The car ride wasn’t as bad as Kevin had anticipated, mostly because they both stayed silent from the time they got into Hadley’s purple POS car—he couldn’t believe the thing was still running—till they reached her place. He had taken a large hoodie from the lost-and-found and drawn it low over his face. The car’s AC was on the fritz, but they drove with the windows rolled tight, so he was sweating like a Saturday-morning jogger by the time they arrived at her granddad’s bungalow on Burgoyne Street. God, he hoped he didn’t stink. They went in through the screened porch out back, and the relative coolness of the kitchen felt like plunging into the river. He stripped off the hoodie and laid it over the back of a chair.
Hadley still wasn’t looking at him. “Granddad, I’m home!”
“He’s not feeling good, Mom.” Hudson, Hadley’s twelve-year-old, didn’t look up from his spot in front of the game console in the family room. “He went upstairs to lie down.”
She glanced back at Kevin. “I better go look in on him. Genny, Hudson, put the Nintendo down and come say hi to our guest.”
“It’s Kevin! Yay!” Geneva, Hudson’s ten-year-old sister, ran across the kitchen to give him a hug. “We haven’t seen you in forever, Kevin. Look, I finally have all my grown-up teeth in the front.”
“Hey, Kevin.” Hudson, past the hugging age, shook hands. “We’ve missed you at track.”
“I miss it, too, buddy.” Kevin had been the volunteer assistant coach for the middle school’s cross-country and track teams. “How’d you do this spring?”
“Not as good as the cross-country last fall, but we did place higher than Greenwich for a change.”
“Good job.” Kevin let the kids pull him into the family room, and by the time Hadley returned, looking cool and collected in shorts and a sleeveless top, he was sitting on the floor, learning the finer points of Kar Krash 3000.
“Mom,” Genny said, “Kevin has fake tattoos! Can we get fake tattoos?”
“No.”
“I told him beards were so over.”
Hadley bit her lower lip. “Well. I trust your knowledge of the trends.” She gestured toward the kitchen. “I’m going to let you kiddos play Nintendo a little longer tonight because Kevin is going to help me in the kitchen.”
“Sweet,” Hudson said.
“No offense, Kevin, but you’re too old to be a hipster.” Genny took the joystick from Flynn. “You should go for the retro grunge look.”
“The retro grunge look?” he said when they were in the kitchen. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“And she’s just starting fifth grade. Imagine what she’ll be like in middle school.” She took a bowl of London broil in marinade out of the fridge.
“Um. How’s your grandfather?”
She shook her head. “He insists on taking the kids for ice cream or fast food and then stuffing himself. Then he has to take another insulin shot, and his gut acts up, and God knows what it’s doing to his arteries.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. Well.” She reached for a baking pan on the bottom shelf.
He couldn’t help watching her shorts tightening, feeling himself respond, and feeling sick about doing so. “What can I do to help?”
“There’s some salad stuff in the crisper. Would you grab it?”
He found a head of leaf lettuce, a cucumber, and some green onions. She had a bowl on the kitchen table with a few ripe and misshapen tomatoes, clearly a gift from some gardening neighbor. “You know how to make a salad, right?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, I don’t know. You didn’t know how to make a baked potato, and that’s about as basic as it gets.”
“Oh, believe me, I know I was way too ignorant for you.”
She spun around, cutting board in one hand and knife in the other. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Let’s just stick to what we need to talk about.” He crossed to the sink and washed his hands. “Knife? Peeler?”
She gestured. “In that drawer. The salad bowl’s in the cupboard beneath.”
He retrieved the tools and bowl and took a seat at the table. She had her head down, watching carefully as she sliced the meat into thin strips. “Okay. What we need to talk about. You first.”
Now he had come to it, he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. Somehow, he had imagined Hadley as reticent and shamed when they finally saw each other again. Maybe a little desperate, needing him to rescue her from her ex again. Obviously a fantasy, because she was never reticent, refused to be shamed, and didn’t need anyone except her kids.
“I guess I just wanted you to know that if it comes down to it, if Dylan’s suit goes to court, I’ll make sure you’re cleared.”
