Infinity + One (46 page)

Then he couldn’t take anymore. Maybe because he didn’t
know
what had happened to her. He didn’t know where she was, and he didn’t know where to go looking. How was he going to find her? He switched off the TV with a violent shove and turned to leave. He was striding toward the door when he thought he heard the sound of water running. He stopped abruptly, suspended between the fear of being caught in a place he shouldn’t be and the hope that finally he was in exactly the right place at the right time. It was the shower. And in that instant he became a believer. God’s voice did sound like rushing water.

Finn walked toward the huge bathroom with the heart-shaped, sunken tub and the giant, glass walk-in shower. When he neared the door he heard her, and he smiled, even as his chest ached at the sound. Crying. She was crying in the shower. Again. And Finn found himself laughing through the tears that were suddenly streaming down his own face.

The door wasn’t locked. Thank God. Or thank Fish—his guardian angel. Somehow he thought Fish might be the one unlocking bathroom doors for his brother. Naked girls were Fish’s favorite thing. He turned the handle and silently asked Fish to please remain outside if he was still lurking around. He needed to hold his wife without an audience.

He shrugged out of his suit jacket and tossed it on the vanity as he pulled open the shower door and stepped under the spray fully-clothed, taking Bonnie into his arms before she even had time to react. She jerked and pulled back, even as she realized it was him.

“Finn? Oh, Finn,” she cried, falling against him, holding him tightly and looking up into his face in disbelief. He pushed her streaming hair out of her eyes even as his own dripped heavily down his back.

“Bonnie. You aren’t fooling anybody crying in the shower, baby. The water hides your tears, but it doesn’t hide the sound, and I don’t want you to cry anymore.” He kissed her as the water soaked through his shirt, plastering the white cotton to his skin, seeping into the black suit pants, and soaking the shoes that had cost way more than Bonnie’s ring. She still wore it, and he kissed that too, frantically. And she cried harder.

“I didn’t think you were coming back.” She sobbed into his chest, and Finn held her tightly, letting the cascading water wash away the words. He almost hadn’t come back, and the thought made his legs weak and his heart quake. He held Bonnie closer, burying his face in her neck and letting his hands stroke the naked length of her body, needing to reassure himself that she was still his. Bonnie was suddenly as frantic as he was, pulling at the buttons of his shirt, trying to peel it off his chest, as if she needed to feel his skin the way he could feel hers. His shirt fell to the shower floor with a heavy, wet slap.

“Your grandmother told me you didn’t want to see me again, Bonnie.”

Bonnie closed her eyes and her hands stilled, her face crumpling with his words. She shook her head emphatically. “No. That’s not true. That’s never been true! Not for one second since I met you. I knew exactly what I was doing when I married you. I was just hoping, just praying, that you knew what you were doing.”

Bonnie reached for him, laying her palms against his face, tipping her chin up so she could hold his gaze, even as water streamed through her hair down her cheeks. Finn kissed her mouth again, not able to help himself. Her lips trembled beneath his, and he tasted her slick heat and the salty, sweet mix of tears and tender words.

“She told me none of it was real,” he whispered against her lips.

“But . . . didn’t we decide that we don’t want real?” she replied, her mouth never leaving his.

“Yeah. We did,” Finn breathed, “but I’ll take real too. And I’ll take imaginary, and I’ll take it all, Bonnie.” And he wanted to take it all, he wanted to sink into her and let the endless supply of hot water beat down on their bodies, and for a moment he was sidetracked by her lips and her skin and the swell of her breasts and the way she felt beneath his hands. He wanted it all, but Bonnie—though her hands and mouth were as busy as his—had not stopped crying. It was if she couldn’t believe he was there. As if she still couldn’t believe he’d come back.

“I wanted to come find you,” Bonnie said, her mouth against his skin, her voice as urgent as her hands. “But I had to let you choose. I thought you might have decided this was all too much. My family, my brother, my life. I hurt you, Finn. So much. It’s all my fault. All of it. Bear getting hurt, you getting thrown in jail and accused of things you didn’t do. Even the things Hank did. The things Gran did. I put it into motion.”

“Shh. No, Bonnie. You can’t take responsibility for their greed. Greed put this whole thing in motion, and you have your faults, but greed isn’t one of them,” Finn soothed. “But none of that would have kept me away.”

He captured her hands in his, bracing them against the shower wall so he wouldn’t be distracted by her touch, and he laid his forehead against hers, trying to find the right words—the words he needed to say, and the words she needed to hear, so she wouldn’t spend her whole life wondering about the way he felt and why he’d come back.

“I love you, Bonnie. So much that I hurt with it. And I hate it, and I love it, and I want it to go away, and I want it to stay forever. And I am terrible at this!” He laughed in frustration. “I feel like I’m asking Bear to have sex with me. Damn, that must have been awful.”

“It was,” she choked out, half-laughing, half-crying. He stole a kiss then, but didn’t release her hands though her body swayed into his, and she protested sweetly.

