Love, Lies and Texas Dips (26 page)

Laura shot fluid on the glass and turned the wipers on hyper-speed to blot out the words, smearing arcs of pink that lingered all the way home. She bit her lip, trying not to cry, worrying about what awaited her when she walked through the front door. What if Tincy had heard from Bootsie already? Or what if Bootsie’s white Cadillac was parked in the driveway right now, and both Tincy
and
Bootsie were sitting in the living room, listening to the grandfather clock tick as they waited for Laura’s arrival so they could double-team her with bad news?

Laura had so convinced herself of that fateful scenario that she was surprised when she turned onto her street and saw Avery’s orange ’Vette in the circular driveway.

Oh, shiz
, she thought, tempted at first to turn the car around and haul ass in the other direction. But she knew she’d have to face him sooner or later, whether she liked it or not. So she brushed at her damp cheeks, tucked her hair behind her ears, and tried hard to pull herself together.

Even before she’d parked her Roadster, the driver’s-side door of the Corvette opened and Avery ambled out. He had on a worn red T-shirt with
CALDWELL MUSTANGS
emblazoned across the chest, and gray sweats with the number 88
in red on his left thigh. He stood by his car, staring her way, like he could see right through the smudgy windshield, and Laura knew she had no choice.

She pulled her Mercedes in slowly, stopping right behind the Corvette with its GR8HANZ plates. She’d had the AC running on high in the car, but the pits of her shirt were damp when she climbed out and shut the door. She dragged her feet, scuffing the soles of her Mary Jane wedges on the driveway as she approached him. If he’d tried to catch her at a worse time, it wouldn’t have been possible. Laura had never felt so rumpled and wrinkled and dispirited as she did at that moment.

She stopped three feet shy of Avery and sighed. “Did my mom make you wait out here, or were you just afraid to be alone with her?”

He barely opened his mouth when Tincy flung open the front door, like she’d been watching for Laura from the window.

“There you are!” she said, motioning Laura inside while giving Avery the evil eye. “Get on inside this instant, missy.”

Laura glumly told Avery, “I’ll be out in a sec.”

He shrugged, as if to say, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Tincy grabbed her arm, practically dragging her into the foyer. She started in on Laura as soon as the door had been shut behind them. “What on God’s green earth is going on with you? What haven’t you been telling me? First, I get a call from Dr. Percy at Pine Forest Prep, and then Bootsie Bidwell requests a private meeting with us in an hour. Would you care to explain, because I’m tired of everyone else dancing around the truth?”

Despite Tincy being half a foot shorter, Laura felt totally
cowed by the tone of her mother’s voice and the grave look on her face. “It’s … it’s a rumor, nothing more,” Laura stammered, hardly able to meet Tincy’s eyes. “Someone wrote something nasty online and now everyone’s gossiping about it … about me.”

“Something nasty?” Tincy’s pencil-thin brows arched, though her Botoxed forehead didn’t even wrinkle. A thin hand suddenly went to her throat. “Please, don’t tell me it’s a sex tape.”

“It’s not a sex tape,” Laura said, her eyes filling up with tears again. She swiped at them, explaining in a shaky voice, “Someone’s spread the lie that I’m having a baby.”

“What?” Tincy teetered on her Blahniks and clutched at the marble edge of the center hall table to steady herself. “A baby?” she repeated, blinking.

Laura swallowed hard and nodded. “But it’s not true. I’m not. I swear to God.”

But Tincy didn’t seem to hear her. “No wonder Bootsie mentioned wanting proof that you hadn’t violated any Rosebud rules,” she rambled on. “I had no idea what she meant at the time, and she wouldn’t get into it, even though I begged her to tell me what she knew. She wanted me to talk to you.”

“Well, now you have,” Laura said quietly, “and I don’t know what kind of proof she expects, unless she wants me to take a pregnancy test.”

Tincy stiffened and her gaze fell to Laura’s belly. “Are you certain you want to do that?”

What the hell was she implying?

“You think I’m really pregnant?” Laura asked her. “You think I’m lying and trying to hide something like that?”

“I don’t know, Laura. Are you?”

Dear God!
She wasn’t even guilty of anything, and yet
she
had to prove her innocence! It wasn’t fair!

