Trespass (16 page)

“A thousand pieces,” he said. “That’ll keep you busy.”

“That’s what I need.”

He nodded. “My grandpa said it was cheating to look at the box. He used to give me and my sisters puzzles for Christmas, but he’d dump all the pieces in a paper bag and throw the packaging away.”

Sarah laughed. “God, that’s hardcore.” For a second she met Russ’s eyes, caught there as they shared a smile, caught for the briefest moment in how they’d been two days ago. She turned her attention to the box, sifting for edge pieces.

Russ lingered, as though poised to say something. Instead he wandered back to the dining room table, to whatever papers he was tending to. Sarah glanced at him. After a minute she stood to walk to the record player.

“Tell me when you need it quiet for your phone calls,” she said, flipping through his albums. She found that one from her first evening here, Hank Williams with his cartoon body. She set it gently on the turntable and lowered the needle, let everything
Russ
about the music and the room and the land outside the windows envelope her.

He looked up from his work and offered a quick smile, a second’s polite effort that warmed her through like a bonfire.

He wasn’t her warden anymore, and this house wasn’t her prison. Still, it wasn’t
hers,
and might not even be the home of a friend. She settled back on the couch and let the puzzle distract her from the body seated across the room, the man she still wanted—wanted worse than she wanted her old life back, maybe. At some point she’d become a lousy person, one who stole from kind strangers and lied about who she really was, ran away from her mistakes. She picked up the box lid and slid it beneath the couch. For everything she’d done badly, she’d do this right. Piece by blind piece, she’d pretend she could fix what she’d so massively screwed up with Russ.

Chapter Nine

By five thirty that evening a heavy rain was falling. By six o’clock Russ had a chicken in the oven, by six fifteen a fire in the hearth. Rain, dinner, fire… Russ wondered if his prisoner-cum-guest was noticing how romantic all these details felt. A knot formed in his chest, good old classic heartache as he registered it again—he missed her. Nicole. He missed a woman who’d never really existed. Now the loss was magnified, punctuated by Sarah’s new hair color and the makeup darkening her eyelashes and fading her freckles. Still, he knew it was her. Same body. Same passion, if she hadn’t faked it. Same fingers he’d felt digging into his back, same mouth that’d singed his skin—

Russ cleared his head of such thoughts and dusted the flecks of firewood from his palms on his jeans. He crossed the room to crouch on the opposite side of the coffee table, to see how Sarah was progressing with the puzzle. He kept his eyes on the tabletop for safety, away from her face.

“Not quite as far as I’d expected you get in two hours.” He watched her audition one piece of sky against a dozen identically blue ones.

“I took a page out of your grandfather’s book,” she said, finding a match. “I hid the box.”

Russ smiled at that. “Technically, he’d be disappointed you even saw the picture to begin with, but still. You’re a better man than I.”

He caught her smirk, her attention on her fingers. “I doubt that.”

Russ held his tongue but didn’t move his eyes away quick enough when she looked up at him.

“I meant what I said before,” she murmured, more bashful than flirtatious. “You’re the best man I’ve ever met.”

Russ stood before she could make an addendum about being a lousy woman, yet another apology he couldn’t stand to listen to. He went to the silent record player to cue up a new album just as thunder rumbled outside. The rain picked up along with the wind, and Russ made out the sound of a whine from the porch. He opened the front door and glared at Kit through the screen.

“What?”

Another whimper.

Russ opened the screen door an inch and waited. The dog gave an almighty shake, flinging the rain from her fur. Russ pushed the door out and let her inside. “Stay.”

She sank obediently onto the mat just inside the entryway, head on her paws, brows shifting in that self-pitiful way she’d practically patented.

“Pathetic,” Russ muttered, and headed back to the coffee table.

Sarah smirked at him. “Somebody afraid of thunder?”

“Yeah. The dog who picks fights with bears…one little flash of lightning and she turns into a bunny.”

Sarah smiled, sliding pieces around on the wood. “Dinner smells good.”

“Yeah, smells just about done, actually.” He watched her fingers, nails short and tidy now, the scrapes from when she’d first arrived here fading already. As much as Russ missed the illusion that was Nicole, he didn’t miss that woman’s wounds—not the ones on the surface, anyhow. And as much as Russ resented some facets of Sarah, she was real. The circumstances that had brought her here were real, if ugly, but that trumped the mysterious omissions of the woman Russ had fallen so hard for.