She put the knife down. “What does that mean, Flynn?”
“It means I’ll tell them I put a bag of meth in his suitcase.”
“Did you? Because I know I didn’t. And Dylan may be an asshole,” she dropped her voice, “but he’s not stupid enough to carry on a flight. Besides, there wasn’t enough for sale, just for use, and I know Dylan. If he had enough to get high, he would have done it, not packed it for later.”
“I will say I put the meth in the bag.” He enunciated every word. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” She took a chair, facing him across the table. “What the hell were you thinking, Flynn?”
He picked up the cucumber and began peeling it. “If I had been the person who—”
“You did it, Flynn! Just … admit it. It’s not like I’m going to rat you out.”
“You’re going to be a witness under oath, Hadley.” Saying her name out loud was strange. “The attorney’s going to ask you if you saw me slipping the meth into your ex’s bag. You’ll say no. Then he’s going to ask you if I ever confessed to you or spoke to you about it. And you’re going to be able to say no to that, too.”
“Oh, God, Flynn.” She pressed her palms against her forehead. “You could lose your badge over this.”
“Then I go to law school like my mom continually bugs me about. Dylan was always going to be able to hold the kids’ custody over your head because of the … what you did. Now he’s got a conviction for possession and intent to transport. That evens the playing field.”
She stood up abruptly and walked back to the counter. She lined the pan with tinfoil and covered it with a broiler rack. “You didn’t know about my porn career that night.”
He felt his throat close up. “No. Obviously not.”
“Then why?”
“Because I know you. I’ve seen you under fire, and chasing down bad guys, and driving through zero visibility, and the only time I’ve seen you scared was when he threatened to get custody from you. So I knew … it was something bad.”
“Oh, yeah.” She laid the meat strips onto the rack. “Something bad. Bad enough so when you found out, you dumped me without a word and disappeared. To goddamned Syracuse.”
His jaw tightened. “Look, you got whatever you wanted out of me. Don’t pretend your feelings were hurt.”
She tossed the pan into the oven and slammed the door. “Pretend? Pretend? You—” She glanced toward the family room, where the kids were still battling it out for world dominance. “You think I let anybody in like that? My God.”
She threw her oven mitt on the counter and stalked out the back door. He could see her through the windows, pacing around the screened porch, her lips moving in what he assumed were curses she didn’t want the kids to hear.
He was not the one in the wrong here. And he sure as hell didn’t want to rehash what had happened that night. Coming in at the end of his shift, the guys clustered around the screen, and those images … he screwed his eyes shut to chase them out of his head. They had made love that afternoon. At least, he thought of it as making love. Obviously, that wasn’t her take on it. And he had been too stupid, too naïve to know. God, he was hopeless.
The timer dinged. He stared at the oven. Was he supposed to take the meat out? Put something on it? Turn the temperature down? Growling beneath his breath, he walked to the kitchen door and opened it. “The timer went off.”
She stalked past him as if he wasn’t there. She slid the pan out and swiftly turned the slices over with a spatula before returning it to the oven. She turned to him. “You. Are a jerk. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, since every guy I ever get close to turns out to have been a jerk.”
“Me?” Kevin stood up. “I never treated you with anything less than respect and complete honesty.”
“Oh, really?” She made a motion like a swinging baggie.
“Forget that. You know what I mean. I told you honestly how I felt. I told you about my inexperience. God, when I think about how I must have seemed to you! Sweet virginal Kevin, too dumb to realize he’s being played.”
“Shh! Keep it down!” She yanked the door open and shoved him onto the screened porch. “Is that what this is about? Because I wasn’t some untouched vestal, too?” She shut the door behind her.
“Oh, for chrissake, Hadley, I knew you weren’t a virgin. I just didn’t expect you to be a pro.”
“I was a performer,” she hissed.
“Performing with dicks in you. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, is it?”
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did, Flynn. I was young, I made some bad decisions, and I regret—I deeply regret—the way it’s affected my kids. But I’m not ashamed of having sex. I notice you were fine dipping your wick until you found out some other guys had been there first.”