She turned away from her mother and caught her reflection in the Venetian glass mirror. So she wasn’t thin by any means, and her belly wasn’t flat.
Is that it?
She was being punished for her size? Like, if she’d been a twig, no one would’ve bought the lie for an instant, but since she was curvy to begin with, somehow the lie made sense?

She sniffled back her tears, feeling angrier by the minute. She turned around to face Tincy, this time meeting her eyes. “I guess I have to prove it to you, too, huh? If my own mother won’t even believe me, it’s no wonder the GSC wants me to pee on a stick. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to talk to Avery.” She went over to the door and put her hand on the knob.

Before she could go, Tincy said to her back, “That boy … he isn’t responsible for this?”

Laura nearly laughed. “No, that boy isn’t responsible for anything,” she said, glancing at Tincy over her shoulder. “I know precisely who did this to me, Mother, and she’s got everyone talking, just like she wanted. But I won’t let this ruin my being a Rosebud. I won’t.”

“Tell me who did this to you, baby. I won’t let them get away with it.”

Laura told her, “Don’t worry, Mother, she won’t.” Then she opened the door and stepped outside.

Avery still leaned against the hood of his ’Vette, looking just as she left him.

Slowly, she walked over, hoping he didn’t notice her red eyes and blotchy cheeks.

“Shouldn’t you be at practice?” Laura asked, wishing she didn’t sound so out of sorts, but her pulse still raced after her argument with Tincy.

“We had a light practice this afternoon already. Coach doesn’t like to work us out hard the day before a Friday night game, though a few of the guys headed over to the cave to pump iron.” He folded his arms and leaned against his bumper. “You okay to talk for a minute?”

She glanced toward the front door, knowing that Tincy was probably standing behind it with her ear to the wood. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “But let’s go around the corner, okay?”

He followed her away from the driveway and toward a secluded spot in the side yard where a carved stone bench sat beneath the umbrella of a weeping willow. Pink Queen Elizabeth roses climbed a trellis alongside the privacy fence, and peppermint crape myrtle lent a sweetness to the air as Laura tucked her skirt beneath her and settled down.

Avery seemed too restless to sit. He stood beneath the willow’s dripping branches, the light green leaves nearly touching the top of his head. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” he said, every muscle in his body taut as he squatted in front of her, forearms balanced on his thighs. “Is your cell turned off or something?”

She looked him in the eye. “Can you blame me?”

He picked up a berry that was rotting on the ground, tossing it at the fence. “No, I can’t blame you a bit.” Then he sighed, and his voice softened as he asked her, “It’s not true, is it?”

Laura stared at him, her heart sinking into a pit.

Oh, hell, he couldn’t really believe it, could he?

It took everything in her not to get up and run away. Despite the fact that she’d done nothing wrong, she felt deeply embarrassed and ashamed.

“What do
you
think, Avery?” The question emerged as a croak, and a warm flush spread through her, inflaming her face. She hated the fact that he’d even had to ask. “You’re the only one I’ve been with like that”—
since the day I met you, God!—
“and we were careful, weren’t we?”

He came out of the squat and sat on the bench beside her. “Yeah, we were,” he replied, and ran a hand through sandy-brown hair. His handsome face looked so tight, like he was having as much trouble breathing as she.

“I’m still the same old me,” she told him, and hugged her belly without even realizing what she was doing. “Nothing’s changed.”

“So you’re
sure?”
he pressed, his drawl anything but slow and lazy. He might slap on his pads and helmet and rush onto Tully field with no fear in his heart. But he was scared now. She could see it in his eyes.

“Bootsie Bidwell called my mother,” she told him, all the while wishing she could curl up in a ball and hide. “She wants me to take a pregnancy test to prove it’s a lie. Sounds like you’d appreciate that, too. So how about you, me, Tincy, and Bootsie Bidwell hop in my car and take a drive down to Walgreens? I could pee on a stick in the public bathroom while y’all wait outside. How’d that be, Avery? Sure enough for you?”

Her voice trembled as she finished, and she choked back a sob. All she wanted was for him to reach across the mere six inches that separated them, take her in his arms, and say, “It’ll be all right, Laura, you’ll see. Just hang in there.”

Instead, he sat stiffly, his hands on his knees, watching her, and his doubt pricked at her like a million splinters beneath her skin.

