Chapter 3
Huddled against the door, Karen stared through the window at the starkly beautiful desert landscape. The searing sun, even through the dark lenses of her sunglasses, along with the vast tracts of openness left her with a vague sense of queasiness but it was nothing compared to what she felt every time she glanced over at the dark, glowering form behind the wheel.
Yeah, she'd take her chances with the desert.
"I swear to you, Carlton—I didn't say anything to Marlowe about any feelings for you." A wisp of conversation from the night before returned. More than a wisp, really. And while she might consider it inconsequential, she owed it to him to be ruthlessly honest about everything. Her voice low she amended herself. "At least, not any current feelings."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means…"
You almost sound as if you've still got some unrequited feelings going on.
For the boy he was… maybe. You know what they say about never really forgetting your first love.
Karen hesitated, then after a deep breath, said, "All I said was any feelings I had were… for the boy you'd been. For first love. That's all."
God knows, she'd been on the receiving end of plenty of Carlton Lassiter scorn over the years—enough to be able give back as good as she got or at the very least, brush it off it without a second thought. Which was why it came as a painful shock to realize just how much his dismissive snort cut her to the core.
Bastard.
He was the one who'd left, dammit. He had no right to question how she felt.
Had felt.
Had.
Pressing her lips into a painful line, she swallowed the tears that threatened and somehow, managed to restrain the sniff that was trying like hell to escape. Karen Vick didn't cry. No sir, she did not. And she certainly wouldn't cry in front of Carlton Lassiter.
Another thirty miles passed—thirty miles of beige and dusty green landscape punctuated by cacti topped with unexpectedly brilliant flowers and weathered Joshua trees, gnarled and bent like wizened old men, their branches extended like arms warning them, slow down… slow down… think… listen. Perhaps take a cue from the towering rock formations that littered the desert floor, boulders stacked haphazardly and looking like they could topple at any moment yet their smooth edges and contours belying the impression. Those big-ass rocks—they'd been there long before any humans had laid eyes on them and would endure long after their petty emotional squabbles had crumbled to once more become part of the desert and sky and the distant, hazy mountains.
"What do you want from me, Carlton?"
From the corner of her eye she could see his knuckles whitening as he tightened his fingers around the steering wheel. "I just want to know what you said to her, Karen. You had to have said something. Not intentionally, but just.. that you said anything at all after all this time... I just can't help but wonder—could you have said something that made her… go?"
Her heart broke a little at the slight hitch in his voice just before the final word. In that hitch she heard the boy he'd been—heard a long-ago confession, whispered into the darkness of a night that had protected them from the world beyond their cocoon—how he'd never felt as if he'd belonged anywhere or with anyone… until her.
She'd held him close and promised, through the few tears that had escaped, that he'd always belong with her. Would always belong to her. And she'd always be his.
And yet, he'd been the one to leave.
Attention K-Mart Shoppers, we have a Blue Light Special on irony, Aisle 4.
For a long time she'd used that to stay angry—had considered it the first of the lies. Then she'd forced herself to forget and hadn't thought of it at all.
Now, with the distance of time and in the spirit of ruthless honesty, she could admit there was no way Carlton would have lied about that. Anything else, maybe, but not his desire to belong to someone. To cherish and be cherished. To love. It was too closely protected a part of him for him to easily reveal, much less lie about.
"Carlton, I swear… I've told you everything I can recall from last night."
"Doesn't mean there isn't something you're not remembering." The Lassiter edge had returned to his voice, obliterating any trace of the boy. "Considering you had trouble recalling you'd even said a damned thing to start with."
"It's amazing how shock and puking your guts up has a way of jogging the memory."
He made some unintelligible noise in his throat but this one lacked the obvious scorn that had characterized most of his unintelligible noises so far. Lifting the bottle of lukewarm Sprite she'd been nursing for the last hour, he indicated she should take it.
"How's your stomach?"
She took a cautious sip, sighing as the liquid slid down her battered throat. "I'll live."
