This was a disaster. I should have written the damn letter or called her, like a normal person. Instead, I’d raced across the country like a lunatic. Maybe I was having some sort of breakdown. I’d heard people did that right around their thirtieth birthdays; maybe I was a little bit ahead of schedule.
I turned to go and heard the door creak open behind me.
I froze. I tried to imagine what she would look like now—the expression she’d wear when I turned around. Sleepy, no doubt, and surprised. I could handle that. It was the other possibilities I feared.
I took a breath and turned.
He seemed to fill up the doorway, all low-riding camouflage pants and the deep black dragon tattoo that stretched across his chest and dipped below his waistband into parts best ignored. His hair was dirty blond and stuck up in short spikes all over his head, as if he’d been running his hands through it. His eyes were still that dark green that should have been genetically impossible, and his wicked mouth kicked up a little bit as he took me in with one sweep from head to toe.
As usual, I felt as if he found me lacking. As usual, this made me wish I had actual breasts instead of a chest better suited to young girls in training bras. Or that I had Dove commercial skin instead of a mess of freckles that only Lucas found adorable.
What was new was the rush of anger that accompanied that feeling.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped at him. “It’s rude.”
Of course, that only made him smile wider.
“Hey, Princess,” Matt Cheney drawled, not sounding at all surprised to find me on his doorstep on a Saturday morning. “Long time no see.”
Chapter Six
The last time I’d seen Matt Cheney, I had been twenty-two years old.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had also been wearing a burgundy-colored, empire-waisted bridesmaid’s dress with a matching flower tiara. The empire waist and burgundy shade would have looked fetching on a large-breasted woman with hair any color outside the wider red spectrum, which was unfortunate for small-chested, copper-headed me. The flower tiara was too awful to look good on anyone, and looked particularly ridiculous nestled against my hair, which was bone-straight, flat, and, at that time, a ragged length I’d produced with my own fingernail scissors.
If memory served, I had also been sobbing, an activity I knew made me look like a platypus. (Tiny eyes and elongated nose. I wasn’t kidding.)
I had begged him not to go. He had ignored me and left.
Fast-forward six years, and it was still humiliating.
I couldn’t even tell myself that it hadn’t occurred to me that I might run into this particular problem. Verena had been quite vocal about the things I’d refused to consider. And in truth, I’d known it, too, I just hadn’t wanted to imagine running into Matt. I’d ignored the possibility, even as I’d been secretly hoping it might happen, and so I was unprepared. I had no one to blame but myself. It was this exact attitude that had caused me to flub my first professional audition, a personal low that could also be laid at Matt Cheney’s currently bare feet, since it had occurred mere weeks after his abandonment of me.
“What are you doing here?” Matt asked after a long moment, when it became clear to both of us, and no doubt the greater Bay Area arrayed around us, that I wasn’t going to speak. I tried to tell myself that only I knew that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, but that knowing look of his suggested otherwise.
“Oh, you know,” I said after a particularly panicky moment during which I wasn’t sure I could speak. I waved my arm in the direction I thought the cab might have come from. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Yeah?” He didn’t buy it, if his smirk was any indication. “You hang out in San Francisco a lot?”
“As you can see.”
What I was trying not to see was that tattoo, which was new. Or new to me, anyway. Who had larger-than-life dragons tattooed across their chests? How much must that have hurt? What was wrong with him? I refused to follow the sinuous tail to its inevitable end, though it was almost painful to force my attention away from that low waistband. He was still possessed of that same obscenely good body, which was all about genetics, since as far as I knew he did nothing to deserve it. On the one hand, that sucked—he should have been fat and balding as divine punishment. On the other hand, at least the ridiculously hot creature who stood in front of me was worth all those years of yearning.
“Does Raine know you’re in town?” he asked.
“Is she here?” I asked, instead of answering him.
“She’s sleeping,” Matt replied.
Another long, awkward moment stretched between us, during which I entertained flashbacks of Norah’s wedding. Matt in a tuxedo—good. Matt sneering at me and running after Raine—less so.
“Do you think she’ll wake up sometime?” I asked. As if she was malingering in some coma, as opposed to simply sleeping late.
Of course, this was Raine. Anything was possible. Maybe Raine had interred herself somewhere as some kind of artistic statement, since she was exactly the sort of person who would find undergoing a voluntary medical coma an exciting creative challenge. I realized I sounded snarky inside my own head. Obviously, I had lost whatever tenuous grip on sanity I’d had before getting out of that cab.
“I’m not going to be the one who wakes her up before noon,” Matt said with a short little laugh. He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “You can come in and catch up, if you want. I don’t mind.”
What a delightfully passive-aggressive invitation.
I could identify it as such, and yet, I still felt sucked right back into that familiar Matt Cheney vortex. It didn’t matter that I might have valid reasons for harboring ill will toward this man. What mattered—though it galled me to admit it—was that he like me. Despite all of our history, I could feel that need burst to life inside me. Or possibly I was just nauseous.
If I’d had any spine at all, I would have used it to turn on my heel and walk away. It was what Matt himself would have done if our positions were reversed. I knew it without a shadow of a doubt.
