Dance of Desire (1001 Dark Nights)

  But she’s not.

  Because her mom’s hiding, that’s all. And that’s why Amber heads for her bedroom and starts stuffing her favorite weekend bag full of blue jeans, halter tops, and T-shirts. First thing in the morning, she’s got a date with a few hundred miles of blacktop and a little town called Chapel Springs. And if her mother calls back before then, well…Amber’s got voicemail too!

  7

  If only he hadn’t touched her.

  If he hadn’t touched her, he could leave her in his rearview right now, along with Watson’s, Dallas, and the entire State of Texas. Maybe he’ll hit Colorado this time. Or Canada. Canada isn’t that much farther, but maybe an international border was just what he needed to protect his heart.

  But there’s no way he can go that far now.

  Because he’d touched her.

  And it wasn’t like he’d had to either.

  There were other ways he could have kept her from going to some crazy sex club.

  Like reasoning with her. Or teasing her. Or begging her.

  Telling her how he really felt, that should have been the last option. The absolutely dead-last, nuclear apocalypse option. And touching her? Well, that was beyond the nuclear option. That was a “zombies are breaking down the front door and the only way out is through the nearest window” kind of option.

  And yet he’d gone ahead and done it anyway, touched her like he was some idiot teenager who couldn’t control his hormones. He’d also tasted her, inhaled her scent, felt her heat on his skin. Sensed that her hunger for him was equal to his own. Heard that hunger with his own two ears, a vibrating pulse under her every desperate breath as he’d held her in his arms.

  And now it’s all falling apart. Now he’s flying down a Dallas freeway with all the windows in his truck rolled down because he’s hoping the wind will drown out his crazy thoughts. He’s been driving for hours now, aimless circles around the city. Sometimes he’ll head in the direction of old landmarks, old places he used to visit, but as soon as he gets close, he forgets about them altogether and goes back to thinking of Amber. Amber’s eyes. Amber’s skin. Amber’s anger. Amber’s passion.

  Bye, bye scrapbook, he thinks angrily.

  Over the years, he’d come up with all sorts of ways to keep his feelings for her under control. But the thing he called the scrapbook had been the most effective.

  Early on, after he’d moved in with the Watsons, he’d forced himself to think of her only in her most unflattering moments. Her furious expressions during dinner table fights after which Abel would send them both to their rooms; her shuffling walks to the coffee maker first thing in the morning, replete with hay bale hair and baggy pajamas. The times a cold or the flu turned her into a red-faced phlegm machine. Out of these awkward, everyday moments, he’d made a scrapbook which he opened whenever Amber, the wickedly smart doe-eyed girl he’d fallen in love with that long ago summer, threatened to tilt him off his axis.

  The scrapbook had not been without its problems, however.

  Every now and then he’d try sliding in an image of how awful she’d looked the night her appendix burst. But the cruelty of this, using one of her most painful moments to dampen the fires of his desire, shamed him into further confusion. Worse, it would often backfire, serving only to remind him of how he’d wanted to protect her in that moment. How he’d wanted to take her into his arms and carry her down the stairs once it was clear it wasn’t just a stomachache, that she was truly and terribly sick. Instead, he’d shouted for Abel and Tina. When they’d burst into her room, he’d hung back, shaking and trying to hide tears, but refusing to break the rule they’d both set for each other, however silently.

  No touching. No grazes. No brushes. No hugs. No kisses, even on the cheek.

  The scrapbook is as good as burned now. Now, every time he thinks of her from here on out, he’ll see the pale creamy skin of her throat bared, her lips parting for him, inviting him to taste. Fuck that. He’ll see that smoldering intensity in her stare when she said Tell me why you really don’t want me to go.

  Sometimes he’d hoped that if they ever did make a move on each other, they’d realize instantly their desire was an illusion. Kind of like prison love, or some outdated teenage fantasy they’d held on to for too long even though it had lost its fire years before. They’d try to kiss each other again and crack up laughing because the whole thing would seem ridiculous.