Maybe. Her abdomen ached as if the cast of Riverdance had performed a reel across it—twice—her throat felt raw, her eyes like they'd been rolled in sand and shoved back in her skull, and she couldn't even describe what was going on in her head, but she'd be damned if she'd admit to any of that. She'd just wait for him to deposit her on her doorstep after which she could crawl into the dark and safety of her own bed and maybe not come out, like… ever.
"Carlton?"
"Yeah?"
Twisting the cap back and forth on the bottle's neck, she spoke carefully. "Is it possible you said anything?"
"No." His voice was flat and absolute.
Damned stubborn, thick-headed, Irish… man.
"Carlton—"
"Karen," he returned, mocking her chastising tone. "What could I have possibly said?"
"I don't know," she shot back. "I wasn't there. But let's face it, you do have a pretty well-documented history of saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible time." She glanced away from the window in time to see a deep flush suffuse his fair skin. To his credit though, he didn't argue. Tough to argue with inescapable fact—even for Carlton Lassiter.
His shoulders rose and fell with a long breath. "Honest to God, Karen, I have gone over and over every single word of my conversation with Marlowe, from the moment she shook me awake to the moment she walked out, saying she'd be back later to get the rest of her things, and I cannot put my finger on a single thing I said that would have driven her to leave." The lines of his face tightened into the familiar scowl, overlaid with an unfamiliar pain.
"That's why… it has to be something you said. Otherwise, it just makes no sense."
Turning back to the window, she muttered under her breath, "And it's always easier to blame the one who isn't there."
"What?"
"Nothing." Karen replaced the soda bottle back in the cup holder and continued staring out the window, lost in thought while beside her, Carlton vibrated with a barely restrained frustration and impatience. He wanted answers and he wanted them now. But if there was one thing the man had learned in the past seven years of dealing with her on a day-to-day basis, it was that he wouldn't get an answer out of her until she was damned well good and ready to give one.
Damn, she really wished she didn't have to give him one. Not about this.
Finally, she pulled her gaze away from the landscape that had, over the last hour, become something of a soothing balm to her aching head—and heart. The idle thought occurred of maybe returning one day when she had time to hike among the ancient rocks and flora—to watch the sun set in dazzling shades of red and purple and orange and gold before the stars emerged to blanket a never ending expanse of night sky.
Right. As if she'd ever be able to return again.
"Look, Carlton," she began slowly, "I'll admit I… reminisced some about what we'd had. How I'd felt about—"
I spent so many hours just draped over him doing nothing more than gazing into those eyes… Thought I had my whole life in front of me to spend on those mysteries.
She swallowed hard. "About you."
And please, dear God, don't let him ask for the details.
"Why, Karen?" His voice was soft. "After how everything ended?"
Ruthless honesty, she reminded herself. Speaking to the hazy outline of the distant mountains, she very quietly said, "I loved you very much back then. Or had you forgotten?"
A long pause, pregnant with a thousand memories, elapsed before he finally said, "I would have presumed the hate would have eclipsed anything you might have felt back then."
"God knows I tried. But I couldn't quite bring myself to hate you. Intense disdain with flashes of dislike was about the best I could muster. And even that faded after a while." And it didn't escape her attention that he hadn't answered her question. Not really. Not that it mattered.
"You sure convinced me it was full-on hate."
The words escaped before she could stop them. "Maybe that was just your guilty conscience since you're the one who left, remember?"
A deathly split-second silence encompassed the car—just long enough for the tiny hairs to rise on the back of Karen's neck—before Carlton's explosive, "I had to."
"What do you mean you had to? You had to tell me we were too young and we weren't thinking straight? You had to tell me it was a huge mistake? You had to break my heart?" Her already-raw throat burned and stung with the pain of words too long held back and the strain of the tears that threatened anew.
He looked away from the road, pinning her to her seat with a gaze that blazed blue fury. "Did you not tell your father you were afraid we'd moved too fast?"
Her heart stopped. It honest-to-God stopped cold, along with her breathing and her self-righteous fury.
"Carlton, stop the car."
"What?"
"Stop the goddamned car, now."