Instead, I smiled brightly at him and his big black dragon, and followed him inside.
The house was old and weathered, which was apparent from the creak in the door and the give in the floorboards. Inside, it was chilly and dark, with unlit candles in dramatic sconces along the walls as well as electric lights overhead. Gloom collected in the corners, but even so, the place felt more like a college dorm than the sort of place two people in their thirties should live. But what did I know? This was San Francisco, where anything went. As public policy. I noticed that the walls had been decorated by hand—here a mural, there a tapestry—and incense spiced the air. It reminded me of Raine’s room when she was in high school—exotic and mysterious, with undertones of sandalwood and jasmine. Matt disappeared down a long hallway, and I trudged after him, getting closer to Raine with every step.
At the other end was a living room packed cheek by jowl with a hazardous jumble of bookshelves and television equipment. It was like an entertainment cave. I tried to see signs of Raine in the furnishings or the posters tacked haphazardly to the wall, but nothing was familiar. Beyond the living room, two steps down and overlooking a patch of grass out back, was a large kitchen.
Matt walked directly to the refrigerator and rummaged around in its depths. I was about to attempt to make conversation with his naked back when I saw the woman lounging at the kitchen table. At first, I thought it was Raine and my stomach lurched in shock, but the woman who stared at me, cold and assessing, was a stranger.
I smiled politely, still reeling from the sudden terror that I might not recognize my own sister. Could she have changed that much?
Matt turned around, holding a Coke. He didn’t offer me anything, which was the first comfortingly familiar sign so far. I had any number of memories of Matt in his teens and twenties, doing the exact same thing in my mother’s kitchen.
“This
is Raine’s kid sister,” he said, presumably addressing the woman.
Her expression changed slightly, while I attempted to digest that description. It was true. I was Raine’s kid sister. And yet I hated the fact he called me that. Really hated it.
“You don’t look a thing like her!” the woman cooed at me. She was wearing a blue bandanna over two thick braids, a flimsy little tank top, and yoga pants. The outfit called attention to her ample breasts and toned curves. She, too, was barefoot, and sporting a toe ring. No doubt to match the one she had through her eyebrow. She was more arresting than pretty, and I had no doubt whatsoever that she was sleeping with Matt.
“They have the same eyes,” Matt contradicted his hippie chick. “They all do.”
“Hmmm.” She made a big production of frowning at me. “I don’t see it.”
“This is Bronwen,” Matt told me. “She doesn’t know Raine very well.”
Or Matt, clearly, because she let him see her hurt at that remark, which even I could have told her from a six-year distance was the kiss of death. The more you clung, the more he enjoyed shaking you loose. Which, given the fact he’d had to remove himself to the other end of the country to get away from me, must have meant my own clinginess was epic. A thought that was not at all helpful, or conducive to a pleasant reunion.
“This is a nice place,” I told Matt with an attempt at brightness, standing near the table and looking around as if I weren’t in the least bit uncomfortable. I also tried to shut off my brain, with less success.
“It’s big and it’s cheap,” he said, and shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or the other. There was evidence of communal living everywhere, from the selection of mismatched mugs on the countertop to the notes in various hands left scattered across a dry-erase board on the wall. Two different bicycles hung from pegs near the back door.
“It’s so funny,” Bronwen drawled. “I can’t imagine Raine as part of a regular family like anyone else. She’s so . . . ” She looked at Matt, and I suspected she chose a different word than the one she’d been thinking. “Elemental, you know?”
Bronwen stretched long and high, like a cat. Like she was something feral and unrestrained, and I felt very bourgeois, suddenly. Very suburban and foolish next to her unrestrained breasts and free-love hair. I suppressed the urge to fidget. Or apologize.
“Wow,” she said when she was finished stretching. She leaned toward me. “Is that an engagement ring?”
I jolted a little bit, and could feel Matt’s attention narrow in on me.
“Um, yeah,” I said, fanning out the fingers on my left hand, as if I were still surprised to see the ring there. I straightened. “I mean, yes. I’m engaged. That’s sort of why I’m here.”
I thought I’d hit the appropriately adult tone there, though I was suddenly a little bit afraid to look over at Matt. I was taken aback by Bronwen’s sudden laugh.
“I’m sorry, I just haven’t seen one of those in a while,” she murmured more to her ringless hands than to me. She looked up. “You know, for political reasons, some people won’t wear diamonds. But yours is really, really pretty.”
I hated her.
“Engaged, huh?”
I looked over at Matt and completely forgot about Bronwen.
“Engaged,” I confirmed with a small shrug.
“Well,” he said after a long moment. “Congratulations.” It sounded very nearly like an insult when he said it that way. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“His name is Lucas.” Like that mattered, or he cared.
We looked at each other again. I felt confused suddenly, as if I should apologize to Matt for the six years I’d had a life without him. The life he’d forced me to have by taking off, but somehow, that didn’t seem to matter.