Sarah addressed Russ’s prolonged scrutiny of her fingers. “You’re welcome to help, you know.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I just spaced out for a minute.”

“Long day?”

Russ nodded. “I better check on the roast.”

“Yeah.”

The chicken was ready, and Russ nearly dropped it, thunder booming just as he was lifting the dish from the oven. He set it on a burner, frazzled. As he slid the mitts off, he listened to the rain, hammering now. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “That was only two Mississippis away.”

Kit whimpered but stayed obediently glued to the doormat.

As Russ carved the chicken, the power went out entirely. “Heh.” He waited for it to flicker back on, but nothing. He rummaged in the junk drawer for a lighter and lit the two dusty candles on the ledge beside the contentious gold watch. Leaving one in the kitchen, he carried the other to the dining room table. Perfect. This scene would be hard-pressed to turn any more pointedly romantic.

“Just when I thought this puzzle couldn’t get any harder,” Sarah said.

Russ glanced at her in the low firelight, squinting at the pieces. “Yeah, my grandpa missed a trick. If he really wanted us kids to work, he’d have made us put those together in the dark.”

“Or spray painted the pieces black.” She seemed to give up on the project, standing and wandering over to take a seat at the dinner table.

Russ went back to carving, mangling the meat in the dim light and serving up a plate for each of them. As he sat across from her, he missed the music, the records’ scratched and tinny voices a better excuse to not speak than the din of the rain.

What was he afraid of, anyhow? Of her, really, of them talking, getting friendly again. Of discovering she still resembled the woman he had feelings for and getting himself mixed up in the head, mixed up in a doomed attraction. It was damn hard to tamp all those feelings down after missing them for seven years, though. But the stakes were too high. He could give in if she made a move on him again, tonight or next week or next month, but he’d have to chance waking up to find out it was another ploy. Or worse, he could make a move himself, get rebuffed and discover everything they’d shared had been a lie, as fabricated as her name.

The rain and low rumbles of thunder, the squeak of their knives and forks—the sounds all faded as she spoke, her voice warming the space between them. “So tell me something about yourself, Russ.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, anything. Have you traveled much?”

He shook his head. “Farthest I’ve been is Virginia. And Canada’s the only other country I’ve been to. I don’t even have a passport.”

“I’ve barely even been there. Just over the border a couple of times.”

“Where, then?” he asked, surprised by how much he suddenly wanted this conversation and its normality.

“Nowhere, practically. Here’s the farthest. I’ve traveled more in the last three weeks than the rest of my life combined, probably. I mean, I’ve been to New York City a bunch, and Florida, once, when I was little, before my mom…before everything got really rough.”

“Before your mom what?”

She frowned at her plate. “She was sort of a mess. But there were two years or so when I was a kid, maybe in first and second grades, when she was clean. That’s when we went to Florida.”

Russ got up and fetched two more beers, setting them down as distant lightning lit up the horizon. “Can I ask, you know, what she was…”

“God, everything. I don’t really want to get into the details. Just some bad stuff.”

“Tell me—” Thunder crashed, cutting Russ off. “Tell me about Florida, then.”

Sarah paused then broke into a broad smile, staring at her food. “I don’t remember much, but I remember a dress I wore. It was yellow. And we went to Disney World, and there was a woman dressed up as a princess or a fairy or something, and she had a yellow dress too, only it was all covered in sequins and shiny stuff. I wanted that dress so bad.” She laughed, pushing potatoes around her plate with her fork. “It’s weird, but I can still remember it now, like it’s right here in front of me.”

Russ let his brain make a bad decision and picture Sarah in a dress, instead of the jeans and sneakers and cream-colored shirt she’d arrived in. He realized then he knew next to nothing about her, only her circumstances and a few garments, snatches of shared memory. But he knew other things as well…how she tasted and smelled, how her skin felt against his.

“I remember balloons too,” she added. “The really shiny silver Mylar kind, shaped like the Mickey Mouse logo.”

“Weird, the stuff our kid brains chose to fixate on,” Russ said. “I remember smells from before I even have memories to match to them… I blew my mom’s mind once, when I smelled some flower or other in the grocery store and said, ‘Oh, I remember that flower. And a yellow house and black dog.’ I guess it was my aunt’s house, where she hadn’t lived since I was about a year old.”

