandy come running over to us. “I think the dress is a total loss,” Doug says sadly as he points to the still glowing orange fire about fifty feet away. “Prez, you’re bleeding all over the place.”

“Thanks for the 411,” I say feeling a little queasy.

Tally searches the left side of my head for the gash, squinting in the semi-darkness as her fingers trace my face. “It’s pretty bad. Come on. Let’s get you to your car.”

Hillman helps me out as I lean on his shoulder as the four of us make our way over to my truck. My whole body aches along with my head on my head as the blood streams down my face. I lean against the driver’s door while Hillman takes over assessing the damage to my skull. Brandy races back into the bar and returns sixty seconds later with a med kit. Tally wipes my face with some dance tights of hers she found in her bag.

The fawning by all three of them becomes a bit too much and my temper has me lashing out yet again. “Everybody just back off. Doug knows what to do. Hillman, there’s QuikClot in my workout bag.”

Tally looks like I’ve just struck her and moves back about three feet away from me. Brandy goes over to console her, putting her arm around her, and saying something neither Hillman, nor I can hear.

Meanwhile, Doug retrieves the stuff from my workout bag like I told him to and acts as the newly anointed medical chief by me. He presses the white packet to the side of my head to stop the bleeding and then applies three butterfly bandages in quick succession to the gash to essentially close it.

Cuts. Nicks. Bruises. Baseball players get them all the time. We know what to do. QuikClot, the cure-all, along with band-aids.

“You’ll live,” he says to me quietly. “If you want to. She’s beyond pissed.”

“You
think
?” I mutter.

“You need to talk to her, Prez. She needs to hear it from you. The truth about LA,” he says quietly. I nod.

Then Hillman turns to Tally who still stands to one side looking wounded in all kinds of ways while the first baseman’s been performed his medical techniques on me. “Tally, you got this? You’re not going to kill our boy here, are you?” He looks sympathetic and smiles at her. “You know girls like the one in LA make shit like that up all the time about ballplayers like us. It takes a strong woman—a very special one—to ignore it and know what’s real and what’s not.”

Tally lasers in on Doug for a few precious seconds. It appears Hillman gets to learn firsthand that if looks could kill we’d both be dead right now. “Well, it takes a strong man—
a very special one
—to be loyal and resist all of that shit in the first place, Doug. And our boy,
Prez
, here, may not have done that this last time around. Nevertheless, we are surely going to talk about all of that like right the fuck now. So, thank you.
Brandy. Doug.
I’ve got this.”

Hillman won’t let it go. I can’t decide if he’s seizing an opportunity because of Brandy or trying to save my ass. “Maybe we’ll see you two tomorrow morning. Breakfast? We’ve got a game tomorrow night, Prez.” Hillman’s looks questioningly at Tally for a response.

It takes her a good two minutes to give him one. Tally looks a little undone. “Surely, there’s a decent place for breakfast around here,” she finally says. “It’s Fresno after all." She rewards them with her best stage smile, but I'm not sure he completely understands how royally pissed off she still is at me, but somehow I know.

“There’s Lily’s Diner. They make great pancakes,” Brandy says, now helpful about a half an hour too late. “If you’re serious…about not killing him and if Linc’s still with us in the morning.” Brandy laughs easing the tension for all of us.

“Oh, we’ll be there.” Tally looks intently at me after she says this. “I think I made my point.”

“I think you did,” Hillman says gently. “You can always buy another dress, Tally. I’m sure he’s going to ask you again before the night is over.”

Tally and I both stare up at the black sky overhead and note the stars are too far away to help us out. It appears we’re both unable to acknowledge Hillman’s last words as a dire prediction or even as a possible promise.

Brandy laughs nervously again and quietly chides Hillman for getting in the middle of our fight. Then starts to grab his hand and gestures toward the bar. “They need to talk. We don’t know their history.”

“Damn straight,” Tally says under her breath to the three of us.

The blood starts running down my face again despite Hillman’s stellar bandage job. As a last ditch effort to help me out he hands me another QuikClot and tells me to keep it on there for a few minutes more. There’s another camera flash from behind us near the fire at the far edge of the parking lot that’s now smoldering but still going with a few persistent flames.

The four of us decide that now is a good time to part ways. Brandy and Doug head back inside still holding hands and make it all look easy being together. A couple without baggage and simple promises. I like you. You like me.

Easy for them.

Apparently impossible for us.

“I wish it was that easy,” Tally says aloud as she too watches the two of them walk off together. Then, she’s staring at my truck. “You drive a truck.” This is apparently bad news to the girl who’s been leaning up against it this entire time. I unlock the cab and slide sideways in the driver’s seat and patiently wait while watching Tally contemplate her next move. She has this vexed look as if she’s been foiled on some level. “You drive a truck,” she says again shaking her head.

“It’s transportation. It was cheap. It holds my gear.” I wave toward the truck bed where my workout bag sits. She raises an eyebrow and just looks at me without saying anything more. I sigh, secretly upset that she doesn’t seem to appreciate the coolness factor of my truck on any level. “It’s
Fresno
, not San Fran.”

“But it’s a truck.”

“But it’s black. I got a good deal on it and look at those wheels.
Chrome
.” I gesture toward them as if chrome explains everything, but she just shakes her head and sort of grunts as she turns me facing forward in the drivers’ seat and then proceeds to climb over me. It would be fair to say that I’m milking the latest head injury and attempting to save my ego at this point, hoping to score sympathy points with her in any way I can, so she doesn’t actually kill me. “It’s not that bad. It’s actually beautiful. It’s reliable.”