Dance of Desire (1001 Dark Nights)

  “It means you do anything other than make a graceful exit—and by graceful, I mean you sign over your majority share back to Amber tomorrow—then your little slush fund’s gone.” Caleb snaps his fingers to indicate how quickly he’ll make that happen. “And in your case, that means no radio spots, no T.V. spots, no nothing to promote any band you’d even think about bringing in here. Including yours. The Shitty Taillights, or whatever the hell they’re called.”

  “The Blinking Jailbirds,” Joel mutters in a lisping voice. That’s when Amber notices his bottom lip is swelling. “You can’t…You can’t do that. You—”

  “I can and I will,” Caleb says. “Four years now and you’ve got this place down to just above the red. Every other week you’re switching out a menu item to something three times the cost. Paying shit-ass consultants thousands to find out what it would take to turn the place into a wine bar. You know damn well if you have to run this place off what you make from buffalo steaks and Corona, there won’t be a dollar left to launch your music career. So sure, songbird. Go right ahead. Make a play. And I’ll make sure you won’t get a single band, manager, agent, or A&R guy anywhere within a hundred feet of you and this place.”

  She’s more startled by the facts Caleb’s just revealed in his speech than she was by the sight of her husband cheating on her.

  Caleb, a trustee?

  She’s barely heard from him in four years, ever since her father died. Just a postcard here and there, usually with a line or two about whatever job he’d managed to land that month. Truck driver in the North Dakota oil fields. Ranch hand at some big spread up in Montana.

  She figured he’d taken her father’s death—their father, she reminds herself, against her will—harder than she had. She’d never imagined him playing any role at all in the business, not now, not ever. And yet, the whole time he’d been gone, the whole time he’d been riding the ranges, driving oil-filled trucks through the lonely highways of the Great Plains, Caleb had been reviewing paperwork and bank documents, using his position as trustee to monitor Joel’s stewardship of her father’s lifework.

  Of course, he couldn’t have learned all of what he’d just said from the bank. He’d probably stayed in touch with Julio and Annabelle too. The knowledge that for the past few years Caleb has been closer than she realized leaves her breathless. She’s not sure if she likes the feeling.

  Things seemed easier when Caleb was far away. For her heart, at least. For her head. But given how bad things are now, apparently it only seemed that way. In fact, now that he’s back, it looks like things are going to get a lot better.

  Joel struggles to his feet. The bruise on the left side of his jaw has doubled in size. When he goes to speak, his swollen lip seems to cause him so much sudden pain his sneer turns into a pained grimace.

  “I don’t need this place,” he finally manages. “I don’t need…you two!” He says the last words with such venom she’s surprised when he doesn’t follow them up by spitting at her feet. “You can have it. Take it. Run it together. Make it your special little project. I’m sure y’all will have a blast. Brother and sister, sitting in a tree—”

  “Joel,” she says before she can stop herself.

  “Oh, come on. I’ve seen the way you look at him—”

  “Joel,” Caleb says this time. “There may be a saying about not punching the same man twice in one day, but I ain’t ever heard it.”

  Joel gives them both a leering grin. When he starts to walk away, his first steps become stumbles.

  Caleb moves out of his path, hands out and a polite smile on his face, like someone letting a drunk move past them in a crowded bar. Amber can hear sighs of relief from the staff when Joel gets a few yards from the curb and yanks his phone from his jeans pocket. But just then, he spins in place. She’s surprised when he shouts a name other than her own.

  “Hey, Annabelle,” he shouts. “Since I finally got the chance to say this, your food? It’s shit!”

  “Oh, Mister Joel,” Annabelle says with a broad grin. “That’s ’cause I always added something special just for you.”

  Joel does his best impression of an idiot’s laugh. But Annabelle keeps smiling and nodding, as if the memory of whatever she added to Joel’s meals is a warm and happy thing that will sustain her for years to come.

  His parting shot having missed its target, Joel stumbles off into the parking lot.

  “So,” Caleb says, “who wants some lunch?”

  3

  Watson’s is so cavernous it feels to Amber like she and Caleb are the only ones inside. But Annabelle and her three cooks are busy making up for lost time in the kitchen while Julio and his servers frantically set up tables on the three levels of platforms surrounding the empty, sunken dance floor.

  Nothing bums her out more than the sight of a dark stage, but apparently she’s in the minority, because in a few minutes, the place will be packed with hungry regulars even though the only music will be coming from the jukebox.

  Caleb walks up to the beer taps like he owns the place which, given what she learned a few moments before , he just might. He fills a pint glass with amber ale and sets it on the bar in front of her with a loud thunk.

  “Thanks,” she says. “But I had a martini at work.”

  “Hot damn!” he says. “I want your job.”

  “Not enough manual labor for you,” she says. “And since when do you like martinis?”

  “Since never. ’Sides, looks like I’m out of the job market now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Gonna have my work cut out for me with this place.”

  “You’re staying?” she asks.

  Does this excite her or fill her with dread? She always feels a mixture of both when Caleb’s around.