Laura’s chin began to tremble, and he finally took her hand, smothering it in his. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his calloused fingers laced between hers, holding tight. “Whatever you need, I’m here for you.”

She eyed him skeptically. “Really?”

“Yes.”

Oh, man, how she’d yearned to hear that from him so many times! Only something about it felt wrong, like he was saying it now not because he loved her and wanted to be with her, but because of his guilt.

“I’m on your side, Laura, I am.” He let go of her hand, and he gestured helplessly. “I should’ve come sooner, but everyone was talking and you weren’t answering your cell, and I didn’t know what to think.” He caught his hands behind his head and glanced up at the roof of green above them, the drooping branches rustling in the breeze. “I hope I didn’t cause this. … I hope my words weren’t twisted.”

Okay, now he was freaking her out. “Cause this?” she repeated, rubbing at the goose bumps that had risen on her arms. “How do you mean?”

“The other night, after your debutante meeting, Jo Lynn dropped by the house,” he said. “I was babysitting, so we just talked for a minute outside in her car. She asked a lot of questions.”

“About us?”

“Yeah.”

Laura stared at him, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. “And you didn’t say a word to me?”

“Why would I?” He shrugged dismissively. “She’s always in my business, Laura. It’s just how she is. I guess I’m used to it. I didn’t even wonder about her questions, until—well, until that MySpace page appeared and everyone started talking.”

Laura shook her head, thinking surely he didn’t, that he couldn’t
possibly
have confided something so private to Jo Lynn? “Please, don’t say that you spilled about the afternoon you picked me up from the airport? What we did—”

In my bed
, she nearly said, but it wouldn’t come out. Snippets of those hours flashed through her head: the gentleness of Avery’s fingers as they’d traced her lips before he’d kissed her, how he’d teased her nipples with his touch and his tongue until it had nearly driven her crazy, how beautiful he’d said she looked when she undressed in front of him, leaving on only the full-length white deb gloves.

Laura trembled, she felt so betrayed.

“There’s no way I’d tell her something like that,” he said, reaching out for her again, catching her chin in the palm of his hand, forcing her to look him in the eye. “But it didn’t matter. I think she figured it out. Oh, hell”—he winced painfully—“and she might be the one sending you the chocolates, too.”

Oh my God!

Laura felt like she’d been sucker punched, even though a part of her had suspected she was being conned. What a fool she’d been, while Jo Lynn had probably been dying of laughter all along.

“Just be careful, okay?” Avery warned as if she needed to hear it.

She tasted bile in her throat, feeling sick to her stomach,
suddenly comprehending the depths to which Jo Lynn Bidwell was willing to sink to get back at her, to drag her down so far she could never recover. Jo didn’t just want her out of the Rosebuds, did she? She wanted to smash her underfoot like a bug.

“Laura?”

She raised her eyes to him. “She won’t leave us alone, will she?”

“She’s got … issues,” he said.

“Issues?
Now, that’s the understatement of the year. The bitch is crazy!” Laura laughed bitterly, then moaned as she covered her face with her hands, wondering just what she’d gotten herself into and how she could possibly pull herself out. “God, this sucks.”

Avery drew her toward him, and she leaned against his chest. He tangled his fingers in her hair and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, holding her there. He whispered, “Don’t let this beat you down, promise me? Sticks and stones and all that. It’ll go away soon enough. Gossip always does.”

Did he really believe that? Or was that just what he wanted
her
to believe?

Laura clung to the back of his shirt with her nails, tugging on him. “She played you, you realize that, don’t you, Avery? Jo Lynn wanted to start a fire, and you’re the one who gave her the gasoline.”

He stopped stroking her hair. “You honestly think Jo spread that rumor just to hurt you?”

“Hell yes, that’s what I think! Don’t you? You know she’s got it in for me, Av. She’s hated me ever since the day you asked me out.”

“I can see her doing a hundred other things to get at you, Laura, but not this.” He turned his head and gazed off somewhere over her shoulder. “She just wouldn’t. It’s too far, even for her.”

“Please, don’t,” Laura told him, completely chilled by his words. “Don’t you dare apologize again or defend her. If you can’t see what she’s up to, then you’re completely blind. You say you’re on my side, but why does it feel like you always take hers?”