  Some days he hoped for this. Other days he feared it.

  When he finally did make his move, everything was very real. All of it. Too damn real.

  Danny Patterson answers his phone after the first ring. All Caleb has to say is that he needs to meet, and Danny’s giving him directions to the hotel, right down to which escalator he should take to get to the lobby bar. Maybe it’s the tone of Caleb’s voice that does it.

  Caleb pulls into the motor court at the Hyatt Regency, hands the keys to his truck to the first valet.

  Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum are just a couple blocks away. Caleb knows this because Abel took him there several times when he was a kid.

  Inside the hotel, there’s a soaring atrium with a sloped glass ceiling that allows you to look right up at the glittering orb that is Reunion Tower. Caleb knows this because Abel brought him here to see visiting friends when he was a kid.

  And that’s half the problem, isn’t it? In Dallas, Abel is everywhere, because Abel loved Dallas as much as he’d loved his own children. Both of his children.

  Danny’s waiting at the top of the escalator, a beer in hand. He’d probably have one for Caleb too, but he knows Caleb barely drinks. Caleb prepares himself for some smartass comment about how wrecked he looks. Instead, Danny steers them to a table and chairs. Rowdy law enforcement types fill the bar. Men, mostly, patting each other on the back, sharing loud war stories about shootouts and crazy arrests. Glass elevators whisk people to their rooms on the floors above.

  The place is loud as hell, but Caleb hears the racquet as if he’s underwater. Underwater and struggling to breathe.

  “I did something terrible,” he finally says.

  “You finally put the moves on the sister who isn’t really your sister?”

  “Are you kidding me? You knew the whole time?”

  “Figured it would mean more if you said it,” Danny says with a serious nod.

  “What would mean more?”

  “I’m just kidding. I left my room key at Watson’s and when I called back, Annabelle answered and I got the story out of her.”

  “Which story? Wait! Annabelle? She hated you!”

  “Nobody hates me. They just need time to…get used to me, that’s all.” Danny frowns and takes a sip of beer. “Do you hate me?” he asks, suddenly sounding twelve years old.

  “You think I would have called you if I hated you? I’m having a breakdown here.”

  “You’re not having a breakdown. You’re having a break…in. Wait. That didn’t come out right. What I’m trying to say is—”

  “Just stop trying to say stuff and listen, Danny.”

  “Oh. I get to listen now. Does that mean you’re actually going to talk about what’s really going on with you?”

  “In a minute. What did Annabelle tell you?”

  “That you two were made for each other. That you were practically in love by the night your parents died and when Abel adopted you, it screwed you both up.”

  “Screwed us both up? Is that what she really said? If Abel hadn’t adopted me, I woulda been homeless. Or living with my aunt in Oklahoma City while she turned tricks right in front of me in her trailer.”

  “So, homeless, basically,” Danny says.

  “Yeah,” Caleb answers.

  “But still.”

  “Still what?”

  “I’m just repeating what Annabelle said!”

  “Okay. Fine. What else did she say?”

  “She said she’d call and give you updates on the bar ’cause they wanted you to come back. That they knew A
mber’s husband was a piece of dog shit, and she only married him so she wouldn’t have to deal with how she felt about you.”

  “Annabelle said all this?”

  “Yes, Caleb. Apparently you’re the only one who had a hard time figuring any of this out.”

  “I didn’t say I hadn’t figured it out. I just don’t know how to fix any of it.”

  “Same thing. Anyway. She also said there’s only one thing keeping you apart.”

  “Yeah. She’s my sister.”

  “No, Abel. She says both of you are in a boxing match with his ghost. Her words. Not mine. Says you both think if you got together you’d be crapping on his memory.”

  These words hit him like a sucker punch, and that’s a good thing. A sucker punch is exactly what he needs to wake up.