  “Somebody’s gotta run this place now that Joel’s out of the picture.”

  “Caleb, I really appreciate what you did out there. Seriously, I do. But I’m not sure it was enough to get Joel out of the picture for good.”

  “You’re not asking me to kill him, are you? Can I pat you down? You wearing a wire?”

  “No!” she barks.

  “No to which? The wire or the pat down?”

  “I don’t think Joel is through with us yet, is what I’m saying.”

  “Fine. Next time I’ll aim for his stomach.” He sinks his teeth into his lower lip, throws a mock punch into the air in front of him.

  “Be serious. Please.”

  “Oh, I’m damn serious. He’s not getting his hands on anything in this bar. Not the jukebox. Not the barstools. Not nothing. And I’m sticking around to make sure of it. Unless, you know, you think you can handle this place by yourself.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want you around.”

  “Didn’t say you said that, sis.”

  “Please don’t call me that!”

  The words slip out before she can stop them, words she’s stopped herself from saying again and again over the years whenever Caleb referred to her as his sister or called Abel his dad. They sound as dismissive and possessive as she feared they would. Like she’s just some spoiled only child who doesn’t want to share her father.

  Explaining the far more complicated truth of the matter would fill her with shame. And besides, part of him must know.

  Is that why he’s staring at her now with the same intense gaze she used to dream about when they were teenagers?

  He’s certainly not doing that thing he usually does when he’s hurt and trying to hide it; he doesn’t cast his eyes to one side while he puckers his lips and looks for a task to distract himself with. Instead, he stares at her as if he’s waiting for her to explain, waiting for her to take them back to the night on the boat dock before everything changed.

  She can’t look into those blue eyes for very long without the world feeling like it doesn’t have an up or a down anymore. So she takes a sip of beer instead.

  “I already called the bank while you were in the bathroom,” he says. “No more
automatic deposits into the operating fund. Not until we get this cleaned up. And I’m sorry to lay this on you this hard, Amber, but Joel won’t give two shits about this place if there’s nothing in that operating fund for him to spend on his band.”

  She doesn’t need him to say the rest, that Joel doesn’t care about her either. The only thing that makes this easier to accept is the dawning realization that Joel isn’t really capable of caring about anyone except himself.

  Good luck, Mary. Hope you used protection!

  “So that’s it?” she asks. “One call and the deposits stop?”

  “They’re not stopping. They’re going into my checking account. I’ll pay the bills myself until we kick Joel out of the LLC.”

  “You can do that? I mean, is that really how Dad set up the trust?”

  “Yep,” he answers.

  “So this whole time you could have raided that trust fund with a phone call and instead you were driving trucks and working oil fields?”

  “Not the whole time. A few years back I was a hand on a big spread outside Surrender, Montana. Didn’t you get my postcards?”

  Yeah, and who sends postcards anymore? she almost says. But she answers her own question instantly—people who are afraid of e-mail because it gives them too much space to talk about forbidden feelings.

  “Still,” she says.

  “Abel trusted me to make the right call. The right call was giving you and Joel a shot. And giving you and Joel a shot meant giving Joel a shot at running this place. Also, it seemed like you loved him.”

  “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?” she says.

  “I’ve never thought anything of the kind, Amber.”

  “You, Dad. You both knew. That’s why you set up the trust like that. You both knew Joel was awful and you were just too afraid to say—”

  “That’s not true, Amber. We would’ve had doubts about anybody, anybody you were going to marry, especially someone who thought he was good enough to run the family business. If we’d had any idea what a shit Joel was going to turn out to be, we wouldn’t have let him within ten feet of the house. Or you.”

  “I still feel like an idiot,” she whispers.

  “Well, that’s a bunch of bull. You have to try for stuff, especially when it comes to marriage.”

  “Got a lot of experience in the marriage area, huh?”

  Now Caleb does look away quickly.

  When he turns his back to her and opens the nearest register, she realizes he’s not hurt. He’s hiding something.

  “Wait a minute,” she says. “Wait just a minute. You got married?”

  She looks to the hands he’s suddenly counting bills with. No ring.

  “Did you really get married without telling us?” she asks.

  “It was a spur of the moment thing.”

  “Like a Vegas spur of the moment thing?”

  “No!”

  “Are you still married?”

  “No!”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  He shakes his head at the register, but he doesn’t say anything.

  She remembers the way he acted at her own wedding, how uncomfortable he looked inside the suit her father had bought for him just a few weeks before. He’d never been a big drinker, probably because of what alcohol had done to his father, but he’d shotgunned so many Coronas during the first twenty minutes of the reception, she’d been afraid he was going to embarrass himself. Instead, he ended up silent and sullen and rooted to a far corner of the reception hall where he ignored the flirtations of a dozen different women. Every few minutes, she’d caught him staring at her. And then there’d been his curt good-bye—a brief peck on the cheek for her, and for Joel, a hard clap on the back followed by the words, “You break her heart and I’ll rip you to fucking shreds, dude.” And then he was gone before either she or her new husband could remark that his parting words were the kind of thing an ex-boyfriend might say, not an adopted brother.