“Some other guys?” He was so frustrated he couldn’t stand still. “Hadley, I thought what we had was special.”
“It was special, you idiot.”
“Then how come in two years you never found time to mention to me, Oh, by the way, Flynn, I used to act in porn. Jesus, yes, it horrifies me to realize everybody I’ve worked with for the last five years has seen you orgasming.”
“I was faking.”
“Oh, that makes it much better. And I’m sick to my stomach when I realize what I must have seemed like in comparison.”
“For God’s sake, Flynn, I wasn’t comparing—”
“But the part that really gets me? That really rams home how little you thought of me? The fact you didn’t trust me. Forget the relationship part. I thought we were friends. But even when you were scared your ex was going to get the kids, you still didn’t come clean. You couldn’t be honest with me, and I had to find out by walking in on the rest of the department watching you banging two guys in full color. Christ, of course I transferred to Syracuse. How could I stay?”
The evening air was still heavy and damp. Outside, he could hear grasshoppers buzzing, and the distant shouts of kids playing.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I should have told you. I didn’t because I knew it would cause everything to fall apart.”
“Yeah? Well, you got that right.”
“You could have at least stayed around to talk about it. You never gave me a chance to explain, or apologize, or anything. I got to work the next day and the chief told us you’d taken your accumulated sick days and you were gone.”
“You could have called me, Hadley. I didn’t change my number.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t call you while I was dealing with the worst crisis of my working life! I didn’t know if I was going to be fired, if I was going to have to resign, let alone if some jackass like Paul Urquhart would start blabbing and I’d have to move the kids again—”
“You don’t get it, do you? Your worst crisis is when you’re supposed to call the people who love you. But no, of course you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t have told me about your ex if we hadn’t been stuck working together. You won’t ask anyone for help, because you don’t trust anyone.” He thumped down onto the picnic bench, shaking his head. “You know, it’s true. I don’t know anything about sex. But at least I know how to be a human being in a relationship.”
Hadley took the bench across from him. “I did trust you. I trusted you to have my back when we worked together. I trusted you to spend time with my kids, and to help me get them back from Dylan, and I trusted you when we…” She trailed off. “I told you I was ready to try. You and me. And then you left without a word.”
“You know what I kept hearing in my head that night? You telling me, It’s just sex, Flynn.” He leaned across the picnic table. “We were together three times, and at least two of them, you jumped me like you were scratching an itch. So when I found out you had been a porn star? It made sense. I finally believed what you had been telling me all that time.” He hated that he sounded so bitter, but he couldn’t help it.
“You know what I finally believed? That you loved me. You told me you did time and time again, and I ignored it, because you were young, and I was the first woman you’d slept with, and how could you love me, some boy whose life had barely started, and me with two kids and a mountain of debt and so much baggage I need a U-Haul to make it through the day.” She stood up. “But you convinced me, Flynn. You made me believe it. For the first time in fifteen years, I thought maybe I am loveable.” She laid her hands on the picnic table and leaned over him. “And I got smacked in the face for it.”
She crossed to the kitchen. “So I guess I was right the first time. It was just sex.” She slammed the door, leaving him alone.
Kevin crossed his arms on the picnic table and laid his head down, too exhausted for the moment to sit upright. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. So much for feeling better if he let it all out. He still felt like he had a gut full of poison inside, but now his outside was lacerated, too, as if he’d been scoured with acid. His head seemed to be stuffed with greasy rags. He let his breath empty out and focused on the knot of hunger in his stomach, the smell of grass clippings from beyond the screens, the feel of the wood beneath his arms. Just being for a moment. Breathing in. Breathing out.
He didn’t notice Hadley was back until she sat down at the end of the bench. He jerked upright. She held her hands up. Pax. “Dinner’s ready.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
“Just one more thing. Not about us. I mean, not about our … relationship.”
“All right. I guess.”
“The lawsuit. They’re going to depose you at some point. What are you going to say?”
That I thought I was being your knight in shining armor. That I wanted to hurt someone who was hurting you. That I was an idiot.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I just don’t know.”