“Excuse me?” Heat snapped in Molly’s eyes, and Colin watched her set her drink carefully down on the step next to her.
“I seriously mean no offence.” He didn’t, that was true. “My sister has all sorts of crap packaged up when it comes to men. She knew she was a folly to our dad.”
Molly’s mouth made an O.
“So, what, your dad didn’t think you were good enough?”
Molly cleared her throat. She seemed to be weighing whether or not he deserved an answer.
Colin jammed the hand that wasn’t holding his drink into his pocket and crossed his fingers.
Finally, she seemed to accept that he was truly looking for an honest answer. “Dad always thought I was perfect. He just thought if I worked a little harder, I could be even more perfect, you know?”
“How?” Colin couldn’t think of a single thing to improve the woman in front of him. Her eyes, her face, her body – she could be on the front of a magazine and he’d buy it, even if it was about knitting. Her laugh made his blood feel carbonated.
She looked at him in surprise. “Looks-wise. You know.”
He didn’t. “No.”
“I was the one who needed to lose weight.”
“Bullshit.” It was a kneejerk answer, and the only one.
“Do you think my sisters were too skinny?”
“I never thought about it.”
“But you thought about my weight.”
It was a trap. He’d fallen into it. It wasn’t a good trap, and she’d dug it in the wrong place. “Only because I was a human being when your band was big.” He’d seen the covers of People and US Magazine.
She shrugged and took a quick sip of her bourbon. “There you go. Every tabloid trumpeted my weight. What they guessed I was up to. Or down to, if they happened to grab nothing but a good angle.”
“That’s a dumb thing to say.”
“Sorry?” One eyebrow arched, and he wanted to reach out with his thumb to smooth it back down.
“You believe what’s on the front of those things? Yesterday when I was buying gum at the market, I read that Angelina Jolie’s getting a sex change.”
Molly made a pissed-off sound between her teeth. “I don’t know how they get away with it. Most of it isn’t even embellished or exaggerated. It’s all just flat-out lies.”
“So you’re saying that they’re full of shit.” He arched an eyebrow.
“God. I know.” She rubbed her cheeks. “I should know that, I should know that in my bones, but when you read those headlines when you’re eighteen and nineteen, it screws with your head, you know? It was hard. The band broke up in two thousand and five, right before social media really became a thing. I can’t imagine how young women – young people – deal with it today. The worst I got was being cut out of the video for “A Secret Made for Keeping”.”
“They cut you out? But you were the lead singer, right? The voice.”
“You wouldn’t know it in that video. They usually put me behind something, or behind one of the other girls, but for that one, they cut out every image of me. I didn’t even know it till the video-release party. I was the voice, all right. And that was all. But whatever. It’s okay. I’m over it now.”
“Yeah?” She clearly wasn’t.
“Most days. Then there are the bad days, but I’m not unique in that. Every woman in America –”
“I thought you were hot then,” he jumped in. “And I think you’re hotter now.” That was the stripped-down truth, unvarnished.
“Mmm.” Her cheeks lit pink, and then the tip of her nose went the same shade. He wondered how far down her blush went.
“So with all due respect, fuck your old man. Maybe he had good intentions, but he was just plain wrong.”
Molly stared at him.
“What?”
She reached forward and touched his wrist with one finger, lightly. His blood fizzed. “You make it sound so easy. I should just let it go.”
“You loved your dad, and I’m sure he loved you.”
“He did. That’s never been in question.”
“Must be nice.” The tone was too automatic, too bitter, and it was out before he could stop it.
“What’s the story with your dad?”
“Eh. Not worth it.”
“What?” She traced the vein on the back of his hand, and he swayed towards her in the starlit dark. “You pushed me into talking about my deep pain,” but she said it lightly and continued with a small smile, “don’t you owe me the same?”
“My dad was a son of a bitch, plain and simple.”
“Tell me.”
Other women had said this to him before, but they’d always, all of them, had a different look on their faces. They’d known something about his father and they’d wanted gossip, or at least that’s what it had seemed like to him.
Molly appeared different. Her face was still so open.
“What do you know?” He was stalling.
“He was the sheriff before you. And your sister told me he killed himself. That’s literally all I know.”
He sighed and moved to sit next to her. Their knees brushed, and she didn’t pull away. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a police officer, so I could be like him. I remember that, remember looking up to him. For a little while, anyway. I remember how shiny his badge was, and how heavy his gun felt.”
“He let you hold his gun?”
“Grow up in a family like mine, and yeah. I learned to shoot before I learned to ride a bike.”
“Were you happy?”
“As a kid?”
She nodded.
“I think so. Yeah. For a while, anyway. By the time my sister got big enough to be going to school with me, things changed. I don’t know who changed first, my mom or my dad, but he started drinking more. The yelling started.” Colin paused. He cleared his throat and considered whether or not he wanted to continue.
Strangely, he wanted to tell Molly more. “They fought a lot. I guess they’d always done that. That’s what they did in my dad’s family – his brother and him fought physically their whole lives. If my dad hadn’t ended up a cop, he would have gone to jail with that half of the family. They were always in and out of prison, still are. But the first time I saw a bruise on my mom’s face was when I was going into seventh grade. I didn’t know nothin” from nothin” – I knew I was starting to notice girls, but I was confused about everything that happened when I was out of the house – so it took a lot for me to notice what was going on at home. But that black eye – she couldn’t hide it.”
“He hit her.”
“Maybe he always had. But he got sloppy about it. Hit her in front of me, and then, eventually, in front of Nikki, too. I wanted to kill him.” He held up his hand and considered it. “The first time he hit me, I was trying to protect her. He threw me against a wall and I landed on my hand. Broke this thumb. Still crooked, see?”