  “Wish I could say out of the mouths of babes, but these are her words, right?”

  “Yeah, also, I’m, like, four years younger than you, dude.”

  Danny smiles.

  “You’re a good guy, you know that, Patterson?” he hears himself say. The words come out of him before he can measure them, but it’s the night for following his instincts, apparently, and saying them out loud makes him feel good. “I give you a lot of grief, but you’re a good guy.”

  “Aw, shut it.”

  “Seriously. I was a dick to you today at the bar, and here you are taking time out from your friends to listen to me whine.”

  “Listening to you whine ages me,” Danny says with a broad grin. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Well, now you know why I’ve been such a loner.”

  Danny spits up beer. It takes Caleb a second to realize the guy’s laughing at him.

  Once he finishes coughing, Danny says, “Dude, you were never a loner. You were always having the other hands at Proby over for cookouts at your cabin. You’d organize all the trips into town. Second an injury looked like it was infected, you were on the phone to Thomas MacKenzie. The reason I went to see you today is ’cause pretty much everyone you met back in Montana wants to know how you’re doing.

  “You’re not a loner, Caleb. A wanderer, maybe. But not a loner. Just ’cause you’ve been running from one woman your whole life doesn’t mean you’re not a people person. You’re one of the biggest people people…or persons… Oh, hell, I don’t know how to say it. But you know what I mean. You love people, is what I’m trying to say. That’s why you’re not going to be able to run from her for very much longer.”

  “Maybe it’s not her I’m running from,” he says.

  “What’s that mean?” Danny asks.

  Even though it’s not his intention, Caleb finds himself looking from happy couple to happy couple. Some of them are leaning in to each other, so close it looks like their eyeballs are about to touch. Whenever he’s in a crowded place, his attention seems to go right to the nearest happy couple, and no matter how hard he fights the urge, his gaze lingers on them while the Goddess of Envy places her cold, invisible hands around his throat.

  There were moments with Theresa. Moments when it seemed like maybe the two of them could pretend their way into being in love. Moments when, if you didn’t know any better and you saw them together in a bar, you might have thought they were as happy and contended as most of the couples in the Hyatt’s atrium bar looked to Caleb right now.

  But for the most part, they were just lonely. Like him, Theresa had convinced herself that true love, the kind you saw in movies and read about in romance novels, was something the universe only offered to other people. People who had their shit together. People who didn’t have so many wounds.

  And that’s what had held them together for a while. A shared belief that the right one, the one for them, had been placed permanently off limits, so why not make a go of the one who was in front of you? That, and their matching wounds.

  Back then, if you’d asked Caleb why he couldn’t be the one Amber loved, he would have told you it was her decision, her choice. After all, she’s the one who’d gone and married someone else. What more proof did you need? Now he knew that was a lie, a lie he’d told himself so he could get comfortable with his decision to run.

  Now he’d seen her desire for him, seen it right where it had been lying just beneath the surface for going on twelve years.

  She wasn’t the one standing in his way.

  Abel was.

  And therein lay the unavoidable contradiction that had defined Caleb’s life—the man who had saved his life was also the one who had shamed him out of pursuing his heart’s desire.

  “Caleb,” Danny says softly. “You still here, man?”

  “The night my parents died, we’d just kissed. For the first time.”

  “You and Amber?”

  “We’d been building toward it all summer. She was… When I’d look at her that summer, something would happen to me. It was like everything about her was more vivid. More there. And when she’d look at me, something would happen to me too. I could feel it in my chest.”

  “You were falling in love with her,” Danny says

  “I was fifteen.”

  “Yeah, you were fifteen and falling in love with her.”

  “But…”

  “But, what?”

  “I took her down to the boat dock with me so I could show her the moon. ’Cause I’d told her how beautiful it looked over the lake at night and she said she wanted me to show her. And ’cause…”

  Motherfuck, he thinks as his vision blurs. Goddamn motherfuck shit. Crying right here in the middle of the bar.