Bronwen had stopped smiling and was instead watching the back and forth between us with a calculating look. I was familiar with that look. I remembered wearing it myself whenever Matt’s groupies ventured near him and I’d had to pretend I was nothing more to him than Raine’s kid sister—which would then, inevitably, make me wonder whether or not that was true.
“Have you planned the wedding?” Bronwen asked, inserting herself into the conversation once more.
“Not yet.” I could tell that I lost points for saying so, as if Lucas and I were on shaky ground because we hadn’t booked a venue, caterer, and a band—things I only knew I needed because of my mother. I wanted to reach over and wipe that smirk from her face. “I wanted to sort out some family stuff first.”
“How’s Norah doing?” Matt asked in a deceptively bland tone. Deceptive because he wasn’t as oblivious as he liked to pretend, and I knew it. He spent so much time with Raine he was like an honorary woman, and therefore fully aware of female politics. He knew that Bronwen was trying to alpha girl me.
“She’s great,” I answered him, looking away from stupid hippie Bronwen and her boneless insinuations. “She and Phil had a little boy a few years ago.”
“Oh yeah?” Matt looked surprised. He laughed. “I can’t really picture Norah pregnant. She must have hated it.”
I had to laugh myself, even though it felt disloyal.
“Every minute,” I confirmed. “I think Phil wants another one, but Norah says the only way that’s happening is through adoption.”
Bronwen made a sympathetic sort of noise.
“It’s awful when people aren’t in touch with their bodies,” she murmured.
“Norah’s in touch with her body,” Matt said, still laughing a little bit. “She’s in touch with the fact she wants it lean and mean.”
“She lost her baby weight in about three weeks,” I said, only slightly exaggerating. “We figure even her own body is afraid to defy her.”
“I know I am,” Matt agreed. It was a whole different thing to look at him and feel connected again. It was disconcerting. I looked away.
“She sounds uptight,” Bronwen interjected, with an edge to her voice that I suspected meant she wasn’t talking about Norah.
“You’re talking about her sister, Bronwen,” Matt said quietly. “Have a little respect.”
Bronwen paled. She rose to her feet in a single, graceful move—I blamed the yoga she obviously practiced and immediately felt inadequate next to all that smooth muscle—and glared at him.
“I’ll be upstairs,” she announced, and swept from the room, making sure to throw a chilly look my way as she went.
Without her snide presence, the kitchen seemed a lot smaller.
I squared my shoulders and looked at Matt. There was no reason not to dive right in. While I had never been entirely immune to the force of the man’s physical presence—and that had been predragon, for the love of God—the fact that he could be an incredible jackass usually tended to soften the impact.
“She seems nice,” I said. Insincerely.
He shrugged. “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s just hanging out.”
“I didn’t ask.” Though I took a dark delight in it.
“Well, in case you wondered, now you know.”
I didn’t have any idea what to say to that, and the fact was, I was still looming there near the table like a dolt. I shoved my fingers into the pockets of my jeans and rocked back a little bit on my heels. I’d spent my entire professional career learning about posture—because believe me, slouch too much and you’d pay the price, as I’d learned quickly—but it took all of twenty minutes in the presence of Matt Cheney for all of that to go straight to hell.
“So why are you here?” he asked. He leaned back against the counter and watched me, eyes hooded.
I shrugged. I wanted to see if there was anything to salvage in my relationship with my sister, I wanted to say. Among other things. But I couldn’t seem to speak.
“Because Raine is more fragile than she looks,” Matt continued when I didn’t speak. “I don’t want you upsetting her.”
“Me upset her?” I could barely process that. “Don’t you mean the other way around?”
> “That’s the attitude I’m talking about.” Matt shook his head at me. “She doesn’t need that judgmental shit.”
“And she doesn’t need you to run interference,” I countered. “Last time I checked, she was all grown up and on her own.”
“Look,” Matt said. “I don’t know if you genuinely just want to see Raine or if you’re in the middle of some Twelve Step program and need to unload your personal crap on her. But be careful, Courtney. Some people don’t want to look back.”
I digested that for about three seconds.
“Be careful of what? That I might accidentally point out to my big sister that it sucked when she got wasted, ruined Norah’s wedding, and took off with my boyfriend?” I sucked in a breath, and wished the words didn’t have that particular bitter kick to them as they hung there in the middle of the cold kitchen like smoke.
“Yeah,” he said. “That.”
I shrugged as if I felt nonchalant, which, of course, I did not.
“Oops,” I said.
Another quiet moment unfolded between us, and I found that I was aware of my own breathing, and the hum of the refrigerator.
The fact of the matter was, I didn’t know what to say to him. I never had. My memories revolved around our silences. Me struggling for something to say. Matt seeming to imbue the air around him with signs and meanings, like some modern-day wizard, but never saying much. Me feeling the weight of all that meaning and squeaking out something—anything—to relieve the tension.
I will not talk just to break the silence. I will not talk just to break the silence. I will not talk just to break—
“You look good,” Matt said. He waved, indicating my body or outfit, I wasn’t sure which. “Classy.” He managed to make the word sound vaguely uncool. And one of the many tragedies of being near Matt Cheney was that somehow I always wanted him to think I was cool.