The Line That Binds Series Box Set (14 page)

The hesitation hung between us when he spoke to me, like he had more important things on his mind. But he was kind enough to give me the shirt off his back. It was a simple gesture. One that was sweet and compassionate, with no hidden agenda silently demanding some form of reciprocity. It was a gesture I’d never experienced before. Most of the gifts I’d received were purchased, and still they held no value at all. And if the kindness wasn’t enough to make me swoon, I nearly blacked out at the sight of him shirtless. He wasn’t chiseled with nasty steroid-induced muscles, yet he wasn’t scrawny either. He was fit. His chest and arms were tighter and more defined than any of my previous boyfriends. Manual labor was the only difference I could think of, and it had cut him to perfection.

Even though he asked me to hang out tomorrow, I was probably being foolish thinking about him this way. Spending extra time with him could be a bad idea. We worked together. However, I’ve gotten particularly tired of shooting down ideas because of obligation, apprehension, and uncertainty. I’d done that too often in my life already. Dad’s home enough now, Gavin’s old enough to fend for himself, and I no longer have friends whose opinions I fear. I needed to move on.

I leaned against the sink in the bathroom and looked into the oval mirror. My nose stopped bleeding, leaving dried streaks along my face. I wiped the trails away with a damp cloth then unraveled Ben’s shirt from my hand. The cut wasn’t as deep as I originally thought and it had also stopped bleeding. I washed it out and bandaged it up. My head was still achy so I popped some Tylenol and returned to the window.

The sun dipped lower, consuming the sliver of sky left between it and the trees. The warmth of its rays intensified through the window glass, and I soaked it up happily. It was a beautiful day despite the trauma to my emotions and my body. For the first time since we’d lost our home, I had hope that my life was taking a better turn. This house was transforming into our
new
home. And now that I’d seen the well that Janine had smothered this place with, it was far less creepy. Standing beside it connected me to her. It was a feeling I never thought I’d have with a woman I’d never truly known.

Everything had to get better from here. Dad finally landed a job, and he looked happier in the ten seconds after he’d gotten the call than he’d been in the last ten months. Gavin might be having a tough time, but I was sure he’d start to fit in soon enough. And I was okay with it all. I was actually excited to discover my true self and forget the one I’d left behind.

“You can’t tease me that way,” Emily said from behind me after I cut the weed whacker’s engine. Her heels poked into the lawn when she stepped off the event house’s front walkway. As much as I didn’t want to talk to her, I couldn’t use her heels stabbing the grass as an excuse; it was good for aeration.

I clutched the rake and started piling grass clippings alongside the garden. “Tease you how?” I asked, knowing she was referring to the fact I was shirtless. I probably should’ve ignored her, but I knew it wouldn’t help. When she wanted something, she was persistent.

“Don’t even play,” she said, stopping a few steps from the sidewalk.

I could see her glossy-lipped smirk in my peripheral vision. I had no desire to look at her straight on. “I’m not playing. What do you want, Em?”

Her arms crossed her chest defensively and she let out an audible huff in her typical defensive form. “Simone told me to remind you about this weekend’s weddings. There’s one late tomorrow and another Sunday morning.”

“Got it,” I confirmed as I bagged the clippings. I’d hoped she’d take a hint and leave, but I wasn’t that lucky. She was silent for a minute, staring. “If you’re going to stand there, you might as well give me a hand.”

“I don’t think so. I’m off work,” she replied.

“Yeah, didn’t think so. Have a good weekend then.” I wanted her to get to the point or leave. Either was fine with me. She obviously had more to say because she wouldn’t have bothered marking up her heels otherwise.

It didn’t matter how often we’d hooked up, we both knew this relationship was worthless. It’d been that way from the beginning. Keeping our relationship strictly sexual was a mutual agreement, one both of us honored. It was never a problem until I realized how inconsiderate she really was. After I’d broken my jaw, she never even asked if I was okay. Our occasional after-work meetings just ceased without even discussing the issue. If the tables had been turned, I would have at least asked how she was. Some might consider me weak for it, but it irritated me. She could go get bent by one of her lunch buddies for all I cared. As soon as my damn jaw was better, I’d have no problem making some party rounds for her replacement.

She shifted her stance, careful not to make more marks on her heels. “Well, I,” she began, lowering her voice in case the pansies were listening. “I was curious how you’ve been. I’m working this weekend. Maybe I can give you a hand some
other
way. We can work around your mouth.”

I kept raking. “Save it. This isn’t going to happen anymore, Em. It was fun, but I think it’s time for you to move on.” My tone wasn’t rude. It was straight. I figured she already had someone else on the line so everything would be copasetic.

“Uh,” she stammered. “You don’t have to be a dick about it.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed, just to shut her up.

“Is this about LJ?” she asked unexpectedly. “Do you have yourself a new work girl, Ben?”

“If it was about her, it still wouldn’t be your business. That’s the agreement we made a while back, remember? You have your own life to worry about. Now that we’re back in school, I get to see that desperate attempt at fitting in every day.” I couldn’t help it. She crossed the line first.

“Nice. Well, I’m glad to see that you’re finally moving on from Harper. It’s about time.”

She’d just pushed her luck, right off a cliff. I clenched my teeth and bursts of pain exploded through every nerve of my jaw. That’s when I actually turned to look at her. I didn’t need a mirror to see the anger on my own face; I could see it all in her reaction. She took a step back, catching a heel on the grass and almost falling. Her eyes widened. I was pissed off enough to scare the crap out of her.