  “I knew my father was gonna die. And so did she. And she knew I couldn’t sleep and she didn’t want me to be alone when I was lying there awake in the other room, so I took her down to the boat dock and when I kissed her it was like… When I kissed her, it was like there’d never been a thing called pain. Like I didn’t even know what the word meant. It was like… It was like she was the only thing that existed.”

  “She still exists, Caleb. And she’s getting divorced.”

  “I’m not finished,” he says, hating the gruff sound of his voice. But if he stops to apologize, he knows he’ll lose his nerve. Knows he won’t finish the story. And if he can’t do anything else right tonight, at least he can do that, finish the damn story for the first time.

  “Few minutes later, Abel got the call about my parents and he came and got us. I don’t remember much after we got back to the house. Except her holding me. I remember that. I remember lying on the bed crying my eyes out. I remember her reaching up and taking my hand. I squeezed it, I think. I squeezed it ’cause even then I wanted her to know that she still existed for me. That she would always exist for me. And then…”

  One time he was horseback riding in the mountains near Proby outside Surrender. His mind had wandered as he took in the gorgeous view. At the last possible second, he’d seen the horse’s hooves perched at the edge of a hundred-foot drop. For a few minutes, he hadn’t been able to do anything except quiver and stare into those aspen-fringed jaws of death. That’s how he feels now.

  “Next thing I remember, I was in the car. Abel was driving. But Amber wasn’t there. He said he was driving me to the airport. That a friend of his had a plane and was going to fly us back to Dallas. And all I could say was, Where’s Amber? I remember saying it over and over again. At first, he didn’t say anything. Then he just pulled the car over, got out, and pulled me out of the passenger seat. We were in the middle of this dark stretch of woods where there wasn’t anything for miles and he was just shaking me, shaking me and saying all kinds of angry things. He was so mad I couldn’t tell at first that they were questions he was asking me.

  “Did I want a real family or did I want to end up drunken white trash, dead on the side of the road like my father? Did I want to listen to my dick the way my father had listened to the bottle? ’Cause that’s what it would mean to be with Amber. Amber was going to be my sister and if I fucked that up, I wouldn’t have nothing, he said. No family, no home. Nothing.” r />
  Danny curses under his breath. Is he trying to contain his reaction because he doesn’t want Caleb to stop telling his story? Caleb's not sure, so he keeps talking.

  “And I just kept yelling at him over and over again, no matter what he said. Where’s Amber? Where’s Amber? And he drew back like he was going to hit me.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. He drove off and left me there instead.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have a watch on me. I thought I could find my way back to the lake house, but I was wrong and I ended up in the woods. Sun was rising by the time he found me. He was half out of his mind by then. Sobbing and crazy and begging for my forgiveness. And what choice did I have? Only other option was my aunt, and she probably would have left me on the side of the road and never come back. Or sold me to some freak for meth.”

  “Jesus, Caleb.”

  “He wasn’t a bad man, Danny. He lost one of his best friends that night.”

  “Still.”

  “He worked so hard to try to keep his men together after they came back from Iraq. But my dad, he was the one Abel couldn’t fix. It’s not like he took his hand to me. My real dad did that plenty.”

  “He left you in the woods, man.”

  “He came back.”

  “After he scared the living shit out of you.”

  “I wasn’t scared. I was something else.”

  “What?”

  “Lost.”

  “And then you were what…found?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Bullshit. He created the situation just so he could fix it. You wouldn’t have been lost if he hadn’t thrown you out of the car.”

  “He wasn’t thinking like that. He was upset.”

  “You’re talking like him because you’re thinking like him, and if you’re thinking like him it means there’s a part of you that still believes what he said to you that night. You think if you go after Amber, you’re going to end up a drunk like your father, dead on the side of the road. You really believe that, Caleb? You really think everything you want is dangerous just ’cause your dad was an alcoholic?”