  Maybe Caleb had wanted to spare her the same discomfort, the same storm of conflicted feelings, by not telling her about his spur of the moment wedding.

  Maybe he was trying to spare her now by not giving her the details.

  “I want details,” Amber says.

  “It was lonely work I was doing. She was transitioning away from someone else.”

  “You mean rebounding.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Rebounding. Whatever. We parted as friends. Maybe because we didn’t have a bar to fight over.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” she mumbles, sipping her beer.

  “What doesn’t seem fair?” he says, cocking one eyebrow and giving her a sidelong look while he counts bills.

  “I don’t know. Having the end of my whole marriage laid out on the sidewalk outside for you like road kill, and I just ask for a few details and suddenly you’re like—”

  “That is so like you, Amber.”

  “What? What’s so like me?”

  “That’s what people call a false equivalency.”

  “False equivalency? That’s not a Caleb expression. Where’d you learn that one? Your ex-wife? What was she? A college professor?”

  “She was a scheduler I worked with up in North Dakota. They’ve barely got any pipeline up there so I was doing truck pickups from fracking platforms all day long. It started with radio talk and then moved on to dinner.”

  And then all those hard muscles of yours flexing as you bring yourself down onto the body of some strange woman and—

  “And then marriage,” she adds to distract herself from this image.

  “Uh huh. But no baby carriage. And no white wedding I didn’t invite you to either. So stop acting all butthurt and drink your beer. I’m here to save the day, remember?”

  “Butthurt. Now there’s a Caleb expression.”

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost your mouth, sis,” he says.

  Done counting the money, he bumps the register drawer shut with one hip.

  This time she doesn’t ask him not to call her sis again. But she can see the challenge in his eyes. Did he use the term again on purpose? Does he want her to snap at him again for using it so that he can finally, after all these years, come right out and ask her why she really hates it when he refers to her as his sister?

  “So here we are,” Caleb finally says. “Pushing thirty and both divorced. Abel Watson was a helluva man but he sure didn’t teach us how to stay married, did he?”

  She knows he’s kidding, but his words cut deep. The cocky grins fades from his expression as soon as he sees the look on her face.

  “Hey,” he says quietly. “That— Shit, that came out wrong. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she whispers.

  Amber allowed herself a few minutes of tears after they all filed back into the bar. But she’d been in the bathroom alone. Not sitting at the bar in front of Caleb.

  He's resting one hand on top of hers, so gently she almost didn't notice at first. She stares at it. Tells herself to look up into his eyes because his eyes will tell her what this sudden touch actually means. But she can't. She just stares at his powerful, veined hand, hears her next words as if some other version of her has spoken them.

  “When a man won’t sleep with his wife, that’s a problem, right? I mean, she should know something’s wrong… Right?”

  He removes his hand so quickly, she’s left to wonder if he thinks that touching her in any way when she simply mentions sex might seal them together in some awkward or painful way.

  “Maybe,” Caleb says.

  His Adam’s apple bobs. He sucks in a quick breath through his nose and grips the counter on either side of him.

  “We don’t usually talk about sex stuff,” he finally says with a startling blend of tension and hunger in his voice, the same way he’d tell a woman she was wearing a pretty dress even though he was really thinking of what she’d look like
once he’d pulled her out of it.

  “It’s a simple question, Caleb.”

  “You’re asking the wrong one.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re asking if it’s your fault. You’re asking if you should take on the burden of a man like Joel. The answer’s no. Scratch that. The answer’s hell no. Kick his ass to the curb and get the hell out. But don’t take responsibility for his failings. Not now, not ever. Feelings aren’t a choice. Cheating is. If he was half a man, he would have come to you about the stuff that was making him want to cheat six months before he ever did it. If he were a real man, he would have copped to the fact that the stuff that was making him want to cheat probably didn’t have a damn thing to do with you.”

  For the first time in years, she allows herself to gaze into Caleb’s eyes, those beautiful, dazzling blue eyes. Her brother’s blue eyes. And for the first time in a while, this knowledge doesn’t dim her fantasies of what it would be like to taste his lips again, to rock forward into his powerful embrace.

  She allows her mind to swim in the memory of that long ago night before everything changed, when the two of them were brought together by the promise of becoming something altogether different than what they are today.

  Caleb stares right back. Has he gone back to the boat dock of her father’s lake house?

  Is he remembering what it felt like to gather her T-shirt into his fists in those last blissful moments before her father’s cry pierced the dark?

  It’s no matter. Her father’s voice returns just as it always does in moments like these, with the exact same tone he’d used with her that one time they were hiking and he overturned a log with a snake coiled under it.

  Back away, girl, he’d say. Back away, right now.

  Caleb’s had his moments of aggression over the years, but he’s no snake.

  Still, the ghost of her father stands between them now. Her father’s wishes. Her father’s plans.

  Her phone vibrates on the bar in front of her.

  It’s a text from Belinda asking if she’s okay.

  “I need to get back to work,” she says.

  “Not sure you should be driving right now,” Caleb says.