She looked but only briefly, keeping her eyes on his face. She caught his hand as it dropped to his lap and held it, touching his thumb lightly with her own. Then she kissed the pad of it. Once. Softly.
Warmth flooded Colin’s torso at the sheer intimacy of it. Had anyone ever kissed him like that? He blinked, trying to remember what he’d been about to say. “So. Yeah. I went from wanting to be him, to wanting to be stronger than him. I knew I’d be a police officer, and then some day, I’d arrest him and take his job. I’d be the sheriff and he’d rot in jail for hurting my mother.”
“Did he ever hurt Nikki?”
Colin remembered watching her say something cheeky, laughing, knowing she was Daddy’s favorite, and then watching her hit the floor. She’d looked up that time, obviously stunned. What happened? The worst part of that night had been their mother’s face as she’d picked Nikki up. Nothing, sweetheart. You fell. “Yeah, he did.” Colin felt a jolt right through to the top of his head. “You’re around her, around Nikki. More than I am right now. If you ever see anything on her, you’ll tell me, right?”
Molly’s eyes got bigger. “What do you mean?”
“If Todd is hurting her, I want to know. Promise me you’ll tell me if you see any evidence of that. Or if she tells you anything.”
“He hurts her?”
Colin didn’t have anything to go on, except his gut. And his gut was usually right. “Promise me. Don’t tell anyone else, just come straight to me.” He probably couldn’t get away with killing the guy, but maybe he could come close enough. “Promise?”
“I-I promise. God. Of course. And then your mom…did she get out?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“A stroke.”
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“She was just forty-five.” The coroner had said the blood clot could have just been in her body, waiting. Maybe the stroke had been coming for a long time, even as young as she’d been.
Colin would always blame the myriad times her neck had been snapped back.
“Jesus.”
“He lost it then.”
“Is that when…”
“No. That took another year. He got caught drinking on the job, and back then, it was something you could get away with a little easier. He was sent to treatment, two months, all on the taxpayer’s dime. He came back, and not much changed. He arrested a woman on a DUI once, and while he was just joking around in the jail, he blew a higher BAC than she had.” Colin had been in the jail that night, booking a kid on a vandalism charge. He was about to be promoted to sergeant. He’d been getting closer and closer to taking his father’s job. He’d been only twenty-five. He’d watched his father, the big man, blow into the machine and then show the woman he’d arrested his higher reading, delighted with himself. Colin had told him to knock it off. Or what? You’ll tell who on me? You gonna report me to myself?
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah.”
Molly didn’t say anything. Another woman might have leaned forward. Might have kissed him. Might have told him he could do it, assured him that she was safe to talk to, that it was okay to let it all out.
Instead, Molly just watched him. One of her hands rested lightly on his knee. She didn’t clutch him – she didn’t touch him reassuringly. She just waited. Open.
Sudden, horrifying tears clogged his throat. Jesus H. Christ, he hadn’t cried for seven years. He wasn’t going to start now. He waited, catching a breath high in his chest and holding it, a trick he’d learned early on.
Molly’s gaze stayed clear, her breathing steady and slow. Her neck was long, and he could see her pulse beating steadily in her throat. Her hand on his knee was warm.
“It was my birthday. I was about to get promoted. He was going to have to be the guy to promote me. I knew he didn’t want to – I thought the gunshot was a truck backfiring on the other side of the station. Didn’t even cross my mind that it could be anything else till I heard Nikki scream. She’d stopped by to drop off a cake for me and the guys. A pineapple upside-down cake, my favorite. Used to be my favorite. She dropped it all over the floor.” He paused. He’d forgotten till this very moment about that damn cake. The paramedics had tromped through it, and then the coroner. “That’s funny. The janitor at the department just switched to some pineapple air fragrance in the bathrooms. It’s been making me sick. I didn’t put that together till right now.” He caught Molly’s hand in his. “Isn’t that funny?”
“No.” She squeezed his fingers. “It’s not.”
“Anyway.” Colin tried to scrape up the memory of a smile from somewhere. “You may have guessed the punch line. Eventually, I kept getting promoted until I got his job.”
She kissed him.
It wasn’t a hot kiss. It wasn’t even a sad kiss.
It was just her lips against his.
She was with him.
Molly was with him, next to him.
His body felt so weak from telling the story that he wondered if his legs would hold him if he stood. And yet he felt strong enough to move a mountain with nothing but his hands to do the digging.
Then he realized something and dragged his head away from her.
He groaned.
“What?”
“That.” Colin touched Molly’s bottom lip. “That was a pity kiss, wasn’t it?”
“Mmm.” A half-smile curved her mouth. “Maybe?”
“Okay. I admit it. I kissed you out of pity, too. At the hotel. I wanted to make you feel better.”
Molly sat straighter. “I knew it. You are a total and complete –”
“But then I lost control of it.”
“– jackass,” she continued weakly. “What?”
“A pity kiss would have been like this.” His heart thumped in his chest so loudly he wondered if she’d hear it. She didn’t pull away as he dropped his mouth to hers. He kissed her chastely, close-mouthed, and it almost killed him to pull away again. “That’s what a helpful kiss would have been.”
“Jackass,” she repeated. There was no heat in it, not like the waves of it rising in the two inches left between their bodies.
“But that kiss at the hotel wasn’t a nice-guy kiss, was it?”
“What?”
“Admit it. You felt what you did to me.”
She gasped, a soft pop of noise that had him just as hard again.
“That’s when I knew I’d lost control and that I’d just shot myself in the foot with my helpful attempt at making you feel better. There was no pity about it. Not a second’s worth. And you know what?”
“What?” she said again, softer this time.
“I sure as hell don’t feel bad for you now.”
“Jesus holy Christoballs,” Molly muttered.
And then she kissed him.
For real.
Finally.