“Freaky. But I know what you mean. Smell’s supposed to be the most deeply engrained sense, or something. I think I read that in one of my stupid magazines.”

Lightning flashed again and Russ shifted in his seat. “They’re not stupid. If they make you happy, they’re not stupid.”

“It’s okay, I mean they
are
pretty stupid. Have you ever read any of the dating advice in those things?”

He shook his head. “Maybe I should. I could use all the help I can get.”

She waved her fork at him dismissively. “Nah. You’d do just fine, if only there were some women around here to woo.”

Against his better judgment, Russ glanced at her neck, the dip at base of her throat. He knew exactly how that skin smelled…yet another olfactory memory he’d be stuck carrying to his grave. He corralled his gaze back to his plate, and they passed the rest of the meal quietly, the din of the rain interrupted with the occasional rumble of thunder and Sarah’s Mississippi-counting. The storm seemed to be moving off, the rain turning from a pelt to a patter against the back windows. Russ didn’t hold out much hope for the power to come back on. They’d probably have to wait for a downed line to be mended the next morning.

Sarah set her napkin on her plate and leaned back in her seat. “That was delicious. Yet another talent you’re denying the single women of the world, hiding yourself away in the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t know about that.” Russ got up and they cleared the table together. He carried the candle from the dining area to the counter, and they tidied the kitchen, stacking the dishes in the sink to tackle once the power came back on. He wanted to blame the waning storm for the buzz he felt in his body…fat chance. A foot separated their hips, and Russ imagined those mad-scientist contraptions from old movies, two metal antennae with waves of crackling electricity strung between them. He wondered if she felt it too, all this hot, antsy energy.

With the kitchen organized and the storm fading, Russ ushered Kit back outside then grabbed both candles and carried them to the coffee table. They cast a sheen across the puzzle pieces, making it nearly impossible to see the picture. Russ sifted through the box, searching for a few missing edge pieces. Sarah returned from a trip to the bathroom and sat beside him, squinting at the project.

“Your grandpa would’ve approved,” she said, angling a piece to make out its colors.

“Probably. He’s still alive, actually.” Russ swallowed and found the courage to keep talking. “Sharp as he ever was. If you’re still here around the holidays and you did end up coming to Idaho, you could meet him.”

“If I came along to play the part of your girlfriend and get your mom off your back?”

“Yeah.” Russ had to give them credit. It was bold of them to be able to banter this way so soon after their doomed affair had ended. But he liked it. He liked that neither was too sensitive to joke about it, liked that their rapport was there, as strong with Sarah as it had been with Nicole. He might even like that they were flirting, as much as it scared him.

“What would your parents think if you brought home some city girl?” Sarah asked, moving pieces around.

“Oh, they’re pretty good with all that stuff. My older sister lives in Seattle, and my younger one spent ten years in San Francisco before she moved back to Idaho. And I mean compared to my parents, I’m like Daniel Boone, out here. My mom can’t stand that I don’t have internet access. She’s obsessed with all that social-networking nonsense.”

Sarah laughed. “Oh God, I’d love to see your profile. Russ Gray, thirty-six. Status, single. Currently listening to Hank Williams, yet again. April tenth, shoved my arm up a cow’s ass. July third, got kicked by a mule. Frowny face icon.”

Russ took a chance and met her eyes, smirking. “If I knew what any of that meant, I’m sure I’d be insulted.”

He got stuck then, staring at her. She seemed trapped too, and all at once the foot between them felt like an inch.
Look away,
Russ commanded himself. Sarah’s lips twitched, and Russ felt his own parting, his body switching to autopilot and ignoring his orders. Chemicals and cravings raised the heat in Russ’s blood and made his self-preserving good intentions fade to a hum in the back of his head. Sarah moved, a shifting of her legs that touched her knee to Russ’s thigh. He swallowed and countered her movement with one of his own, a hand reaching out to cup her shoulder. A split second was all it took to decide—use that hand to keep her at arm’s length or pull her closer. Russ’s body made the decision, urging her nearer as he leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers. He got lost in the smell of her skin, the warmth of her lips on his, got lost in the power of the physical connection they’d shared before, the one he’d nearly managed to convince himself had been a dream.