“You don’t even have the right to talk about her.”

“She was my friend too, Ben. I loved her too,” she spat.

“I remember. You loved her so much you begged her to go to that party with you.”

“Don’t you dare put that on me! Her death wasn’t my fault and you know it.”

“I know enough, Em. Now, if you want to keep your job, I suggest you leave me the hell alone.” I bent back down to the garden and scooped the clippings into a bag.

A sob escaped her throat before she hurried off the lawn. Her heels clacked quickly down the sidewalk, and her parents’ Lexus tore off down the driveway a minute later.

Maybe I was too harsh. She just wanted to sting me back for ending our barely-friends-with-benefits relationship. But she crossed a line that had been off-limits since she’d started working here last year. We hardly talked before then. Emily was a crowd chaser. Wherever the highest level of popularity was found, that’s where she’d be, trying to soak it all up. She wedged into our group freshman year and latched onto Harper. When Harper died, I ditched the group. They were all closer to Harper anyway so it was easier for me to let them go. I also blamed all of them. Only one person gave her the pills, but
none
of them found her for a half hour.

If someone had found her earlier …

If I would’ve been there …

If …

“Are you in for the night?” Pop asked when I walked past him on the way to the kitchen.

I dropped my helmet on the table and grabbed some water from the fridge. “Yeah.”

“How’s the mouth feeling?”

“Good. It’s opening a lot wider now, or it just feels really wide because it was shut for so long.” He didn’t respond so I rummaged through the fridge for something to eat. I settled with some oatmeal from the cabinet. When I finished preparing it, I went back to the dining room and took a seat opposite him as he flipped channels with the remote.

“I met Carson this morning,” he said, eyes still on the TV.

I finished chewing a bite of the brown sugar flavored mush that I’d been favoring since Monday’s wire removal and asked, “How’d that go?”

“Fine. He seems like a decent guy. Didn’t sound too fond of Simone, but I can’t blame him for that. She doesn’t exactly give people the fuzziest of feelings.” He smirked and the corners of his mustache tipped up. The lines in his face were relaxed. He’d been settled lately, not as worried about Janine’s bloodline and the supposed curse.

“Simone will get used to them.”

“How about you? Are you getting used to them?” He turned to face me and set the remote on the table.

“Not entirely. I haven’t even met Carson or the son.”

“Gavin.”

“Right, Gavin. I haven’t met him yet either.”

“And I haven’t properly introduced myself to LJ, but I should do it soon. It seems like she’s holding her own around the grounds with you in the afternoon. How is she?” He folded his hands on top of the table and waited patiently for me to finish chewing.

“She works harder than I thought she would. And she seems okay.” I shrugged.

The corners of his lips tipped into a frown. “Have you spoken to her?”

“Yeah. She’s nice,” I replied, thinking about LJ’s smile at the end of our conversation earlier. It was sexy, and it felt good to know that I was the one who made her smile after she’d had such a crappy day.

“That’s it? She’s nice?” He sighed. “Does she know anything?”

“I don’t think so. She’s only commented about the paintings,” I hated lying to him. All I needed to do was to find out how LJ was feeling tomorrow. If she was okay, I wouldn’t have to worry about the curse and I wouldn’t need to tell Pop anything. And if she wasn’t … I didn’t need to think about that right now.

“Hmm.” He turned back to the TV with a stare that took him somewhere far beyond the confines of the house. “I asked Genie about them once. About a year ago.”

“Really?”

“She was mostly gone at that point, though there were days that her mind would open up and remind her who she was. It never lasted long.” His eyes shifted to the well painting above the blackened mantle. “I always thought those paintings were therapeutic for her, but it also seemed obsessive. She’d often spend hours in her bedroom, mixing those grays perfectly on a color palette. No matter how distant her mind was, she could always replicate that well.

“After one of her routine doctor visits last year, I asked her about them. She told me that the painting she’d given me reflected the wish she’d made for me, the same wish that brought you here. That’s the reason it sits up there. It may not be the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen, but it represents something way more beautiful than its drab colors and clumsy brush strokes.”

“So the paintings are the wishes she made?” There were tons in her house.

“I suppose so, though it’s hard to tell. She lost a lot of herself those last few years. I couldn’t imagine her painting one for every wish that took a piece of her.”

“No, I guess not.” I agreed, thinking about how completely screwed up it all was. Did Janine really believe in all of it? And if so, why? Why bother to paint the same picture? Maybe it
was
just an obsession. Or, if the legend was true, was it her way to keep a physical tally?

I finished my oatmeal while Pop surrendered to silence. He was lost in his own mind, luckily not the way Janine once was. “There’s a wedding later tomorrow and another Sunday morning.”

He nodded. “It’s late in the season. I’m sure Simone’s booked every event possible before the winter slow season.”

“I’m hanging out with LJ tomorrow,” I said and took my dish to the kitchen. I couldn’t bear to look at him when I knew there was so much more I should tell him. “I’ll try my best to dig any more info out of her, but I really doubt she knows anything.”

“Let’s try to keep it that way until we can figure out what to do,” he replied in a solemn tone from the other room. “You’ll have to try and get invited inside the house soon. I’m not sure what other way to go about this. The only other option is to start purposely breaking water lines to gain access inside. There has to be something in there that we missed.”