“This thing we have, it hurts,” he continued. “But the pain is almost sweet because it means
you
happened.
We
happened. And I can’t regret that, no matter how little or how long I get to tag along with you and pretend that I don’t hate having people recognize me or take my picture or having people whisper about my record—”

“Your record?”

“My criminal record, Bonnie. Nothing platinum there. I’m an ex-con, and instead of starting over and building a new life where I can put it behind me, I’m building a new life where it will
never
be behind me, and for you, it’s worth it. It’s easy math.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“No. I’m doing it for me,” he confessed.

“I like a selfish man,” she said, her face splitting into the smile he loved so much, and Finn felt a tidal wave coming, growing in his chest, and he released her wrists so that he could cradle her face in his hands.

“What’s Infinity plus one?” she whispered and kissed his unsmiling mouth, and he answered her from his heart and not his head.

“It’s not infinity after all. It’s not even two. It’s one, Bonnie Rae. Didn’t you tell me? You and me? We’re two halves of a whole. We’re one,” and he pulled her up and into him, the steam making a thick fog around their bodies, reminiscent of the night they met on the bridge. The night Bonnie met Clyde. And Finn realized something then. That was the night they both jumped. The night they both let go. The night they both fell.

And that was the biggest paradox of all.

I HAD PULLED all the bedding off the huge white bed and made a pile in the middle of the floor because I couldn’t face the mirrors. While I’d waited for Finn to come back to me, I’d slept on the pile, far away from my lonely reflection and the bed where Finn had held me and loved me like he would never let me go.

Finn carried everything back, making the bed neatly, making me laugh at his fussiness. I tended to destroy a room faster than a tornado—something Minnie had hated, and something I pledged to work on so that my fastidious husband had one less thing to tolerate in his life with me. And I would make sure we had maids. Lots of them.

“They’re just going to get all messed up again,” I pointed out. “You’re a powerful lover, Clyde. It will all just end up on the floor again. Just like the first time.”

Finn laughed and blushed, just like I’d intended, and I tackled him, toppling him into the center of the fluffed pillows and the straightened duvet. And then we talked about what came next.

Vegas was out. Nashville was out. My brother was going to be on trial for attempted murder in St. Louis, and as much as I longed to be far away from anything concerning my family, Finn and I would both be involved in the trial. Hank had gotten desperate. He had a drug habit and he owed money to some very scary people. When I came up missing, and rumors started to abound that I was in the company of an ex-convict, Hank saw an opportunity to capitalize on it. It wasn’t hard. He was living with Gran and knew everything that was happening as it happened. He sent Gran a ransom demand, pretending he was Finn, and arranged a drop off location and a time—Thursday afternoon. But then I’d contacted Bear. Hank got nervous that Bear was going to bring me back before he could get his hands on the money. So he watched Bear’s house. When Bear took off Thursday morning for St. Louis, Hank had followed him. When Bear left Finn’s father’s house in Finn’s rental car, without me, Hank had followed him to the gas station, and he’d shot him—shot him in the back so Bear wouldn’t interfere, so Hank could collect the ransom that afternoon, and so everyone would think Finn had done it. Hank had been stupid though. He hadn’t made sure Bear was dead, and he’d quickly searched the car Bear was driving, stepping over Bear’s body to get there. Bear had seen Hank’s snakeskin boots, the ones I had given him for Christmas a couple of years before, and he’d known who shot him, even as he lost consciousness. If I had gone back to Nashville with Bear, odds were Hank would have shot me too. And the sad thing was, it wasn’t hard for me to believe. Because it wasn’t hard to believe, I didn’t grieve for him, not the way a sister should grieve for her brother. Hank had never been mine in anything but name, and pretending differently didn’t change it.

But there were other reasons to settle in St. Louis. Finn’s father had begged Finn to consider going to work for a St. Louis think tank closely associated with the math department at Washington University. It would mean time with his dad and a chance to put his genius to work. He was my Clyde—but there was enough Infinity to go around, and I could share. According to Finn’s father, the math community was a small one, and it didn’t care about socio-economic status, ethnicity, or even a prison record. If you could do the math—if you loved math—you were welcomed.

St. Louis was only four hours from Nashville, my record label, and my career, which Finn insisted I had to take ownership of. He said I was too brilliant and too destructive to sit still. I needed to be singing. It was what I was born to do. That, and love him. And this time, I couldn’t argue with Infinity.

HE WAS ASLEEP now, relaxed and loose, one big arm under his head, one thrown across my body. We hadn’t left the suite at all in two days. Food was brought in, clean sheets too, and we were officially holed up. Not because we had to be, but because we wanted to be. And right now, I didn’t want to sleep. I was too happy. I wanted to burrow into Finn, but I was restless, and I knew I would wake him up, so I slid out from under his arm and tiptoed to the sitting room and flipped on the television. It had kept me company while I’d waited for Finn, but we hadn’t watched it since. I had needed it to drown out the conversation in my head and the fear that he wasn’t coming back, and it was on way too loud.