Without a word, he swerved sharply to the right and hit the brakes. Moments later, he was kneeling beside her, arm around her, holding her head, as she deposited the scarce contents of her stomach onto the desert floor. She heaved for what seemed like interminable minutes, her stomach contracting with such force, pain radiated up through her chest and out to her arms and legs. As the retching subsided, she spied a lizard, several feet away, regarding her curiously—through her blurred, tear-filled vision, its entire demeanor seemed to suggest she was a stupid, stupid creature.
She couldn't bring herself to disagree.
"Karen?"
At the sound of his voice—the gentlest she'd heard from him since the moment her daughter had been born—fresh tears flooded her vision turning the lizard and the surrounding landscape into an amorphous mélange of color.
"I can't right now, Carlton," she managed around the burning in her throat. Staggering to her feet, she stepped away from him and sank against the side of the car, closing her eyes against… everything. She just wished everything could disappear. The last twenty-four hours. The last twenty-five years. And yet… no. She couldn't wish that. Not when Iris had come to her in that time—she'd take anything her past had dealt her many times over in order to have Iris in her life.
An instant later she felt a bottle pressed into her hand. "God, no more Sprite, please." Her stomach lurched uncomfortably at the mere mention of it. She'd never much cared for the sickly sweet drink in the first place. Now? It was right up there with raspberry mojitos with a twist as a drink she'd likely never imbibe. Ever again.
"It's my water."
She nodded without opening her eyes and lifted the bottle to her lips, taking a swig that she swished around in her mouth and spit out. As she took a second sip, she opened her eyes to find Carlton unbuttoning his shirt, revealing the plain white t-shirt he wore beneath. Her breath caught as he tossed the button-down to the hood and swiftly reached behind his head to yank the t-shirt off.
She stared, feeling as if she were trapped in a time warp. While still rangy and lean, he'd filled out, giving more breadth to chest and shoulders and the hair that had once so aroused her, thick and black and so masculine compared to the boys she'd known before him was now, like the hair on his head, liberally sprinkled with silver. As she lifted her gaze to meet his—those eyes still so large and still so damned blue—she saw in them equal parts Carlton the shy boy and Lassiter the resolute man.
Her head ached and fresh tears burned in her throat.
"Thought you might want this." He offered her the shirt, while nodding at hers. Glancing down, she saw that the t-shirt she wore hadn't escaped her bout of sickness completely unscathed and since the rest of her clothes were with Juliet, Carlton having barely let her throw on a pair of jeans and shoes before he'd dragged her to his car, she had nothing else to change into.
"Thanks," she said hoarsely, but she wasn't even sure he heard since he'd already turned away, presumably to give her some privacy, and was busy pulling his button-down back on.
After glancing around to make certain no other vehicles were on the horizon, she quickly pulled off her damp, stained t-shirt and pulled his on, her heart stuttering as the still-warm folds draped over her body and fell just past mid-thigh, the smell of him wrapping itself around her. Like his body, altered, yet not altogether unfamiliar. Along with the fresh smell of detergent, she caught a faint whiff of light, woodsy aftershave she realized with a slight flash of surprise she'd recognize anywhere as his and further beneath, the earthy, still-achingly familiar essence of him.
"Here—" She turned to find him popping the trunk and pulling out a plastic bag. After she balled up her dirty shirt and tossed it in the bag, he tied it closed and set it in the trunk. Ducking back into its depths, he emerged a moment later holding a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash—cinnamon, she noted, recalling his allergy to mint.
"Go bag," he said with a shrug. "If you don't think it'll upset your stomach further, it might make you feel better," he said quietly, not quite meeting her gaze.
"Thanks," she repeated, seemingly incapable of more than one-syllable answers. She knew what he was doing. Other than taking care of her, that is. He was occupying himself with the mundane in order to keep from pressing for what he really wanted to know.
He wasn't alone—either in intent or desire. But now wasn't the time. Maybe that time was long past. What they both needed to concentrate on was the here and now.
Whatever mistakes and misunderstandings had occurred so many years ago, their time was long past.